The Meaning of Life
This page is about the Monty Python film; for the philosophical concept, see the Meaning of life.Monty Python's The Meaning of Life is a
comedy film/
musical made in
1983. This film was essentially a series of comedy skits and about the various stages of life â€" in some ways a return to the sketch comedy format of the original television series. It was also the last of the Monty Python films.
The resulting film is regarded as a little uneven, though which particular scenes are thought funny varies from person to person. Many scenes contain deep philosophical themes disguised as grotesque or infantile humor. Some more generally praised scenes include:
*
The Crimson Permanent Assurance, originally conceived by
Terry Gilliam as a 6-minute
animated sequence, then later expanded to a 16-minute live-action piece, to the point where it no longer fitted into the framework of the film and became a pre-movie
short film in its own right. In an early satire of
globalization, elderly office clerks rebel against their cold, efficient corporate masters at 'The Very Big Corporation of America', commandeer their
building and turn it into a
pirate ship, raiding
financial districts in numerous big cities before falling off the
edge of the world. (The sequence particularly echoes Gilliam's
Time Bandits (1981) and the 1950's
Hollywood movie
The Crimson Pirate.)
* "The Miracle Of
Birth - Part I", is the opening scene of the film proper, where a woman in
labour is ignored by
doctors,
nurses,
Japanese tourists, and eventually the
hospital's administrator (
Michael Palin) as they drag in more and more elaborate
equipment, including 'the machine that goes PING!'. (This scene is based on the argument about the technologicalisation of the birth process.)
* "The Miracle Of Birth - Part II: The Third World", which shows a Catholic family living in
'the Third World' (Yorkshire), who sell their 63 children for medical experiments, because they do not believe in birth control. The skit culminates in the musical number "
Every Sperm is Sacred" [
1], a parody combining "Consider Yourself" from the musical
Oliver! with the ragamuffin dancing orphans of
Annie, released the previous year. The segment satirises the Catholic Church's attitudes to
contraception and
masturbation and follows with a burlesque of Protestant tolerance, always available but somehow never used.
* "Growth And Learning", in which a group of schoolboys watch in boredom as their teacher (
John Cleese) demonstrates sexual techniques with his wife (played by
Patricia Quinn).
* "War - Part I", in which a
First World War officer attempting to rally his men to find cover during an attack is hindered by their insistence on celebrating his birthday, complete with presents, gift vouchers and a cake.
* "War - Part II", set during the
1879 Anglo-Zulu War in
Natal, in which a decimating attack by
Zulus is dismissed in lieu of a far more pressing matter; one of the officers having had a leg stolen during the night. Suspicious that a
tiger might be the perpetrator, despite being in Africa ('Well, it's probably escaped from the zoo.' 'Doesn't seem very likely...'), a hunting party is formed, which later encounters two suspicious men in tiger suits who attempt (rather pathetically) to assert their innocence in the matter through a succession of increasingly feeble excuses as to why they are dressed as a tiger.
* "The Middle Of The Film", introduced by Palin in drag, which leads onto "Find The Fish", in which a
drag queen (
Graham Chapman), a gangly playboy (
Terry Jones), and an
elephant-headed butler (in fact dressed in the costume of a troll from
Time Bandits) challenge the audience to 'find the fish' in the following abstract scene in a living room set, actually part of the operations floor at the former
Battersea Power Station,
Wandsworth. (This is perhaps the strangest thing Python has done, giving literally no explanation to what it is. Later, Terry Gilliam confessed it was supposed to be parodying strange dreams that we sometimes get, and wished that they could have examined it more fully in the movie. The prevailing solution is that 'the fish' is in fact the viewer, as the scene is shot with a
fish-eye lens, another whimsy on the philosophical subject of the film. A goldfish (or perhaps something that resembles a goldfish) can be seen in the elephant's plate.)
* "Live Organ Transplants", in which a couple of
paramedics doorstep a card-carrying
organ donor to claim his liver immediately. Later, a man in a pink suit (Idle) emerges from the
refrigerator belonging to Mrs. Brown (
Terry Jones), the 'donor's' wife, to sing her a
song about the wonders of the
universe, resulting in her realising the futility of her existence and agreeing to one of the paramedics' request for her own liver.
* A
Noel Cowardesque fop (Idle) performs a song about the
penis.
