Terry Gilliam and the Holy Grail

 This Thursday marks our return following the Easter break (it was also Passover and Ramadan; there's a whole lot of Holy going on this month) and I thought an Easter-themed film would be in order. So naturally, I thought of the Holy Grail.

Don't worry, I'm not about to show an Indiana Jones film (No Spielberg. "Never, ever Spielberg" is my middle name) nor am I planning to show The Da Vinci Code, or even Monty Python and the Holy Grail (although the latter, at least, is a genuinely good film and, thinking about it, a very good fit for this current series...).


The film I am planning to show shares a director with the Monty Python offering, but that is the only thing the two films have in common, apart from stories that deal with the Holy Grail. Okay, two things. The two things these films have in common are a shared director, and a story that features the Holy Grail. Also a really scary, murderous Knight. Maybe I should start again.


Okay, putting Monty Python to one side for a moment, The Fisher King was Terry Gilliam's first purely Hollywood film, after such independent (and mostly British) projects as The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Brazil, and The Time Bandits. And Monty Python, of course. The Fisher King is also a modern re-telling of the story of Percival (or Parsifal, if Wagner opera is your thing) one of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table, and a central figure in the Arthurian quest for the Grail.


The Fisher King takes the Arthurian tale of a wounded king whose injuries can never be healed (until he encounters a holy fool) and transports it to New York of the early 1990s - a time when the city was in very poor shape. Jeff Bridges plays an arrogant and offensive (but highly successful) radio host who spectacularly falls from grace after his broadcast is linked to a violent atrocity, committed by one of his fans. Robin Williams (in one of his more memorable performances) is a history professor caught up in that same atrocity. When they cross paths some years later, the stage is set for a highly idiosyncratic and genuinely moving story of pain and loss (and - possibly - redemption).


I can't let this film come and go without mentioning a particular narrative trope that some of you will have heard me discuss some years ago, so please bear with me while I take a moment to talk about refrigerators.

Women in Refrigerators

Fridging is a term coined in 1999 (almost a decade after The Fisher King) to describe female characters who are horribly killed (or raped, tortured, violated etc, etc) purely as a plot device to give some gravitas and motivation to the central (male) character. Writer Gail Simone came up with the term after reading an adventure of the comic book hero Green Lantern, in which the super-hero's girlfriend is tortured and murdered, and her mutilated body is stuffed into a refrigerator for the protagonist to find when he returns home.


While the women don't always wind up inside a refrigerator, it's a bit depressing to realise just how many writers have gleefully murdered a woman (on paper) just to give the male character some tragic motivation.

Click here for a closer examination of some notable fridgings in high profile movies.

And while you're contemplating that, remember that we'll be screening The Fisher King at 7.30 on Thursday, the 28th of April at the Victoria Park Baptist Church!






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