Jabberwocky · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Look at what Gilliam keeps putting between you and the scene. A hanging carcass. A cartwheel, a beam, somebody's back. In nearly every shot of Jabberwocky you are looking through some object at the thing you are supposed to be watching, and because Terry Bedford's lens is very wide and very close, the obstruction bulges toward you while the room behind it bows away into depth. This isn't atmosphere. It's a statement about where you're standing. Not in a seat. In the mud, with something in the way.

Hold that image. The rest of the film is versions of it.

Dennis Cooper arrives fully equipped to be a hero. Michael Palin plays him straight, no winking: an earnest young man with a business plan, an eye for inventory, a faith in efficiency. He is built for what Deleuze called the action-image, the ordinary engine of narrative cinema, in which a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the acting works. Fairy tale is its purest version. Deleuze called that version the large form: a whole kingdom's condition presses down until one decisive act transforms it. Gilliam keeps the shape and quietly removes the working parts. Dennis perceives all the time. He acts all the time. What he sees never connects to what he does, and what he does never lands where he aimed it.

Deleuze had a name for this failure when he traced it through postwar cinema: the crisis of the action-image. Not a crisis in a story, a crisis in a form. The link between seeing and doing goes slack, and people are left reacting to a world that no longer answers them. This is the lens that rescues Jabberwocky from its own reviews. The standing complaints in 1977 were that it was shapeless, that the plot went nowhere, that the hero was passive and the jokes stopped arriving. Every one of those is an accurate description. They are descriptions of the subject.

Take the shapelessness. The film is a picaresque: Dennis walks into an episode with a plan and walks out of it beaten, cheated or ignored. Deleuze called this the voyage or balade form, the trip that transforms nothing. Then take the plot. The Jabberwock, the supposed motor of everything, is offscreen for most of the running time. What it actually does is economic. It drives refugees into the city, inflates certain trades, occupies the court, organises a market. Deleuze's phrase for this in the conspiracy cinema of the seventies is the condemnation of the plot: a diffuse plot behind the plot that nobody inside can see whole. Gilliam finds it in the twelfth century and plays it as a joke about guilds. It is still the argument.

Which brings back the obstruction. Gilliam runs a structural gag throughout: consequential things happen at the edge of the frame or just outside it while the ostensible subject carries on obliviously. In Deleuze's vocabulary the frame is a closed set, densely informative, and it always opens onto an out-of-field, the space next door that the image implies. Bazin praised deep focus for handing the viewer a continuous world and the freedom to look where they chose inside it. Gilliam grants that freedom and then makes a fool of you with it. You had the whole depth of the shot. You watched the wrong part. The monster works the same way at a larger scale, a pressure from somewhere unlocatable that reorganises the kingdom without ever appearing in it.

Under all of it runs something older than plot. Deleuze called it the impulse-image, and found it in Stroheim and Buñuel: a recognisable social world, the derived milieu, here court and church and guild and market, which turns out to be a crust over an originary world of raw appetite. Jabberwocky is relentless about this. Butchery, eating, disease, filth. The sound is livestock and hammering and the wet noises of chewing, with dialogue buried in the din so that nobody in the film can quite hear anyone else. Over the top of that, the De Wolfe library score lays heraldic fanfares on events that don't deserve them. Pomp on the track, dung in the picture. That gap is the film's steadiest joke and its clearest evidence that the world has two floors.

The people are handled in the same spirit. Gilliam casts and blocks his crowds as one ragged mass with a single appetite between them, which is close to what Deleuze meant by the dividual, a collective registering as one affective unit rather than a set of individuals. Even the named grotesques are figures more than characters, nearer to woodcut types than to psychology. Against them, the knights: vain, useless, dangerous, maintaining heroism as a performance for their own benefit. Deleuze's inversion-image is exactly this pairing, the sublime hero shadowed by his feeble double. The one genuine monster-slaying in the film is committed by accident, by a man who wasn't trying, and rewarded with a princess and a kingdom he never wanted.

None of this came from nowhere. Gilliam carries Bedford, the real castles and the rule that mud is actual mud straight over from Holy Grail. From Welles's Chimes at Midnight he takes the discovery that a medieval world can be built from bare stone, smoke and crowded low ceilings when there's no money. The throne room and the guild interiors are the very wide lens of The Trial, Toland's deep focus bent into a funnel around one small functionary. Bergman's The Seventh Seal licensed the period as epidemic rather than storybook. Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales supplied the principle of casting faces for their irregularity and blocking them in Bruegel-derived planes, down to the teeth. Fellini Satyricon supplied the drift and the background freakery.

Gilliam's own addition is the animator's frame: cut-out collage rebuilt with lenses, foreground shoved into your face, depth stacked from inches to infinity. That grammar goes forward almost unchanged. Dennis becomes Sam Lowry, the kingdom becomes the Ministry of Information, and Brazil is this film with more money and a worse ending for its hero. Beyond Gilliam, the squalid Middle Ages became the default register for serious screen fantasy, and the monster-as-economic-fact has been quietly borrowed ever since.

1977 was the wrong year for it. Star Wars opened that spring and told everyone what popular fantasy would be: clean, mythic, propulsive, aimed at wonder. This film is dirty, anti-mythic, digressive and aimed at disillusion, and it proved something the boom didn't need to know yet — that a whole world can be made out of density and texture when the lens does the work the budget can't.

Watch it again with two habits. Look at the edges while the scene plays out in the middle. And notice the exact moment the film stops being a comedy without telling you. The question it leaves open is whether Dennis's rationality is the joke or the only sane thing in the frame. Gilliam spent the next forty years declining to answer.