Banned in Norway

Starting with a contemporary and bombastic song, Monty Python's Life of Brian portrays society in Judea under Roman rule with a modern interpretation that is both funny and accessible to current-day audiences. Many critics of the film accused the makers of blasphemy; as if the inherent message of the story was to prove the Christian God does not exist and that writings about God are misinterpreted. While there are many tongue in cheek jokes about the potential sources of supernatural power, the overall message of the film is that individuals should not allow the beliefs of others to be their only guide in life to the exclusion of their own thoughts and ideas.

Released in 1979 the film was being seen when the Boomtown Rats released the song "I Hate Mondays"; a song written about a girl who shot 13 people, killing 2,  and wounding 9. The problems of today are echoes of yesterday's and those reverberations cross millennia. While the senseless song about a senseless act was topping the charts, Life of Brian was illustrating the dangers of blindly following others and how everyone projects their own meaning onto the thoughts, actions and desires of everyone else around them.

Brian starts life being slapped by his mother and the story quickly moves to 33 years later, showing Brian still living with his mother, getting badgered away from a barely heard speech by Jesus and off to a stoning. Once there, the film makes a quick point about the nature of blasphemy; that just saying a word, such as Jehovah and by extension any word, shouldn't be blasphemy.

It was a Roger Ebert review that helped open up another aspect of the film that I thought was brilliant writing.  Most of the people throwing stones are male actors, dressed in drag to portray women, dressed as men to overcome the limitation of no women being allowed at the stoning. The flattening of the gender roles helps illustrate a general pattern to human behavior as being cruel, quick to judge, and sentencing without sound evidence.

The film overall is not so much blasphemy as it is heresy, as the start of Brian's late career as an unintentional religious leader begins with an actual miracle. An alien space ship catches him as he falls, running from the Romans, and he then survives a space battle and consequent crash landing.  The episode is never mentioned again in the movie and it's easy to forget it even happened by the end titles.

By taking Brian into an incomprehensible dimension of space travel, the movie shows the audience something that is already a familiar popular tale and interpretable as not God-like intervention, but happenstance and being pulled into a much larger narrative of a clash between alien civilizations. The Voyager spacecraft made their closest approaches to Jupiter in 1979, Star Wars had been released in 1977, astronauts had landed on the moon in 1969, and War of the Worlds in the 1930's with dozens of space films released between. The audience might be surprised by the turn of events and laugh at the non-sequitor, but to the character Brian, it should be a sign that he might have a supernatural presence on Earth. He continues on without believing this and is oblivious to anything but Romans chasing him and a girl he would like to get to know.

Brian's babbling at the wall of prophets attracts the notice of passersby, who then proceed to follow Brian, and create, debate and codify an entire self-conflicting narrative and religious structure during the  chase, without Brian's help. One of my favorite scenes involves Brian stumbling into a hermit's hole. The hermit singing out now that he can talk freely and stopping after spotting the crowd still trailing Brian.

The remainder of the film continues a relentless series of scenes where mobs and others behave without displaying an ounce of sound critical thinking and projecting their own desires and views onto Brian's circumstances.

After being caught up in the desires of the mob, his peers, recently acquired girlfriend, and his mother; each project their own feelings about his circumstance, Brian is stuck responding to them while being held securely in place on a cross. The movie's signature song, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" helps close out the story and the narrative that it is up to us as individuals to respond to our situation, hopefully with some sound reasoning.