Scene Eight
This scene is very nearly continuation of action of the previous scene, and the actions will overlap as Brian and the PFJ meet and converse.
BRIAN: “Larks’ tongues . . . otters’ noses . . . Ocelot spleens”—In one of Auberon Waugh’s diary entries for 1973, he describes Mrs. Walter Annenberg’s “very dainty fricassee of nasturtium leaves, served in a sauce of brandy, cram, Grand Marnier, foie gras truffe, caviar and crushed nightingales’ tongues.”1
In the world of the film, this list implies that there is ample food available in the Pythons’ Jerusalem, at least for purchase. Juvenal wrote that satisfying the Roman people (of the empire, not the republic) eventually came down to two items: bread and circuses (panem et circenses). Once they had abdicated their duties, as Juvenal saw them, the Roman people and subjects could be well controlled by simply being fed and entertained.2 The PFJ complain about Roman rule, but they also attend Roman entertainments and eat Roman food after just a token fuss. (To be fair, they also second-guess Jesus’s message earlier, and will eventually abandon Brian to his fate, but also plan an insurrection while watching the Roman munera.) Later they’ll tick off a long list of the benefits of Roman rule, too. In life, these terror types often came from privileged First World backgrounds, not Third World poverty—Burleigh mentions that there was no consideration of the lumpenproletariat in the literature of West Germany’s RAF-type groups—so contradictions are plentiful.3
As it is, no one in Brian is seen to be starving. Lepers and ex-lepers beg, but as a job; in a draft of the film script Brian has been invited to dinner with Judith’s family, and there is also a “Last Supper” scene; and a mob (and a single hermit) can be fed on wild berries. Food and eating are not a major part of the world of the finished film. As in Holy Grail, the Pythons don’t spend much time on feeding their characters, nor on plot points that hinge on either food abundance or scarcity. Food is a major part of the settings and props throughout Meaning of Life: A lack of work meaning lack of food forces the Catholic father to sell his children for medical experiments, and there are dinner/meal settings in the “fiercely proud” Protestant scene, the World War I, medieval Hawaiian restaurant, Live Organ Donor, and dinner party scenes, as well as in the penultimate “Christmas in Heaven” scene. This film is, admittedly, often more domestically sited—like Flying Circus was, as well—meaning kitchens and dining rooms (and the routines therein) are more likely to appear.
REG: “You got any nuts?” . . . “I don’t want any of that Roman rubbish”—Perhaps a sign that these are truly rebels, since Magness notes that many Jews had come to enjoy Roman foods, that they were “open to Roman culinary influences and prepared to try and taste new food.”4 Simple foods would have been the fare for most Romans, though, and for most citizens of the Roman Empire. Nuts would have been available, including almonds, pistachios, pine nuts, and peanuts.5 “Roman rubbish” includes any food that was exotic, difficult to prepare, or just rare and expensive. Spices from across the empire—cinnamon, nutmeg, or pepper—and unique dishes like roasted thrush or stuffed dormice could be found at Roman banquet tables. Horace’s Satires, written about sixty years before the events depicted in the film, list a similar array of exotic and perhaps grotesque delicacies served by “Nasidienus, the rich man,” whose slaves
carried to the table, followed by a giant board, a crane served into parts and coated well with salt and crumbs, the liver of a fig-fed, albino gander, and rabbit legs torn from the trunk: that way they’re daintier etc. than if still connected to the rabbit. Next course was boiled blackbird breasts served with de-assed doves, quite a treat without the lecture his lordship gave about their cause and essential natures.6
The guests then “fled” before tasting any of these latter delicacies, dismissing this haute cuisine like Reg and the PFJ. Other tidbits served earlier at this feast included “Lucanian boar,” all sorts of expensive wines, skirret root, fish-pickle, cakes, birds, oysters and fish, various livers, sugar apples, and Lamprey eel on a bed of prawns.7 This same disdain for unacceptable items is heard in Flying Circus Ep. 37, when peasants reject the latest items of “bloody silver” from the redistributor of wealth, Dennis Moore, demanding “Venetian silver,” instead.8
Trimalchio’s feast as described in Petronius’s The Satyricon is equally rich and exaggerated—the Pythons’ “ocelot spleens” and “otters’ noses” fit right in:
On arches built up in the form of miniature bridges were dormice seasoned with honey and poppy-seed. There were sausages, too, smoking hot on a silver grill, and underneath (to imitate coals) Syrian plums and pomegranate seeds . . . [and] a lot of peafowl’s eggs. . . . Trimalchio turns his head at this, saying, “My friends, it was by my orders the hen set on the peafowl’s eggs yonder; but by God! I am very much afraid they are half-hatched. Nevertheless we can try whether they are eatable.” For our part, we take our spoons, which weighed at least half a pound each, and break the eggs, which were made of paste. I was on the point of throwing mine away, for I thought I discerned a chick inside. But when I overheard a veteran guest saying, “There should be something good here!” I further investigated the shell, and found a very fine fat beccafico swimming in yolk of egg flavored with pepper. . . .
An immense circular tray bore the twelve signs of the zodiac displayed round the circumference, on each of which . . . a dish of suitable and appropriate viands: on the Ram ram’s-head peas, on the Bull a piece of beef, on the Twins fried testicles and kidneys, on the Crab simply a crown, on the Lion African figs, on a Virgin a sow’s haslet, on Libra a balance with a tart in one scale and a cheesecake in the other, on Scorpio a small sea-fish, on Sagittarius an eye-seeker, on Capricornus a lobster, on Aquarius a wild goose, on Pisces two mullets. In the middle was a sod of green turf, cut to shape and supporting a honey-comb. Meanwhile an Egyptian slave was carrying bread around in a miniature oven of silver, crooning to himself in a horrible voice a song on wine and laserpitium.9
Also, imagine and add as much liquor and wine as the guests could drink.
JUDITH: “Why don’t you sell proper food?”—For Jews, meat would have been boiled, generally, though occasionally roasted, as a paschal lamb on a spit. Other foods included bread, made daily, “flour cakes sweetened with honey or figs,” griddle and barley cakes, myriad vegetables, figs, olives, wine and parched grain, beans, fruit, cheese, stews made with lentils and herbs, and meat sparingly.10 This is quite a variety of food, but we see almost no eating or producing of food in the finished film. Jeremias notes that there was plenty of food and wine for the buying during festivals, but that Jerusalem was also prone to food shortages exacerbated by drought or times of siege.11
The idea of what’s “proper” changes over time, of course, and by culture. Much in the news during this period was the Iran situation, where the long-reigning Shah had begun to institute the White Revolution, an attempt to curtail Islamic sectarian activism while borrowing the more progressive ideas for modernization.12 Influence from the West, and specifically America and Israel, were the targets of these Islamic religious backlashes, with the notion of “proper” food, dress, and behavior changing as their influence grew. Under the influence of the Westernized Shah, Iran had been dining on American food, “Zionist” food, if you will, and the Shiite clerics wanted an end to this gluttony.
During the Pythons’ youth there had been significant and mandatory rationing of food in the UK, both during the war and for several years after. In Flying Circus Ep. 29, Klaus (Idle) is being offered “rabbit fish” by his irritated wife (Jones), in place of “proper food”:
Rationing (from January 1940) was a part of life in the UK for many years, with coffee, meats, sugar, butter, bacon, etc., all diminished as the war pushed on—remaining scarce in the frugal postwar years, until at least 1954. (A Milligan character in “The Fireball of Milton Street”—Sir Jim Nasium—asks several times if anyone knows what happened to “that crisp bacon” they had “before the war,” and is shot for his troubles.) Beginning in 1940 each family registered with the local government and were given coupons for precisely what they deserved, by age and number of family members, and no more.
