CinemArchetype #24: The Fisher King

"It's not a question of where he grips it!" - Knight discussing coconut-importation via swallows- Monty Python and the Holy Grail

The cinema has done wrounght or rongt for the Fisher King - wrong and right mixed inextricably together -- until body, mind, and soul bled into each other (and if you doubt Gregory Peck makes an astonishingly great Ahab, just dig the way he elides that sentence); the wound of the fisher king is what sets the search for the holy grail in motion, you silly English a-personne! 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 I here now present can be read both the ultimate in deliverance and the final abandonment of the futility of hedonistic pursuits. Imagine being, say, a rock star in the early 70s, living a basic porn movie come to life existence--a nonstop drug-fueled orgy--well, if you spent your painful pre-rock adolescence dreaming of such a life, then what ever will you dream of now, old man? Child rearing? To paraphrase Colonel Rutledge, any man who engages in child rearing at your age deserves all he gets! 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, "Financially dissatisfied, 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. The alcoholic, like me, the poor bedeviled guy whose whole life is spent on fire with thirst, vampirically chasing the next drink, and dreading the holy day blue laws would be destroyed within weeks if he one day inherited a fully stocked bourbon bank. The fisher king's wound--a mirror to Christ's own wound from the Roman spear in the thigh--reflects this, the agony of achievement without God, for no amount of gold can match a hunk of rock if the lord hath tossed it, so sayeth the fans.

My own spin on the myth is that in reality Christ never would have approved of grail and spear worship, though; when the grail kingdom finds the spear that wounded Jesus, they sayeth therefore let us wrap it in gold and silver and deliver it unto the high priest with all due pomp. Dude, that kind of idolatry runs counter to every word the man said! It's that golden calf again, the people all but begging for another plague of pestilence!

Depending on whether you're reading Wagner or Wolfram Von Eisenbach, Maria Franz, Carl Jung, the fisher king's own wound is from mishandling the spear, or having it stolen by a Muslim warrior (Parsifal's own long lost brother, in one version), or he's just stabbed in a joust with a visiting Muslim knight and the spear and grail come later. There's way too much of that stuff in different forms to go into, but I think there's a separate archetype here for the modern age, for enough of cinema's most memorable patriarchs are effective partly because of some visble wound or weakness that mirrors their nation/family's current pestilence, something that can be symbolically healed and thus heal the land, for the king and the land are one. So we are given an unconscious purpose in life. Gandhi made himself almost die of hunger to give the newly freed Muslims and Hindus a purpose, to stop fighting, a more noble purpose then escalating reprisals.

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, what are world and national and any other kind of leaders, as long as they are smart enough to display their wound, their symbolic groin castration, to exploit the Jungian collective unconscious? For true men are not inspired by the heat of the mob, the social contagion of mass hysteria. True men, the best of us, must be reached on personal, mythic level, if we are to risk our lives in defense of something, to walk, unarmed and unblinking, into the bloodied batons of salt mine sentries, or the spray of redneck fire hoses. The leader must activate their warrior confidence, their bravery, their willingness to commence war, or  peace, or reconstruction, even at risk of losing life, happiness, 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 free-thinking, free-speaking, royalty-free democracy... for those free countries, convincing someone to lay down life and limb in pursuit of your goals takes the kind of touch where a single TV broadcast can galvanize a million individual human minds and hearts, like Martin Luther King, or Kennedy, or Bulworth.


Sorry. So yeah, I'm the fisher king, too. Wounded by age, loss, irrelevance, and my world's a wasteland--Park Slope Brooklyn with its infernal stretches of brownstone front lawn flower bushes, willowy fairy children and their adorable mom with no make-up, organic red kale jutting up, accusingly, from her co-op cardboard half-box, walking in out-of-order duck disarray as I rush past, abhoring their comfort and ease in their own skins. Some of us are born for war, and if we're too lazy to fight we have to make-do with internal vigilance. Tis a poor promoter of peace who can't get their own inner war resolved. We see such people all the time, the seething rageful feminists sneering at any lusty male who just wants to say what's up and love those shorts, the racist furying at his designated hateheart... wait do I mean me? Dear Lord. In hating racists and misandrists misogynists, what am I?

