THE ZERO THEOREM

THE ZERO THEOREM. Terry Gilliam, dir., additional dialog. Pat Rushin, script. David Warren, production design. Adrian Curelea, art direction. UK, Romania, France, USA: Voltage Pictures and Zanuck Independent (main production company) / Amplify (US distribution), 2013. See IMDb for complexities of production and distribution.[1]

Definitely a Terry Gilliam production set in a dystopian world, as in Gilliam's BRAZIL, that is satirically parallel and, in a paradoxical figure of speech, eccentrically tangential to ours. As in BRAZIL, note oppressive surveillance ("MANCOM IS WATCHING" + camera) and intrusive advertising; in ZERO THEOREM, however, the Big Brother figure is called "Management" and is associated with capitalism more than with the State, although in Dystopia, and elsewhere, the two can converge and merge. ZERO THEOREM has been legitimately seen as "A satisfying companion piece to BRAZIL"[2], but one that continues the theme in PI of the quest for some ultimate mathematical truth — with the name of the protagonist in ZERO THEOREM, Qohen Leth, possibly a citation to PI's Max Cohen — and with similar images of a man at, and surrounded by, cybernetic devices. If BRAZIL was postmodern in its visuals, ZERO goes even further over the top in visual movement from diegetic surveillance footage in black-and-white to Industrial … stuff similar to the time machine in BRAZIL to sequences in a kind of psychedelic pomo.

In addition to surveillance and transgressively intrusive advertising and equally intrusive Skype-like contacts, see for Qohen apparently naked amidst his computer, and virtual reality (VR) sequences with Qohen and his potential love-interest on an idyllic beach, with Qohen in an all-encompassing body-suit with fiber-optic and other colorful electronics. Note very well that Qohen initially works in the equivalent of Winston Smith's cubicle in Nineteen Eighty-Four and its film versions, and Sam Lowry's minute office in BRAZIL; but in ZERO the cubicles are fully computerized, wildly colorful, and provide a space like a video-game arcade, with the computers operated like video-games tweaked by a mad designer with a Day-Glo palette and some retro tastes.

For the VR sequences on the beach, cf. and contrast similar images in cyberspace at the end of William Gibson's Neuromancer and Count Zero, and in the probable real-world of the/our future in Gilliam's 12 MONKEYS.

RDE, 16/VIII/15 DG, 17Aug15