Summary
The phone rings. It’s someone who found Jack’s wallet. Jack and Anne head to the hospital, where Parry is catatonic, re-experiencing his trauma. The doctor tells the two of them that Parry was assaulted, and that he will be brought to the mental hospital where he went after the death of his wife, until he has returned to a healthy state. When they’ve heard the full story, Anne turns to Jack and says, “Poor Lydia, she finally finds her prince and he falls into a coma. Some women have no luck, huh?” Then, she leaves the hospital in a huff. “I’ll call you!” Jack yells after her as she leaves.
The scene shifts and we see Jack settling back into his life as a radio DJ. He takes a phone call and smokes a cigarette. We then see him riding a limousine, with his agent, to go have a meeting in an imposing office building. On his way into the building, the former cabaret singer recognizes Jack and runs towards him. He wants to talk to Jack, insisting that they know each other and have spent time together. Jack feigns ignorance, as a cop pulls the singer away forcibly.
Inside, a producer pitches “a weekly comedy about the homeless” to Jack, “a funny, upbeat way of bringing the issue of homelessness to TV.” He tells Jack about the whacky characters on the show, characters who love being homeless, and Jack looks distracted. “The best part is, it’s called Home Free,” says the producer, and Jack bolts from the room.
Outside, Jack looks for the singer, but he cannot find him. He goes to Jack’s old basement abode, where he finds a book about the Holy Grail. In voiceover, we hear Jack’s earlier, skeptical interactions with Parry about the Grail, as he looks at Parry’s notes.
The scene shifts and we see Jack at the mental hospital visiting Parry. He gets off an elevator and walks into a large white room filled with beds. He is holding the Pinocchio doll from the beginning. Suddenly, Jack sees Lydia asking after Parry, but he doesn’t say hello. When Lydia leaves, Jack goes and finds Parry, who is catatonic, wearing watermelon pajamas that Lydia got him. After tucking the Pinocchio doll under Parry’s arm, Jack sees just how unresponsive Parry is. All of a sudden, Jack begins ranting at Parry, repressing his feelings and telling his old friend that he doesn’t feel bad for him. He then begins talking about what an incredible life he lives, which devolves into a rant: “I’m living an incredible fucking life. So don't lay there in your comfortable coma and think I'll risk all that because I feel responsible for you. I'm not responsible! I don't feel guilty. You've got it easy. I'm out there every fucking day trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing. No matter what I have, it feels like I have nothing. I don't feel sorry for you. It's easy being nuts. Try being me!” After insisting, “There’s nothing special about me!” Jack yells, insisting that he’s not going to help Parry get the grail. Then, Jack completely changes his tune, and agrees to steal the Grail from the apartment on the Upper East Side and bring it to Parry.
We see the exterior of the apartment, then Jack climbing a rope, dressed in Parry’s knightly clothes. After successfully making it up to a second story of the building, Jack notices a stained glass window with the Red Knight of Parry’s nightmares painted onto it. He looks terrified, before rigging up another way to climb up yet higher on the side of the building, using Parry’s plans as a guide. When he makes it up to a tall tower, Jack enters the apartment, but inside, he has a hallucination, thinking that he sees Edwin, his former listener who shot up the restaurant. The hallucination of Edwin points a gun at him and shoots.
Realizing it was only a hallucination, Jack climbs down a long flight of steps to the floor below, and wanders into a dimly lit library, where a fire is burning in the fireplace and the Grail sits on a shelf. When he picks up the grail, he reads the inscription and realizes that it was a gift to the architect who won it as a child, on the occasion of a Christmas pageant. It is not a Grail after all.
As he turns around, Jack sees the architect, Carmichael, sprawled out on a chair, drunk and with an empty bottle of pills beside him. Realizing that Carmichael has overdosed, Jack tries to revive him, but to no avail. In the hall, Jack sees only two options for escape: going the way he came or through the front door. Opting for the door, he sets off the alarm, but manages to escape.
