Key Images of 21st Century Cinema #14

Le Monde Vivant (Eugène Green, 2003)

Against Imagination

Terry Gilliam has always been too sincere to be a Surrealist and his willingness to depict the fantastic, sometimes in excruciating detail, is proof of his disinterest in it as a phenomenon. Like Verhoeven, he's got no qualms about showing the monster. The monster's existence is always certain. The viewers, no longer burdened with imagination, with looking a crooked shadows, are forced instead to feel. That is, Gilliam is a filmmaker who uses his imagination as a weapon: a bomb that obliterates our capacity to imagine, replacing whatever we might have thought up with his own detailed special effects, more meticulously photographed than Michael Bay's. Gilliam's point: "There are things more important than fantasy."

Which brings us again to Verhoeven, who, always and without shame, gives us the violence, the sex, the disgusting monsters. With his detailed "bugs" in Starship Troopers, Verhoeven guarantees that the movie isn't about them -- the question of the aliens and what they're like is no longer something that the audience has to think about very much. We are goaded into thinking about the humans instead, who are much more ambiguous. The lurid sex of Katie Tippel de-eroticizes her struggle.

Similarly, the careful realization of Sam Lowry's fantasies in Brazil is proof that it isn't a film about imagination, but cold, harsh reality. This is also the essence of Gilliam's sad Munchhausen.