It's Worth Doing Badly

The Fisher King

Here’s a post based on this week’s episode of Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics and (at the end) a player that lets you listen to the show. The post and the podcast don’t totally overlap: they complement each other. The post usually is a deeper look at a single idea raised in the podcast. We take requests, so leave a comment below if there’s a film you’d like us to cover. This is our 300th episode! Please subscribe to the show and listen wherever you get your podcasts and consider leaving a review on your platform of choice. Thanks.

In Flannery O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” Mr. Shiftlet complains, “The world is almost rotten.” That he contributes to the rot never crosses his mind, but his opinion often feels like a fact. When Hamlet says, “There’s ne’er a villain dwelling in all Denmark / But he’s an arrant knave,” Horatio replies, “There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave / To tell us this”—the Elizabethan equivalent of “No duh.” In T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, what should be Paradise has become an “arid plain” in which “the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water.” And before he turns his rifle on himself, Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket says, less poetically but with no less sincerity, “I am in a world of shit.” These examples from across genres and centuries point to the pessimism and despair that it is sometimes difficult to keep at bay: we read the news and find example after example of our fallen state. We walk down streets in once-glorious cities and wonder how they became such painful metaphors for the lives of their inhabitants. There are days when we wonder if we, as a culture, civilization, or species will ever pull ourselves out of the moral and spiritual quicksand that seems to be getting closer to our necks.

This isn’t how we feel all the time. If it were, we would be miserable or disturbed.

But it is how the two main characters of The Fisher King seem set on remaining forever. Jack (Jeff Bridges) is filled with guilt, anger, and self-hatred over what he views as his role in a mass shooting; Parry (Robin Williams) has retreated into psychosis as a means of avoiding the pain that that shooting—a random, terrible event—brought to his door. Suicide and psychosis seem to be the only ways in which they can escape the despair that has marked each of their days. When the film begins, each assumes that he is living in the conclusion of his life story. They have seen what they think to be the true nature of the world and have decided it’s a terrible place that can never be changed. The credits may as well roll. Most of us, according to Jack, are among “the bungled and the botched”: “We get teased. We sometimes get close to greatness, but we never get there. We’re the expendable masses. We get pushed in front of trains, take poison aspirin ... get gunned down in Dairy Queens.”

Or, as Parry knows, in nightclubs.

How each gets out of the hole into which he has fallen and from which he doesn’t initially want to escape is the subject of Terry Gilliam’s film and of a strain in literature as old as Le Morte d’Arthur. That Gilliam co-directed Monty Python and the Holy Grail makes perfect sense: he clearly finds the tales of knights-errant entertaining (for great parodies always reveal a deep love of the original form) and crucial to understanding what brings happiness to our lives when we are in pain: a quest.

Parry’s name is meant to suggest Parsifal, but his real literary ancestor is Don Quixote. Like Cervantes’ hero, Parry undertakes a quest in which the search for beauty and meaning occurs in the least likely of places. Both Quixote and Parry adopt a questing perspective that puts them into what Perry calls “a state of radical amazement” in which Dulcinea seems like a duchess and Lydia becomes a lady. When we see Lydia’s clumsiness and social awkwardness, we pity her; when Parry sees her, he gasps. His calling her “the greatest thing since spice racks” makes us laugh, but to him she is no laughing matter. She is Guinevere and Helen and any other high watermark of feminine perfection. Having a quest affects one’s vision for the better; it’s like moral eyeglasses that illuminate the meaningfulness of life. He sees Lydia in a way that we cannot. When we are in Grand Central Station, we see crowds of people pushing and shoving, but why when Parry is there, all he sees is dancing.

The grail, according to Parry, can “heal the hearts of men.” But it’s the quest for the grail that brings about the healing. The grail is a moral Maguffin.¹

Questing for something, whether it is the grail, a relationship with our families, fulfilling work, or deeper understanding of whatever interests us is worth the effort, even as we know that we’ll never completely attain the thing being sought. It explains why people spend hours working on Substack posts knowing that they aren’t making a dime from them or why people in love go out of their ways to make their beloveds happy. Knights in Mallory have glimpses of the grail, just as we have great moments of satisfaction: these moments fuel our quests and keep us motivated. We become better people by pursuing noble goals, even if those goals (such as being a perfect parent, spouse, or person) are unattainable. Chesterton wrote, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly”—in other words, anything truly valuable will be truly difficult to attain, but we still need to try, even if we do the thing less well than we had hoped. It’s worth trying to be a perfect father even when one errs in the attempt; it’s worth making a film as odd as The Fisher King even when some viewers will call it “overstuffed.” Quests need to be difficult because the difficulty is what makes them meaningful. To fall into despair and live as if nothing were worth pursuing—to live as Jack and Parry do at the start of the film—is to live like wooden creatures; to quest is to become, like Pinocchio who lays between Jack and Parry at the end of the film, a real boy.

The film’s title applies to both Jack and Parry, who tells his version of the Fisher King legend:

It begins with the king as a boy, having to spend the night alone in the forest, to prove his courage so he can become king. Now, while he's spending the night alone, he is visited by a sacred vision. Out of the fire appears the Holy Grail, symbol of God's divine grace. And a voice said to the boy, “You shall be keeper of the Grail, so that it may heal the hearts of men.” But the boy was blinded by greater visions of a life filled with power, and glory, and beauty. And in this state of radical amazement, he felt for a brief moment not like a boy, but invincible - like God... so he reached into the fire to take the Grail, and the Grail vanished, leaving him with his hand in the fire, to be terribly wounded. Now as this boy grew older, his wound grew deeper. Until one day, life for him lost its reason. He had no faith in any man - not even himself. He couldn't love, or feel loved. He was sick with experience. He began to die.

Both men felt invincible: Jack in his high tower, spouting off to the world, and Parry secure in his career and marriage. But they lose faith in anything and begin to die. And just when they are at their lowest points—think of Jack with the cinderblocks tied to his legs and Parry screaming in the street at the sight of the Red Knight—a chance meeting changes them:

One day, a fool wandered into the castle, and found the king alone. And being a fool, he was simple-minded; he didn’t see a king. He only saw a man alone, and in pain. And he asked the king, “What ails you, friend?” The king replied, “I’m thirsty—I need some water to cool my throat.” So the fool took a cup from beside his bed, filled it with water, and handed it to the king. As the king began to drink, he realized his wound was healed! He looked in his hands, and there was the Holy Grail, that which he sought all of his life. And he turned to the fool and said with amazement, “How can you find that which my brightest and bravest could not?” And the fool replied, “I don’t know. I only knew that you were thirsty.”

Each of them is brought his grail—the trophy Jack steals, yes, but really the reclaiming of their lives—by the other. Neither planned to save the other; each only knew that the other was thirsty. The world is almost rotten—but The Fisher King gets us to think about the importance of that adverb.

You can listen to the episode wherever you get podcasts or here:

1. A Maguffin is, according to Hitchcock, “the thing the spies are after.” It’s an object or piece of information that only exists to propel a plot, like the microfilm in North by Northwest containing “government secrets.”