Black hearted film

I find that with a Python film you’re laughing, enjoying the absurdity, appreciating the ideas and the quality of the writing and artistry, and underneath all that you notice a dark nihilism. Holy Grail and Life Of Brian both have bleak endings, but there’s plenty of fun to be had along the way. You could show your kids those films.

Meaning Of Life feels different. Yes, the comedy is there and the absurdity is on steroids, but it’s relentlessly fucked up, nasty, mean spirited, cruel and disgusting. Kids being sold for scientific experiments, child actors singing about sperm and suggesting their mother use contraption or their father cut his balls off, schoolkids watching their teacher fuck in front of them, yet more young kids getting brutally beaten on the rugby pitch, one being casually told his mother just died.

It’s all ice cold and disturbing, and that’s before the live organ donation in which a man’s stomach is ripped open with pipe-cutters and mounds of guts are pulled from his abdomen as he screams and screams with blood spraying across the room. The humour is overwhelmed by sheer disgust the scene evokes. One commenter around here said they fainted after watching the scene.

There’s much to enjoy in Meaning Of Life but the blend of ingredients feels off. I have to wonder if the intergroup conflicts and the sense that the Pythons were about to disband cast a dark shadow over everything and took the fun out of the film. Like they’re fighting over who gets to do what more than they’re trying to entertain the audience, and that bitterness comes through.

There’s quite a gap between the jolly personas of the Pythons in interviews, and the viciousness at the heart of MOL. I know Cleese was never happy with it and was a pain during the creation of the film, he’d rather be making Fawlty Towers, and I’d be surprised if the other Pythons rate it well against Grail and Brian.

I still enjoy the film as a curiosity. It’s wonderfully surreal and features some great moments and some of Python’s best songs, and it credits the intelligence of the audience in a way that is completely absent from Hollywood movies today. It’s nice to watch as a bonus after the earlier, better films, but yeah - that black heart at its core leaves quite an unpleasant taste in the mouth.