I love this movie. The Fisher King, directed by Terry Gilliam, tells the story of Jack Lucas, a complete asshole, and Parry, a traumatized man who everyone seems to think has gone crazy. Parry, played by Robin Williams, was formally a university professor, until his wife was murdered in a public shooting. Her death caused a huge shift in his daily life, and he is eventually homeless and lost in his “delusions.”

Jack Lucas, a famous radio host, frequently makes calls on his show, and never fails to make an ass out of himself. One woman calls to complain about her lackluster husband who always finishes her sentence. In his answer, Jack makes sure to cut her off and finish her sentences. This type of response is how he got famous, and he feels powerful in his cruelty.

At one point, a regular caller, Edwin, calls Jack about a beautiful woman that he met at a restaurant. He fell in love with her, and assumed that she felt the same. When she didn’t, he felt hopeless and called Jack to get advice. Jack’s response is as follows:

“I told you about these people, they only mate with their own kind. It’s called yuppie in-breeding. That’s why so many of them are retarded and wear the same clothes. They aren’t human, they don’t feel love, they only negotiate love moments. They’re evil, Edwin, they’re repulsed by imperfection, horrified by the banal, everything that America stands for, everything that you and I fight for! They must be stopped before it’s too late! It’s us or them!” (0:03:32).

Edwin takes this to heart. He goes into the restaurant, shooting whoever he felt needed to die, including Parry’s wife. This shooting became the end of both Jack and Parry’s careers. Jack’s show was canceled due to his connection to the shooting while Parry was so overcome with grief that he would never be the same again.

The movie follows the two of them as they meet, and out of guilt, Jack tries to “protect” Parry, and eventually agrees to help Parry find the Holy Grail.

The movie is based on the story of King Arthur and the Fisher King. It is a beautiful recreation of the stories that we have known for centuries, and I felt a strong connection as soon as I watched it.

When I first watched the movie, I couldn’t help but feel like it was, in some way, shape or form, queer, and even though there isn’t any queer romance in the film and only one canonly queer character (who was created in the midst of the AIDs crisis and many many queer stereotypes), the movie just feels queer.

The Red Knight, who brought Parry so many nightmares throughout the film.

While the queer feeling about the movie is likely from my understanding that so much of the King Arthur lore, through the centuries, was incredibly gay. In the one academic class that I took that focused soley on King Arthur through the ages (which also happened to be the name of the class), we talked a lot on the queer imagery that is seen in so many of the stories.

The queerness isn’t necessarily always out in the open, and it changes a lot through each era of the legends, but queer media and theory and King Arthur go hand in hand.

Jack (left) and Parry (right) walking on the sidewalks of New York City

Michael Jeter and His Role in The Fisher King

The Late Michael Jeter, an openly queer Broadway star and stage actor had a role in The Fisher King (Koresky). The role, being the only queer character in the film, had no name. I thought I had to have just missed the character’s name, but when searching for it online, I found that his character was simply “Homeless Cabaret Singer,” which broke my heart. His role in the film “is to guide the audience into the AIDS crisis — yet we are never informed outright that he is gay. We are informed with subtext. He wears high-heeled shoes and large earrings, dressed as much in feminine attire as the gesticulations of his flamboyant body language” (Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier). Jeter’s character brought life into the film and showed someone who unapologetically was himself.

Jeter’s character also mirrors Parry’s sense of self. Even with Jack, who so openly tries to get Parry back on his feet, as his sense of duty after finding out he was the cause of death for Parry’s wife, Parry refuses to change. Even as he changes clothes and takes a shower and shaves (all the important things, apparently), he never tries to act like the “normal” people around him. He wants Lydia to have feelings for him, but not because of Jack’s makeover.

Jeter’s character also break’s part of Jack’s cold exterior away. Having to be seen in public with an eccentric drag queen makes him incredibly uncomfortable, but Jack eventually begins to care for the character.

Jeter’s character eventually dies, presumably of AIDS complications, and it breaks Jack’s heart. He has to watch as a man, who he barely knew and who had so few supporters, got carried out of the open hospital room.

I feel like Jeter’s character, while a smaller role in the movie, brings queerness into the film, and allows the viewer to think about the other aspects in the film that might be seen as queer.

Jack and the Cabaret Singer, on the way to Lydia’s workplace.

Parry and the Queer Experience

Parry, who throughout the movie expresses his romantic interests in women, is a character that beautifully shows the queer experience.