In the larger cities especially, where there was less chance of growing a useful garden, Brits had to scrounge and resort to illicit sources for all sorts of items, from cigarettes to tea and, eventually, even bread. Londoners reported many days when bread and milk were the only meals, when housewives had to travel outside the city to buy black market vegetables and dairy products from small farms, and when virtually any kind of animal—including horse—could be justified as a meal.13
Marr mentions that beyond even the horsemeat (“regarded as disgusting”) made available to a hungry population, Ministry officials imported whale meat from Commonwealth partner South Africa, which was meant to be eaten like tuna, as well as the tropical fish “snoek,” also tinned and also from South Africa, but also ignored by British consumers except for the making of “a great joke in the newspapers and in Parliament.”14 On the whole, the young Pythons and their countrymen turned up their noses at food they considered to not be “proper.”15
Moving away from food, one of the genesis points for Irish nationalism was the decline of the speaking and teaching of Gaelic in Ireland across the mid-nineteenth century. Activists sought to increase the presence of Gaelic speech and literature, the “proper” language of a free Ireland.16
BRIAN: (reluctant to move away): “Are you the . . . Judean Peoples’ Front?”—This would have been an easy mistake to make in the 1970s. There were diverse political action groups at most British universities, for example, including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and its splinters, as well as the Radical Student Alliance (RSA), the Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation (RSSF), the National Front (NF), the British-Vietnam Solidarity Front (BVSF), and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC). There were many more of these groups, large and small, as well as versions of many that were more and less Trotskyist, Marxist, Maoist, or Revisionist.17
In 1975 the Times profiled Japan’s young terror groups, finding a dizzying array of names and leftish ideologies. “Besides the Red Army and the three major rival movements of student radicals,” Hazelhurst18 writes, “the Chukakua (6,500 supporters), the Kakumarha (the Revolutionary Marxists, with 4,500 supporters), and the Hanteigakuhyo (the Anti-Imperialist Student Council with a force of 2,000)—it is estimated that another 25 militant and fanatical groups, supporting different shades of left-wing ideology, exist in Japan today.”19 The JRA would become inextricably connected to the PFLP after leader Fusako Shigenobu went to work with the PLO, and spent more than thirty years in the Middle East.
REG: “Fuck off!”—An equivalent of this phrase that has been traced to this period—and even found scrawled on the wall of the Stabian baths in Pompeii—is “in cruce figarus,” or “get nailed to a cross.”20 Graffiti in the Roman Empire will be further discussed later, in relation to Brian’s anti-Roman slogans painted on the palace walls.
This language was one of the reasons that the film offended so many upon its initial release, but the specter of larger-than-life (and in this case “biblical”) characters using such language shouldn’t have been a surprise. The recent revelations from the Watergate affair, for example, displayed an American president’s penchant for cursing and racial slurs,21 and Private Eye reported the following in March 1976:
The recent vote against the Government on the public spending cuts seems to have gone to Chancellor Healey’s head. On the evening of the vote he was seen to be in the House of Commons, standing over a mild-mannered Scottish Tribunite MP, Denis Canavan, and shouting over and over again, very loudly indeed: “You—you’re a fucker. You, you’re a fucker. A fucker, do you hear?” (And so on for about ten minutes.)22
Other filmmakers had already slipped things holy into bed, often literally, with things profane. Buñuel’s ascetic saint Simon (in Simon of the Desert [1965]) is tempted by worldly things, including sex and popular culture; Pasolini’s celebrated Canterbury Tales (1972) and The Decameron (1971) offered everything Mary Whitehouse and the NVLA could have found offensive: “This Italian New Wave retelling of the Boccaccio work . . . features mud, filth, excrement, sex, Church-bashing, death, plague, etc.—quite Pythonesque, actually.”23 The fact that such films weren’t greeted with the same righteous indignation as James Kirkup’s poem in Gay News24 or Pythons’ Life of Brian might be the fact that this “filth” was both foreign (Pasolini an Italian; Buñuel an itinerant Spaniard), and that both attacked, at some levels, popery and the Catholic Church, no sin for many English “Christians.” Pasolini’s nuns were breaking their vows, but Jesus himself wasn’t implicated.25
Incidentally, this was where Palin, at least, thought the film was heading most fruitfully in the early days of writing. As the troupe tried to write funny sketches based on actual Gospels events, moments like the Immaculate Conception and the miracle of Lazarus were subjected to sketch treatment, to fitful results, Palin records:
The sketches, or fragments, which work least well at the moment are those which deal directly with the events or characters described in the Gospels. I wrote a sketch about Lazarus going to the doctors with “post-death depression,” which, as I read it, sounded as pat and neat and predictable as a bad university revue sketch. The same fate befell John and G’s sketch about Joseph trying to tell his mates how his son Jesus was conceived. The way the material is developing it looks as though the peripheral world is the most rewarding, with Jesus unseen and largely unheard, though occasionally in the background.26
The fact that these types of sketches—where Christ could have played a significant role—were not working early in the script process likely saved the Pythons from even more backlash as the film was being completed.
REG: (incredulously) Judean Peoples’ Front!??? We’re the Peoples’ Front of Judea”—This is a misunderstanding that would have been common in the postwar period, as anti-imperialist groups proliferated in various colonial countries. The Goons had made this joke already as early as October 1954. In that year the French military control of Vietnam was ended, Vice President Nixon admitted the possibility of American troops going to Vietnam, the Algerian struggle for independence from France began in earnest—in the guise of the Algerian National Liberation Front—and the unsettled Labour Party swirled helplessly in the eddy of a thirteen-year absence from No. 10. Goon Show writer Milligan adroitly tosses all political groups—new and old, traditional and revolutionary—into the mix. In “The Lone Banana” episode a single banana tree, characterized as “the last symbol of waning British prestige in South America,”27 is the focus of an armed incursion:
Moriarty: It is the revolution señor—everywhere there is an armed rising.
Seagoon: Are you in it?
Moriarty: Right in it—you see, señor, the United Anti-Socialist Neo-Democratic Pro-Fascist Communist Party is fighting to overthrow the Unilateral Democratic United Partisan Bellicose Pacifist Co-belligerent Tory Labour Liberal Party!
Seagoon: Whose side are you on?
Moriarty: There are no sides—we are all in this together.28
Among the expected antis, pros, fronts, and -isms Milligan has lumped in all three British political parties, picking no favorites. This jab at domestic politics is apropos, given the contentious and divisive nature of the ongoing “Gaitskellite” coup endeavors in the Labour Party of the 1950s and 1960s. The Gaitskellites29 of the right side of the Labour Party, named for Hugh Gaitskell, had been working to pull the party away from the extreme Left, led by Aneurin Bevan. The application of the principles of socialism—whether forced upon, suggested for, or chosen by the electorate—were the sites of contention in this fight. There were many who believed—perhaps Milligan, too—that this political chasm helped keep Labour out of power between 1951 and 1964, when Harold Wilson’s more moderate views and colleagues finally brought Labour out of opposition status. In other words, internecine squabbling can prevent anything significant being accomplished in a political group, as the PFJ will discover before the film is done.
Later, during the 1970s, the anti-imperialist revolutionary groups proliferated, split from each other, and renamed themselves with confusing regularity. Even earlier, though, in the violent postwar years across the Middle East and spawned from the sprawling Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza and Jordan, for example, came many new terror groups:
This period saw a proliferation of Palestinian “resistance” groups. The Arab Front of the Liberation of Palestine was formed when three other organizations combined: the National Front of the Liberation of Palestine, the Palestinian Revolutionary Movement, and the General Command of Palestinian Self-Organization. Societies calling themselves the Red Hand and the Black Hand came into being and were followed by the Palestinian Military Organization and the Arab Palestinian Fedayeen. . . . The Palestinian Rebels Front of Mohammed Abu Sakhila; the Palestinian Liberation Front; and, most notable, the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), which merged with the Palestinian Liberation Front to form the PFLP, still exist today [in 1977].30
In 1969, Burleigh identifies at least fifty-two separate, active “armed Palestinian groups” in Jordan alone.31 By the period closer to the film’s creation there were terror groups whose names weren’t as easily shortened, including Shining Path (Peru), the Red Army Faction (West Germany), the Japanese Red Army, the 2 June Movement (West Germany), the First of May Group (Spain/England), and the Tupamaros (Uruguay), among many. A short list of terror groups active in the 1970s offers a confusing array of acronyms, including the DFLP, PLF, PLO, PFLP, PFLP-EO, PFLP-GC, PNLM, PPSF, PRFLP, SLA, and SOT, to mention just a handful.32 A number of these groups are offshoots of the PLO and Fatah (based in the Middle East and North Africa), splinter groups either more or less dedicated to the use of violence in attaining, for example, the liberation of Palestine, or, in the case of the American-born SLA, the overthrow of capitalism, patriarchalism, racism, sexism, and on.
