Terry Gilliam is the last surrealist. His latest film, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, confirms such an assertion with its dazzling and disorienting visual effects. In “the imaginarium” Dr. Parnassus brings visitors into a world of the dreams, an inversion of those intimate possessions as they are made an entire, external world. These spaces are disproportionately “surrealistic” in that they askew proportions and employ color schemes right out of a Dali. Though supposedly the dreams of the individual, all of Dr. Parnassus’-assisted-dream-spaces bend toward the surrealistic, complimenting the aesthetic and narrative predilections of Parnassus who is really just a proxy for the vision and desires of Terry Gilliam.
Terry Gilliam has a long history of perpetuating the surrealist paradigm. As a foundational member of Monty Python (and the author of its iconic animations) Gilliam participated in the invention and popularization of surrealist humor. He complimented the zany antics of Python humor with bleak, dystopian, unexpected, and often Jungian dream animations where the unexpected was always the protagonist and a sort of Victorian stiff-upper life was brought down to mere bathroom humor.
From Python, Gilliam became an independent director with film adaptations of Jabberwocky, and Baron von Munchausen, works of literature some bizarre and fantastic, so cryptic and unnerving that they suited his surrealist proclivities perfectly. Later work, like Time Bandits, 12 Monkeys, and his Criterion Collection edition of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas simply perpetuated a certain aesthetic status quo. To say nothing of his immortal Brazil, which is firmly Orwell made surrealist, all of Gilliam work plays out like a dream you didn’t want to have, but can’t look away from. His penchant for the absurd, the grotesque, and the weird lends itself to new hybrid genres of narrative entirely his own: medieval surreal (jabberwocky) victorian surreal (Dr. Parnassus, Munchausen, Monty Python) and retrofuture surreal (12 monkeys, Brazil).
It’s not a great film this Dr. Parnassus, but it is proof that Terry Gilliam truly is an auteur, and one keeping lit a century old flame of surrealist art. In his veins pumps an aesthetic style conceived of by Dadaists and discontents, Dali and the French school, and made cinematic by Gilliam’s unique vision.
Parnassus tells a story of stories- claiming that if stories are no longer told, the world ceases to exist. And that may be the secret mantra of Terry Gilliam’s own production. For if he stops telling his stories, surrealism with its signature aesthetics, proclivities towards mirrors (how Freudian), and narratives that lack syntagmatic sense, will fade into a thing of the past, killing a whole approach to life and its creative subversion.