Читать книгу Gilliamesque - Terry Gilliam - Страница 9
Оглавлениеnever met my grandfather on my mother’s side. His and my grandma’s marriage had broken up after he got ripped off in a business deal and turned to drink, but I wasn’t encouraged to ask about that as a child, because it was perceived as such a disgrace to the family. Years later, when my mum gave me her journal to read, I found out that one of my grandpa’s other shameful accomplishments was running a cinema in Bismarck, North Dakota – which she initially tried to pass off as ‘a theatre’ (as if that made it more respectable!). So the cinematic gene was definitely in there somewhere.
If we’re going to get into genetics, although I’m a bit of a neo-Lamarckian when it comes to the inheritance of acquired characteristics, I’ve spent most of my life trying to counteract my genes (whether by acquiring as many Jewish friends as possible as soon as we moved to LA, or by voluntarily exiling myself to the colonial motherland as an adult). You know that feeling you get as a kid at Christmas when you see your relatives sitting around and think, ‘I’ve got to get out of here . . . ’ Surely it can’t just have been me who felt that way? It wasn’t that I’d had a bad time in the bosom of my family, or that they were genetically unsound, I just wanted to see a bit more of the world.
My grandfather on my dad’s side was an early stepping-stone into a different kind of landscape. He was a Baptist preacher (albeit one who qualified via mail order rather than theological college), a big, charming guy who lived in the South, in Hot Springs, Arkansas. We’d driven down there from Minnesota a couple of times and my memories of those early trips are a splashy blur of swinging out and jumping into creeks on big tyres on ropes. All that shit was great, except that when you rolled around in the tall grass you’d get covered in ticks and chiggers – a.k.a. nasty little biting fuckers that burrowed under your skin, and when you tried to pull them off their heads broke off inside you, causing days of painful itching.
Another thing that stuck in my mind about the South in the forties and fifties was how civilised it seemed. Everybody was always so polite – black and white, everyone would say ‘Good morning’ on the street – you couldn’t have asked for nicer people. Of course, I’d realise later on that all this politeness was conditional on everyone staying in their place. (Although many years later I did meet a black woman who shared my surname in the foyer of a London film company, so the Gilliams must have done the odd bit of mixing and matching on the quiet.)
The first time I went out to Hot Springs on my own, in the summer of 1955, I experienced a foretaste of later dissenting tendencies, but in this case the seeds of disenchantment were planted – as so often – in the fertile mulch of self-interest.
The same July weekend that I was first trusted to embark on the long train journey East from LA all by myself also turned out to be a historic occasion on a larger scale – the grand opening of the original Disneyland, an hour down the road from Panorama City, in Anaheim, California.
I was tremendously disappointed to be away from LA for what, by my reckoning – then as now – was one of the major cultural events of the twentieth century. Missing out on what turned out to be a famously disastrous opening ceremony (notwithstanding the reassuring presence of Ronald Reagan – a man from whom both California and the world in general would later hear more than they might’ve expected – as one of the three TV anchors) was about the closest I ever came to real childhood trauma. That’s what kills me; I’ve always wanted the scars, but I just don’t have them. In fact, that’s probably why I had to go into film-making – to acquire the deep emotional and spiritual wounds which my shockingly happy childhood had so callously denied me.
Once back from Arkansas, I wasted no time in making good my Disneyland deficit, returning to Walt’s magical kingdom many times in the years that followed. The thing that made Disneyland a genuinely enchanting place for me was the quality of the craftsmanship. Previously, theme parks had always been pretty tacky, gimcracked places, but so much love and care went into making Disney’s dream a reality – there were no shortcuts.
Everything you could ever think of, he put in there . . . it wasn’t just about seeing the favourite cartoons of your childhood in 3-D. Disneyland was also where I first learned about architecture – the way the windows would be scaled on Georgian buildings to give them a greater sense of height – and Sleeping Beauty’s castle became the template for all my ideas about Europe. OK, it was a fantasy land, and some might say I’ve been living there ever since, but at least now I know where the dirt is hidden.