Dobson and Payne note that specifically Arab groups in the 1970s could be fairly cavalier in regard to names, aims, and revolutionary goals, though all tended to have an anti-Zionist plank, at least, and then an axe to grind with the Western (read: imperialist) powers supporting Israel. When in 1975 Carlos’s motley group stormed the OPEC headquarters in Vienna, they demanded all sorts of comforts and supplies, and that a missive be read out on Austrian radio:
This was easily agreed to. It was a verbose and banal document couched in all the clichés of Arab extremism. The gang announced that they were “The Arm of the Arab Revolution.” The name means nothing except that it places them in the left-wing of the Arab spectrum. Every operation is undertaken by groups which seem to choose their own names, either for glorification of some martyr or to confuse their origins. Black September33 was itself chosen as a name to hide its Fatah parenthood.34
The Pythons have already mined this ore, in Holy Grail, where the “Knights Who Say Ni” announce their name change (“We are now no longer the Knights who say Ni!”).35
Clearly the closer-to-home “Troubles” in and from Northern Ireland also produced a hodgepodge of acronymed, terror-bent groups, with British newspapers taking great pains to separate the IRA from the Provisional IRA (and then from the Official IRA) from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) from the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) from the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), and on. It didn’t help when one group, for example, the IRA, blamed another group, the USC (Ulster Special Constabulary, the B-Specials), for explosions in April 1969, explosions that had been blamed on the IRA by the government just days earlier.36 In an Ireland Cabinet Committee meeting in December 1974, Bernard Donoughue admits to passing a note to a new private secretary “comparing the IRA to the PLO.”37 The Pythons would simply take the next step and create their own acronymed group, the PFJ, reflecting the actual terror organizations so prevalent in newspapers and on the evening news.38
The most active group directly involved with Holy Land terror in the 1970s was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a more radical PLO “splinter.” In September 1970, for instance, the PFLP were responsible for multiple hijackings and attempted hijackings, holding hostages to secure the release of comrades, and generally showing up the Israelis and the world with their “daring piece of ‘theatre.’”39
FRANCIS: “Wankers . . . ”—This can mean masturbaters, but it also has a more general, desexualized connotation that means the person is merely “objectionable or contemptible.”40 In his diaries for 27 September 1977, Bernard Donoughue mentions a very PFJ-type group he came across: “Then went to North St Pancras Labour management committee. What a bunch of wankers!—not a serious working person there. All part-time polytechnic lecturers. Terrible. Did not finish till 11.”41 Similar epithets, like “sod,” have also accrued both sexual and simply pejorative meanings, depending on the situation and usage. In the lyrics for the “Brian” song under the opening credits, Brian is mentioned as having “one off at the wrist,” meaning he masturbates. His mother will later tell him to “leave it alone; give it a rest.”
JUDITH: “Splitters!”—“Party splitter” was a common term in parliamentary politics of the day. In July 1974, Roy Jenkins was being called a “splitter” by the Left of the Labour Party, including Ian Mikardo, just after he “called for more moderate policies” to address the country’s “grave economic conditions.”42 The Left wanted to move closer to state control of industry, following up on their 1973 manifesto, and moderates like Jenkins, Shirley Williams, and especially Harold Wilson knew such a move would cost many votes in the middle. This squabbling didn’t derail Labour, though, as it narrowly won the next election.
BRIAN: “ . . . Which are you again?”—It’s a fun irony likely not missed by the Pythons and thoughtful others that government acronyms can sound very much like these terror group initials. In Ep. 15 of Flying Circus, a civil servant-type policy briefing begins with a barrage of acronyms, some legitimate, some silly: “Gentlemen, our MP saw the PM this AM and the PM wants more LSD from the PIB by tomorrow AM or PM at the latest. I told the PM’s PPS that AM was NBG so tomorrow PM it is for the PM it is nem. con. Give us a fag or I’ll go spare.”43 Through Bernard Donoughue’s Downing Street Diary volumes, acronyms come hard and fast, including PM James Callaghan being referred to fittingly as “JC,” and more than once Donoughue complains about the underhanded terror tactics of the dreaded “PLP,” or Parliamentary Labour Party—his own political party.44
BRIAN: “May I join you?”—This may be Brian’s Pauline moment, his conversion to the righteous cause. He was clearly struck earlier, as he saw Judith out at the sermon, and now he’s wanting to be part of anything she’s doing. His road to Damascus conversion is as much sexual attraction as political commitment. In recent films like Bonnie and Clyde, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Badlands, it had been the interested woman who, attaching herself to an attractive man, was drawn into a journey of violence and destruction.
REG: “No. Piss off”—A milder version of the phrase Reg uttered moments before, and already heard from Mandy when she’s seeing off the pesky Ex-leper. This may have been just one of several tried as they shot the scene, given their experience with ratings and on-set work on Holy Grail, where multiple versions of “swears” would be recorded.45 This is the kind of language that the BBC was uncomfortable with during the first season of Flying Circus.
BRIAN (referring to tray): “I don’t want to sell this stuff you know . . . it’s only a job”—In Ep. 45 of Flying Circus, the man at the door (also Chapman, dressed in Icelandic costume) doesn’t want to be selling Icelandic honey, either:
Mother (Idle): Well why do you come in here trying to flog the stuff?
Man (Chapman): Listen Cowboy. I got a job to do. It’s a stupid, pointless job but at least it keeps me away from Iceland, all right? The leg of a worker bee has . . .46
This “I’m only doing my job” line had been in the collective consciousness (and conscience) of Europe since the Nuremberg Trials. There, a long line of Nazi functionaries tried to defend themselves by saying they were merely following orders, saving their own lives, participating in the new “empire” without knowing the atrocities, etc.
BRIAN: “I hate the Romans as much as anybody”—In yet another distinction from Brian being simply a Python stand-in for Jesus, it’s clear that Brian does have opinions about the Roman occupiers, that he is not “insulated” from the current political situation, as some representations of Jesus seemed to posit: “The Johannine presentation of Jesus sharply defines a problem that is implicit in the accounts of the Synoptic Gospels,” Brandon writes. “It is constituted by the fact that these documents agree in representing Jesus as insulated from the political unrest which was so profoundly agitating contemporary Jewish society.”47 Brandon also points out that it simply defies belief that a potential Messiah and Son of God could or would allow or support (Ben-like) “an abiding challenge to Yahweh’s sovereignty” like Roman taxation and “obligation.”48 The Yeshua of The Passover Plot (book and film) was more aware of the Zealots of his day, and even quietly aligned himself with them and their goals.
The REVOLUTIONARIES all look around anxiously to make sure no one has heard—(PSC) The revolutionaries in any oppressive society have to operate this way, always expecting the KGB, NKVD, Stasi, (Hoover’s) FBI, or Praetorian Guard loyal to the government at any turn. Herod was reported to have a network of spies in place in Jerusalem, ready to ferret out disloyalty among cabals like the PFJ, while Pilate is said to have forbidden gatherings of men, six or more.49 In Poland in the 1970s, the secret police were the SB (Służba Bezpieczeństwa), and as the new pope’s homecoming visit approached in 1979, eager Poles had to remember to be of two minds:
Poles of this era had grown up in a society where life was split into two parallel realms, the public and the private, each with its own versions of language and history. As in so many other authoritative states, citizens . . . of Poland learned from early on to parrot their allegiance to official ideology in public while keeping their real opinions to themselves and their families. Communist rule depended on ensuring that people persisted in paying public tribute to the official version of truth, thus preventing them from seeing how many of them actually rejected it.50
Reg, Francis, Judith, and the PFJ also have their public and their private lives; they never talk about revolution in any mixed company, they meet furtively, and generally keep to themselves. There were characters in earlier drafts who were not members of the PFJ who were given interactions with the PFJ (two groupie girls, for example, and even Otto), but those characters were eventually written or edited out of the film, or those intersections were removed. (Otto is still part of the film, but he doesn’t ever talk with Reg, as he did in earlier drafts.) Like many of the terror groups of the 1970s, the PFJ keep their own company.
