Why Terry Gilliam's "The Zero Theorem" Deserves Your Consideration
I announce here that I am nearly finished with a book, an edited collection of reviews that were first posted on letterboxd.com.
That book highlights great movies that I don’t think have gotten their just due. Often, online ratings have trashed such movies, while I have thought otherwise.
Possibly the biggest discrepancy between me and the aggregate ratings is Terry Gilliam’s 2013 science-fiction film “The Zero Theorem.”
Here’s a sneak peek of the book, the chapter on “The Zero Theorem,” right below the movie poster. So far as I know, this is the only review where I’ve written to a fictional Judge.
In the court of movie opinions, this movie allegedly sucks. Witness the current 3.1 rating on letterboxd.com and 6.0 on imdb.com.
However, your Honor, if it should please the court to allow a brief defense of “The Zero Theorem.”
Your Honor should take note that the opinionators discussing this film and rating it have, almost to a review, completely forgotten to say WHY the movie sucks. Along with failing to produce a comprehensive set of “whys,” they have left out discernible standards by which to judge films. They have simply uttered their mere feelings about the movie, and then moved on.
Your Honor, the bulk of criticism against this film is just Adjective Criticism.
What I mean is that the film is labeled with adjectives devoid of context — e.g., “This lame movie lacks adequate pacing and seems too incoherent and pretentious.”
Yet we all know that criticism can illuminate without rendering any subjective judgment. Even if you hate a film, you can get a lot out of it by analyzing, in terms of a variety of plausible interpretations.
Yet here we have in the case of “The Zero Theorem,” for the most part, judgment without criticism. This is no way to rate movies in bulk, your Honor!
I should first like to reduce Terry Gilliam’s “The Zero Theorem” to one of its essences: this movie depicts what it’s like to be an extreme introvert, one who thinks it’s a good idea to work from home. And yet that person later realizes, after working from home for awhile, how bad an idea that was.
This subject matter, more relevant than ever thanks to the social effects of COVID-19, had not come up much at all in cinematic art before the film. That the main character is an extreme introvert is undeniable. I should know, for I am one: it takes one to know one.
The movie depicts the introvert’s dilemma perfectly, including the main character’s hesitance to attend and remain at a loud party, and his social difficulties when confronted by authorities. As well, witness his extreme awkwardness when people show up unexpectedly at his house and stay there too long for him.
Our main character — the oddly but aptly named Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz) — seems to be working on an equation to solve a crucial philosophical problem of the universe. It’s possibly because the corporation he works for wants to dominate everything. This is an exaggeration of a real-world trend, which is to quantify human desires and experiences into something called “algorithms.” The movie visualizes this as a Minecraft-like experience — the main character’s work looking like a frustrating Minecraft game — and I note that the film came out right as Minecraft itself soared in popularity.
I submit, your Honor, that the movie is both descriptive and prescient on a number of fronts, and will continue to be. Witness some of its questions.
Can your desires and experiences be quantified via algorithms and other data sets, as the world’s largest corporations such as Apple and Google would have it? Can you and your experience be reduced to a number?
No, unless all of life is reducible to math alone, which is both a reduction and abstraction of everything in the real world.
You’ll note, your Honor, the advantages of reductionism to the giant corporation depicted in this film, called Mancom. In Mancom’s view, all of its employees are merely Minecraft-like blocks of productivity. Should they not meet their goals, they are monitored extensively and notified immediately of their failures. That’s part of Qohen Leth’s struggle with working from home. Here, the surveillance state is part-corporate, maybe all-corporate. This depicts something all too real for most readers of this piece.
For example, your Honor is probably aware of “mouse-movers,” real-world devices that employees attach to their mice or laptops that perpetually move their work computer’s mouse, so that employers think they are working. Wouldn’t the main character in this movie like that! The reason we have those mouse-movers is because of the extension of power employed by businesses, and also with employee’s struggles with . . . you guessed it . . . working from home and being monitored there. Guess what this movie depicts throughout?
Yes, a reason why it’s worse to work from home, if you are working for a business like Mancom, is because then you are at work all the time!
I should describe for you a bit more of the film’s storyline. Sometime in the future, the movie being science-fictional, Mr. Leth hopes to be rescued from the dystopian world he’s in from a mysterious phone call. He once got a phone call that would, he hopes, rescue him from the flashy, perverted consumerist hellscape he’s stuck in. It may be that this call represents a salvific rescue from an unknown person or god, or it may be a ridiculous delusion on the part of Mr. Leth. Nevertheless, he persists in his hope, while slaving away at his computer, trying to appease the mysterious corporation he works for.
Your Honor, my guess is that a lot of viewers struggle with the depiction of the main character. In some ways, he’s like no other character in movie history. He not only mumbles a lot, but he actually calls himself “we,” not “I.”
Probably if you were going to create a character in film that you couldn’t relate to, you would make him say “we” instead of “I.”
But the real question for viewers is why he is doing that. Again, you can’t just say that this choice sucks and move on. Reasons, please!
The main character is named after the writer of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, one called in some translations “The Preacher.” Qohen Leth is that name, mispronounced throughout the film by his associates, probably because they’ve never heard of the book of Ecclesiastes, one of the wisest and most brutal books ever written. More on that later.
The main character’s name evidences at least two things. One is the universal type he represents. As “The Preacher,” he is literally speaking for everybody ever, or the common person at least, when he says “we.” He is us. We are him, the person subject to working for The Man (“Mancom”) and waiting for someone to rescue us from our servitude to The Man, The State, The System — as represented by his corporate work.
