Terry Gilliam's Eliminationist Rhetoric

At the conclusion of his interview with pop culture Website Collider.com promoting his new film The Zero Theorem, the only American member of Monty Python drops the mask and reveals his inner liberal fascist:

It’s interesting that we look to that as sort of permission to go with that philosophy since I doubt any human being will be around anyway at that point. We should maybe be looking at our own mortality as the signpost for that.

GILLIAM: Your Republican will do that, yes. Your Republican thinks like that. I remember when Reagan was president, the secretary of the interior was a guy who was an Armageddonist who actually believed the end of days were not too far in the distant future. He was put in charge of the environment and his approach was of course, not to protect it, but let’s get as much money as we can before Jesus comes back. And I despise that. We’re here and we’ve got to do whatever we can to keep the place running. We think in terms of quarterly statements and we should be thinking a little bit further in advance of that. At least the communists had ten year plans. We don’t have that anymore.

A lot of times that kind of thought absolves people of responsibility. I think a lot of times they go with it because it’s the most convenient thing and it makes the most sense for those quarterly reports.

GILLIAM: Yeah, I know. It’s about how you are inside and there will always be those people and there will be all the others that worry about every single thing we do that might cause damage to the planet. I’m somewhere leaning more towards the damage to the planet side, much more towards that. This is the problem, it’s like if you happen to be a Presbyterian, which I was as a kid, there’s a thing called predestination that creates the same situation. You’re going to heaven or hell no matter what you do in life, because you’ve been predestined, so your job is to lead an ethical, moral, and hardworking life while you’re here, but you’re going to go to hell anyway [laughs]. But it’s what you do while you’re here, and what you should be doing is living hopefully and trying to balance your needs and the needs of the world and the planet, and don’t fuck the place up. So that’s the problem with the idea that it’s all going to go to rat shit eventually so let’s make as much money as possible. Those people will always be a fungus and if I was running the country I would take them out and shoot them frankly, but that’s something else [laughs].

As I’ve joked before, when Al Gore titled one of his environmentalist tomes The Assault on Reason, he wasn’t kidding, was he?

Just as a reminder, when Democrat Gabrielle Giffords, a Bush #41-appointed judge, and a dozen other victims were shot in Arizona in early 2011, Sarah Palin was crucified by much of old media over bulls-eye clip art. The following year, when an insane gunman in Aurora, Colorado, shot up his local movie theater during the premiere of the last Batman movie, ABC’s Brian Ross immediately smeared a Tea Party member by the same name. Here we have a socialist Hollywood film director who declares those he disagrees with as non-human (“fungus”) and advocates shooting them.

Gilliam’s dystopian 1985 film Brazil ends with Jonathan Pryce’s protagonist being brutally tortured by Michael Palin’s Speer or Eichmann-esque coolly technocratic statist character. Presumably, Pryce’s character dies at the end of the film or shortly afterwards.

Who knew until now Gilliam meant it to be a happy ending and the whole film a how-to guide for big government?

Exit question:

@verumserum @JonahNRO So RFK. Jr, with his mansion and Leo with his jet would be executed due to their huge carbon footprints?

— George L. Duncan (@GeorgeLDuncan) September 22, 2014