REG: “Listen, if you wanted to join the P.F.J., you’d have to really hate the Romans”—This is the first mention of their little group as an acronym, an indication that contemporary audiences would have recognized the “acronymizing” phenomenon for terrorist groups immediately, as it had occupied headlines for at least a decade. Writing in 1977, Ovid Demaris discusses the relative importance of terrorism as a foundational concept for world change (to Guevara and Marighella, specifically, who disagree with one another), and easily resorts to the lexicon of the day:
The idea is to show that the capitalist state depends for its continued existence upon the use of violence and its own terror. This is the conventional wisdom of a wide spectrum of terrorist groups—IRA, FLQ, ERP, RAF, ETA, URA, ALN, MIR, FAR, PLO, PFLP, PDFLP, ALF, ELF, TPLA—a veritable alphabet soup of terror, not to mention the separatist movements active all over the globe.51
A Rand Corporation report outlined what it saw as the future, given the fractiousness of the postcolonial world, “a world in which the acronyms of various self-proclaimed revolutionary fronts may take their place in international forums alongside the names of countries.”52
The IRA had recently brought the specter of terrorism right into the English streets, which might account for its significance in the film. The year 1974 witnessed attacks on a military coach (killing twenty-six), and bombs detonated at the Tower of London, and in pubs in Guildford and Birmingham.53 One of the less deadly but more spectacular attacks had been directed at the very heart of British power, the Houses of Parliament, on 17 June 1974. An IRA bomb exploded that day, injuring eleven. The Pythons had brought this up earlier, when Launcelot reminds Arthur that they have the Holy Hand Grenade, and then they use it effectively.54 By the time the Pythons are contemplating Life of Brian, the hatred of the IRA for everyone who disagreed with a united Ireland, free from Westminster and free for Roman Catholicism, had become despairingly evident. Everything violent that happens or is even talked about in Life of Brian—kidnappings, ransoming, torture, body mutilation, intimidation, and even an overwhelming military presence and response—had also been front-page news (and regularly erupting) in Northern Ireland and Britain.
REG: “Right, you’re in”—Since Brian hates the Romans “a lot,” he’s welcomed into the secret society. Admission to the Essene society at Qumran was more difficult. Only “full members” could take part in communal meals, and then only after taking “tremendous oaths,” and even then, the novitiate could only have the solid food for a year, and after two years the liquid.55
FRANCIS: “And the Judean Popular Peoples’ Front”—Homegrown revolutionaries and terrorists, meaning those of Jewish origins, were as old as the oppression the Jews lived under. Jesus Bar Abbas (also “Barabbas”) was one such figure, active during Christ’s lifetime, who will be discussed later, when Pilate is considering his Passover gift to his people. In the Pythons’ lifetime it was the Irgun Zvai Leumi,56 an extreme right-wing “Revisionist National Military Organization” set on the creation of a Jewish state, by force. “Jewish paramilitary organizations were not new,” Demaris writes. “There had been Jewish self-defense forces in Europe for years. In Russia the Hashomer . . . and in Poland the Betar had attempted to defend the people against the savage pogroms instituted there. . . . They were the forerunners of the Hagana57 and the Irgun Zvai Leumi in Palestine.”58 Also according to Demaris, just a few years earlier, in the 1920s, revisionist Jews were reacting negatively to any suggestion of Arabs allowed anywhere near Palestine:
Vladimir Jabotinsky59 [rejected Chaim] Weizmann’s gradualism and his acceptance of an Arab presence on the east bank of the Jordan[;] the revisionists were maximalists who wanted not only all of Palestine but all territory that had been part of King David’s kingdom at its height. And they were ready to use violence to gain their ends.60
During and after WWII the Stern Gang (also “Lehi”61) were actually Jewish terrorists trying to drive the British out of Palestine.62 Even earlier, there were Special Night Squads formed by the Brits with Jewish (Hagana) help in 1938, put together to protect oil pipelines, power stations, and villages from Arab attacks. Their actions tended to be quite vicious, according to Demaris.
STAN: “And the Peoples’ Front of Judea”—Everyone initially agrees here, caught up in the moment. Even in straight-ahead, registered political parties, not revolutionary groups, name confusion abounded in the tumultuous postwar period. By the mid-1970s there was a small Democratic People’s Party in Hungary vying for votes, while in the Sudan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan, versions of a People’s Democratic Party attempted to gain electoral traction. In Portugal in 1974 the situation approaching elections was recognizably confused. In a lengthy interview with Portuguese Minister of Foreign Affairs Mario Soares, a typical question and answer betrayed the Left’s predicament:
Times: Will the grouping of the parties of the left be forming a popular front to counter the danger of a right-wing reaction?
Soares: No, for the time being strategy for the elections has not yet been made clear, but there is every reason to believe that parties will be standing as single units. So there will be a Socialist Party list [of candidates], a Communist list, a PPD (People’s Democratic Party) list—the three parties in the government—and who knows what other groups?63
Soares concludes that when the election results are in, alliances will then be explored. (This could have benefited the PFJ and members of the CFG whom they struggle with beneath Pilate’s palace.) A similar series of discussions took place after the 1974 General Election put Wilson back into No. 10, but with a slim majority. By 1977 that majority was failing, and both the Lib-Lab pact and agreements with the Unionist parties were collapsing, as well. The Liberal Party had agreed to “struggle together” with Labour and the smaller parties, but never felt sufficiently empowered. This ever-loosening concatenation of like-minded votes couldn’t overcome the Tories’ no-confidence vote in March 1979, forcing an election, which the Conservatives won.
The Pythons weren’t the first pundits to lampoon the party name confusion, either. In May 1973, Times contributor Richard Harris reports on Asian elections (in Cambodia, Ceylon, India, etc.), noting that Western journalists need to better understand the fundamental differences between those contests and ones held in France and Britain. The differences tended to include historic tribal structures, racial and religious divides, and the difficult transition in these Third World countries from colonialism, monarchism, or despotism to perhaps just a more democratic version of those three regime types, and not necessarily to democracy. Harris’s summation of the fate of fringe parties in these “consensus” countries sounds like the PFJ’s discussion: “No hope then for those dedicated hopefuls on the left in the People’s Socialist Party or the Democratic Revolutionary Party, or the Revolutionary Socialists or the Democratic People’s Party?”64 Harris then directly connects the Western world, and specifically Britain, to these Third World parties, and he even seems to be talking about the (im)possibility of success for a group like the PFJ:
The obvious reason why these opposition parties have little chance of power is not just that they were all born in the 1930s in the London School of Economics (or whatever centres of left-wing thought have succeeded that institution), but that they have never been reshaped by the reality of their own society. Their revolutionary passions are Western-made, their jargon comes off the assembly line, they are urban, theoretical, far too world conscious ever to win support from the slowly changing minds of their own peasants. Moreover, as parties that seek the overthrow of the exciting society they seem more like enemies of the consensus than advocates of a new one.65
Clearly, the PFJ has not “been reshaped by the reality of their own society.” Trapped in the peak of the Roman Empire’s power, their jargon is borrowed from other groups of the 1960s and 1970s, and they never do try and enlist the support of the enslaved Jews around them. This is why their version of “consensus” can justify surrendering Brian to the cross, labeling him a useful martyr, then going home to continue the quiet talk of action-free revolution.
