Hacker Cinema
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
1983 · Film · 107 min
Directed by Terry Jones
Life's questions are 'answered' in a series of outrageous vignettes, beginning with a staid London insurance company which transforms before our eyes into a pirate ship. Then there's the National Health doctors who try to claim a healthy liver from a still-living donor. The world's most voracious glutton brings the art of vomiting to new heights before his spectacular demise.
4 positive5 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
I don't have much to add, but I just took a re-watch of Monty Python's Meaning of Life. The opening scene (after the intro short film) is amazing in that it's only a couple minutes and shows many of the pathologies of a modern health system (despite being 40 years old now), while also being hilarious. It depicts the birth of a child where the mother is basically an afterthought to all the expensive machines that the doctors get to play with. As soon as they have the lady's legs in stirrups, a gaggle of onlookers is welcomed into the room, but the husband is asked to leave since he's "uninvolved". But most important the amongst the crowd is the administrator who explains how they cleverly use accounting to manipulate the costs of the medical equipment.
To cap it off, when the mother asks if the child is a boy or a girl, Graham Chapman responds, "it's a bit early to start putting roles on it".
Like alluded to in 'the meaning of life' movie, school is a preparation for military/war.
When I was young but not too young I watched Monty Pythons Meaning Of Life movie. There's an extremely violent scene in that movie that I find very funny, now, but which disturbed the hell out of me as a kid.
That's what he's saying, some kids might not get the humor aspect of Portal and just perceive the paranoia and violence.
Books:
Most of you will know it, but to make sure: I wouldn't want to die without having read
"Gödel Escher Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid" (Douglas R. Hofstadter),
a 1000-page recursive poem about consciousness, bio-chemistry, mathematical versus musical beauty, zen koans, recursion, symmetry, formal rule systems, AI and more. Every second chapter is written as a dialog.
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky)
In our time, media manipulation is at its historic peak, so perhaps everyone should know a bit about the political-economic underpinnings. How issues are framed and chosen, the influence of money, reporting biases.
Dining with Terrorists: Meetings with the World's Most Wanted Militants (Phil Rees)
A former BBC journalist tells about meals with 'interesting' people and the trickiness associated with the definition of 'terrorism'.
I'm also going to throw in some movies for good measure.
Films:
Meaning of Life https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085959/
Adam's Apples https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418455/
Harold and Maude https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067185/
> The answer to your question is I don't know. I guess I'm agnostic. He's too hard to assess objectively, and the resources to do it aren't available.
Eh? There are a handful of Reichian therapists around, cloudbusters are pretty cheap to make, I don't think they'll arrest you for building an orgone accumulator, etc.
I'm not seriously suggesting you go out and mess around with this stuff but I'm curious about your motivation. Did you just read about it and never try any of it?
I was looking to cure my depression so I tried things. Now my depression is cured but I feel like a visitor from the future. I went too far too fast, raced out ahead of consensus reality, and now I have a kind of reverse futureshock. I can feel a rant coming on so I'll cool it. I'm bored and lonely and everyone's problems seem so simple and easy to solve... Y U NO Golden Age already Humanity!?
Aaaaaaanyway...
> I wonder which Python was into that stuff. Perhaps Cleese?
Yeah. He used to have an old flash site and there was a video there of him doing a kind of talking-head fireside chat bit, and halfway through that he starts talking about Gurdjieff. Blew me away. After that, I guess I was primed to see it, that scene I mean. It's incredible to think that they wrote that and filmed it and stuck it in there as a killer joke: the Meaning of Life is in "The Meaning of Life".
It's interesting how they set it up: there's basically a post-hypnotic suggestion to get distracted and then sudden attack by the Crimson Assurance acts as an amnesia induction pattern.
I wonder if they told anyone? I mean there had to be a group of people in on the joke, yeah? I've never heard of anyone else noticing that scene and making the connection to Gurdjieff, but then I don't get out much. At all. (I'm kind of a recluse. In fact, this HN account is pretty much my only connection to the outside world. Great work btw dang. I can't tell you how grateful I am to you for all you do. I owe you. If you're ever in Southwestern SF and want to experience some Chi or other weird shit get in touch.)
