By David Futrelle
Terry Gilliam is tired of talking about his movie The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Instead he’s decided to take advantage of the media attention surrounding the film’s late UK release to expound at length on his rather tiresome (and decidedly unoriginal) theories of gender and race and how white men like him are the most persecuted people on planet earth.
Yes, he’s turned into one of those guys. Or perhaps, given his reputation as kind of a dick, he’s always been one.
In an, er, wide-ranging interview with Alexandra Pollard of The Independent, the 79-year-old director called #MeToo a “witch hunt,” whined that white men are “being blamed for everything wrong with the world,” and then, for funzies, declared that his manifestly white self was somehow really a “black lesbian” because lots of people with his last name are black.
Refusing to talk for more than a moment or two about his movie, Gilliam began the interview with a tirade about the alleged evils of #MeToo.
We’re living in a time where there’s always somebody responsible for your failures, and I don’t like this. I want people to take responsibility and not just constantly point a finger at somebody else, saying, ‘You’ve ruined my life.’ .
#MeToo is a witch hunt. I really feel there were a lot of people, decent people, or mildly irritating people, who were getting hammered.
After all this humorless bloviation, he then wondered aloud why people don’t think #MeToo jokes are funny. While admitting that a lot of #MeToo accusations are true, he added that “the idea that this is such an important subject you cannot find anything humorous about it” was just plain wrong.
Gilliam then brought race and gender identity into the mix, making the One Trans Joke that so many reactionary would-be comedians think is so hilarious.
When I announce that I’m a black lesbian in transition, people take offence at that. Why?
Pollard, who at this point must have been inwardly cringing at each new pronouncement from Gilliam, told him it’s because, er, he’s manifestly not that.
He explained that many people with his last name are indeed black so maybe he’s half black or something? (The exceedingly white looking Gilliam doesn’t seem to realize that it’s infinitely more likely that his similarly lily-white ancestors owned the ancestors of the black people who now have that last name.)
He then gave up the fatuous claim, only to insist that
I don’t like the term black or white. I’m now referring to myself as a melanin-light male. I can’t stand the simplistic, tribalistic behaviour that we’re going through at the moment.
But he quickly returned to the joke about being a black lesbian.
I’m talking about being a man accused of all the wrong in the world because I’m white-skinned. So I better not be a man. I better not be white. OK, since I don’t find men sexually attractive, I’ve got to be a lesbian. What else can I be? I like girls. These are just logical steps.
It’s not hard to see why Pollard says that it’s “deeply frustrating to argue with Gilliam. He is both the devil and his advocate.” And a pretty tedious devil at that.
Get some new material, dude.
NOTE: In case you’re wondering about the title of this post, it’s from an old Monty Python routine.
H/T — thanks to Twitter’s@WeaselFidget for alerting me to the interview.
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Unpopular opinion maybe but the Terry Gilliam animation bits from Flying Circus were the least entertaining parts of each episode. The animations for Holy Grail were pretty entertaining, though.
Ugh, not Terry Gilliam…
Saw this earlier on another site.
Rather unpleasantly surprising how quickly the bait is jumped for(Just imagine the web outrage fest is some half-wit had posted a celebration of Trump !)
Anyway,I think that it’s worth remembering that Gilliam is a joker_a joker provacateur,AND an original Python !
Terry Gilliam has a bit of a history of transphobia, as mocked by this comic:
That came out in July of 2018, so this isn’t new exactly.
I confess that I enjoyed a lot of old Python stuff. Rather frustrating that Gilliam has fallen into this crap.
@William Hooper
Translation: Gilliam is a comedian, a comedian who punches down, and is old.
I have no respect for comedians who punch down or claim that the only way to be funny is by punching down. For decades, comedy has been used as an excuse for bigotry while simultaneously being used by oppressed groups to fight back. It’s possible to be funny without causing harm to less privileged people, and being unable to do that shows a lack of creativity.
oh my pythons :'(
*Sigh* Fuck, another person I liked turns out to be an asshat… Saw this shitfest on Twitter earlier today and emailed it to Dave, though he probably saw it on his own/had it reported to him earlier. Given how much I’ve been a fan of Gilliam’s past work, this is mightily depressing. Not even sure I’ll see “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” in theaters, although given the usual track record of his films on first release that’ll probably change Jack and Shit…
@ Mish :
Blah,Blah,Blahbety Blah.
@William Hooper – Seriously? You’re going with the “Just Joking” justification/excuse? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a George Carlin skit this interview ain’t.
(Besides pretty sure the late great Carlin himself would have ripped him a new one had he been alive to see this tragic farce)
PS – Would it kill you to type properly? Your message looks like it’s by a particularly lazy thirteen-year-old.
John Cleese is okay, I think. Don’t know about Eric Idle.
@Naglar_Replying to your reply to my comment.
My first reply was mistakenly sent to Mish,to whom I apoligize,but to YOU,Naglar : Blah,Blach,Double Blahbety BLAH !
I wonder what it is about Terry Gilliam’s I don’t give a fuck about other people stance that appeals to the person who wrote
I can’t even imagine.