He, a man who is so kind, has had too much happen in his life. He has faced loss and trauma. He has been in so much pain, and yet he remains so kind. While yes, the death of his wife has brought him, in a traditional sense, away from what people want and expect the well off adult to appear and act, Parry acts on his own accord. He is seen as mad, and yet he has no issue, ever, about how he acts.

As he acts as his true self, he is outcast. He is in deep poverty, beaten by strangers, and ignored at the hospital when he is put into a coma. Even Jack, who is at his lowest, pushes Parry away, believing himself to be better.

The life story of Parry follows a common queer experience. He lived a “normal” life, as an English Professor. He hid himself for so long, keeping his emotions held tightly to his chest, even as going as far as not speaking for the entire year after his wife’s passing. He then, according to those around him, went insane. People didn’t want to support his “lifestyle,” even though that was what made him happiest.

Yes, he was traumatized, but what queer person, who has been looked at and made a spectacle of for their entire life, isn’t? I agree that a lot of Parry’s behavior stems from the death of his wife, but, even past all of his trauma, his happiness will now always be judged, for simply being different than those around him. He might be in love with Lydia, but he is queer, if only for being fundamentally different than the normal.

Parry, seeing Lydia at the lobby of her workplace.

AIDS, Queerness, and Sense of Self

Towards the beginning of the film, Jack, who is beyond drunk and talking to a doll, states “Nietzsche says there are two kinds of people in the world, people who are destined for greatness… and then there’s the rest of us. He called us ‘The Bungled and the Botched.’ We get teased. We sometimes get close to greatness but we never get there. We’re the expendable masses” (0:15:14).

He states that they’re expendable, and that society hates you when you are any different than those who are “destined for greatness.” This covers so many different minorities and experiences, but because the movie, which came out towards the end of the AIDS crisis, directly mentions queer death from AIDS, I felt that this statement ties into the queerness of the movie.

When Jack and Parry first find Michael Jeter’s character, they bring him to the hospital. Jack asks him if he lost his mind slowly or all at once, and the singer responds:

“I’m a singer by trade… and God, I absolutely lived for it… I can do Gypsy, every part, even backwards. Then one night, right in the middle of singing ‘Funny,’ suddenly it it me: what does all this mean? I mean, that plus the fact that I’d watched all my friends die. Sound like a veteran, don’t I? My dad would be so proud of me.” (0:50:27).

A queer man, watching all of his friends die through the AIDS crisis, for such a long period of time, was expected as a queer person. The government did not care about them. They were “expendable” (0:15:14).

The movie, through subtext, makes a comment on AIDS, queerness, and people’s sense of self. Jack, who had no remote idea of what those struggling with homelessness were dealing with, met Parry. He began to see “into the reality of an issue from which” he “may otherwise be removed” (Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier). He meets a gay man, and lives through the loss of someone through AIDS. He has to live outside of his own box, experiencing humanities horrors through the people he meets.

Parry and Jack, as well as Jack’s girlfriend, Anne, create a sense of familiarity. Through their own traumas, strangeness, and queerness, they take to one another’s quirks, creating an odd little family of friends.

(From right to left) Parry, Anne, Jack, and Lydia going on a double date.

Works Cited

Gilliam, Terry, director. The Fisher King. 27 Sept. 1991.\

Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier, Liam. “The Fisher King and AIDS: A Case Study in Dying Quietly.” Medium, Prism & Pen, 13 July 2020, medium.com/prismnpen/the-fisher-king-and-aids-a-case-study-in-dying-quietly-1b077c5cb8fd.

Koresky, Michael. “Michael’s Turn: Michael Jeter in the Fisher King.” The Criterion Collection, www.criterion.com/current/posts/3606-michael-s-turn-michael-jeter-in-the-fisher-king?srsltid=AfmBOophiqcp1euRApPVwf2bziMk3RKMJTnHy2cMyTroZodDXQaPg3KW. Accessed 15 Dec. 2024.

The Story of the Fisher King (as told by Parry)

“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. While he’s spending the night alone he’s visited by a sacred vision. Out of the fire appears the holy grail… The 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 filed with power and glory and beauty. In this state of radical amazement, he felt, for a brief moment, not like a boy… Like god. So he reached in 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. One day, a fool wandered into the castle and found the king alone. Now being a fool, he was simpleminded. 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 and filled it with water, and handed it to the king and 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. He turned to the fool and said with amazement ‘How could you find that which my brightest and bravest could not?’ The fool replied ‘I don’t know. I only knew that you were thirsty.” (0:58:55)