Monty Python: they’ve become an institution, an icon, an adjective. Children unborn when their show debuted on the BBC back in 1969 have had children who irritate their parents with their imitations of the Knights Who Say “Ni!” They are one of the landmarks of comedy in the 20th century (others include Buster Keaton and Richard Nixon on Laugh-In). But are they still funny?
Hard to say. In a millennium that has begun with Freddy Got Fingered, Pearl Harbor, and the second Bush administration, what is “funny” any more”? (Although I’ll wager that adjectives in quotation marks will always be “funny.”) A screening of a “restored” (“funny” already!) version of their second film, 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail, did elicit laughter (my favorite gag: when the guy says, “A message for you sir!”) but perhaps more thought.
The “restored” part, for example. Some sharp eyes were able to spot a few extra tits and quips in the “Castle Anthrax” sequence, but those are also in the special 1996 DVD release. The changes I noticed were the additions of plot, character, setting, and theme. I had not seen the film since its original release, but in the intervening quarter of a century it had somehow become more symbolic, self-referential, mythic, and dramatic. In short, the comedy had become a tragedy.
King Arthur (Graham Chapman) and his trusted page Patsy (Terry Gilliam) ride into the screen on horseback (actually, just coconuts clopped together, a brilliant nod to the illusion of film and, if certain Eastern philosophies are to be believed, all existence) on a quest that eventually becomes a search for the Holy Grail. Really, though, it’s a film about death. I mean, it’s so Seventh Seal (“Bring out your dead” in the first five minutes!), but with “laughs.”
That’s surely the influence of Terry Gilliam, here in his feature debut directing with Terry Jones. He’d later go on to pursue the Grail myth further and less convincingly in The Fisher King and come to grips with this death thing again in his masterpiece, Brazil. Even in this early effort, however, certain motifs can be identified.
Like dismemberment, scatology, and decomposition. The Black Knight (John Cleese) sequence, of course, is a prime illustration. He’s one of the first obstacles Arthur encounters, unless you include the pseudo-political verbal detour of Michael Palin and Terry Jones as anarcho-syndicalist peasants (a telling remark: “He must be a king; he hasn’t got shit [italics mine] all over him”), and Arthur must dispatch him by severing each of his limbs, leaving him a helpless (“What are you going to do, bleed on me?”) but still game torso and a memento mori, a mirror image of Arthur himself as he will some day be, doomed, as we all are, to the treachery of the physical body.
Another image that conjures up this dread of/fascination with corporeal “ickiness” is an extreme close-up of a skull with Arthur and his knights passing in single file in the distant background, looking as if they were emerging from the skull’s nose. Ironic, since they are approaching the Cave of Eternal Peril and the lethal monstrosity that dwells within. Which brings us to the next motif:
Bunnies. I don’t want to give away too much about what’s inside the cave, but it certainly is “hare”-raising and one of the film’s “funny” moments and inevitably arouses questions of leporine imagery not only in this film but throughout Gilliam’s career and in art in general. And so the deft link with the Greek classics of the “Trojan Rabbit” with which the Knights try to defeat their nemesis, The French Taunter (John Cleese again). And so finally:
Empty reflexivity. Many have chided The Holy Grail for its “abrupt” ending, which seeks, perhaps too ingeniously, to unravel the artifice and reveal that this is, indeed, only a movie, and not necessarily a great one. Which, you might argue, should be my attitude as well, the acknowledgment that this is indeed the exact same movie I mindlessly laughed at as a callow youth and that the subtextual meanings I have “restored” to it are merely pointy-headed figments of the film critic I have since become. One day, you might ask, will I not be reading Lacanian signifiers into The Animal and Joe Dirt? To which I can only reply, quoting the text itself: “I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!”
See Peter’s interview with Terry Gilliam in “State of the Art,” www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/movies/reviews/documents/01673185.htm.
