Andrew J. Myers and Dr. Darl Larsen, Theatre and Media Arts
My ORCA project was a study of the films of director Terry Gilliam. I found that the most accessible angle to begin to understand his body of work was by looking through a lens of Peter Wollen’s structuralist auteur criticism. This approach entails looking at the binaries common to many of Gilliam’s films—such as fantasy vs. reality, birth vs. death, individual vs. society, organic vs. machine—and carefully examining how these binaries shift alignment from film to film. The complex interweave of these binaries throughout the structure of a director’s films is, according to Wollen, what establishes a filmmaker as something more than a great director—a great artist.
In my research on Gilliam, I watched all of his films (some of them multiple times), taking note of the common themes and binaries, and the different ways they were used from film to film. I also researched what critics had identified as the central themes and commonalities in Gilliam’s films. In this research, I isolated fantasy vs. reality as Gilliam’s “master binary” and traced the various ways it functioned from film to film. As I expected from Wollen’s auteur theory, I found that the fantasy/reality binary was a richly complex structuring element. It varies in interesting and sometimes conflicting ways from film to film—sometimes even shifting greatly within the same film. Sometimes fantasy is dominantly good: in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, fantasy liberates a city from insanity masquerading as reason. Other times, fantasy has an edge of danger and decadence, as in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And sometimes, as in The Fisher King, fantasy both heals and destroys.
But when I embarked on a close reading of what I consider to be Gilliam’s most important film, Brazil (1985), I discovered something rather unexpected: Wollen’s theory was inadequate for accurately describing the actual structure of fantasy and reality in the film. In Brazil, rather than a binary of fantasy/reality, Gilliam has used a triadic structure: reality vs. personal fantasy vs. societal fantasy. By relying on simple binaries to interpret the film, one can miss the subtle differentiations between different modes of fantasy, as well as the way the film depicts the subversion of societal fantasy and its replacement by individual fantasy. Furthermore, these three different structural elements, rather than being opposed to one another—and therefore easily distinguished—fold in to each other and distinguish themselves only temporarily before ultimately blurring together.
I presented this analysis of Brazil, and how it fits into Gilliam’s larger body of work, as a paper entitled “The Complication of Fantasy and Reality in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil” at the Popular Culture Association’s national conference in New Orleans. This was my first academic conference and it was a great experience. I learned a lot from attending conference sessions and conversing with other conference participants. Since I am planning on attending graduate school and eventually becoming a professor, I found encouraging and gratifying to discover that I felt like I was among peers at the conference, and that my skills were adequate for advanced academic research.
I am currently revising and expanding this paper and plan to send the newest draft to the undergraduate film studies journal Film Matters within the next few weeks. The large amount of research I have done on Gilliam this year has not just resulted in a conference presentation and a possible publication; it has laid a solid foundation for further research on this subject. A large part of my reading in this project has been on Surrealism, and I am currently using the findings of this project as a launch pad for a larger study of contemporary surrealist cinema, examining how the binary of fantasy/reality is complicated by filmmakers such as Gilliam, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, and Charlie Kaufman.