The Meaning of Life?

We've been on something of a Monty Python kick this fall. We started by watching Holy Grail, then watched every episode of the old series, first to last. It took us a while, as time has been rather dear lately, but we persevered and finished up last week. Full up, even bloated on Python though we were, we decided to watch just one more little movie. The disc was, after all, wafer thin.

Monty Python's The Meaning of Life is the film that most resembles the old series; it's a bunch of comedy bits connected by links. The weakest of the three Python movies, it is still pretty darn good. Required viewing for all Python fans, I should think. The overall theme is, of course, the search for the meaning of life. They cover life in all its stages while having a go at big business, modern medicine, religion, classism, war, Americans, and popular culture in general. They also manage to be really silly while throwing a little blood and a lot of vomit onto the screen.

A word about vomit. If you have a weak tummy like me, you might want to turn your head away when the corpulent Mr. Creosote comes on-screen. If you have a very weak tummy you might just want to step out to the kitchen for a few minutes. It’s quite funny, but it is also quite disgusting.

All that aside, do the boys deliver? Do they actually give us a clue as to the meaning of life? Oddly, they may just. Near the middle of the movie, in the midst of the usual silliness, someone says this: “Matter is energy. In the universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person’s soul. However, this ‘soul’ does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man’s unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.”

Could that be it? Are we here to create our own souls? Are we the garden and the gardener, tending to the flower invisible? Should life be an ongoing process of questions and answers, sought from without and answered from within, leading to an ever increasing knowledge of one’s own soul? In a word, yes. Inner life. That’s a close as you can come, I think, to an answer.

Or 42. Whatever.

Right. Here are the top five reasons you should see this film:

The Crimson Permanent Assurance.

The “Every Sperm is Sacred” musical number. Amazing.

The Galaxy Song.

Eric’s Noel Coward impression.

That last wafer thin mint (really, very disgusting, but still funny).