It wasn’t all about Yurp (as Europe was pronounced in America). On the African ride, you’d get on the boat from The African Queen, and the animals would poke their heads up from the water or suddenly appear roaring from behind a tree – it was everything you could want from travel, but without the bugs. Then there was the World of Tomorrow, featuring the Monsanto House of the Future (which didn’t seem as sinister an idea then as a genetically modified future does now). You could drive little cars in the miniature Autopia, even though you weren’t yet old enough to have a driving licence. And Main Street was like a dream version of America: idyllic and historical at the same time.
My imagination was always stimulated by enclosed worlds with their own distinct hierarchies and sets of rules – whether that be the virtual reality of Disney’s Tomorrowland, or the medieval castles or Roman courts of the ‘sword and sandal’ movie epics, which I loved just as much. Such well-defined social structures give you something to react against and take the piss out of, and I’ve always – and I still do this – tended to simplify the world into a series of nice, clear-cut oppositions, which I can mess around at the edges of. It’s when things become more abstract and unclear that I start to struggle.
There are few more exotic and compelling examples of a self-contained community than the travelling show, and some of my most vivid childhood memories were supplied by the annual visits of the Clyde Beatty circus, which used to set up in the car park in Panorama City and put the word out for local kids to come and help raise the tents. They’d give you a bit of money in return for the work you did, but I found the carnival atmosphere so intoxicating that I’d probably have done it for nothing. They always needed extra pairs of hands and one year, when I was thirteen or fourteen, I ended up helping out in the freak-show tent. The experience of seeing all the exotic circus acts sitting around playing cards – just like everyday people, except they were pin-heads or dwarves – has stayed with me to this day. It wasn’t just the revelation that these extraordinary people would behave in such a normal way that fascinated me – in retrospect, that should have been obvious – it was the moment when the show would begin, the barkers would introduce them, ‘All the way from darkest Africa . . . ’, and they’d have to instantly make that transition to being ‘the leopard man’ or ‘the alligator boy’.
I must have been about fourteen when I helped raise clyde Beatty’s freak-show tent. It was not to be the only circus in my life.
The idea of someone subsuming themselves completely within another identity has always intrigued me, I suppose because that’s something I’ve never felt quite able to do myself. As far as my first forays into public performance as a junior magician were concerned, I was so bad that I’d generally find myself fucking up the tricks themselves and then having to do something ridiculous to get myself out of the resulting mess. It seemed much easier to just act the goat as a way of keeping people at a certain distance – for a while I earned myself the nickname of ‘clown’ from other kids of my age for my willingness to make a fool of myself in order to distract audiences from my technical shortcomings.
I was always very gregarious and loved making people laugh, but I think ultimately the reason I was never going to become a performer first and foremost – and certainly not an actor – was that at heart I don’t have the neediness or incompleteness that will ultimately drive you in that direction. I like showing off, and I don’t mind making a fool of myself or playing the grotesque, but I’ve never been comfortable exposing whatever subtler sensitivities and emotions I may or may not have buried deep-down inside. That’s the well a good actor is willing to dip into and reveal to the world. I prefer to hide behind a mask or a cartoon.
The most important single cultural influence on my teenage years was Mad comics. They had a very distinct brand of humour, which kids of my generation had in common (and subsequent ones too, as the magazine went from strength to strength – commercially, if not artistically – in the years after its co-founder and my comic book superhero Harvey Kurtzman moved on in 1956), in much the same way that Monty Python or South Park would end up uniting people in later years.
Still a little way to go here in terms of background detail, although the trash-can is a start. But I make no apology for the civic-minded understone – people dropping litter have always made me angry.