"You are looking at the result sir, of a very gaudy life." General Sternwood isn't being self-pitying here, just rueful of the way wild women and whiskey has taken its toll without even leaving him much in the way of pleasant memories. Hell, I am rueful too, and a little fisher king-y myself these hot summer days. So is Bogart, who takes an instant shine to the General, though alas he is only present in this one scene. But once he meets daughter Vivian he realizes he's "beginning to like another one of the Sternwoods." Sternwood is a capital fisher king, inspiring the loyalty of Marlowe almost at once, with the blackmail letters concerning his wild daughters hanging over him like a painful wound from an errant Muslim warrior.


The movie itself is one of those anemic too-pretty art flicks, the style Merchant Ivory inflicted on the world cinema like a cancer of good taste, one where tiresomely reticent hearts and sunshine fields of flowers, arrays of butlers, polished silver, antique cars and lack of anything meaningful dialogue all come together to annoy anyone who doesn't subscribe to the New York Times Sunday section. The only characters with any balls are Bill Murray as FDR and emily mortimer (it seems very disrespectful that the sexuality of the 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? Of course, because the writer and director have no idea how to film a friendly genuine social interaction or demonstration of Mad Men style masculine authority, the bitch of a mom ordering her son around is just irritable, only Olivia Williams as Eleanor has any spunk, the visiting king and queen are portrayed as two insecure pompous twits, afraid of their own shadow, as if in referencing Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, they now go off to reference The King's Speech and Lincoln (insane shrew of a wife trying to make his few moments of home life as miserable as possible, now that's something feminists should mind). 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. Laura Linney seems like she's rehearsing for an upcoming audition rather than acting a part. Bill Murray fails to represent the full width and power of FDR, at least as far as I saw, though this is him at his most un-Murray-ish; he seems subsumed in mannerisms though, he makes some impressive monologues while hauling himself from his wheelchair to the bar, but in the end it 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 acting important, and waiting til all the bitchy women finally go to bed so the men can drink and talk and tell jokes. 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 from his wheelchair --you don't get more fisher king than that.


My interpretation of the fisher king might differ from various texts, for many his archetypal connection is to Parsifal, and he is the grail keeper, not the grail needer. Parsifal needs to answer the questions of the grail correctly to win it, but the variants condensing in Boorman's Excalibur posit Arthur as the fisher king, wound not be 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 Morganna's 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 is turned into abeautiful flowering kingdom as they ride past each tree it bursts into life, a beautiful brave scene scored to De Falla and bursting the stitches of Jungian archetypal symbolism into a paroxyism of perfect inetersection between myth, psyche, music, and cinema. Boorman never made a better movie since.


Conan is the ultimate teenage alienation movie --- If you were my age--15--seeing it in theaters you never forgot it. The dark dad comes and kicks you out of your home life, shackles you to the wheel of woe (school), and you go deep into yourself. 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 Subotai shows up, Conan finally has someone he can talk to, who's not out to kill him. Conan gets a girlfriend after that, and the three of them are off and running, they get brought before the king after robbing a hippie serpent-handling church, and rather than punish them, he laughs. He seems not quite "now grown old and sotted" as Mako narrates, but he does have two babes at his side. And he hates that church, his daughter ran off and joined them. They're like Woodstock if everyone smoked salvia instead of pot (if you don't know the serpentine menace lurking beneath the smoke of the sage, then 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 and company to steal her back. 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 well and we're in a swell realm, and the character of Conan is thus presented with the second father so essential to a fairy tale, and Conan's path to helping Osric is his path to confronting the dark father, Vader-voice made flesh, James Earle Jones.


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. The severed ear Jeffrey finds is the 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 detectivework, i.e. he's Hamlet if the dad was just in the hospital and the brother sucked on laughing gas.


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, that would have saved the company or ruined it, the grail in this case, is hidden until Parsifal (Tim Robbins) figures out the riddle, at which case the angel Warring doth 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 in snaring the 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. He


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.