The Errant King

After carelessly inciting a violent incident over the radio, a shock jock slums it with a homeless Robin Williams in Terry Gilliam's 1991 film The Fisher King. As much as I love Terry Gilliam movies, I've only very infrequently watched this one but I found it perfectly suited my mood on Sunday.

The main character played by Jeff Bridges always seemed like he was based on Howard Stern to me. Googling now, I see Gilliam tried to get Stern as a consultant at the time but that was a period in Stern's career when being hard to get for any project was part of his shtick. Nowadays, I suspect a good portion of the people reading this probably don't know who Howard Stern is. That would have been almost unimaginable at one time when he was the dominant voice on the car radios of millions of Americans. Now, in this world of fractured audiences and podcasts and audiobooks, it may be impossible for someone to achieve such a status. Stern's interview with Kamala Harris during the last presidential election that failed to attract much if any notice, even among her supporters, was probably a nail in the coffin of both Stern's notoriety and Harris' campaign. But at one time, he was a figure of prominent controversy so people really worried about something like what happens in The Fisher King.

Bridges' character, Jack, tells a listener that rich people are basically non-humans and ought to be disposed of. After the careless remark, a listener to Jack's show takes a shotgun to a restaurant and murders several people. I was reminded of the podcast about Nazis I listened to last week in which I heard that the Nazis had a hatred for aristocrats, tied with Hitler's populist rhetoric that exploited resentment for the wealthy. But The Fisher King never becomes explicitly political.

The story takes Arthurian legend as an influence and Jack's downfall and quest for redemption are linked to the quest for the Holy Grail. I like how the film never explicitly states this motive for Jack but instead compels the viewer to find it through tactics of storytelling and filmmaking. Gilliam and his screenwriter fill the film with symbols and clues. At one point, Jack, drunkenly wandering the streets of New York, is given a Pinocchio puppet by a child. Jack's not exactly a liar but perhaps it's an indication that he is, in a sense, not real. A significant scene before his downfall has him practicing a line from a sitcom he's supposed to play the lead in, a catchphrase that consists of just a sarcastic, "Forgive me." As he practices different ways of saying it sarcastically, one is compelled to wonder if he's capable of saying it with genuine feeling.

Robin Williams is quite good as Parry, a man who loses his mind after his fiancee is killed. His subplot with Amanda Plummer as his love interest is very sweet.

The Fisher King is available on The Criterion Channel.