BABE PRESLEY – that’s old Elvis, in an early drawing from my high school magazine. You can see how much care I’ve taken over the signature. You get the signature right and everything else follows – that’s how it worked for Picasso, too. I’ve been lucky to be exactly the right age at the right time at several different points in my life, and 1956 was definitely a good year to be sixteen (just as ten years later, being a bit older than most of the first generation of hippies probably helped stop me getting as badly fucked up as some of my friends did). I remember sitting in a parked car outside my high school when ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ came on the radio and thinking ‘Shit! I’ve never heard anything like that before.’ But there was no danger of me trying to follow in Elvis’ blue suede footsteps. I played the French horn in the school band and openings were few and far between for people lumbering around wrapped in one of those at Sun Records. I didn’t care, though. I loved the way the sound of that instrument came from another space, and I was good at dancing, so the benefits of the rock ’n’ roll era were not completely denied to me in an out-of-school context.
Looking back, there were some similarities with Python, in that Mad could be very intelligent and unbelievably silly at the same time, and this was obviously a mixture I liked. Its highest purpose was to entertain, but if you could have fun while saying something important at the same time, then so much the better.
The first lesson I learned from Mad comics was that one of the most effective ways of making a comedic point is to take a well-known character with certain widely accepted attributes, and then turn them on their head or use them in illicit ways. Whether that meant subverting a pre-existing comic strip or TV show or – because Mad mainstay Harvey Kurtzman loved movies so much – using familiar faces or storylines from the cinema as grist to the mill of political satire (Humphrey Bogart’s Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny was a < particular favourite), I found the audacity of it breathtaking and hilarious.
The other key thing about Mad comics, apart from the boldness of its parodies and appropriations, was that it was beautifully drawn. The penman ship of Jack Davis was so amazing that I just had to try to copy it – that was how I schooled myself as a draftsman, not with Rembrandt but with Jack Davis: looking at the effects he’d achieved and trying to work out how he’d done it by having a go myself. All the main Mad artists brought something different to the table – Willy Elder was the gag-master. Harvey would write a basic storyline and then Willy would add all these little accretions of humorous detail (which he called ‘chicken fat’), so you could go back to his work time and time again and keep finding new things in it. Years later, Elder’s drawings would end up being maybe the biggest single influence on how I’d make movies – inspiring me to try to fill up each shot with so much detail that it would repay second, third and even fourth viewings.
Harvey Kurtzman’s magazines were, in a sense, movies without movement. I learned from Mad and Help! how to do zooms, tracking shots, close-ups – all the grammar of film.
Last but not least among the building blocks of Mad comics’ irresistible allure was the unabashed sensuality of Wally Wood’s female characters, which were so unbearably sexy that they almost felt like pornography. As a precautionary acknowledgement of the vague sense of impropriety associated with the publication, I used to hide my Mad comics in the garage. On one unfortunate occasion they were discovered, and I got a whipping with a belt for my pleasures, but if that was meant to be aversion therapy, it didn’t work, probably because the leathery strictures were applied by my dad, who didn’t think it was entirely justified and was just doing my mother’s dirty work for her.
It wasn’t that I didn’t take anything seriously when I was growing up. On the contrary, I was so intensely engaged with all the things that did interest me that it sometimes made me oblivious to salient facts about my broader situation. In some ways, this inner directedness was a good thing – it meant other kids found me quite easy to be around, because I had no issues, and basically inhabited my own private world, which at least made sense to me. But it could also lead to unwelcome surprises, when my naive vision of the world came into conflict with reality.
For many people, such a conflict might have manifested itself in the form of unexpected public humiliation at the hands of malevolently inclined schoolmates. For me, it was more likely to involve having the mantle of unsought social responsibility thrust upon me. At the tender age of fourteen, just a couple of years after my arrival at Chase Street Elementary School in Panorama City, I found myself giving the school’s graduation address on the subject of ‘Mexico’, a topic about which I knew extraordinarily little. Later on at Birmingham High School – which was one of the largest in LA, with more than 2,000 students in an old army hospital that had been converted into classrooms after the war – one of the most painfully embarrassing moments in my educational career would see me elected king of the senior prom, in preference to my infinitely better-qualified best friend Steve Gellar, who just happened to be Jewish.
