Summary
The film begins with Jack Lucas, a shock jock on the morning radio. As a shock jock, Jack makes sweeping generalizations and glib jokes as a mode of advice. First we see him talking to a woman whose husband won't let him finish her sentences. Jack finishes her sentences and makes fun of her. Then we hear him talking to a woman who is having an affair with a U.S. senator. The scene ends with the woman calling Jack a "pig" and hanging up. The final caller is a sad sounding man named "Edwin" who seems to call in regularly. Edwin tried to go to a restaurant called Babbitt’s—an exclusive “yuppie” spot, according to Jack—where he met a beautiful woman who he thinks liked him back.
Jack fires back at Edwin, saying, “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!” Edwin accepts Jack’s assessment and says goodbye.
Jack gets in a car with his agent after his workday. The agent looks over a screenplay that Jack has been given to read and speaks highly of it, but Jack doesn’t want to read it until he’s been given an offer. Suddenly, a homeless man knocks on the window asking for money, and Jack refuses to open the window to give him change. When he returns to his impersonal, luxe penthouse in Manhattan, Jack finds his girlfriend there, and they get in an argument. The following day, Jack is slated to shoot a sitcom, and his girlfriend is less impressed than he wants her to be.
After she leaves, we see Jack in the bathtub practicing his lines for the sitcom, putting a mud mask on his face and repeatedly saying one of his lines, “Forgive me,” into a mirror. After saying the line over and over, he turns on the news, which is reporting a story about Edwin, the caller from earlier that day. Edwin went to Babbitt’s that evening and killed seven people before shooting himself. The newscaster reports that Edwin was emboldened by the advice of Jack earlier, and Jack looks at the television, horrified.
Three years later, we see a gritty video store. Inside, Jack is reading a tabloid newspaper, when Anne, his girlfriend and coworker, tells him to get back to work in the video store. Jack is now extremely depressed, paranoid and somewhat delusional. He helps a woman who is looking for a “Cary Grant-y, Katharine Hepburn-y movie,” but instead of direct her towards what she wants, irreverently gives her a pornographic film. The woman looks pleasantly surprised by the smutty film, but Anne is frustrated with Jack and sends him upstairs to their apartment to take a nap.
That night, Anne and Jack watch a laugh-track sitcom. Anne is laughing hysterically, but Jack doesn’t like it. When Anne asks Jack why he watches it if he doesn’t like it, he tells her, “It makes me feel good to see how not funny it is. America doesn't know funny. It makes it easier not being on TV. That would just mean I'm not really talented.” After Jack insults her taste and tells her that he only lives with her for the sex, she leaves the room in a huff. On the television, the character in the show says the line that Jack was practicing—“Forgive me!”—on the night Edwin shot everyone at the restaurant. Jack leaves the apartment and stumbles outside. He walks past a fancy hotel, where a young rich boy hands him a wooden Pinocchio doll in pity.
Jack sits beneath a statue talking to the Pinocchio doll, drinking from a bottle and ranting about the hopelessness of the world. He straps some cinder blocks to his ankles and prepares to jump into the East River, when suddenly two teenagers come by and attack him, calling him names and pouring gasoline all over him, intending to light him on fire.
Just when things seem hopeless for Jack, a group of homeless men arrives, led by the flamboyant and theatrical “Parry,” a man who believes himself to be a knight. Parry and the other bums fight off the two teenagers and save Jack’s life, before leading him under the Manhattan Bridge where the bums have set up a camp. As he sits on the ground, Jack accidentally catches on fire, but manages to shake his arm and put out the fire. The bums applaud him, and one of them puts a bottle in his mouth. The bums sing in jubilant unison and Jack passes out.
When he wakes up, Jack is in Parry’s home, a dingy basement of an apartment building nearby. Parry wakes him with a wide smile and offers him a fruit pie, which has gone bad. Suddenly, Parry begins speaking, apparently to no one—he is addressing what he calls the “little people,” who tell him that Jack is “the one.” Parry tells Jack that he is a knight in search of the Holy Grail, which is located in the home of an architect on the Upper East Side. “That’s why they sent you,” Parry says, referring to the “little people.” With this, Jack becomes frustrated and excuses himself to go home.
Analysis
The start of the film drops the viewer down in the godless world of a “shock jock,” Jack, a man who has become famous on the radio for saying shocking things and “telling it like it is” in a deliberately offensive way. The character is modeled after other famous “shock jocks” like Howard Stern. We see Jack as he gives provocative counsel to the people who call in. He makes fun of a woman who complains about her husband’s disrespectful behavior by being even more disrespectful to the caller. He invades a woman’s privacy by calling attention to a controversial affair she is having. And he seeks to comfort a man who has been sexually rejected by telling the man that he will never belong in the aristocratic circles to which he hopes to gain entry.
This last bit of advice, to “Edwin,” goes awry when Edwin takes Jack’s advice a little too seriously and opens fire on a restaurant in Manhattan. Jack, who has lived a careless and decadent lifestyle—silk robes, penthouse apartment, limousines, and a relentless sense of entitlement—is bowled over by the news of Edwin’s shooting. The rug is pulled up from under him as he realizes that his words and his council—built to provoke—have an actionable impact on the world around him.
The shock of Edwin’s act sends Jack into a deep depression, and the scene shifts to three years later, when Jack is an alcoholic working at a seedy video store and acting out his erratic moods with unsuspecting customers. The camera now takes on a whackier perspective, complete with extreme close-ups and jerky movement, as Jack stumbles through his now washed up life. He picks fights and drinks during the day, channeling his once high profile provocations into everyday squabbles and a petty, almost adolescent nihilism. The camera reflects Jack’s conflicted and confused inner life, moving around woozily, as if filtered through a funhouse mirror. In this way, director Terry Gilliam shows Jack’s warped sense of reality and vividly portrays the ways that Jack has had a falling out with civilization.
Jack’s misanthropy and nihilism radiate into everything he does, and his girlfriend, Anne, takes the brunt of it. She tries to take care of Jack as well as she can, sending him to take a nap when he is acting out at work, but he doesn’t appreciate any of it. As they watch a sitcom, the one in which Jack was going to star three years earlier, she laughs appreciatively at the corny jokes, but Jack takes the show as evidence of television’s mediocrity. Brattily, he tells her that he only watches the show because it’s proof that the world is bad, not him. It appears that in the wake of the tragedy that he brought about, Jack has projected his own guilt and anger onto the world around him, avoiding any responsibility.
Oddly enough, Jack is saved from his suicidal and paranoiac nihilism by a character who is even more deluded than he is. Parry, the charming but deranged bum who saves his life, lives in blissful squalor and seeks to find a Holy Grail on the Upper East Side. Jack looks mystified as Parry speaks to figments on the pipes, the “little people,” and tells Jack that he is “the one.” Parry arrives in Jack’s life none too soon; Jack is so gone that he needs a man far removed from reality to poke a hole in his calcified and cynical worldview.
