The Zero Theorem

Terry Gilliam – 2014 – Romania
 

Terry Gilliam’s films are always about energy much more than content; meaning that what makes them special starts to dissipate as soon as individual ingredients – like still frames or plot points – are isolated or subjected to written analysis.  It’s easy to say that Gilliam’s subject – as before in Brazil (1985) and 12 Monkeys (1995) – has something to do with Orwellian dystopia, but that theme has certainly been dealt with more thoroughly and more intellectually in other films.  Beyond its outward premise, Gilliam’s The Zero Theorem, like all of his films, is really about movement, activity, bustle, dynamism, etc.  In fact, it has confirmed to me more than ever that these intangible sensations are precisely the point of his films and not mere aids to advance story and theme, rather than vice versa.  Like Orson Welles, Gilliam seems to believe that “the illusion of reality fades quickly when the texture is thin,” and so one of the key pleasures of his films is succumbing to the simultaneously hysterical and maddening jostling that his protagonists endure at the hands of their fellow men; whether they’re being manhandled by dubious law enforcers or simply harassed by peddlers and panhandlers while trying to cross a street.  Gilliam’s trademark omnipresent 14mm lens distends the frame so that even more commotion can invade the hero’s personal space while somehow also keeping him all the more detached.  In a world where rats boldly, and hilariously, pop out of holes everywhere to snatch up anything that people discard, human beings are phobic about germs to the extent that they walk about wrapped in plastic, shave most or all of the hair from their bodies, and have abandoned normal sex as far too dangerous to risk.  Public spaces are plastered with dozens of signs forbidding various activities.  Advertisements actually follow you along the street as you walk until someone else passes they can latch onto.  Parties are filled with people focused solely on their comically large device screens and the earphone wires dangling from their heads.  Gilliam’s satire on contemporary social culture is obvious and typically portrayed as an awkward mixture of someone’s exaggerated idea of modernity that is always betrayed by the sputtering, filthy, old world that refuses to be wiped out; the grease, smoke and dirt that leak through the constantly malfunctioning machinery of the new world.  Where Gilliam goes subtly in a darker direction than usual, though, is in his implication that all of our gadgets, games and entertainments are not merely a distraction from life, (which is bad enough), but are actually a rehearsal for the oblivion of death.  At the center of the film is Christoph Waltz as Qohen Leth, a working drone whose mounting neuroses allow him to start working from home – a burnt-out monastery – where he uses mathematics to try and penetrate the secrets of the universe, including the question of whether or not life has any meaning.  It isn’t necessary to describe the climax and finale but it’s safe to assume that Gilliam’s persistent themes remain intact; especially the notion that insanity is the only sane recourse in an insane world.