Before we can dip a nervous toe into that particular WASP-plagued swimming pool, the particular chronology of my personal odyssey from teenage paragon of civic virtue to subversive cartoonist-in-waiting requires a digression into scouting. Being a boy scout was great fun because it took me out into nature, and you had to work as a group and learn new skills – two activities I still enjoy to this day. The Morse code I don’t use so much, but I can still do knot tying, and if I was trapped in a well with a broken arm, I could probably tie a bowline around myself with just the other arm to pull myself out, which is a reassuring ability to have.
Scout meetings were once a week, but every now and then they’d take us on these amazing camping trips up in the mountains. That’s what’s wonderful about LA – how close the San Bernardino mountains are. We’d go up there for the weekend and sit around the campfire at night, where tales would be told – all these things which are so primal, and which I’ve never quite grown out of. (Luckily I went into showbiz, so I’ve never had to.)
Even at one with nature in the wilds as we were, Hollywood’s magic Kingdom still cast a long shadow.
Among the stars who came out to dazzle us in the light-pollution-free skies of Irvine Ranch were several – Danny Kaye and Debbie Reynolds among them – who I’d later get to know via friendships with their diversely talented offspring. If you’d broken this big news to the thirteen-year-old me, I would’ve found it immensely unlikely.
The most spectacular of these outward-bound excursions was the 1953 National Scouts Jamboree at Irvine Ranch in southern California. It’s probably all identical tract homes now, but then it was a huge temporary hormonal metropolis of 45,000 teenage boys in shorts.
We stayed there for a whole week – it was our Kumbh Mela – and hopefully these extracts from the beautifully designed official souvenir brochure (design standards were stratospheric in 1950s America, as the pristine layouts of my high school yearbooks will also attest) give you some sense of the mood of this infectiously purposeful corralling of youthful vitality.
As if to suggest that there might be some truth in the old adage that ‘politics is show-business for ugly people’, another distinguished visitor – vice president Richard Nixon – also dropped by to briefly rejoin his old troop. ‘The Veep squatted on his haunches [it says here] and whipped up one of the 44,000 best patrol pancake breakfasts eaten on the Irvine Ranch that morning.’ Pity the 1,000 scouts who didn’t get breakfasts. Just the previous year he had failed in his attempt to become governor of our fair state – famously telling reporters, ‘You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more’ – but he could still make a mean pancake: truly, there was no stopping that man. Richard Nixon was certainly an interesting character – you couldn’t take that away from him. Years later I sat near him on a plane and noticed for the first time how huge his head was. I was in the row right behind him at first, but then his security guys pushed me back – I think they needed more room for his head.
Marching, carrying flags, these are the kinds of things we did in the fifties. The Cold War was very much in everyone’s minds, from the ‘duck and cover’ exercises we had to do at school to ensure that we would be properly prepared for a possible Soviet nuclear attack, to the hysterical witch hunt of the McCarthy hearings. That’s why we were healthy, we were strong and we were good – we weren’t quite America’s Hitler Youth, but there was definitely a militaristic undertow. Our scout troop was a little army in miniature, and if cold-war push ever came to shove, the communists didn’t have a chance: tomorrow belonged to us.
Or so I thought, until the time came for me to make the inevitable transition from Life to Eagle Scout, the scouting equivalent of a scientologist going ‘clear’. While not necessarily the highest achiever in our troop, I was certainly one of the top two or three, having been awarded approximately fifty-three merit badges in useful disciplines such as cooking, carpentry, safety, firemanship, fishing and animal industry. (What exactly is ‘animal industry’? I guess it’s battery chickens – how to raise poultry in the smallest space imaginable.) And yet for some reason our scout leader wouldn’t accept that I’d earned all my badges in the proper way.
It wasn’t so much him refusing to make me an Eagle Scout which really pissed me off – though that was bad enough – as the fact that these bureaucratic fuckers were effectively accusing me of lying. Didn’t they know that the lying skills would only come later in life (you can’t make films if you can’t lie), and you certainly don’t get a badge for them?
