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

crowd convinces itself that Brian’s inability to tell others the secret of life is a sign that he is hiding it; when they decide that Mandy, his mother, must be a virgin; and when losing a sandal creates a small storm of debate about whether true followers should gather sandals or cast them away. In this way Monty Python’s Life of Brian teaches a brand of healthy skepticism toward the pontifications of the religious.

Even more sharply, the film mocks a certain religious smugness. Religious belief can feed a sense of satisfaction with oneself that can lead to carelessness, hypocrisy, and even violence. Think of those in the film who are attending the Sermon on the Mount with their parasols, congratulating themselves for attending a religious event, but unengaged with the significance of the message. As they bicker with each other about big noses, they mistake “Blessed are the peacemakers” for “Blessed are the cheesemakers,” and eventually break out in a fistfight. They figure out that Jesus has said, “The meek will inherit the earth” (not, as they first thought, “the Greek”), but it does not touch them: “That’s nice, I’m glad they’re getting something ’cos they have a hell of a time.” Monty Python’s target is not the belief in a perfect being, a being that is all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful, what is sometimes called “the God of the philosophers.” The target of the movie’s ridicule is instead the popular belief in a more human-like God. David Hume targeted this idea as well; he calls it “anthropomorphism.” Anthropomorphism in this sense is a belief that is focused not on a perfect being, or a benevolent creator, but on an extremely powerful being that, one hopes, is on one’s side. We see this anthropomorphic belief in the prayer offered in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life: “O Lord, Ooh, you are so big, so absolutely huge, Gosh, we are all just absolutely impressed down here, I can tell you. Forgive us, Lord, for our dreadful toadying. And barefaced flattery. But You are so strong and, well, just so super. Amen.” And the belief in a powerful being who takes sides can easily be used to justify violence. There are, after all, prayers like this one from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade that, with it, Thou mayest blow Thine enemies to tiny bits in Thy mercy.”

Monty Python’s Life of Brian does not blaspheme against God but it does hold religious hypocrisy up for ridicule. Terry Jones calls this “heresy.” He says, “The Life of Brian isn’t blasphemous, it’s heretical. It’s not blasphemous because it takes the Bible story as gospel; you have to believe in the Bible, you have to understand and know the Bible story to understand it for the film really. It’s heretical because it’s making fun of the way the church represents it. Heresy is basically talking against the church’s interpretation, not against the basic belief.”4 It’s true that Monty Python’s criticism is directed at religious believers, but it is not necessarily anti-religious: in fact, one could be religious and agree with it completely.

“A New World, a Better Future”: The Question of Humanism

In their eager desire to be followers, a crowd of people takes Brian as a prophet. But does Brian actually teach anything? Does he have a message or a philosophy of any kind?

In fact, Brian “preaches” twice in the movie: once in the marketplace when he is masquerading as a prophet to hide from the centurions, and once to the multitude from the window of his mother’s apartment. In the market, Brian’s message is a hodgepodge of phrases and parables presumably taken from the other apocalyptic teachers—and some clearly pilfered from Jesus. For example, Brian says, “Don’t pass judgment on other people, or you might get judged yourself,” which sounds as if Brian is parroting what Jesus says in Matthew 7:1. And in Brian’s rising panic he blurts: “Blessed are they . . . who convert their neighbor’s ox . . . for they shall inhibit their girth . . . .” At this point, Brian’s sermons have no message—or, at least, he is too scared to express it.

At his mother’s apartment, however, Brian speaks his own words, and if anything can be called Brian’s religious teaching, it would be found here. To the crowd gathered outside his mother’s window, he says with real passion: “You’ve got it all wrong. You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals.” “You’ve all got to work it out for yourselves,” he adds. “Don’t let anyone tell you what to do.”

From this one might deduce that Brian does have at least one principle, for his philosophy seems to be that one should be an individual. One should think for oneself. One shouldn’t be a follower. Perhaps this teaching is meant only to set up the joke when Brian says, “You’re all different!” and from the crowd a man named Dennis objects, “I’m not!” Dennis thereby creates a nice little paradox, since he both rejects Brian’s teaching and accepts it at the same time, whereas all the rest who follow the crowd in accepting Brian’s teaching actually fail to accept it. But the passion in Brian’s voice when he says this, and his pained look, suggest that this is more than a joke; it suggests that here he is sincere, that this reflects his real thoughts. That this quote is in fact a message that the Pythons wanted to send comes through in this comment from Michael Palin, who says that Monty Python’s Life of Brian reflects “the basis of what Python comedy was all about, which is really resisting people telling you how to behave and how not to behave. It was the freedom of the individual, a very Sixties thing, the independence which was part of the way Python had been formed”