The cinema has done wrounght or rongt for the Fisher King. What are these two odd words? They wrong and right mixed inextricably together -- facing each other, but theah one!-- fusing until body, mind, and soul bleed into each other. The point where they intersect and overlap is the wound of the Fisher King. It is what sets the search for the Holy Grail--which can be anything from la sangre de Cristo to a mere mcguffin -- in motion, you silly English-a person! For without the blood of Christ there can be no cure, and so the land in turn is turned to waste, and the day is wasted if you're not. Up, sluggard, and waste not the drinking day!
The grail in these cinematic contexts can be read as either deliverance or the final abandonment of the futility of hedonistic pursuits and the embrace of the divine. Imagine being, say, a rock star in the early 70s, living a nonstop drug-fueled orgy. Well, if you spent your painful pre-rock adolescence dreaming of such a life, then as a youth achieved it, then what ever will you dream of now that you are living it, old man? Now the young groupies look at you askance. So, being a dad? To paraphrase Colonel Rutledge, any man who engages in child rearing at your age deserves all he gets. You're screwed, bra, wounded in exile. When one's desires are fulfilled beyond measure one is put in the painful position of being forced to realize one's desires were idiotic. Or as Mick Jagger says, "sexually satisfied, philosophically trying." For he was debauched enough by then to know debauchery is only useful as an artistic tool, a perspective-widener, rather than something that builds long-lasting happiness. That can only be found in one's children and our one's art/music. The alcoholic, like me, vampirically chasing the next drink, would be destroyed within weeks if he one day inherited a fully stocked bar (as I almost was). The Fisher King's wound--a mirror to Christ's own wound from the Roman spear in the thigh--reflects the agony of achievement without God, Dr. Faustus painfully walking amongst his signed-for splendor without joy, for no amount of gold can match a hunk of rock if the lord hath tossed it, so sayeth the fans.
Depending on whether you're hearing Wagner or reading Wolfram Von Eisenbach or Maria Franz or Carl Jung, the Fisher King's wound is from either possessing the spear that pierced Christ and mishandling it, or being stabbed by a Muslim warrior (Parsifal's own long lost brother, in one version) who either stabs him with it and flees or it's stolen from the Muslim warrior, or the Fisher King is just stabbed in a joust with a visiting Muslim knight and the spear and grail come later. It's all relevant to life in cinema, so whatever the cause of the wound, the Fisher King's power endures. Enough of cinema's most memorable patriarchs are effective partly because of some visible wound or weakness that mirrors their nation/family's current pestilence, something that can be symbolically healed and thus heal the land. We are given an unconscious purpose in life by the Fisher King, a chance to perhaps save our father from his lonesome death and thus stay our own irrelevance (we being next on mortality's gruesome daisy chain). Gandhi made himself almost die of hunger to give the newly freed Muslims and Hindus a purpose, to stop their escalating reprisal spiral, FDR's wheelchair made his resolve in the face of German and Japanese aggression that much more motivational, etc.
Watching Lincoln (2012) the other night made me aware that while the Fisher King archetype may inspire only a single Parsifal on a hero's journey, it is enough. As long as leaders are smart enough to display their wound, their symbolic groin castration, to exploit the Jungian collective unconscious, they will always inspire the independent man who's heart craves a worthy cause. For true men are not inspired by the heat of the mob, the social contagion of mass hysteria. True men, the best of us--if we are to walk, unarmed and unblinking, into the bloodied batons of salt mine sentries, or the spray of redneck fire hoses, or Japanese machine gun fire--must be reached on personal, mythic level. The Fisher King, the wounded leader, must activate the warrior spirit in his fellow men, galvanize them to risk of losing life, savings account, and freedom. FDR had this gift, as opposed to Hitler or the Emperor of Japan, who brainwashed unquestioning unthinking obedience and hero worship rather than courting the noble heart. Convincing free thinkers to lay down life and limb takes the kind of touch where a single speech or TV broadcast can galvanize a million individual human minds and hearts, like Martin Luther King, or Lincoln, or Kennedy, or Bulworth. But if the cause is not true, weeks of nonstop bombast and brainwash will fail to inspire anything real, other than the vilest of all human traits, mob mentality.