@Hooper
What is ‘provocative’ about transphobia? It’s the status quo.
@William Hooper
Hi. It is I, Naglfar. I don’t know about anyone else, but to me that hasn’t really been an effective counter argument since the first grade. If you disagree with something I said, we can discuss, but if you actually take issue with it surely you can respond specifically and coherently.
@Linda
That’s the other thing that annoys me about reactionaries. They think they’re being cool and being outside the establishment with their bigotry, while really they’re just reinforcing said establishment.
@Crip Dyke : Yes,I CAN imagine that you can’t imagine !
However,had you been attentive,Crip,you sould have seen that I mistakenly addressed that “blah”to Mish,that I corrected myself and apologied in respondy my Blahs properly to N[someting]
IF,Crip De you read and were capable o comprehending my oiginal comment,you would know that I was neither approving,nor disaproving of Gilliam,but expressing m dismy at how quickly so many people Jump for the Clickbait.
IDo Hope,Crip,that you aren’t so easil sucked into Conspiritoud Youtube videos ! Pizza,Anyone ?
@M K, I’m with you. The animation got tedious fast.
I guess Gilliam wants to be remembered as the biggest asshole and the least talented of the Pythoners.
@William Hooper –
Lazy immature troll confirmed.
@William Hooper
Can you at least get punctuation right? It would make your comments a lot easier to follow.
I actually did notice that, though it’s rather irrelevant to Crip Dyke’s point. Just out of curiosity, why is my ‘nym censored?
Umm…I’m not sure how this is clickbait. This has a witty title, as is common on this blog, and directly quotes the source.
Also, it very much sounds like you’re defending Gilliam when you start telling us what to keep in mind and singing his praises.
Still not sure what this has to do with “Conspiritoud” Youtube videos, whatever those are.
@Paireon
Indeed.
Perhaps Hooper is a bot.
The thing about the interview is that it shows how utterly without insight Gilliam really is.
So… you don’t like people saying that other people ruined their lives, but you have a problem with #metoo ruining other people’s lives? How does that work? The “victims” of #metoo get to blame other people for ruining their lives, but the victims of Weistein don’t? Why is that?
Okay, but Gilliam now insists that, in the interviewer’s paraphrase:
If women hold all the power, then by Gilliam’s reckoning, women should abuse Gilliam specifically and men generally and Gilliam should shut up about it.
But does he? Nope.
Gilliam, therefore, is lying about what he believes. He cannot believe that people should tolerate being abused because no one else can ruin their lives and that powerful people should abuse others without accountability AND that #metoo is wrong for abusing its power and harming (white) men.
Of course, it’s possible that he’s simply such a blithering idiot with so little insight into his own thoughts that he doesn’t realize that he’s spouting mutually contradictory propositions, but in that case, he’s a blithering idiot and deserves no more of our attention than if he were intentionally lying.
But all that isn’t even the most obvious evidence that Gilliam is completely and totally without the capacity for useful thought. That honor belongs to this comment:
“We weren’t offending people” says Gilliam about the comedy troupe who created “Every Sperm is Sacred” and “Life of Brian”? Both Meaning of Life and Life of Brian were banned in a variety of townships and other localities in both North America and the UK. They were offending people right and left. But with “upper middle class twit of the year” and many other bits they were clearly punching up. Even “Every Sperm is Sacred” is most reasonably seen not as an indictment of poor Catholics, but as an indictment of the elite, rule-making Catholic bishops and popes.
Thus while you were definitely offending people, you weren’t seen as a bully and thus your humor garnered more widespread approval.
The change isn’t that you’ve suddenly started offending people. It’s that you have become (known as) a bully. I rather think it’s likely that you were bullying when you were younger as well, but allowed the group to help you pick different targets because you wanted to be one of the cool kids. But whether your bullying instincts are new our old, the obvious bullying in which you’re seen to engage is, to many people, new.
That’s the source of any difference in reactions. And anyone who saw Python movies at the time can tell you that your success did not come without giving offense.
I would think that anyone who actually lived Python’s history and still had 2 brain cells to rub together would be even more acutely aware of this.
But nope. Gilliam has officially made it clear that he’s an idiot with entirely too little insight to say anything worth hearing on purpose. And if anything he says is achieves coherence through fortuitous accident, it’s not going to be worth wading through the dribbling spittle to find it.
Toddle off to second infancy, Gilliam. You deserve it.
Thanks to “conspiritoud”, which has apparently never before been typed on any public webpage ever, this page is going to be a googlewhack soon.
@Snowberry
It’s probably not the only googlewhack on the site, seeing as our trolls and the people we talk about have a penchant for creative spelling and making up new words.
@Nagflar:
Shut Up,TROLL’S ANUS.
@Hippodameia – Not sure he’s the least talented, his movies are awesome IMO (Jabberwocky, Time Bandits, Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas…
…Which is why I find this depressing. If it was an actual talentless hack like Uwe Boll who said this tripe I’d be in point and laugh mode.
In addition to this mess:
(I particularly enjoy “oiginal” and the capitalization of “Clickbait”)
we now have
to aid in analysis of how Hooper might still look up to Gilliam’s intellect.