Just three years after Harris’s article in the Times, the paper produced an eight-page special section in its 12 August 1976 issue dedicated to Portugal. Two years earlier, Portugal had endured the “Carnation Coup,” so-called for its lack of bloodshed and violence, in April 1974, where a democratic government replaced the fascist, authoritarian government. The news stories on the political page of this special section look closely at Portugal’s hopes for a secure NATO link, and the fact that the fractured radical left in Portugal couldn’t agree on enough basic principles to form any kind of lasting coalition. To illustrate this second story, the Times editors provided a semi-serious illustration laying out the political parties vying for ascendancy in Portugal, labeling it “The Party Game.” The fourteen parties appearing on the 1976 Portuguese ballot were listed in the bit of artwork, each with its accompanying logo, and a brief (and sometimes funny) descriptor. These included (name, descriptor, and acronym):
Centre Social Democrats (Conservative): CDS
Left Socialist Movement (Marxist-Catholic intellectuals): MES
Communist Party of Portugal (Marxist-Leninist) (officially recognized Maoists):
PCP M-L
People’s Socialist Front (ultra-left split from main Socialist party: FSP
Revolutionary Party of the Workers (Trotskyist schism): PRT
Movement for the Reorganization of the Proletariat Party (unofficial Maoist): MRPP
People’s Monarchist Party (regal with bizarre anarchist shades): PPM
Popular Democrat Party (liberal: number two in national strength): PPD
Christian Democrat Party (failed Christian Democrats—do not count): PDC
Portuguese Communist Party (Stalinist inclined): PCP
Workers’ and Peasants’ Alliance (alleged ultra-left: suspected Socialist Party front): AOC
International Communist League (orthodox Trotskyists): LCI
People’s Democratic Union (ultra-left Stalinist): UDP
Socialist Party (officially Marxist and government: moving rightwards): PS66
The last, PS, became the leading power in the Socialist-pluralist government, headed by Mario Soares. In this same eight-page spread, Christopher Reed writes that “the confusing glut of party initials” (as many as fifty emerged in the weeks after the coup) might have only “encouraged many commentators to dismiss the ultra-left as the fanatical fringe.” Even the major, centrist parties “provided enough initials to make a molecular biologist feel he had an easily explicable discipline compared with Portuguese politics.”67
So it seems the joke about political (and revolutionary) party acronyms was making the rounds in 1976. The first real meeting with all the Pythons to discuss ideas for their biblical film took place just two weeks after these stories and illustration appeared.68
STAN: “ . . . I thought we were the Popular Front”—Generally a catch-all term for an agglomeration of leftist groups who have banded together to increase their chances of electoral success.69 This is a term even used in Benn’s voluminous diaries.70 When laying out just a short list of those far-left groups participating in the loud and lengthy Grunwick Strike in June–July 1977, Sandbrook makes the obvious connection for us. “Active groups included the Communist Party of Great Britain, the Socialist Workers’ Party, the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (Trotskyist), the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), the International Marxist Group, the International Communist Current, the Indian Workers’ Movement/Caribbean Workers’ Organization, and so on. No doubt the People’s Front of Judaea [sic] were there too, if only in spirit.”71
This naming challenge isn’t limited to newspapers and terror groups of the 1970s. Even though Josephus spends a great deal of time and energy describing the agitating activities of group(s) outside the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes, identifying and vilifying a fourth group, it’s their name he withholds: “Even if he thus later admitted this connection with Pharisaism, Josephus still omits to give a name to the followers of Judas and Saddok in the Antiquities, as he had omitted to name those of Judas only in the Jewish War. The omission is very curious.”72
It’s possible the group was so scattered and shadowy that no name was settled on, and descriptors like “brigands” had to do. But if the group was large and influential enough to be called a fourth philosophical sect by Josephus, an actual name should have emerged over time, especially given the widespread spoliations attributed to them. It’s fun to think of Jewish patriots like Judas, Saddok, and others (like initiate Brian-types) struggling with unrecognizability, splitters, and perhaps having to eat “rich imperialist titbits” as they fought their good fight.
REG: “Peoples’ Front. Twit”—Peoples’ Front parties (traditional political and reactionary) had been active in Java, Singapore, Yugoslavia, Japan, Italy, Finland, Chile, Hungary, and a score of other countries. The largest and most well known in the immediate postwar period were those in Hungary and Yugoslavia. There were of course many versions of this name, as well, including Peoples’ Popular Front, People’s Democratic Front, the New People’s Democratic Front, and the People’s Progressive Front.
FRANCIS: “Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?”—Reg answers that “He’s over there,” and we are shown a lone man sitting below them. They shout “Splitter!” at him, and he turns to see what the fuss is about. At the 1975 Labour Party Conference in Blackpool, Bernard Donoughue noticed another splitting of ideological factions, this within the ranks of the more liberal (and usually lock-armed) side of the party: “At lunch it was noticeable that the Left is split up. In the old days they all sat at one table. Now they are split up around the room. Michael Foot is very separate—the Tribune Group have dropped him from their recommended slate (in favour of Dennis Skinner!).”73 The Labour Party and Wilson’s government worried a great deal about this fractiousness, especially as the strength of coalition votes (Irish and Scottish MPs) vacillated with every whiff of cordite in Belfast or devolution referenda in Edinburgh. Donoughue, Haines, and Wilson are talking about these splits as early as 1975, divides that lead to Callaghan’s tottering administration from 1976. By December 1976, the Left’s Tribune Group was hotly divided, many wanting to detonate the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s dismayingly moderate economic proposals. Foot tried in vain to keep them from fighting each other, while the Shadow Cabinet “decided to abstain on the procedural vote to adjourn the House, leaving the field open for Labour MPs to quarrel amongst themselves,” which they then did.74 By 1979, the inability of the Labour Party to agree on enough points to fight a concerted general election battle saw the ascension of Thatcherism.
The answer to the obvious question, “Whatever happened to the Popular Front (for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf)?” is: “It’s over there” (in Oman and Bahrain). The Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG, formerly the Dhofar Liberation Front) were a small Maoist group fighting against the sultan in Oman. The sultan’s forces were trained and commanded by British officers.75 In 1974 the group divided, becoming the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Bahrain. In early 1975, two British officers were even killed in battle in Oman. Even after Palestine, Aden, and Suez, the British military presence in the Middle East and Gulf continued.
REG: “He’s over there”—The man representing the Popular Front sits alone, watching the gladiator contest, and certainly not plotting the downfall of the empire. Newton notes that the IRA went through a fracturing, and with a similar result:
In January 1970, political dissension in the IRA produced a rift in the organization, with “official” and “provisional” wings adopting different philosophies and tactics. Since that time, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) has carried out the bulk of armed resistance to British rule in Northern Ireland, while the “official” wing has withered to a tiny, passive remnant.76
The “official” Popular Front doesn’t look “withered,” but he certainly looks disinterested.
GLADIATOR: “I think I’m going to have a cardiac arrest”—Some criminals or slaves not only accepted their gladiatorial sentence, but attempted to magnify their situation. Success in the arena offered a few combatants the chance to eventually buy their lives and even freedom, but there was even more, according to Wiedemann: “The criminal condemned ad ludos was a socially ‘dead man’ who had a chance of coming alive again.” Surviving could mean not only surviving, as in the body, but a social recuperation of sorts, where this lowest of the low could reenter Roman society and retire into mythdom. The Pythons’ version of this potential recuperation is typical—the gladiator dies ignominiously, and his prey celebrates.77
Structurally, the rampaging Legendary Beast in Holy Grail had only been stopped by fortune of the animator’s fatal heart attack, a simple, obvious narrative tie-off. In Flying Circus, the Pythons had followed the Goons’ example of such narrative trickery, as described by Peter Sellers:
We wanted to express ourselves in a sort of surrealistic form. We thought in cartoons, we thought in blackouts, we thought in sketches. We thought of mad characters. We thought of—take a situation and instead of letting it end normally, let it end the other way—twisted around.78
These narrative side doors are used throughout Flying Circus, though nowhere more blatant than in Ep. 34, “The Bicycle Tour.” In that episode—unusual for the Pythons in that it is a self-contained, singular-narrative story of Mr. Pither’s (Palin) bicycle adventures—Jeremy Pither and Gulliver (Jones) find themselves in a predicament. They are about to be bayoneted by Soviet soldiers when a “SCENE MISSING” caption appears over a black screen. When that ends, our heroes are safe on a “Cornish country lane.”79 In Holy Grail, the expense of additional postproduction animation work or additional pickup shots precluded the sweetening most films enjoy, so the “cartoon peril” can end self-consciously, aligning Holy Grail with both the art films of the period and the cartoons the Pythons had grown up watching:
The intrusions of the modern world have already been blessed with believability in the Python’s Dark Ages, so a cartoony death (farcical, fast-motion) fits well. It’s also likely that the Pythons were drawing on their medieval sources yet again, since Chrétien de Troye’s masterful work Perceval also ends abruptly—in midsentence, even: “When the queen saw her she asked her what was the matter—”, and scholars assume the author died before finishing,80 perhaps even as the sentence was being composed.81
The characters, settings, and situations are very often cartoony in Life of Brian (including a spaceship interval and the condemned singing and dancing on crosses), there are several blackout transitions (including one in a few moments that finds Brian approaching the palace wall), and the film is almost entirely composed of stitched-together sketches (The Sermon on the Mount, The Stoning, Harry the Haggler), just as Holy Grail had been. During the run of Flying Circus, characters could agree to stand up and leave an overly silly situation (Ep. 35), an authority figure could stop the film and transition the show into another scene (Ep. 15), or the camera and narrator could just meander away from uninteresting characters to something else entirely (Ep. 7). Ultimately, Holy Grail itself is brought to a close by a constable’s hand covering the camera lens, causing, miraculously, the film to slip out of the gate and the projector to fall.
