“Did you ever hear the story of the Fisher King?”
We are all familiar with myths and legends, the kinds of stories that filled our childhoods with awe and wonder, with adventure and delight, with conclusions of morality and conscience. Among these vast myths and legends, we may even be familiar with certain Arthurian tales, medieval literature and mythology revolving around the character of King Arthur and other kings and heroes of Great Britain. For American-born British filmmaker Terry Gilliam, the Arthurian legend of The Fisher King is the basis for his 1991 film of the same name.
A modern quest for the Holy Grail set in New York City, Gilliam’s film follows an uncongenial shock jock radio DJ, Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges), who meets a homeless man, Parry (Robin Williams). After learning he is unwittingly responsible for a tragic event in Parry’s life, Jack embarks on a journey of redemption by helping Parry reshape his fate.
The Arthurian legend of the Fisher King follows a King, incapable of standing due to an injury, tasked with taking care of the Holy Grail. The myth says that the King’s fate rests in the path of a noble knight who will ask him a certain question. As a young boy, the King is assigned a test of courage to stay alone in the woods at night. There he sees a vision of the Holy Grail, a symbol of God’s divine grace. A voice speaks out to him: “You shall be keeper of the Grail so that it may heal the hearts of men.” Blinded by visions of a greater, godly life brimming with honor and glory, the King reaches into the fire to take the grail. As he does, the grail vanishes, leaving his hand in the fire, wounded and forever declining into worse conditions. Eventually, life loses its reason for him. One day, a Fool wanders into the castle to find the King alone. Seeing the King only as a desolate man in pain, he asks him, “What ails you, friend?” Upon replying that he is thirsty, the Fool takes a cup from beside the King’s bed and fills it with water. Drinking the water, the King’s wounds begin to heal, and he realises the cup is the Grail. Asking him how he found the Grail, which even his own men could not find, the Fool simply replies, “I don’t know. I only knew that you were thirsty.”
The legend can be interpreted in various ways, but Gilliam uses it to tell a story about healing. The Arthurian legend is used as a base for constructing a personal, emotionally charged quest for Parry and Jack in the film, framing their respective journeys of recovery from trauma and grief around the tale.
Like the Fisher King, we find Parry in a similar situation of hopelessness; where the King was wounded physically, Parry was wounded mentally. Parry, whose real name is Henry Sagan, lost his wife in a mass shooting, which Jack had unintentionally provoked due to his mean-spirited and malicious on-air remarks towards an unstable caller when he was a DJ. The death of his wife and the trauma of losing her right before his eyes pushed Sagan into a catatonic state, from which he woke up and assumed the persona of Parry, a man obsessed with the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King.
Aligning with this persona, he is continually haunted by a hallucination of a Red Knight, a tormenting distortion on his memory of his wife’s head exploding from a shotgun blast right in front of him. Sinking further into delusion to cope with the loss of wife, Parry seeks to find the Holy Grail, a symbol of recovery from his grief and trauma; to him, the easiest way to represent the unintelligible state he is in and the seemingly impossible path to recovery is to envision a quest and a prize waiting at the very end of this journey.
The beauty of Gilliam’s film is that there’s an altered sense of duality in how Gilliam adapts the tale for a contemporary setting. He twists the very nature and flow of the myth to accommodate the narrative and developmental arc of his story by switching up the dynamic between the King and the Fool to fit his two lead characters. Although Parry is a conspicuous parallel to the Fisher King in his personal wounds, delusions, and quest to find the Grail, Gilliam also uses the tale to subtly frame Jack’s journey through the film and his road towards his own personal redemption.
Jack starts off as a radio DJ, and his involvement in unwittingly prompting an unstable caller to commit a mass murder-suicide leads him into a melancholic, intoxicated, and guilt-ridden state. Jack’s journey begins in a place of power and security: a stable job where he has access to a wide-reaching audience as a DJ. Similar to how the king is offered to be the keeper of the Grail “so it may heal the hearts of men,” Jack was in a similar position where he had the ready ability and access to heal others. Stripped of his position of power and sunken into a depressed state, Jack is only brought out of it once he meets his own noble knight, Parry, who rescues him after he is attacked and nearly set on fire by thugs who mistake him for a homeless person.
Similarly, Parry is wounded unremittingly until he finds his own noble knight to save him from his wounds. Parry rescues Jack, but the same could be said in how Jack, upon learning of his unintentional part in the death of Parry’s wife, tries to assist Parry in finding love again — what he believes is the key to Parry’s quest for the Holy Grail. Parry does not just rescue Jack from the attack, but also from his hopelessness, in unknowingly providing Jack with a new path towards redemption.