At that far-off juncture in my life, the Christian ideals of justice and morality I had been taught in Bible school were still holding firm. So when the scouting bigwigs finally confirmed that they had no intention of admitting their mistake, my response was to say – not in so many words, as such foul-mouthed insubordination would come later, but this was definitely the underlying gist of it: ‘Well, in that case, I am no longer a scout of any kind. Goodbye, and fuck you.’
It would be stretching a point to describe this moment as the beginning of my life-long struggle against injustice, but I do remember sitting in the scouts’ review board – which is sort of like a military court-martial, except you don’t get shot at the end – with my hands in front of me on the desk, imagining that I was playing the piano. It was an incredibly vivid sensation; related to later flying dreams, but not wholly overlapping, and less an out-of-body than an extended-body experience, as my hands felt like they were a million miles away and yet still connected to my arms.
It took me twelve hours to get this Phantom look, using the same techniques as Lon Chaney. I’d read up all about Lon and his clever use of Collodion – which had previously been used for sealing wounds – and then built the layers up with cotton.
A lot of kids my age would have been alarmed by such a strange feeling of bodily alienation, but I found it fascinating. It was probably no coincidence that in later life I would end up marrying a make-up artist, because from an early age I was very intrigued – in a Lon Chaney-esque rather than Liberace-ish way – by the changes in people’s appearance that could be effected cosmetically. Not just for the potential for mischief in putting on a disguise, or for the act of transformation itself, but more for the combination of the two. I suppose it was the idea of what you might get away with on the journey to becoming something different that excited me.
I wore my creation to a Halloween party with a bag over my head like Lon’s MAN OF MYSTERY. One girl pulled it off and she just screamed and ran… That’s how I seduced women in those days, and to be fair to her (and me), I did look genuinely horrific. I suppose at seventeen years old it’s nice to be confident that you’re only getting that reaction because of the make-up. And thanks to Michael Crawford and Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Phantom of the Opera is now recognised as a great romantic lead, so maybe I was just ahead of my time.
This biblical character took even longer to sort out. I can’t remember if he was meant to be Moses or John the Baptist. Either way, it was a role Charlton Heston would have relished. I know what you’re thinking: ‘How on earth did this fine upstanding young man grow up to be in Monty Python’s Life of Brian?’
The funny thing was that my single-minded dedication to achieving those effects probably – in terms of mischief at least – closed far more doors than it opened. My mum’s diary captioned her photographic record of my most phantasmagoric transmogrification as follows: ‘This is Terry as the Phantom of the Opera . . . he had all the girls screaming and afraid to get near him.’
It’s possible that there was subconscious method in my Lon Chaney madness. As keen as I was to extend my as yet woefully limited (come on, this was the 1950s – and as the great reproductive historian Philip Larkin pointed out, sex wasn’t properly invented till 1963) portfolio of erotic experience, my mum’s diary also mentioned me reassuring her that I had no intention of becoming ‘seriously involved with a woman’ for the foreseeable future because I had ‘too much left to accomplish’.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that looks a little pompous, but as high school drew towards its close, there was definitely a sense that nesting time was at hand. Girls were getting themselves knocked up and guys were getting themselves trapped.
I understand how when you’re eighteen years old and wondering what you’re going to do on leaving school, getting married and having kids (not necessarily in that order) can look like a short-cut to becoming a grown-up, but I saw a lot of really smart people get stuck up that particular cul-de-sac, and I was always adamant that this sorry fate would not be mine. I wouldn’t say that I was actively keeping myself pure, more that girls were helping me to achieve that goal, despite my best efforts.
Looking at the way me and my friends Met Metcalfe, Richard Lotts and Bob and George McDill, the sons of the minister Rev’d McDill [far right], the man who would eventually help me get a Presbyterian college scholarship, are standing in this photos – in a kind of arrowhead – you might be tempted to think ‘Gillison the Leader!’ I probably was the nominal head of the church youth group we all belonged to, but that didn’t cut too much ice with lois Smith, the girl (standing, appropriately enough, in the centre) we all had the hots for. I wasn’t a sensualist in those days – I think Mel and Richard had made more progress than I had in that direction. They’re both much more tanned than me, and Mel was quite smooth and ended up being a sound mixer in Hollywood. I presume the book we’re all holding might be a prayer guide for young people wanting to know how to keep clean and pure – I certainly needed one.