* "
Mr. Creosote", in which the eponymous
gourmand, an impossibly
fat man (Jones), waddles into a decorous
restaurant, swears at the host (Cleese),
vomits copiously, eats an enormous meal while vomiting into buckets, and finally â€" after being persuaded to eat one last 'waffer-theen
mint' by the impeccable 'French' host â€" explodes, showering the restaurant with
offal. (This scene is possibly based on
Jean Paul Sartre's existentialist book
Nausea, in which the customer feels constantly sick with existence, though never actually vomits as graphically as Mr. Creosote.)
*"The Man Who Chose His Own Death", in which a condemned criminal, given the choice of his manner of execution, is chased off a cliff and to his death by a horde of topless women. It is revealed that he was being executed for 'making gratuitous sexist jokes in a motion picture'.
* "Social Death", in which a group of snobs at an isolated country house are visited by the
Grim Reaper (Cleese), who knocks on the door. When the host answers and sees the Reaper with an enormous scythe, he says, 'Is it about the hedge?' The dinner guests then spend a lot of time arguing with him before finally being persuaded to leave the mortal coil. When asked how they all died at the same time, the Grim Reaper replies, 'The salmon mousse.' In a rare Python ad-lib, Michael Palin says wonderingly as they are leaving to attend Heaven, 'I didn't even eat the mousse.' 'Heaven' turns out to be the restaurant from an earlier sketch. When they enter, the rest of the characters from the film (the Roman-Catholic Children, the topless women, Mr. Creosote, etc.) are already seated, and all are then serenaded by the monumentally cheesy song "Christmas In Heaven", a parody of Las Vegas-style shows, complete with women wearing plastic breasts in Santa Claus outfits (the women were supposed to be topless but, according to the DVD comments, one of them refused, on the grounds that she thought her breasts were too small) and a gleaming-toothed lounge singer telling all those present that in Heaven, it's Christmas every day, forever.
* "The End Of The Film", in which the presenter from "The Middle Of The Film" (Palin in drag again) concludes the film by reading out 'the meaning of life':
'Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.'
He then announces:
'And, finally, here are some completely gratuitous pictures of penises to annoy the censors and to hopefully spark some sort of controversy, which, it seems, is the only way, these days, to get the jaded, video-sated public off their fucking arses and back in the sodding cinema...'(The pictures of penises do not actually appear - they were censored.)
* Finally, the film ends with part of the theme music and title sequence from
Monty Python's Flying Circus on a TV set drifting off into space, before the "
Galaxy Song" begins again, and plays over the end credits.
*Because the film was not intended for television, some sketches show much more
black humor than the original TV series (for example "Mr. Creosote" or "Live Organ Transplants").
*In
2004, a 'Special Edition'
DVD was released, with director's commentary, deleted scenes, and behind-the-scenes documentaries (both real and spoofed).
*During the title sequence, the title of the movie is first written on a stone tablet as 'The Meaning Of Liff', and is corrected in a second by a lightning strike. This appears to allude to the humorous dictionary
The Meaning of Liff (by
Douglas Adams and
John Lloyd), released in the same year as the movie, though the Pythons say they didn't know a book existed bearing that name, though they were friendly with Adams, who even assisted Graham Chapman in writing a sketch for the final series of
Flying Circus.
*
Ireland banned the film on its original release, as they had treated
Monty Python's Life of Brian, but later rated it
15 when it was released on
video.
*In the
United Kingdom it was rated
18 when released in the
cinema and on its first release on
video, but was re-rated
15 in
2000.
*In order to persuade
Universal Studios to make the film, the Pythons wrote a poem about the script, budget and content of the film. The poem being recited by
Eric Idle was featured as the introduction to the film on the special edition DVD.
*The sketch "The Man Who Chose His Own Death" is scored to music from
Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
*One of the plastic-breasts dancers during the song "Christmas In Heaven" is
Jane Leeves, in her first screen appearance; she would go on to play
Daphne Moon in the American sitcom
Frasier.
*The
tagline says 'It took God six days to create the Earth, and Monty Python just 90 minutes to screw it up', but the length of the film is 107 minutes. The movie has a length of 90 minutes only if
The Crimson Permanent Assurance is counted as a separate 17 minute short.
*This is the last film featuring all the Pythons together as a group.
*
A page about The Meaning of Life