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| God be praised. |
1. Charles Waldron as General Sternwood
The Big Sleep (1946)
2. Bill Murray as FDR
Hyde Park on the Hudson (2012)
The movie itself is one of those anemic too-pretty art flicks, a Merchant-Ivoried bit of dreary memoir where tiresomely reticent hearts, fields of flowers, arrays of butlers, polished silver, antique cars that look fresh off the assembly line, and the lack of any legit rhythm to the dialogue all come together to annoy anyone who doesn't fawn over New York Times Sunday section anymore. The only actors with any ability to stand out from the wallpaper are Bill Murray as FDR and Olivia Williams as Eleanor. And it seems very disrespectful that the sexuality of a president is once again relegated to an off-the-wrist HJ, poorly and confusingly alluded to --is this proper, to focus on a great man's indiscretions? Perhaps a great politician is by nature an emotionally stunted lover? Did Ken Starr produce and insist we add this quick one off the wrist down on the auld main drag? because the writer and director have no idea how to film a friendly genuine social interaction or even to provide a demonstration of presidential authority, FDR's mom ordering her son around is allowed to come off as bitterly irritable; the visiting king and queen are portrayed as two insecure pompous twits, afraid of their own shadow. Having first referenced Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky via the off-the-wrister, they now go off to reference The King's Speech and Lincoln (insane shrew of a wife or mom trying to make a great man's home life as miserable as possible).
I confess I had to give up after 45 minutes. The music score was unbearably trite, as if rummaging through John Williams most corny and obvious passages while he's in the shower, stealing them outright, not that he'd be able to prosecute, having stolen them in turn from the Russians. Laura Linney seems like she's rehearsing for an upcoming audition rather than acting a part, is so cloying it's like she's reading Hallmark cards to her mentally-impaired grandchildren before church. Bill Murray fails to represent the full width and power of FDR; he seems subsumed in mannerisms. In the end it all seems like a painful memory from the eyes of a very bored child stuck watching grown-ups talk, and remembering them only as a bunch of strained, uncomfortable simpletons; the men grit their teeth and wait 'til all the bitchy women (moms and wives) finally go to bed so the real drinking can commence, which then we don't even get to see. Of course Murray's a Fisher King in and of himself, and FDR inspired an entire nation to rise up on a bloody hero's journey --you don't get more Fisher King than that. Too bad their combination is left stranded in a doily-decked bed and breakfast, with the martinis measured out in eyedrops.
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3. Nigel Terry - King Arthur
Excalibur (1981)
My interpretation of the Fisher King might differ from various texts, for many his archetypal connection is to Parsifal, period, and whether he is the grail keeper or the grail needer is the only variant. Always Parsifal needs to answer the questions of the grail correctly to win the grail, but the variants condensing in Boorman's Excalibur posit Arthur as the Fisher King, wound inflicted not by a Muslim warrior but by lightning thrown from his evil sister, timed with spotting Lancelot shacked up with Guinevere, leaving behind the sword of power - stabbing the earth in his sorrow, and having the sword run through Merlin, all timed to this double betrayal. "The king without a sword! The land without a king!"
Percival finds the grail at last by recognizing the Fisher King is Arthur, who is synonymous with the land, and the stuff of 'future legend.' Arthur sips from the grail, is restored, retrieves his sword from Guinevere, who has kept it all these years after naked Lancelot bravely ran away away. And when Arthur and his nights ride forth to battle Mordred, the wasteland blooms as they pass by into a flowering kingdom, a beautiful brave scene scored to De Falla and bursting the stitches of Jungian archetypal symbolism into a paroxysm of, like the rest of the film, a perfect intersection between myth, psyche, music, and cinema. Boorman never made a better movie since, maybe even before.