I met John Cleese once and roundly failed to serve him popcorn. I was working at a movie theater in Santa Barbara and he came in with a date to see "In the Name of the Father". Slow night. Empty lobby. I looked up and there he was. He's tall. Over six feet. I managed a sentence or two before I just started stammering. One of the other kids had to step up and serve him while I leaned against the wall and just gaped like a fish. He was ver British, didn't notice, might have been waiting to catch a bus. I thought that was wonderful of him, and his date was really enjoying it. :) They left via the side door... heh
> If you're interested in Gurdjieff's influence in Britain
Nah, like I said, once my depression was cured I lost interest. Not proud of it but there it is.
Cheers dude, well met!
The answer to your question is I don't know. I guess I'm agnostic. He's too hard to assess objectively, and the resources to do it aren't available. By the way, there is a recent documentary about Reich that I haven't watched yet: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/wr1897.
> I'll see that and raise you Gurdjieff's Fourth Way embedded in the middle of "Meaning of Life" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2QJvc_SxFQ
Wow! That's incredible, and would have gone over my head when I saw the movie as a kid.
I wonder which Python was into that stuff. Perhaps Cleese? Edit: looks like it: https://theweek.com/articles/677504/john-cleeses-6-favorite-books, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/25/magazine/cleese-up-close.html. Maurice Nicoll is another character; an early UK psychiatrist and son of a prominent Victorian critic, who was Jung's British colleague. Jung was asking him to lead his work in England, but by then Nicoll fell into the Gurdjieff/Ouspensky orbit and ran off to Fontainebleau. The books Cleese is referencing ("Psychological Commentaries" [etc.]) are Nicoll's lectures to his Gurdjieff group that went on through WWII until he died in the 1950s. They're a strange mix of sharp psychological observation and impenetrable esoterica.
If you're interested in Gurdjieff's influence in Britain, I recommend the memoir of J.G. Bennett, who encountered both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky when he was running British intelligence in Constantinople just after WWI: https://www.amazon.com/Witness-Story-Search-Collected-Bennett/dp/1545300232/ref=sr_1_1. As an old man in the early 70s he became the spiritual teacher of a lot of English hippies, eventually including, of all people, Robert Fripp. You can hear Bennett's voice at the beginning of Fripp's new-wave dance record (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPQWHEu_rqQ), which also went over my head when I was a kid and frankly creeped me out. But what a great record! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPQWHEu_rqQ#t=12m
I'm racking my brains and Google and can't seem to pull up which Monty Python sketch or movie that one comes from. Give a hint?
Edit: Oh. Found it. In "Meaning of Life", uttered shortly after this musical number. NSFW and liable to cause religious / political flamewars, but it makes the point, so here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVHjg3AqIQ . You can skip to 6:09 for the line.
Mocking implies that the purpose was to make Muslim people feel bad, and I don't think that is the case. I see it in the context of works like The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan (1995), The Meaning of Life (1983) by Monthy Python, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (2006), and South park episode Trapped in the Closet (2006). The point is to illustrate and highlight the superstitious believes of religion in the context of existing culture that gives it enormous power and influence.
Among those four, two use comedy as the medium. Three of them has been banned in various countries. The only exception is the south park episode and I suspect the only reason is because scientology is not the majority religion in any country or state.
What seems odd is that he thought Monty Python would be interested in trying to get (the equivalent of) a G rating.
Well, their TV show was entirely G-rated and suitable for children (even with the occasional naked cartoon woman). This was their first movie, so they hadn't really gone into offensive stuff yet (as they would with Life of Brian and Meaning of Life).
Monty Python generally appeals to children, so losing the "oral sex" in exchange for something that you can show your young kids wouldn't be a bad exchange. (I'd keep fart-in-your-general-direction, though.)
When I was a kid my dad used to have a set of Monty Python audio tapes which he'd play in the car on long journeys, but I didn't realise until I was much older that he'd edited out all the swear words.