He brings the Grail to Parry, hoping that it will somehow magically revive the catatonic knight, but it does not. Later that night, Jack has fallen asleep on the side of Parry’s bed. As the camera zooms in, we see Parry’s hands begin to move as he realizes he is holding the Grail. His eyes flutter open and he sits up, seeing Jack asleep near him. “I had this dream Jack. I was married. I was married to this beautiful woman, and you were there too. I really miss her, Jack. Is that okay? Can I miss her now?” he says. Jack weeps.
The next day, Lydia comes to visit Parry, but finds his bed empty and neatly made. Nearby, Parry is leading a chorus of patients in a rousing chorus of “I Like New York in June.” Jack is among them, singing. Lydia begins crying, walks towards Parry, and they kiss. Jack takes over conducting the chorus of patients.
We see Anne smoking a cigarette and looking over some paperwork at the video store. When she looks up, Jack is standing there, and she says, “What do you expect me to do, applaud?” She tells him she burned his stuff (accidentally), then asks him to tell her why he’s there, so she doesn’t have to “do all the work.” “I love you,” he says simply. Anne is shocked, and goes to him. After laughing for a minute, she slaps him, then kisses him, knocking over a bunch of videos in the process.
Later that night we see Jack and Parry lying naked in Central Park, the Pinocchio doll between them. Fireworks go off over the Manhattan skyline.
Analysis
In this section, a horrible tragedy befalls Parry and he is once again transported into a post-traumatic catatonic state. As soon as this happens, Jack enters his own kind of catatonia by returning to the smooth-talking, hollow world of entertainment. He goes to work at a radio station, drives around in a limousine with his agent, and takes meetings with shallow-minded producers. When he was closely aligned with Parry, Jack began to develop a moral code, and to care about people worse off than himself. Without Parry, Jack turns back into his old shallow self, even while haunted by ghosts of his recent past, like the cabaret singer who flags him down outside the office building.
It is only when the shallowness and inhumanity of his world become outrageously offensive that Jack is able to jolt out of his stupor. When he takes the meeting with the producer who raves about a television sitcom that will show the fun side of being homeless, Jack realizes that his professional detachment is at odds with the transformative experience of his friendship with Parry. He leaves the meeting and goes to Parry’s former home, then to the hospital to find Parry, in an effort to reconcile the cognitive dissonance between his intimate experience with homelessness and his position of power as a show business power player.
When he visits the catatonic Parry at the hospital, Jack has internalized some of the fraught logic of the producer and takes it out on Parry, his captive audience. He screams about the fact that Parry’s life, as a catatonic crazy person, is in fact better than the high-pressure existence of a wealthy radio DJ. “No matter what I do, I feel like I have nothing!” he tells Parry, and this is the most emotionally revealing thing he has said for the entire film. As a result of this unexpectedly candid admission, Jack realizes that he wants to help Parry find the grail—that he finally believes in the delusional knight’s topsy-turvy plan.
When Jack embarks on the mission to retrieve the Grail, breaking into the wealthy architect's castle-like apartment, he finds that Parry’s prize is even less magical than he thought; in fact, it is a small prize from the architect’s childhood. Jack’s desire to complete Parry’s task and to help bring him back to life is so strong, though, that this realization changes nothing. While the Jack from the beginning of the film might have been cynical about the entire mission, the new Jack shares Parry’s belief in magic, and knows that his belief in the powers of the object are what imbue it with magical properties.
The film, for all its grittiness and darkness, is a fairy tale at its core. While the magic in The Fisher King isn’t actually real, the story follows how Jack is able to rekindle his belief in magic in order to live a more intentional life. When he notices that the Grail is not an actual mystical artifact from days of yore, this does not stop him from suspending his disbelief and bringing it to Parry nonetheless. His belief in the object’s healing properties makes it so that it ends up having resuscitative powers after all, and Parry is healed. The architect's imposing apartment becomes a castle simply because it looks like one. Jack becomes a knight because he believes it. The film suggests that letting madness and magic into one’s life has many benefits, and that believing in the supernatural can make it real.