4. Max Von Sydow as King Osric
Conan the Barbarian (1982)
Conan is the ultimate teenage alienation movie. The dark dad comes, kills the old, and kicks you out of your home life, shackles you to the wheel of woe (school), and you go deep into your room and comic books. When you finally make a friend, the movie's 1/4 way through. Before Subotai shows up there's no banter, no joy, just unrelenting grimness, we feel the release of a lot of tension when Conan finally has someone in his life who's not out to kill or enslave him. Conan gets a girlfriend after that, and the three of them are off and running, until they get brought before the king after robbing a cult of serpent-handlers. Rather than punish, the king salutes them. He seems not quite "now grown old and sotted" as Mako narrates, but he does have two hot babes at his side. And he hates the serpent-handlers since his only daughter ran off and joined them. They're like Woodstock if everyone smoked salvia divinorum instead of pot (if you don't know the serpentine menace lurking beneath the divine sage, you won't get that joke). Osric isn't notably wounded, he has lost his daughter to a shady Eddy Mars of a grifter named Set (James Earle Jones) and wants Conan for a Sean Regan. Conan agrees because he's sworn to kill Set (he stole his fatha's swoahd), which right there tells you that Excalibur the mighty phallus is alive and the character of Conan is thus presented with the third father so essential to a fairy tale, and Conan's path to helping King Osric is his path to confronting the dark father, Vader-voice made flesh, James Earle Jones, and Max played his own dark father in Flash Gordon (1980)
5. Jack Harvey as Jeffrey's Dad in
Blue Velvet (1986)
The sudden mortal vulnerability of the father is a terrible thing for any son to witness. Regardless of how mature the son may be, he is never ready for this, as he can't help but realize that he is next. The son will soon be in this exact spot, dying, wounded, vulnerable. The son will then perform the phallus, as it were, enact the father's stiffness. For me, for example, that consists of mirroring my dad's home life: sitting on the couch, drinking, smoking mounds of cigarettes, and yelling at the TV, presuming it hears my japes. The severed ear Jeffrey finds is his first glimpse of the grail, the start of the breadcrumb trail, the purloined mail that Jeffrey returns to his quail's male. Too much? Soon dad is back to mowing the lawn, and the beauty and banality of Lumberton is restored, all indirectly because of Jeffrey's dogged detective work, i.e. he's Hamlet if the dad was just in the hospital and the evil brother sucked on laughing gas.
6. Charles Durning - Warring Hudsucker
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
There are a lot of Fisher King archetypes in the constellations of the Coens, from the Colonel Sternwood-riff of the 'other' Lebowski (also Durning), to George Clooney's machine and oxygen-tube dependent old boss in Intolerable Cruelty, but the best for me is Durning as Waring Hudsucker because, though he may jump out the window, he's always present. His death a mystery but a sacrifice, his letter, never delivered by the incompetent Parsifal (Tim Robbins), figures out the riddle, at which case the angel Warring doth re-appear.
Katherine Hepburn is evoked (flawlessly, at first) by Jennifer Jason Leigh (with dashes of Marilyn Monroe, Vivien Leigh later, even Stanwyck); editors spitting out questions in the manner of the news reeler in Citizen Kane; two bum taxi drivers at the lunch counter do Lady Eve's Stanwyck talking to her mirror while discussing her rivals for Hopsy; Paul Newman chomping on cigars and showing off his incredible 70 year-old abs, a living connection to the invoked studio era. The only drawback is Tim Robbins' discomfort with playing such a reticent spazz; he seems to amuse the Coens--they give him long loving takes to do his business--but it takes a lot of forgiveness on our parts to stick it out and just appreciate the unified field theory, geometric symbolism, those horrible dreams you have that you're still at your last job and ordered on some unfathomable mission, and Waring's triumphant reappearance, playing ukulele and singing "Comin' Round the Mountain" like he wrote it.
7. Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab
Moby Dick (1953)
He turns the Holy Grail myth on its head; instead of a potion to cure his pain he seeks the strong venom of vengeance, but in this case it's far beyond mere retribution, and that's why I think Peck's strange performance is so great, and I fie and foo and even fum those critics who call him a confused Lincoln. I know Welles wanted to play him and wound up playing Father Mapple instead, wherein he does a grand job. I think the combination of a difficult water shoot and difficult Welles would ensure they'd STILL be working on it otherwise. What makes Peck so great is that he seems like a pretty normal, capable guy, but the combination of having been struck by lightning in the past, and losing his leg to Moby Dick has left him with a kind of unholy power. He won't be cured until Moby Dick is dead, so in this case the Grail is filled with the blood of the whale, and when it comes, he gets a chance to drink deep ere he departs, if not of the blood then at least the salty water Dick calls home. He in effect becomes part of the etchings around the lip of the Grail -- in addition to gold letterings of harpoons and scars, thar he lies, a skeleton caught up in mariner's ropes beckoning... beckoning to drink deep therefrom, and depart in style as befit one's rank.
8. Daniel Day Lewis
Lincoln (2012)
While Spielberg makes sure Lewis is as penny-and-five dollar bill-like as possible, Lewis makes Lincoln gentle and full of biblical anecdotes, speaking in a Walter Brennan voice modulated like the ebb and flow of a leisurely incoming tide, until the zero hour at which point he becomes a paragon of democracy, fire and brimstone; and when the canons fire and the celebration hits the streets he becomes gentle once more... ebbing and flowing. This kind of long game rhetorical strategy should of course be in any decent politician's schtickbook. For his inspiring wound, Lincoln also uses his terrible posture, his tall thin geekiness, the ache in his heart over losing his first son and having a bi-polar harridan of a wife. None of this is ever cured by some Parsifal grail. In fact, the bullet from John Wilkes Boothe may have been that grail in a dark hue. Men with mentally ill spiritual drains for wives often succeed at their jobs because they never want to come home. The office becomes their place of comfort and relaxation, they dread weekends. When he dies in Spielberg's film, it's almost a triumph, as if his spirit moves into every five dollar bill, painting, and film about him; his death is a rebirth into a holy legend, one of the greatest of Americans, now free from his crazy wife at last, as democracy steers its lumbering will into existence.
His Fisher King's wound alight, each man must rise to his aid, each a hero's journey intwining into what we call democracy, a giant rugby pile where one man can set a massive change rippling the fabric of history and finally smooth out the god-awfullest rumple even if it's over mounds of the dead. As children we're brought up to think that 1776 was a long, long time ago, and that democracy is solid and inescapable. But it was constantly in jeopardy then, and so is today, both from within and without. In that sense we were a lot like Israel is today; Israel is only 70-ish, right? That's approx. how old America was circa Lincoln. This is how I imagine history, through such leap-frogging. I try to be the Fisher King for the seventies, to remember a time of sexual and experimental freedoms, which we have renounced now, scared of AIDs and choosing to forget how far we went, to murmur it down to shag rug and blacklight postcard that we wince at once in awhile, never looking past the tackiness of the chosen signifiers. We hunger, as Loki says in The Avengers, for subjugation. For some people, freedom, real freedom, is far scarier than any conservative tyrant's crushing grip. Goddamn it, I think I'm one of them.
9. Bill Nighy as Viktor
Underworld (2003)
Vampire Kate Beckinsale's mentor hibernates for millennia while upside down and vertical in a giant ornate bronze tube and isn't scheduled to be rehydrated for another 200 years. But she needs his help because her lover's a werewolf and her ex-boyfriend is a vampire out to gun him down. This is really big! To her. How dare she wake him up? Does it turn out he's evil and whatnot? Of course it doth. He's got dark secrets, and when your dark secret lord takes a drink it better be Christ-level blood if you wake him early.
