THE LIFE OF BRIAN revisited

Like a lot of people my age I grew up on Monty Python. In schools you could always spot them easily - a group of slightly disarranged kids, throwing words at each other like "the knights who say dot" or "lumberjack" while the laughing got more and more manic. Until the bell rings and it was back to class again. I like to think that the anarchistic yet terribly dry humour of Monty Python formed the best of a generation or two, but maybe it just made us grown up twerps with an obsession that makes life a little easier to bear. Well, Monty Python was and still is a unique and very important part of the world's comic heritage. I think that the UNO should introduce rescue zones for humorous adventures as it did for forests and castles and such. Because a movie like "The life of Brian" - which is generally regarded as the Python's finest work - couldn't be made today. Too many religious implications on too many religions, basically, and with the number of bigots the clock has turned towards mindnumbing gore-appraisals like The Last passion of Christ or burning flags and rioting in the streets.

in 1977 the Monty Pythons found themselves on a sort of crossroad. Having stepped off television and with the mighty Monty Python and the Holy Grail being an unsuspected success, they had to decide if they wanted to pursue making movies or rather become a stage act. On a weekend trip to Paris they decided that it should be movies and that they would take on the biggest book of all as their next target: The Bible. Allegedly it was Eric Idle's idea to make a biopic about Jesus Christ, but the idea and story took many twists and turns before even getting into script area. The first drafted title was Jesus Christ - Lust for Glory. Another early suggestion was The Gospel according to Saint Brian, in which Brian was to be a 13th apostle, who always turns up late for wonders and such. (Compare this to Kevin Smith's Dogma...)

Terry Jones & Michael Palin

Next the Pythons relocated to Barbados for a two week writing and working holiday, that consisted of a lot of eating, writing, swimming and some water skiing. Eric Idle invited Mick Jagger over, who brought Keith Moon and Jerry Hall with him, while Graham Chapman invited his family and the whole thing slowly turned into an old gentleman's club. But it was also the first time all the Pythons had been together for such a long period once again. And they managed to churn out script that included all the things that went into Life of Brian.

Next they moved to Tunisia to shoot the movie on the sets that Zefirelli had left after his shooting of Jesus of Nazareth. The shooting went rather smoothly, except for some problems, e.g. when Chapman had to expose himself in front of 500 extras, half of them Muslim women, who are forbidden to look at a naked man by their law, and who instantly fled from the set.

And these problems were only a prelude to the major financial, bureaucratic and theocratic problems that dogged the film's production and release. The film almost stalled at the pre-production phase when executive producer Bernard Delfont of EMI withdrew his support. A last-minute rescue by George Harrison's handmade company freed the Pythons to prepare rigours of a lengthy shoot in Tunisia, a muslim nation not known for it's sense of humour. And high-calibre hotels.

 Graham Chapman & John Cleese

But the real problems only began when Life of Brian reached the cinemas in 1979. The film was attacked upon its opening in the USA by Jewish organisations, Muslim organisations and probably every Christian organization conceivable. In the UK the reaction was somewhat less dramatic but stillt he clergy appeared on tv-shows and the movie was banned by local councils all over. The level of hostility could only be compared to Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ some eight years later. Just imagine what would have happened in Arabic countries or the middle east if shots of the movie had appeared on the Internet via YouTube, in times when some little cartoons are raising bombings, violent demonstrations and flag burning. I guess, if that movie would have been made in 2005 instead of 1979 Tony Blair himself would have stopped the release. Fortunately, Life of Brian is a timeless movie and its main message - to portray the bigotry and stupidity of organised religion - still holds true.

The movie is not a blasphemous monstrosit, as religious powers would have it. The story of Brian Cohen, who is mistaken for the Son of God and tries to free Judea from Roman rule only to be crucified at the end, is well known. Jesus himself only appears during the Sermon on the Mount and his portrayal is distanced and untreated by pythonesque humour. As Terry Jones said at the time: "We have no quarrel with Mister Christ." The narrative is somewhat dislocuted, rather a series of sketches than a real story, but it is a Python movie, so what? The laughs are many and the jokes are brilliant. The main point is probably best concentrated when Brian's newfound followers discuss the religious importance of a sandal he lost and a discarded gourd. 2.000 years of catholic concils and relict cults, the core of organized religion rolled into 150 seconds. Pure genius.

Graham Chapman, Michael Palin & Terry Gilliam

As Graham Chapman once noted, the point was that Catholic churches seemed to really have missed the central point of Christ's gospel, which is that people should love one another. "Instead they got rather diverted by joining little clubs, wearing different clothes and thinking of themselves as 'rather special'". After all it is hard to touch Jesus Christ in a comic fashion, because as John Cleese said "Jesus is wise and flexible and intelligent and he didn't have any of the things that comedy is about - envy, greed, malice, avarice, lust, stupidity." And mainly it is to find latter characteristics of themselves mirrored in a movie for everyone to see that heats up religious bigots all the time.

The final scene of the movie will always remain one of cinema's main parts: a string of crucified victims sing the rather nihilist "Always look on the bright side of life", a funny ditty that explains that life is rather worthless and that there is no need to be afraid of dying because after all, there is always death at the end. This idea, cotrary to Judeo-Christian belief of man's ultimate worth, directly juxtaposed to the image of the cross, is pure genius. And intolerable to Christian bigots. The religious organisations who organised campaigns against the movie - though most of them only read what other religious organisations had written about the movie, who probably didn't see it as well - finally managed to help the movie at the box office and gave it a lot of the cult status it has today.

Georg Cracked, May 2007