Monty Python and Philosophy by Gary Hardcastle (best novels for beginners .TXT) 📗

. could somebody give me a push.” As the French guard says in the final scene, “You couldn’t catch clap in a brothel.”

Gender misidentification, exaggerated masculinity, homo-social bonding, the heterosexual matrix, and phallic allusions abound in the preceding scenes with Prince Herbert and Sir Launcelot. Feminist ideas are clearly woven into the intricate fabric of the historical, literary, cultural, philosophical, and mythological tapestry of this brilliantly funny Python film.

Yes, but What About the Killer Rabbit?

There’s no time here to examine the killer rabbit, brave, brave Sir Robin and his minstrels, or the uncompromising Knights who say “Ni!” Yet beneath the humor these sketches also bear the imprint of the struggles—involving philosophy, gender, and social politics—that make Monty Python and the Holy Grail as much a document of the 1970s as a satire of medieval life and culture.51

8

Against Transcendentalism: Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and Buddhism

STEPHEN T. ASMA

John Cleese portrays a schoolmaster in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. One of his Bible readings to his congregation of schoolboys goes like this:

And spotteth twice they the camels before the third hour. And so the Midianites went forth to Ram Gilead in Kadesh Bilgemath by Shor Ethra Regalion, to the house of Gash-Bil-Betheul-Bazda, he who brought the butter dish to Balshazar and the tent peg to the house of Rashomon, and there slew they the goats, yea, and placed they the bits in little pots. Here endeth the lesson.

Cleese then turns to his chaplain (Michael Palin) who rises to lead the congregation in prayer:

Let us praise God. Oh Lord, oooh you are so big. So absolutely huge. Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here I can tell you. Forgive us, O Lord, for this dreadful toadying and barefaced flattery. But you are so strong and, well, just so super. Fantastic. Amen.

Headmaster Cleese then addresses the schoolboys with a series of general announcements, including the importance of “Empire Day, when we try to remember the names of all those from the Sudbury area who gave their lives to keep China British.” Almost forgetting, and clearly resenting its intrusion on these more important matters, Cleese turns to one boy, Jenkins, for just enough time to deliver a message from home: “Oh . . . and Jenkins . . . apparently your mother died this morning.” Over Jenkins’s tears, Palin briskly resumes business by leading a hymn to match his earlier prayer: “Oh Lord, please don’t burn us,” it goes. “Don’t grill or toast your flock, Don’t put us on the barbecue, Or simmer us in stock. . . .”

This sketch is emblematic of a philosophical mood that one finds throughout Monty Python’s work. But it sparkles in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. This movie is filled with reductio ad absurdum arguments that reduce traditional positions to absurdity by drawing out their logical conclusions or by juxtaposing them in the context of our deeper (usually ethical) convictions. Here, the complete insensitivity of the Headmaster and chaplain to one of the deepest injuries that can befall a young boy (the death of his mother) is compounded by the elaborately useless verbiage of religious orthodoxy. The thing that’s needed most in response to little Jenkins’s loss, some humane compassion, is completely truant in these rituals and authority figures. So it goes throughout Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life—not just the cruel humor but also the suggestion of a causal connection. The Headmaster and chaplain are not just insensitive people who happen to be running a religious boarding school. They are in fact insensitive because their religion has led them to lose perspective and compassion.

Much of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life is a critique of ridiculous and dangerous distractions that dehumanize us. Among them are religious ideology, class distinction, science, medicine, education, and corporate greed. The film displays the myriad ways that humans alienate each other and also alienate themselves from their own happiness. In the section titled “Birth,” for example, we see the way that modern medicine objectifies and abstracts a patient into a meaningless afterthought that gets significantly less consideration than the expensive equipment that fills the “fetusfrightening room.” The “machine that goes ‘ping’”—as the Python-doctors call it—is more valuable than the mother and newborn child. Their humanity has been crowded out by profit-driven corporate healthcare and sterile technology. As the Pythons’ depiction of life’s cycle continues (into the section titled “Growth and Learning”) we see institutional education deadening the spirit of young people. Even sex education, illustrated vividly by “teacher” Cleese and Patricia Quinn, becomes a dry pedantic exercise that simply affords the abusive tutor one more excuse to berate and scold his students. All these comments, moreover, come on the heels of the film’s surrealistic “short feature presentation” depicting a mutiny by the oppressed workers of the Crimson Permanent Assurance Corporation. Despite the transformation of their office building into a fierce, seaworthy battle-ship, and their swordfight victories over their corporate foes (including the Very Big Corporation of America), they meet an inglorious end as they sail off the edge of the earth into oblivion.

For all that, however, the film is not despairing. A thread of optimism runs through it and serves as an alternative to the portrayed estrangements. To see this, I’ll explain how the movie offers a sustained critique of transcendentalism, a way of looking at the world that connects and unifies the film’s sketches.

Is There Really Something Called ‘Transcendental Metaphysics’?

Transcendentalism is a theory embraced by thinkers as diverse as Plato, St. Augustine, and Vedantic Hindus. It posits the existence of two worlds instead of one. The physical world we live in is, according to the transcendentalist, a corrupt copy of a more perfect world. My slowly degenerating body, my material lap-top computer, my faltering democracy, and my entire sensory experience, to take a range of examples, are all just fleeting shadows when compared to the ideal and perfect realm believed to exist by transcendentalists. This ideal