Terry Gilliam has a gift. Well, two gifts, technically. Gilliam is one of the most inventive filmmakers of his generation, a visionary who breathed life into fantastical concepts that only he could have pushed across the finish line. Any director who dabbles in futuristic or dystopian narratives and thinks to themselves, “You know, what if we got a little weird with it?”? They have him to thank for helping pave the way.
His other gift? He has an almost pathological need to cash in all the goodwill he’s accrued by saying some stupid, stupid shit.
Back in 2018, Gilliam made headlines for “joking” that he no longer wanted to identify as a white man because he was, quote, “be blamed for everything wrong in the world.” Gilliam continued by saying that his name was now Loretta, and he was “a black lesbian in transition.” The same year, Gilliam weighed in on the ongoing #MeToo scandal, telling AFP that “a night with Harvey—that’s the price you pay,” and suggesting that the people who benefitted from Weinstein’s activities “knew what they were doing.”
READ MORE: Terry Gilliam Clarifies Controversial “Black Lesbian In Transition” Comment
So when Gilliam sat down for a wide-ranging conversation with IndieWire, of course he was going to be prompted to join the ongoing debate about the value of Marvel movies, and of course his response would go awry. After a few thoughtful comments about the impact Marvel has on the financial landscape of Hollywood – including the criticism that superhero movies are “taking all the money that should be available for a greater variety of films” – Gilliam turned to Ryan Coogler‘s “Black Panther.”
“I hated ‘Black Panther.’ It makes me crazy. It gives young black kids the idea that this is something to believe in. Bullshit. It’s utter bullshit. I think the people who made it have never been to Africa. They went and got some stylist for some African pattern fabrics and things. But I just I hated that movie, partly because the media were going on about the importance of bullshit.”
Whew. OK. For starters, the costume designer for “Black Panther” is three-time Academy Award nominee Ruth E. Carter. Carter, by her admission, tried hard to push back against the homogenized image of a single African culture. “There’s so much beauty around Africa and it’s so diverse. There are so many things that you don’t know that you probably would be surprised about,” Carter told CNN in February. “So, to me, it was inspiring to be able to present Africa in so many ways, with different tribes and different color palettes, and use beauty, just plain old beauty, as my guide.” So, no.
READ MORE: ‘Black Panther’ Takes Home 2019 Costume Designers Guild Award
It’s possible to offer a charitable read of Gilliam’s comments that points to the studio, not the film, as the culprit; that what Gilliam meant was young black moviegoers deserve better than studio-sanitized tentpole films. But that would ignore both the impact of representation within those movies and the countless interviews with people like Coogler and Carter, which focus on the political importance of what they were working on. To push back against the significance of the film without bothering to adopt any perspectives other than your own? Yeah, that’s a social media paddlin’.