An animal version of the “heart attack” ending can be found in the actual history of the games. Mannix cites a report from one Christian martyr, Polycarp, of just such a spectacle in a provincia amphitheater.82 In the period when Christians were regularly tortured and executed as part of the games, editors did allow for public recanting, and a prisoner could agree to acknowledge the Roman gods right there at the arena—where an altar was kept ready—thus saving his life:
One man . . . held out until actually in the arena. Then he collapsed and begged to be allowed to sacrifice. The editor refused and demanded that the animals be released. The only animal was a lion who had been starved to make him savage. But the bestiarius had overdone it and when the lion was released, the poor brute just lay down and died. The martyr had to be burned at the stake.83
Severed limbs in the background—Behind the dying Gladiator a lower leg dangles from one of the nets strung between spears. For most arena spectacles, especially those closer to Rome, such messiness wouldn’t have been tolerated. Between performances slaves would clean the bodies and body parts, human and animal, change scenery (desert rockscape, forest, even flooding the arena for a sea setting) and would then lay out fresh, clean sand to cover all the bloodstains.84
(draft) The ROMANS in the audience look at each other in disgust—This is modeled after the audience response to Ben-Hur’s win in Ben-Hur, where many had clearly been betting against Sheik Iderim’s horses (which Ben-Hur drives), and instead on the favored Roman, Messala.
Muttered comments in versions of the script include “pathetic,” “terrible,” and “appalling”; these Romans are clearly appalled not by the bloodshed and carnage, but the fact that their man lost, and lost in such a disappointing, nonviolent way.85 Marcus Aurelius’s inurement to the depravity and gore—swollen by an unslakable “morbid taste” shared, evidently, by his people—is evident as he comments on these public spectacles: “I wouldn’t mind the games being brutal and degrading if only they weren’t so damned monotonous.”86 The games were an ongoing attempt to distract both the lower class Romans from their difficult lives, and men of ambition from their ambitions—games often staged, successfully, simply to quell food riots or mutinous movements.87 In 1970s Britain, this clear separation is identified by columnist Peter Jenkins as the “Two Nations” concept, where those ten millions living at or even near the “supplementary benefit level” (essentially the poverty level) found life a daily, unremitting challenge. Britain’s continuing decline simply deepened these people’s sufferings.88
But the violent, fantastical Roman Empire games also served as an escape from the boredom of a privileged life, just as sexual debauchery of every kind helped distract outside the arena. Also from Mannix: “As the mob gradually lost all interest in finding work, serving in the legions or taking any responsibility, the games became increasingly brutal and lewd. Finally they were simply excuses for sadistic debauches.”89 This specter of damaging, caustic boredom has been broached by the Pythons in Flying Circus, there “expressing a Kierkegaardian complaint voiced in Either/Or—namely, that for the aesthete—whose life is devoted to the pursuit of pleasure and amusement—boredom is the single greatest corrosive.”90 These games-goers fit this bill. Mandy is ready to leave the Sermon on the Mount so she can get to something a bit more exciting, a stoning. Later it’s Pilate who seems to be spending his time on interior decorating rather than running Judea, perhaps building another useless Babel, in Kierkegaard’s terms, and the prospect of a little violence is a pleasant distraction—it’s his version of Kierkegaard’s “crop rotation.” The members of the PFJ aren’t depicted doing anything apart from bloviating and circular planning, meaning they’re not unlike the other upper-middle-class revolutionaries of the 1970s, or even the disaffected have-not generations often depicted in postwar New Wave cinemas. In Bunuel’s Los Olvidados it’s Jaibo and the kid gang; in Pasolini’s Accattone it’s the layabout gang of pimps and scroungers with nothing to do but scavenge, eat, and swim; and in Godard’s Breathless, our “hero” drifts from larceny to murder before dying in the street.91
This Samaritan gives an “up yours” (or bras d’honneur) sign to the assembled Romans, who already think the day’s events have become “dreadful.” An Encyclopedia of Swearing gives credit for this gesture to the Italians, suggesting American and British servicemen brought it back with them after World War II.92 The fact that our Samaritan is giving it right back to these Romans is quite fitting, though anachronistic. This is one of the few épater la bourgeoisie moments that goes unpunished in the world of the film, incidentally. The Roman spectators are appalled by the success of the Samaritan prey/victim, as opposed to the blood and gore scattered across the arena floor, but the crowd made up of the people of Judea clearly appreciate the fact that the slave managed to best the gladiator.
A fight like this is described in some detail in Those about to Die. Flamma, Mannix imagines, might have been a trained soldier whose unknown crime “sentenced him to the arena.”93 Once there, Flamma was cast in the role of Secutor, giving him bulky armor and helmet, and pitting him against an unarmored gladiator, a more nimble Retiarus. Flamma was likely supposed to fight well but lose to the better-trained, faster, and more seasoned gladiator. As it turned out, Flamma found he had a knack for this gladiatorial fighting, tricking the better fighter into mistakes that allowed him to win. Mannix notes that the standard response to this unforeseen victory (actually a loss for the promoter or editor of the games) was the emperor’s signal to another Retiarus “to come out and finish him off.” The crowd—who had started out cheering against the mutinous ex-soldier—turned immediately and cheered for him, and, according to Mannix: “Very few emperors dared to ignore the will of the people in the circus.”94 In the Pythons’ Colosseum, the non-Roman sections of the crowd cheer lustily for the surviving Samaritan, while the lounging Romans simply grumble and accept the will of the people. It’s possible (though not likely) that the wily Samaritan will be promoted to a gladiator school and spend the rest of his days performing for appreciative audiences, as Flamma did.
The non-Roman audience claps and cheers the triumphant Samaritan—This happiness and celebration will likely be short-lived. Depending on the editor of these paltry games, a second gladiator can be sent out to finish the kill, or the victim will be recaptured and held over for the next games. It’s unlikely that a slave or criminal or just captured foreigner (any of which this victim might be) would have benefited from the crowd’s appreciations, except to live one more day. Refusing to fight in the arena was also a mistake, as Cicero relates “in a letter of 43 BC about L. Cornelius Balbus, Caesar’s quartermaster, who was said to have tried to force a Pompeian officer called Fadius to fight twice as a gladiator in Balbus’s home town of Gades, and when he refused to have had him burnt alive in a gladiatorial school.”95 There are also many instances where Jews and, later, Christians thrown into the arena with wild animals refused to defend themselves, with grisly and predictable results.96
REG: “. . . bruvver!”—Reg seems to say “brother” as he cheers along with most of the crowd for the successful Samaritan, identifying another sibling, at least in spirit. Anyone who manages to best the Romans is family, it seems. Seneca spent energies attacking the crowds who attended these games, those cheering on the “ludicrous cruelties at midday”97 with unattractive gusto: “Nothing is so morally degrading as the spectators at the games. As if armed combats are not bad enough, the midday intermission, when criminals have to fight without helmet or armour, are sheer murder,” Seneca wrote. “Many spectators prefer this to the regular programme. In the morning they throw men to the lions, at midday they throw them to the spectators.”98
“Bruvver” is a much-caricatured Cockney version of “brother,” heard earlier on Flying Circus when Palin and Jones played the Vercotti brothers, shaking down the military.99 This may also be a nod to the contemporary punk/skinhead trend in Britain, where “cropped hair, levis and braces, and Cherry Red boots” brought disaffected “siblings” together in the poorest white areas of Britain.100 These “aggro” punks were lashing out at any semblance of authority in the 1970s, at immigrants and unemployment and—given the moribund economy of the later 1970s—perhaps just at the awful prospects of their lives.101 The Pythons have provided versions of shorter-haired young “punks” (the PFJ) in the stands cheering against “the Man,” and a long-haired hippie type (he’s even “weedy”) giving the up-yours to the Roman establishment—successive antiauthoritarian cultures from 1960s and 1970s Britain.
BRIAN: “Brian . . . er . . . Brian Cohen”—He knows by this time that he’s not actually the son of “Mr. Cohen,” whom we never meet, but the very Jewish name is likely a better calling card for introduction to an anti-Roman terror group than “Brian Maximus.”
REG: “We may have a little job for you, Brian”—The “weedy Samaritan” has “defeated” the gladiator, upsetting the status quo in the Roman world, where the stratigraphic divisions in society were essential. Is it simply coincidental that at this moment Reg announces to Brian and the rest of the PFJ that there is a further antisocial activity in the offing? Or is this decision directly connected to the performance they just witnessed? Many found fault with these violent and passionate games; moralists feared a deleterious effect on the audience-cum-mob. Plato, the Stoics and Epicureans, and many Roman writers agreed that these spectacles did not bring out the masses’ most noble natures: “Nothing is so damaging to good character than the habit of wasting time at the Games; for then it is that vice steals secretly upon you through the avenue of pleasure. . . . I come home more greedy, more ambitious, more voluptuous, even more cruel and more inhumane, because I have been among human beings.”102 If the Samaritan had lost, would Reg have had “a job” for Brian, or would the reinforced social order have been settled comfortably, and the PFJ just gone home? We can’t know. The gladiator dies, the crowd cheers the victorious Samaritan, and the PFJ sends off their pledge to make his bones.
