Summary
Parry’s legs shake uncontrollably as Jack hems his suit pants with a stapler. Parry talks about Jack and Anne’s relationship, telling Jack that he can be “kind of an asshole” to Anne. The scene shifts back to Lydia and Anne, and Lydia is talking about the fact that her mother (with whom she used to live) calls weekly asking if she’s met a man. “I think some people are meant to be alone,” Lydia says, outlining a theory she has that she was a deceitful man in a former life and she’s now paying for it. “I think you’re getting a little too complicated. What, in your opinion, is the actual problem?” Anne says. Lydia bemoans the fact that she feels forgettable and boring. Anne responds simply, “You want a personality? Try this on for size. You can be a real bitch.” Lydia is delighted to hear it.
Outside, Jack gives Parry his wallet so that he can pay for dinner. Parry is grateful, but incredibly nervous, and they go up to meet the women. Upstairs, they find Lydia and Anne sitting on the floor laughing hysterically and smoking cigarettes like old friends. Lydia and Parry are terrified of one another and retreat to opposite sides of the room. Anne and Jack encourage them both to go out for Chinese food. They walk to the restaurant in couples, and Lydia tells Parry about her job. Lydia is self-deprecating because her office publishes mostly “trashy romance novels,” but Parry insists that romance is “passion, imagination, beauty…Besides, you find some pretty wonderful things in the trash.” He hands her a small sculpture of a chair made out of some trash, which charms Lydia.
They go to dinner. Parry and Lydia are exceedingly clumsy as they eat their meal, both of them dropping dumplings on the floor, spilling noodles, and slurping. As the meal progresses, Anne and Jack look at each other, disgusted and amused. “I think they’re meant for each other. It’s scary, but true,” Anne whispers to Jack. Soon, Jack and Anne are laughing about how well their matchmaking is going. At one point, Anne notices her bra strap is showing and pushes it up, but Jack pushes it back down and kisses her arm.
The couples go home separately. Anne and Jack laugh uncontrollably as they walk back to her apartment. They share an intimate moment, and Anne tells Jack that she was proud to be with him. He kisses her passionately, thankful for her help. Elsewhere, Parry asks Lydia to tell him more about herself on their walk. Once they reach Lydia’s apartment, she cynically tells him that it won’t last, that he’ll abandon her soon enough. She knows the drill: a man sleeps over, then never calls. Parry tells her just how much he loves her, that he would never hurt her, and that he is there to stay. “You’re real, aren’t you?” she says, kissing him tenderly, before saying goodnight.
Parry is exuberant for a moment, but suddenly he has a horrible flashback to the night that Edwin shot up Babbitt’s and his wife was killed. We see the flashback in graphic detail, Parry’s wife shot brutally in the head. He runs away from a hallucination of the Red Knight, and ends up under the Manhattan Bridge, screaming and crying. Suddenly, a car pulls up, and the two violent teenagers who almost killed Jack show up and beat Parry up.
The following morning, Jack calls his former agent with hopes of restarting his career. Anne comes into the room and is delighted to hear that Jack wants to return to his former glory. Immediately, she starts making plans for their future, but Jack stops her, and wants to talk about something. Anne sits on Jack’s lap as he tells her that he wants to take a break from their relationship while he returns to his entertainment success. At first she tries to reason with him, saying, “I love you, you love me, what more do you need?” When he cannot tell her he loves her, Anne becomes furious, and yells, “If you’re gonna hurt me, hurt me now and not some drawn out bullshit that takes months of my life because you don’t have the balls!” Jack says he’ll pack up his things and leave, and they argue more.
When he tries to comfort Anne as she cries, she snaps at him, “I ain't gonna play a stupid game where we act like friends so you get to walk out feeling good about yourself. I'm not a modern woman. If this is over, let’s just call it over.”
Analysis
While it seems like Anne and Jack’s plan to get Lydia and Parry together might work, they are somewhat obstructed by Lydia and Parry’s abject fear of one another. While Anne is able to loosen Lydia up a bit one-on-one, when Jack arrives with Parry, Lydia runs to the other side of the room in terror, and clams up into her usual inhibited shell. Likewise, Perry, usually so full of life and spirit, is rendered almost mute. Once they manage to have some more private time on the walk to the restaurant, however, the two begin to connect.
We are clued into just how compatible Parry and Lydia really are in a charming and comical dinner montage. We see the two dates seated in a booth at a Chinese restaurant, with a spinning lazy susan in the center of the table. Lydia, ever clumsy, struggles to hold dumplings in the grip of her chopsticks, and can barely get noodles onto her plate without taking almost all of them. This is hardly a problem for Parry, however, as he is equally unsuited for dining out, knocking silverware and china onto the floor and fumbling just as much as Lydia. The extended montage shows just how ridiculous both of these oddball characters are, but by the end, everyone is laughing as they realize that Lydia and Parry are meant to be.
While the matchmaking is supposed to be for Parry and Lydia’s sake, it ends up bringing Anne and Jack closer together as well. The fact that Parry and Lydia begin to recognize their compatibility as a couple creates a tenderness between Anne and Jack, as they realize the success of their shared plan. For the first time in the film, the viewer sees the genuine affection shared between them. This is portrayed in the way that Jack touches Anne’s bra strap at dinner and kisses her arm, and in the way they share such hearty guffaws after the dinner. Jack even slings Anne over his shoulder and carries her to their bed.
Lydia and Parry are pleasantly surprised by their compatibility, Lydia’s fears about Parry’s abandonment assuaged by his heartfelt reassurance. Good feeling doesn’t last for long, however, and as soon as Lydia says goodnight, Parry’s post-traumatic feelings track him down again. He begins to have a flashback to the night that his wife was killed, and his literal memory of the event is mixed in with his medieval fantasia. In this way, we see how the Red Knight is a physical manifestation of the violence of that night at Babbitt’s, a personification of the blood spilled and pain felt.
The flashback is disturbing and upsetting, all the more so because it feels dreamlike and surreal. We watch the night at Babbitt’s as if through a funhouse kaleidoscope, as if we are privy to someone else’s nightmare. The camera movements are jerky, and we see the scene from various perspectives. Terry Gilliam stages the scene almost like its own kind of fairy tale, and the violence is depicted in a cartoonish way. Blood splatters all over Parry’s face in the blink of an eye, and the image is grotesque and unbelievable. The over-the-top nature of the depiction has the effect of making the memory seem at once unrealistic and overwhelmingly horrifying. In this moment, the viewer is forced to reckon with not only the terrible tragedy that Parry has endured, but its singularly damaging effects.
