Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Fisher King
1991 · Terry Gilliam · The Fisher King on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Look at how the edges of the frame bend. (camera)
Pratt and Gilliam use extreme wide-angle lenses and exaggerated low angles. Real New York rooms warp at the corners, monumental in one scene and menacing in the next.
Payoff: The lens insists the world looks the way a state of mind makes it look. Nothing here is a neutral record of a place.
Watch the commuters when Parry spots Lydia in Grand Central. (staging)
The rush-hour crowd puts down its briefcases and waltzes. Gilliam shot it overnight in the working terminal with hundreds of extras, and nobody in the film explains it.
Payoff: Parry stands still while everything around him moves. He can feel everything and do nothing, so the station does the moving for him. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of the world: the figure goes still and the world flows around him instead.
Listen for the noise that arrives before the Red Knight. (sound)
A wall of sound drowns out the city and you along with it. Gilliam built the flaming horseman physically, with a costume and a real horse, and shot him in camera.
Payoff: The nightmare has hooves and weight because it does for Parry. The film never lets you stand safely outside his head. In the reading: onirosign / dream-image. The reading calls the Knight an onirosign: a dream that erupts into the film without being framed as one.
Compare Parry's basement with Jack's apartment. (setting)
Mel Bourne fills the boiler-room grotto with Grail iconography, toys, and salvage. Jack's place is sleek and nearly empty. The mad man's world is the crowded, living one.
Payoff: The production design settles the film's moral geography before anyone argues it. The sane world is the hollow one.
Watch Williams's face in the pause after a joke. (performance)
Parry's riffing is a symptom. Williams keeps the grief visible under the improvisation, most nakedly lying in Central Park at night, still and unguarded.
Payoff: The comedy and the wound are made of the same material. Watch how fast one drops away and shows you the other.
Once you have seen it
Track whether the film ever settles what the Grail is. (structure)
A kitschy trophy on a shelf inside a fortress of a townhouse. Nobody verifies anything. LaGravenese and Gilliam leave the question open on purpose from beginning to end.
Payoff: Belief manufactures its own result. Parry tells the story of the holy fool until he becomes one, and the telling is what cures somebody. In the reading: fabulation / legending. The reading calls this fabulation: a person legending himself, where telling the story is what makes it true.
Track how fast a scene turns from a joke to horror. (cutting)
Walker gives the two-handers long unhurried runs, then cuts the Knight sequences and the radio-booth opening with sharp, disorienting rhythms. Both registers live inside single scenes.
Payoff: The instability is the subject. Minds in crisis give no warning before the tone changes, and neither does the cut.
Track what each man gives the other. (structure)
Jack's on-air cruelty helped cause the catastrophe that broke Parry. The film chains him to one of its victims by proxy, and neither man can get well alone.
Payoff: The Fisher King myth says a wounded king waits for a fool's kindness. Here both men are the king and both are the fool.
Watch Anne and Lydia rather than the two men. (performance)
Ruehl plays Anne with plainspoken adult love and exasperation. Plummer makes Lydia's clumsiness almost unbearable to watch. Neither woman needs a myth to explain what she wants.
Payoff: The women hold the film's actual argument. Love is the more plausible miracle, and it is harder to come by than a Grail.
Carry this in: Watch Parry stand still while the world moves. Gilliam gives the motion to everything except the man who cannot act.