Whatever you might say about the Underworld films, they have a great coterie of Brit thesps and a unified dark blue look. There hasn't been a ray of sun anywhere in the series' four film run, and for that I am truly grateful. Beckinsale is beautiful and can act, as can the mostly Shakespeare company-ish cast, so the only drawback is Scott Speedman whose a little too heavy-lidded WB hunk slackjawed, with that weird mix of constantly wet shoulder length rich kid hippy hair and puffy gym muscles we associate with 80s porn stars, or the kind of guys Syl murders in Species.
10. Gabriele Ferzetti - Morton
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
If you got into Italian cinema via Leone, you may have wondered why you instinctively didn't like the romantic lead in Antonioni's L'Aventura (1958). That's because he was a sweaty railroad baron in Once Upon a Time, a Fisher King tycoon gone to seed, crippled by polio and losing control of his body, and his men. He needs his champion to bring him the cure, which in this context is the sea... to know the railroad made it all the way across the country to the Pacific. But this is no Jungian self-actualization but the scourge that is capitalism, big business, ambition and naked greed at the cost of decent wages and fairness. BUT we got the rail road didn't we? We delivered the bomb.
Men needed to be corrosively driven. Apparently their odyssey started out pretty well but out here in the endless wastelands of Monument Valley it's a bit like Aguirre, Wrath of God or Apocalypse Now, only the darkness-infused hearts can survive. In the end, Morton has to settle for a painting of the sea, a nice little Morricone death cue, and a few final good-by bullets from his angel of death, a brilliant Henry Fonda. Such is life, not every Fisher King, even if he's evil, gets to live through his wound's rough cure.
13. Burl Ives - Big Daddy
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
(from Mendacity A-Go-Go):
The family basement is packed with souvenirs and statues from a Cook's tour to Europe Big Daddy took with his wife, who takes after the mendacity side of the family. What could be just a cliche'd rendition of Charles Foster Kane's big ole basement becomes a mythic underworld, with Burl Ives as a kind of pot-bellied troll king, and cobwebs on tall lamps draped to resemble stalagmites and tree roots. There's moments for Burl and Paul to each smash stuff in a clutching heart attack way as their illusions of immortality and glory are dashed on the altar of passing time and irrelevance, the horror of all existence, and then are redeemed, sweaty and wrecked, by the icky area they fear and recoil from the most - genuine feeling and human love.
I've had those breakthroughs before with my own big daddy, maybe you have too -- the late night boozy moments of truth when you can look at him and suddenly see--instead of a paragon or symbol of authority--a fellow aging human, ever trying to escape his future by ignoring his present, just as you do, and if alcoholism runs in your veins you can bond quite well until the hungover morning when you scarcely remember the progress you made. Like many of Williams' plays, it seems made for me, made for a brooding drunk writer by a brooding drunk writer - with booze as the thing that both gives you the brio to stare into that void, and at the same time shorten the distance to the bottom, where the teeth are, at the base of the Sebastian's Venus fly trap garden. Click! SNap went the DraGon!
12. Jeff Bridges - Jack
The Fisher King (1991)
Man, if I wanted to see an alcoholic artist slacker in the late 80s taking advantage of the kindness and fierce protective instinct of a goodhearted Italian-American girl, I would just look at my scrap book! Twice! That's why I was happy to see Jeff Bridges finally becoming.... Jeff Bridges, as you can plainly see above. He does a great job of the slow transformation, with Robin Williams in prime 'who's crazier, the crazy guy or the 'sane' one in an insane world?" Terry Gilliam format. Williams gives an interesting version of the Fisher King myth, where the grail is finally granted the king via a fool rather than all the searching knights. Of course this is Williams, making our friend Jeff, the dude, the Fisher King. Look at him there, above, aren't you proud? Grail achieved! What is it? It's a golf trophy Williams stole from an UES apartment!
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