By inviting Parry and Lydia (Amanda Plummer) — a woman Parry is smitten with — to join him and his girlfriend Anne (Mercedes Ruehl) for dinner, Jack believes he will bring a sense of serenity and catharsis to Parry’s life, like the Fool did to the King’s by making the presence of the Holy Grail apparent to him. Motivated by his own guilt, Jack assumes that this act will redeem his misdoings. Although, like the King’s delusions of glory and honor, Jack later learns that this isn’t the correct answer to Parry’s personal quest.
All seems to go well for Jack’s redemption-driven plan to bring Parry back to reality again — Parry confesses his love for Lydia, and she reciprocates his declaration — but once Parry is brought back to reality with this moment of love and intimacy, his road to recovery fades into a mirage, as he is once again visited by the tormenting hallucination of the Red Knight. Like the King, Parry’s false impression of what would heal him drives him further away from reality.
The deceptive illusion of the Red Knight causes him to run away from this encounter with Lydia, and he is ambushed by the same thugs who he rescued Jack from and then ruthlessly beaten and menaced back into his previous catatonic state. At this point, unaware of Parry’s regression, Jack is given the impression that his path to redemption is complete due to his belief that Parry’s path to recovery is also complete and that he has saved him from his grief. Recharged with an artificial sense of purpose, he breaks up with his girlfriend and rebuilds his career as a radio host, turning back to where he started, diving further into his own misleading vision of his journey.
Only later, unbound from this false sense of completion by a crisis of conscience, does Jack realize the fallacious path he has traversed onto and learn about what happened to Parry. Once realizing that helping him find love again is not the solution to his trauma and grief, Jack gives into Parry’s quest of retrieving the Holy Grail from a renowned architect — who Parry believes owns the real Grail. Infiltrating the Upper East Side castle of the architect, he steals the Grail.
Unbeknownst to Jack, this retrieval of the Holy Grail does not only mark the completion of Parry’s quest, but also of his own. Whilst stealing the Grail, Jack accidentally finds the architect unconscious after a suicide attempt; on his way out, he triggers the alarm to alert the authorities, saving the architect’s life in the process.
Gilliam compassionately frames the climax of Jack’s journey towards redemption around this moment; in all his focus on redeeming himself and absolving his guilt through initially helping Parry fall in love, and later stealing the Grail for him, he fails to see that the solution to his redemption cannot be achieved by self-motivated intentions. His redemption isn’t achieved through saving someone who he has unintentionally hurt, but rather through becoming a better and much more empathetic person. By saving the architect, he redeems himself and his past actions through a pure act of empathy and humanity, completing the quest for his Grail. Once Jack brings him the Grail, Parry regains consciousness and tells him that now, having completed his quest by receiving the Grail, he can trust himself fully in being able to properly accept and mourn his wife’s death, without being further haunted by his delusions.
The end of both Jack and Parry’s individual quests sees them finding purpose and love in life again. Jack later reconciles with Anne, whilst Lydia reunites and embraces Parry as he is in the hospital singing a rendition of Burton Lane and Ralph Freed’s “How About You?” with Jack and other patients in the ward. “I like New York in June, how about you?” the song delightfully starts — a cheerful and amusing celebration and embrace of life, highlighting the leading pair’s newfound enthusiasm for living. Bringing their roads to recovery to a finale, we see Jack now joining Parry in his eccentricities; previously, when lying on the grass in Central Park recounting the story of the Fisher King, only Parry was naked, but now Jack joins him in embracing this liberation as they lie nude in Central Park, gazing at the sky as the film closes.
Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King wonderfully balances light and dark, playing with humor, absurdity, fantasy, and adventure, whilst tackling darker themes of trauma, grief, and recovery. It also represents one of the most creative ways of adapting an age-old tale. Gilliam contorts the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King by adapting the myth to a contemporary New York setting and fitting it into the friendship dynamic of Bridges’ and Williams’ characters, intertwining the roles of the King and the Fool into both of their thematic and narrative journeys. The Fisher King is a passionate story about the power of friendship and how a new friend can often lend us a fresh eye in viewing our journeys from a new perspective. In helping each other through their respective paths towards healing, Jack and Parry find unseen perspectives in recognizing that the solutions to their problems do not lie in the straightforward actions of self-motivated concerns — like the King learns from the Fool — but rather in the humble embracing of vulnerability, empathy, and humanity.