And who was the Labour Party’s go-to man for unattractive little jobs? During this period there was at least one man who was always ready to be the David taking on Goliath, or the Samaritan besting the Macedonian Baby-Crusher—Tony Benn.103 This very-Left Labour minister and Cabinet member was ever the wild card, the most “out there” (meaning active and willing) member of the Cabinet during this decade; both a “left-wing prophet” and “bogeyman,” Benn could be called upon to do the painful, unthanked, unpopular, and politically dangerous heavy-lifting of Labour’s extreme Left.104 Donoughue complained about him often because Benn seemed to push and pull and threaten from and toward the left, and when blocked he’d promise to resign and bring down the house. Wilson and Callaghan both could have taken him up on this promise, but then he’d back off, keep his Cabinet job, and quietly manipulate centrist Labour positions leftward, from within.105 And even though Benn irritated those at No. 10 with his prickly, assumed, man-of-the-worker shtick, Donoughue at least, saw the potential usefulness of such a strong-willed (and expendable) foot soldier:
I am deciding, slowly I realise, that Benn and Bennery could be useful in getting this country’s manufacturing industry out of its mess. Not his ad hoc subsidies to any bunch of shop stewards. Not his marginal co-operatives. But the NEB106 at the van[guard] of a proper policy of industrial regeneration. He would not be my chosen instrument—he is too fanatical. But he is all we have, and if controlled might just pull it off.107
Benn did spend much of his time trying to drag British industry into reorganization, into the hands of the workers, a Dennisean task of “anarchosyndicalism” that could never have achieved but seemed noble and worth fighting for. Along with Ian Mikardo he was generally the conscience of the Left (and, like Jiminy Cricket, often ignored).
This is Brian’s rite de passage for his potential membership in this secret society, the PFJ.108 And while many of the nineteenth-century revolutionary syndicalists109 believed in the reprise individuelle, an “individual expropriation” of wealth or goods from the bourgeoisie, Brian and the PFJ don’t “liberate” ill-gotten deposits from banks, nor do they rob the temple or moneychangers or rich men like Gregory, even though in first-century Jerusalem these latter targets would have been ripe for plucking.110 What Brian is asked to enact instead is a sort of proclamation individuelle—he will adorn the palace walls with an anti-imperialist slogan. Russian scientist and activist Peter Kropotkin would have characterized this act as essential and epoch-changing:
By actions which compel general attention, the new idea seeps into people’s minds and wins converts. One such act may, in a few days, make more propaganda than thousands of pamphlets. Above all, it awakens the spirit of revolt; it breeds daring. . . . One courageous act has sufficed to upset in a few days the entire governmental machinery, to make the colossus tremble.111
An anarchist, essentially, Kropotkin would have had much in common with the more anarchic individualism112 Brian espouses later, as he naively counsels people to not follow authority blindly and to think for themselves, and even later telling the crucifying centurion that he doesn’t “have to follow orders.” (The crowd parrots Brian’s words back to him and the Centurion says he likes following orders, so the individualist argument is consistently mooted.)
This “individual terror” is more at home, likely, in the modern world, where students and disaffected minorities declaim by voice, banner, and graffiti, using media of all kinds to rail against the oppressive system, institution, or state.113 Brian and the PFJ haven’t these means, so a man and a paint brush must suffice. When Brian succeeds—and Reg and Francis seem surprised that he does—he will be welcomed into their group, given the secret salute, and added to the commando raid on Pilate’s palace, with predictable results.
Notes
1. Waugh, FCY, 5 March 1973. Walter Annenberg was an American publisher and philanthropist; Mrs. Annenberg was the former Leonore Cohn.
2. Juvenal’s Satire X (Loeb Classical Library), 373.
3. See Farrell, BRJ, chapter 6.
4. Magness, Stone and Dung, 56.
5. JVL, “Jewish Food”; also, King and Stager, LBI, 105.
6. Horace, Satires, 2.8.85–93; from Fuchs, Horace’s Satires and Epistles, 1977.
7. Fuchs, Horace’s Satires, 45–46.
8. ATW, 2.37.207.
9. Petronius, The Satyricon, chaps. 5 and 6.
10. LBI, 64–69; also, Jeremias, JTJ, passim.
11. JTJ, 121, 131.
12. Caryl, Strange Rebels, 7–9.
13. Larsen, MPFC: UC, 2.47.
14. Marr, HMB, 82–83.
15. Marr does mention that the snoek purchases—“millions of tins”—ended up satisfying cat food producers, who bought most of it at a greatly reduced price (83).
16. Burleigh, BRT, 1.
17. Like Mrs. Conclusion (Chapman) in Ep. 27 of Flying Circus (MPFC: UC 2.15–16).
18. Peter Hazelhurst provided additional stories on Japan’s terror groups for the 7 and 14 October editions of the Times.
19. “Japan’s Terror Groups,” Times, 22 October 1975: 16.
20. See Cook’s “Envisioning Crucifixion,” 276–78 for more on this insult.
21. The 1977 Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Book) had included on the back cover many names from the Nixon administration, and specifically those recently convicted in relation to the Watergate affair (BAFHG, 13).
22. 19 March 1976: 4. In an example of the cross-fertilization within the entertainment industry of Britain, Blake Edwards was also shooting at Shepperton during this period, finishing The Pink Panther Strikes Again, and was also obviously reading Private Eye. To this same issue he contributes a short letter, responding to an earlier “Grovel” column: “Sir, About Grovel; BOLLOCKS . . . BLAKE EDWARDS.” On 1 May 1974, Bernard Donoughue diaried that Marcia Williams had attacked Harold Wilson for “mentioning Private Eye in the Commons”—an indication of the magazine’s scope and influence in British culture (Donoughue, DSD, 1.111).
23. Larsen, BAFHG, 74–75. Buñuel’s The Milky Way (1969), had actually attacked what the filmmaker saw as “Catholic heresies,” perhaps rendering him less threatening to Christians like Whitehouse and NVLA. Again, Buñuel isn’t attacking or even depicting the figure of Christ, which is likely why these films avoided attention.
24. See the “ . . . as a blasphemer . . . ” entry earlier in “The Stoning” scene for more on the poem, its publication, and the subsequent trial for blasphemy.
25. Likely one of the reasons a filmed version of The Last Temptation of Christ, originally published in 1955, had to wait for a later generation.
26. Palin, Diaries 1969–1979, 349–50.
27. Britain’s shrinking empire is a consistent locus of comedy and self-deprecation for both the Goons and the Pythons. See the index of MPFC: UC and BAFHG under “British Empire.”
28. 26 October 1954. As the country tried to rebuild after the war while still supporting the principles and fiscal realities of the Welfare State, Britain’s international influence declined while domestic commitments rose.
29. Important Labour figures like Callaghan and Donoughue were identified as Gaitskellite (belief in personal liberty, etc.), while Bevan, Tony Benn, and Michael Foot were the “Bevanites,” much further to the Left (where the public would own the means of production, etc.). PM and Party leader Wilson was seen as a moderate. See Sandbrook, Haines, and Donoughue for more.
30. Demaris, Brothers in Blood, 134.
31. BRT, 152–53.
32. The acronyms stand for, in order (including establishment dates): the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (1969), the Palestinian Liberation Front (1961), the Palestine Liberation Organization (1964), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (1967), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command (1968), the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (1967), the Popular Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Palestine (1972), the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Sons of the Occupied Territory (both c. 1973) (Demaris, Brothers in Blood, 35, 150–58). This last group (SOT) hijacked a Japanese airliner out of Amsterdam in July 1973, landed in Benghazi, then blew up the plane after everyone (excluding one hijacker, already dead) had left the plane. This was the group’s one and only operation. See entries in scene 16, “Hiding with the PFJ,” later for more.
33. Black September is the terrorist group that stormed the Israeli athlete rooms at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, killing eleven.
34. Dobson and Payne, Carlos Complex, 112; italics added.
35. BAFHG, 416.
36. “IRA Blame Police for Explosions,” Times, 22 Apr. 1969: 10.