This is a literalization of metaphors, and here it’s the most common metaphor in movies, the character representing a group of people, or in this case the main character representing everybody watching in the audience. Many movies actually do this — for example, the “hero’s journey” character represents us all. This movie just calls it out in its language.
He, the main character, is me. And you. And you all. That is what he means by “we.”
A digression: this is a movie of literalized metaphors, as science fiction itself is. That the corporation is always watching is literalized. Trying to find “your calling in life” is literalized, by the character’s hope for a phone call. That your home is your sacred domicile is literalized, since Leth lives in a church. That capitalism can solve all problems is literalized — with pun on “solving” vis-a-vie Leth’s search for the equation.
Back to the main character’s name, Qohen Leth. Along with him representing all of us, it signifies something that’s noted in hundreds of artworks prior to the film: that the modern person is “schizoid.”
I mean schizophrenic, though not formally in terms of clinical diagnosis, but polyvocal and fragmented and even a split self.
The “we” of the main character literalizes the fact that he’s multiple voices in one, plus he has different personas in different situations. Why we all are this way, or if we are this way, is an entirely separate treatise to be explained elsewhere. I just note that director Gilliam grew up and rose to fame during an era, the late 1960s, in which the “schizoid man” was talked about and depicted in art. The movie is showcasing King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man,” a song that birthed heavy metal and its social discontents, 44 years after that song.
“The Zero Theorem” offers gigantic questions about a dominant philosophy of our day, particularly espoused in the hard sciences: pure materialism without metaphysics. What if there is really nothing more than this world and this universe(s)?
Well, the main character dreams of that, your Honor. That’s the opening, the black-hole imagery, repeated throughout the film. His deep hope is one against total nihilism implied by this imagery: that he will receive a mystical “call” that will tell him the secrets of his life. That’s why he has to work from home. He structures his life around hoping that the black-hole of nothingness that will swallow him up upon death is just a fiction, that it will be overcome by a mysterious voice telling him his purpose.
Who isn’t facing this question, your Honor? Everyone is. When you die, what happens? Nothing? If so, then why bother to obey the conventions and morals of this world, which disappear upon your death, as you supposedly will? Why bother caring about what you care about if everything turns into nothing?
I know, your Honor, there are dozens of answers put forward here as to why you should be a moral person even if everything means nothing. I am only suggesting this is one of the strongest movies ever to raise these questions to its audience. We are confronted with a guy working too fervently for a corporation that is just using him, and since the film puts that within the perspective of the black-hole of nothingness that could be all of existence, the question is why is he doing what he is doing. These are questions for Plato, your Honor.
Also, the world of this film is remarkable, your Honor, a science-fiction future of total stimulation and hedonism, signifying nothing. The main character lives in an abandoned church, right next to a porn shop. Porn, the fantasy that falsely offers the feeling of overcoming the dominance of nothingness, is something the main character rejects. Most of his world does not.
His house is curious, your Honor, one of the most unique houses in movie history. It’s a beautiful and weird cathedral. It’s strange that his workspace is on the church’s old altar, and the crucifix above it has been modified with a surveillance camera, a sign that the former reign of a sovereign, all-seeing God has been replaced by the all-seeing God of the surveillance state. Like most great dystopian science fiction, this movie has a touch of Orwell, a Gilliam specialty.
That house, though, suggests that the concept of the sacred hasn’t disappeared, even though it’s been vacated. Despite the threat of nothingness, maybe something sacred, like the hope of a phone call, transcends it. And maybe the sacred is everywhere, haunting everything, in the movie’s world of pure hedonism wrapped in an ignored nothingness?
I note that the film uses the typical Gilliam idea of the fantasy of escape, the tropical island or dream of the tropics. In his other movies, it’s a real island that exists somewhere else — the country of Brazil in “Brazil,” or a paradise vacation in “12 Monkeys.”
But here, Gilliam has gone to the heart of everything. There is no escape in this world of ours, not even in the tropics and the breezy islands, which can be turned into dystopias by governments and corporations. His characters in this film are escaping to the virtual world, either of virtual-therapy sessions or porn or the VR set that the main character enters to do his job. Maybe the real world offers nothing, but perhaps we can create an ideal world that we can enter into?
No, and if only, and I submit that that’s half of the Internet. Also, it’s many video games, art, and (gulp) even films. Even this film itself! The virtual is a temporary escape from the reality of existence. No one gets away scot-free. Again, Mr. Leth’s plight as “we” speaks for us all.
If one of the purposes of art is to ask us to ponder why we are living and what we are living for, and if so many writers are correct — or Morpheus in “The Matrix” is correct — that we are slaves to somebody else’s vision of a good life, then this film is one of the strongest ever in prompting these questions about the whys of existence.
I cannot help, your Honor, if people are weirded out by the cameo by Matt Damon, or the portrayal of Qohen Leth himself, or something else in the film. No movie is for everyone. However, look past that and stare into the black hole that this film showcases, the hole of our lives today. As the Sean Penn character says in “The Thin Red Line,” “they either want you dead, or to live in their lie.” The “they” in this film is at least the corporation Leth works for, if not that grand, nebulous and often indefinable term “society.”
This film, likes Ecclesiastes, forces viewers to consider what your ultimate purpose is, and it takes you into the depths of despair. I submit that is why the ratings of this film are so low. Some reviewers might viscerally reacting to its uncomfortable truths, of which it depicts so many.
At any rate, I humbly suggest that fellow movie-raters think about the “whys” first — such as why this movie has a main character who says “we.” We find reasons for all of the things we hear and observe in a film, plausible ones, and only then are judgments best formed. Please tell me why, if you think so, that this movie sucks. I will listen.
The defense rests, your Honor.