The unsustainability of trying to sustain the world
November 17, 2009
(The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus (2009, USA), directed by Terry Gilliam, written by Terry Gilliam and Charles McKnown, with Heath and friends)
Same as immortal Dr Parnassus himself, the film about his Imaginarium doesn’t show, much less tell, but instead facilitates: musings that branch into speculations, morph into their own negations or fizzle into unfinished interpretations.
The gamble this movie takes upon itself is to succeed, or not, to lure the viewer behind the mirrors (shiny and opaque on the outside, camouflaged on the inside) guarding the part of their brain that concerns itself with stories and that one can choose to donate as battleground in the fight between right and wrong choices.
Nothing is final or permanent in Dr Parnassus’ world, apart from the immortality of temptation. This is a gentle form of non-heaven where the possibility of a choice is never exhausted, as long as it is desired: choices between imagination and safety, between good and bad, the continuous, exhausting choice between different filmmaking options (one can assume); finally the choice between choosing and not choosing. Every choice is both a chance to find the right way and the damnation of never reaching a way that leads to any end. What’s at stake is not to take the wrong path – that can always be fixed with another gamble, another twist in your personal myth, another crossroad. The true temptation lies in the act of choosing itself, at least when seen as a mean to a guaranteed end; in the attempt to sustain the world with crouches made of human stories, either as fairytales or in their more modern incarnations of scientific theories, judgements passed on one’s choice of a lifestyle or, in particular, of marketing, advertising and narratives of self-improvement. Stories are founded on a good-bad dichotomy, but to force one to listen to them is to push them to choose wrong, and to protect one from hearing alternative stories is to never allow them to grow up.
Ironically enough, the one character who is not offered the chance of redeeming himself is the only one who voices a belief in his own goodness, the shepherd who dies when his tune crumbles in his throat; and if he relies on ensnaring words to save him every time when he is in danger, it is also through the business of words (on the first page of a newspaper) that he perishes.
Through this neverending labyrinth of choices, is there any way left for a decent man to peacefully enjoy his immortality? Judging by the final scene, the rules are: not to judge, not to promise, and not to bet; in other words to submit the fun of roaming through the wonders of one’s mental ego to the unfolding of the great untold story that is the world, full of the transmittable magic of imagination.
So it comes that the final choice is handed over to the audience: to take a gamble with interpreting the filmmakers’ intentions; to applaud or damn the writing and directorial choices; or to throw away the crib and just enjoy every minute of this one hell of a story, be it good or bad.