37. DSD, 1.265.
38. See Demaris, Brothers in Blood, passim.
39. Dobson and Payne, Carlos Complex, 21. This explosion of activity was followed by an all-out assault by King Hussein of Jordan, in whose territory the Palestinians resided, and hundreds of terrorists and refugees were killed (21–22). This was the first “Black September.” In this case Hussein acted more like the Romans depicted in Brian—hunting down and destroying the enemies of Rome.
40. Later, when Biggus Dickus is being laughed at, “wank” will be mentioned again.
41. DSD, 2.240.
42. “Labour’s Left Raps ‘Splitter Jenkins,’” Sunday Times, 28 July 1974: 1; also “Jenkins Sparks Fury on the Left,” Sunday Times, 11 March 1973: 1. Jenkins was attempting during this period to bring Labour back from the furthest left, in the hope of fighting a more winnable election without resorting to austerity (lurching to the right) or out-and-out socialism (keeping left).
43. ATW, 1.196; MPFC: UC, 1.246–47.
44. DSD, 2.82.
45. BAFHG, 446.
46. ATW, 2.45.332.
47. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots, 17.
48. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots, 17.
49. Levine, Jerusalem, 173; the latter figure is whispered to a Centurion in The Passover Plot, and may be a Herodian leftover. In seething post-WWI India—where Home Rule was the native goal—the British Empire’s representative, General Reginald Dyer, forbade assemblies of any kind, hoping to quash rebellion (Brendon, DFBE, 266). The April 1919 Amritsar Massacre followed, anyway.
50. Caryl, Strange Rebels, 200.
51. Demaris, Brothers in Blood, 383–84.
52. Demaris, Brothers in Blood, 385.
53. The presence of the Holy Hand Grenade in Holy Grail can be directly connected to the explosive events of 1974.
54. BAFHG, 452.
55. Magness, Stone and Dung, 80. The Essenes will be discussed later in relation to the ascetic hermit Simon.
56. Israeli PM David Ben-Gurion would call these types of men “Jewish Nazis,” suggesting a genesis for the Pythons’ Otto (DFBE, 477).
57. Military wing of the Zionist Congress. After the war and when it became clear that the British weren’t ready to support a sovereign Jewish homeland, Hagana and the Stern Gang worked more closely together in acts of sabotage and civil disobedience against the British (Demaris, Brothers in Blood, 81).
58. Demaris, Brothers in Blood, 74.
59. Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky was a Russian Jew who founded the Jewish Self-Defense Organization; Chaim Wiezmann was also a Russian Jew who would become Israel’s first president in 1949. For a survey see Demaris’s Brothers in Blood, 73–75; and BRT, chapter four.
60. Demaris, Brothers in Blood, 74.
61. Lohamei Herut Israel—“Fighters for the Freedom of Israel.” See Brendon, 474–76, as well.
62. Demaris, Brothers in Blood, 78–80.
63. “A Country Eager to Make Up for Lost Time,” Times, 3 December 1974: I, VI.
64. “Ne’er the Twain Shall Meet, Particularly in Politics,” Times, 4 May 1973: 18.
65. “Ne’er the Twain Shall Meet,” 18.
66. Times, 12 August 1976: iii.
67. “Ultra-Left May Yet Swamp Nation,” Times, 12 August 1976: III.
68. Palin, Diaries, 310–11. In the general elections of 1974 and 1979 in the UK, the three “major” parties were Conservative, Labour, and Liberal, but there were also the following parties to choose from: Scottish National, Ulster Unionist, Plaid Cymru, Social Democratic and Labour, Independent, Communist, Socialist Unity, Vanguard, Socialist Party of Great Britain, Democratic Unionist, Independent Labour, Marxist-Leninist, Independent Conservative, Workers’ Revolutionary, Independent Republican, and on.
69. As discussed earlier, the Labour Party in 1974 had to make agreements with the Liberals, and then the Unionist (Irish and Scottish) parties to ensure a working majority, creating a British version of a popular front. This popular front held together for almost four years.
70. Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun, 36.
71. Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun, 610.
72. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots, 38–39.
73. Left-leaning Labour politician and writer/editor Foot worked in the Wilson and Callaghan administrations. Donoughue mentions him often and warmly, especially in comparison to Tony Benn, whose conduct tended to alienate even fellow travelers. The Tribune Group was so-named because they circled around the democratic socialist magazine Tribune. Foot was editor of the magazine 1955–1960. Skinner was mentioned earlier as the “Beast of Bolsover.” DSD, 1.513.
74. “Foot Divides Tribune Group,” Financial Times, 21 December 1978: 1.
75. “Gulf Guerrillas ‘In Peking,’” Financial Times, 5 March 1970: 9; “British Officers ‘Killed in Oman Battle.’” Times, 13 January 1975: 5.
76. Newton, Encyclopedia of Kidnappings, 233.
77. Shakespeare killed off his enormously popular character Falstaff in the most uncharitable way possible, for a stage favorite—off-stage (Larsen, MPSERD, 164). The Pythons kill both Gawain and Robin’s minstrels this way in Holy Grail, as well. Gawain isn’t mentioned until he’s been killed, and the minstrels are happily eaten during voiceover narration (BAFHG, 226 and 309, respectively). Our gladiator dies well away from his milieu, the fight, a “dreadful” death indeed.
78. MPFC: UC, 1.20.
79. ATW, 2.34.163–64; MPFC: UC 2.101–9.
80. Similarly, Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War ends mid-sentence, in 411 B.C. (Richard, WWAR, 169).
81. BAFHG, 466.
82. Polycarp (69–155) was one of the Apostolic Fathers and bishop of Smyrna. Generally, the best circus performances could be had in the major cities of the Empire, with Rome and the Colosseum or Circus Maximus claiming to be elite, while further flung settings could feature less accomplished fighters and fewer, perhaps ill-trained animals.
83. TAD, 137.
84. See Mannix, TAD, passim.
85. There’s no sign of the most popular games-related activity, gambling. A loss by the gladiator would have cost these men thousands of sesterces, perhaps prompting their muted outrage.
86. TAD, 117; also Grant, Gladiators, 75–76.
87. See TAD, passim. One magistrate complained about the escalating price of this onerous necessity: “It’s cost me three inheritances to stop the mouth of the people” (131).
88. Jenkins, Anatomy of Decline, 101.
89. TAD, 133.
90. MPFC: UC, 2.177–78, 1.97.
91. BAFHG, xxi–xxv passim, xxxn56, xxxn62, and 3; and the entries for New Wave in the BAFHG index.
92. Hughes, Encyclopedia of Swearing, 259–60.
93. TAD, 21.
94. TAD, 21–22.
95. Quoted in Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators, 140; see also Grant, Gladiators, 32.
96. See Mannix’s creative story about Carpophorus and his encounters with the old rabbi and captured Jews (TAD, 80–89).
97. See Cook, “Crucifixion as Spectacle,” 76n26.
98. Quoted in Bauman, Human Rights in Ancient Rome, 124.
99. “Army Protection Racket,” Ep. 8. There it’s “fings” for “things,” “bruvver” for “brother,” and “dunnay” for “don’t they.”
100. From Meriel McCooey’s article “Skinhead,” Sunday Times, 28 September 1969: 53.
101. “Aggro” was a shortened version of “aggressive” seen often in newspapers of the day. The term doesn’t appear until 1969, with the rising concern about youth “antisocial behavior.”
102. Seneca, Letters 7.3; quoted in Wiedemann, 142–43.
103. Lightning rod Enoch Powell was his opposite number on the Tory side of the Commons divide, always willing to take the hard line when it came to the damaging potential of mass immigration, for instance.
104. “Act Like a Prime Minister,” Economist 17 May 1975: 9–11.
105. See DSD, 1.575, but also the index there for the many, many references to Benn and his relationship with Wilson and Callaghan.
106. The National Enterprise Board, established in 1975.
107. DSD, 1.247; italics added.
108. Laqueur, Terrorism, 23.
109. See the discussions of syndicalism in BAFHG. There, Dennis lectures Arthur on the value of the anarchosyndicalist worldview; Arthur eventually throttles him.
110. See JTJ for more on the financial systems of the city during Christ’s lifetime.
111. Quoted in Iviansky, “Individual Terror,” 45.
112. For a very contemporary take on the types and tints of both “Individualism” and “individualism” in Britain, see Shirley Letwin’s “Can Individualists Be Compassionate?” in Spectator, 2 June 1978: 14. Brian may be speaking here for Chapman and the other Pythons as they see the approach of Thatcher’s Britain at the expense of Labour, the Liberals, and England in general. More on this later, when Brian addresses the multitudes beneath his window.