Mel and Richard aside, most of my best friends in high school were Jewish. They tended to live up in the slightly more well-to-do town of Sherman Oaks, and their parents were often involved in the film business, either as editors, or working on the accounting side. But much as the voice in my head was honing its heady mantra of ‘Hollywood! Hollywood! Hollywood!’, the question of how my own mundane reality could somehow be made to intersect with that impossibly glamorous realm – so physically close, yet so practically distant – was no closer to finding an answer.
My dad still stubbornly refused to find work in the movie industry, inexplicably choosing to spend his working life constructing pre-fab movable office partitions. It never once occurred to me that he might find this occupation as tedious as I did – an oversight on my part which can probably be ascribed in equal parts to my dad’s dignified, craftsman-like approach to the need to put food on the family table, and my own adolescent egotism.
The one upside of my dad’s job was that he’d come home with these giant 8-foot by 4-foot cardboard boxes that his pre-fab partitions came in, which were great for making stage sets with – you’d have this huge slab of a thing that took paint beautifully. All you had to do was stick a frame on it and it was practically a canvas. I was constantly laying these things out on the patio at the back of our house, rushing against the clock to finish some ludicrously over-ambitious school project or other. My parents would always be there to help me through when I needed more hands to get a job done. Far from resenting me for these demands, they seemed to really enjoy it – marvelling at the fact that there was this kid living in their house who was so excited about having all these ideas and making all these things.
By the time my junior prom came around, I was building this huge castle out of cardboard boxes for the set. Inevitably, the project fell behind schedule – though luckily there were no studio executives on hand to pull the plug – to the extent that by the time my classmates were arriving with all their tuxes and corsages immaculately in place, I was still rushing around the hall covered in paint.
A year later, the famous jazz musician Stan Kenton played at our senior prom, which probably wasn’t where his ambitions would have lain at the start of his career.
This not-remotely embarrassing appearance in a local newspaper’s ‘Teen of the Week’ spot reassures those who might have worried about me appearing insufficiently clear-cut that my cartooning is only a ‘hobby’ and I ‘do not plan a career in the art world’, preferring to focus my energies on higher-minded philanthropic goals of the kind with which my name is now rarely, if ever, associated.
How did I come to be trapped in such a suffocating web of civic virtue? Sporting mediocrity probably had something to do with it. I was reasonably athletic at school and had always remembered myself – perhaps encouraged by the local print media’s wildly inaccurate description of me – as a ‘pole vaulting star’. Sadly, mediocrity had a firm grasp on my skinny legs and I never rose above the ‘B’ team. Still, I sported a cool ‘Balboa’ hairstyle (crew cut top, Fonzie-like back and sides) to distract from my failings.
Obviously sporting achievement has a much higher social value at school than academic excellence. I think that is one truth that holds good equally on both sides of the Atlantic. And if I wasn’t going to be in the forefront of the action on the field of play itself, there was one other option, a strategy to which any red-blooded American adolescent male could not help but feel himself drawn: I became a cheerleader, inserting myself between the crowds in the bleachers and the ‘jocks’ tens of yards further out on the playing field.
As a pole vaulter, I made a pretty good physical comedian. The worst thing that can happen to you in that athletic discipline is to come down straddling the crossbar. It is as painful as it looks, and I suffered this indignity, all too often, invariably (or so it seemed to me) with a large crowd gathered watching in the stands. On those occasions, I found the secret was to round the humiliation off with a nice little showbiz flourish – ‘Ta daah!’ That way you could win the public over and turn the whole situation in your favour, much in the same way as (say, for the sake of argument) an incompetent magician might redeem themselves by getting a laugh out of the failure of a trick.
