TERRY GILLIAM: A Director With Fangs
Just to let you know what kind of geek I am, with a month or so more or less to myself I decided to watch all the Monty Python's Flying Circus episodes. In order. Twice. I have scripts for the shows, but while this has allowed me to memorize all of the skits, they give few if any details about Terry Gilliam's cartoons. Thus, in watching all the old episodes it is the animations that seem the freshest to me.
The thing about them is that no matter how weird the skits get (one I recently watched involved a news program in which various people get thrown in a river by Arabs) the cartoons are always--always--weirder. One of his more memorable ones involved various characters eating small girls like french fries, drinking from a straw stuck in a man's open skull, etc. This is both disgusting and genuinely funny--a hard mix, as anyone doing a shock-schlock movie or cartoon would tell you.
Just for being in Monty Python, Terry Gilliam is a geek hero (check out his portrayal of Cardinal Fang in the Spanish Inquisition skit--"Give the rack a turn!" Hee hee.). Just for doing the cartoons he did, he's a geek hero. But, amazingly, he went even beyond this to become one of the best directors around.
At first, he directed the Python films. These were notably better than the series, at least from a technical standpoint. This is partially because there was more time to write and rehearse the material before it was actually committed to film; the acting in the films makes some of the TV performances look amateurish by comparison. But beyond the acting, there was a more definite and refined visual sense. The action flowed a lot better. The "pichez la vache" scene in Holy Grail is testament to this, as is the final scene from Meaning of Life, which really did bring tears to my eyes the first time I saw it (from "Isn't it awfully nice to have a penis?" to "One thin little mint " What a progression!). Any director that can produce a convincing shot of a hugely obese man exploding gets my respect.
But stretching even beyond his original scope, Terry went on to make three of the best films in recent memory-- Brazil, 12 Monkeys, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas--as well as a few pretty damn good films-- notably The Fisher King and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. These are obvious centerpieces of the geek genre. Besides being sci-fi (or at least really weird) these films celebrated the geek in a multitude of ways. The main character in Brazil is about as dweeb as they come, and one of the final lines from Fear and Loathing--
"One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."
--I would seriously consider having tattooed on my forehead, as should all hardcore geeks.
Terry's rise to power as a director from a maker of freaky cartoons is both surprising and heartening, a real beacon of hope to the geek auteurs among us. He's also an young member of that wonderful class of artists, the cantankerous genius, whose ranks include such notables as Harlon Elison, Kurt Vonnegut, and Charles Bukowski. Terry uses any opportunity he gets to complain about the treatment of artists and intelligent people in our increasingly mass-produced culture. He isn't a blockbuster director by any stretch of the imagination, but unlike some directors that make more money, he has final cut. Why? "I've been really lucky because I'm just so pig-headed and difficult to deal with that I've gotten away with it." This is a lesson to us all.
Final thought: Disney's doing a new (hopefully good--D.A. says nice things about it) version of Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I wonder if Terry's available...?
Hank Quinlan is pale 'n' pasty--a geek cover boy. He has opinions about movies he hasn't even seen. He picked the wrong day to stop drinkin'.