I had always sung in the church choir - following my mother’s and grandmother’s leads – and how better to adapt and expand that primal impulse to collective music-making than to surround myself with the pom–pom waving cream of Birmingham High School’s pulchritudinous crop of senior cheerleaders? Naturally there was an element of emotional awkwardness involved, in that however much we fancied the girls, they were only ever interested in the jocks who were actually on the football team, but at least we could lurk yearningly in their midst.
Observant readers may well have found their eyes being drawn to the good-sized Bs adorning the alluring frontage of my fellow cheerleaders. In case anyone was wondering, the ‘B’ stood for ‘Braves’. Birmingham High School was one of many US institutions to include Native American imagery as part of the rich stew of iconography upon which mid-century sports fans were invited to dine. Lurking at the left-hand edge of the yearbook (page 33) – as if about to be edged out into the margins of history – you can see the beautiful ceremonial head-dress that was brought out on grand sporting occasions. This was later banished to the back-rooms by a new kind of McCarthyism – one which deemed such powerful and aesthetically meaningful historical images ‘derogatory’. The ‘Brave’ in this case was none other than Larry Bell, who went on to become a famous sculptor in the 1960s and ’70s, and interestingly is one of the cut-out figures on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Cheerleading in animated form via the school newspaper. These ‘trophies’ are pretty basic, but there is some character in them. As you can see, I’m still refining my signature at this point – the big V in the middle was an experiment I soon dropped out of a prudent desire not to emphasise the fact that my middle name was (and is) Vance. Why do you think I blessed my own progeny with the middle names Rainbow, Thunder and Dubois? I’d suffered for my parents’ thoughtless disregard for naming convention, so why shouldn’t they?
Pondering my collection of high school badges, it’s interesting how large the kind of heraldic imagery I would later explore on film loomed. By the time I was an American film-maker in Britain some years later, people found it strange and anachronistic that an upstart colonial would have such an interest in the knights of the round table. Yet this stuff was actually the common currency of my education – and once you got to college, with all the fraternities vying for your attention with their fancy Greek names, things would get even more classical.
The Tiger actually came from college a little later on, but check out the natty blue chariot on a pink and grey background, which was the beermat-like insignia of my senior class, The Phaetons. The original Phaeton, as the classical scholars among you will already know, lost control of the sun chariot in a bid to prove himself the son of a deity – not an example I would be following in any way.
By the time I was in my final year of high school, a complex overlapping network of school, church, sporting and charitable organisations seemed to be forming a kind of protective cocoon from which a grown-up, responsible Terry Gilliam – at once a man of action and a pillock of the community – would inevitably emerge. One day I was approached by several girls, who turned out to be the behind-the-scenes kingmakers, asking if they could put me forward as a candidate for student body president. I had no ambitions along these lines, but I find it hard to say ‘No’ to lovely ladies, so I agreed, and before I knew what hit me I was banging a gavel and pretending to be in charge. Again, I had no knowledge of what was required to lead the student body and had to learn as I went along while pretending I knew exactly what the job entailed.
Here I am with the Knights of Birmingham High School – committed to the preservation of high school law and order but secretly itching to work in conjunction with ‘Ladies’ My friend Steve Geller is the one holding the left-hand end of the banner.
In my new position of unasked-for authority in my final year at Birmingham High School, I began to feel the tug of some of the dark undercurrents swirling beneath the supposedly still waters of the late 1950s. As student body president, you were inundated with reams of right-wing propaganda from conservative lobbying groups like the John Birch Society, whose logo incorporated the Statue of Liberty with the word ‘communism’ as a snake entwining it. If we didn’t all change our ways, America would be under communist control within the decade, there was no doubt about it. And as for the threat black men posed to decent white women . . . well, it was no wonder all those guys were getting lynched in the South.
I used to get into big arguments about all this ridiculous bullshit. A sense of injustice seemed to be bubbling under everywhere you looked, and when you think of what was going on in the cinema around that time – from High Noon to Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory – it was basically all these lefties and commies showing how much more humane they were than the people who wanted them to stop making films.
If only my high school valedictorian’s speech has been recorded for posterity, you wouldn’t have to take my word for just how politically revolutionary it was… Not!
