Monty Python, Dogma, and Transatlantic Difference

Mike King
Centre for Postsecular Studies
London Metropolitan University
mike.king@londonmet.ac.uk

Introduction

With the 25th anniversary launch of Monty Python’s the Life of Brian coinciding with Mel Gibson’s release of The Passions, it is an appropriate time to consider some issues of UK / US divergence over religion and film. This article compares The Life of Brian with Kevin Smith’s Dogma, both on the surface looking equally satirical of religion. It is argued however that Brian is spiritually disengaged, while Dogma is spiritually engaged; that Monty Python promotes secular values, while Kevin Smith, though on the surface equally satirical, has serious religious intent.

[1] The journalist Alexander Chancellor, reflecting on the 2004 US presidential election in the British newspaper The Guardian, wrote: ‘In Britain, flaunting religious faith is a liability; in America it is a political necessity.’ Some months later the televised debate between the presidential candidates took a brief theological turn, as Bush and Kerry presented their views on God. Chancellor is right to suggest that such a scene would be impossible in Britain; such are the transatlantic differences in contemporary culture. This is an issue in the different emergence of secularism as a cultural force: secularism as the determining factor in how religion enters or is denied in the public sphere. The European epicentre of secularism is of course France since the Revolution in the 18th century, which was as much against the Roman Catholic Church as it was against the aristocracy. Each European country has negotiated this issue differently: Britain itself was shaped by a secularism that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as a competitor to Marxism for the hearts and minds of the working classes. America took an entirely different historical route, one influenced by its origins as a haven for European non-conformists of all persuasions, and by the Deism of its founding fathers.

[2] Film, as a defining cultural production, can be used to explore the differences between Britain and America regarding the role and reception of religion in society. We will explore Monty Python’s the Life of Brian and Kevin Smith’s Dogma as illustrating a key difference: that Britain is culturally far more sceptical of religion. Two films, or even a much wider survey, cannot prove the difference, because we can nearly always find counter-examples, yet such an attempt is important in the post 9/11 climate. This is because the very nature of secularism, and its different articulation in nations such as America, Britain, France and Turkey, goes to the heart of the new geopolitics. We will suggest that mainstream culture in America is generally more open to cultural production that explores arguments within religion, whereas British cultural production is more open to arguments against religion, as epitomized by the two films under discussion here. (The point is being made in full awareness of numerous exceptions: for example, the work of Gore Vidal in America is virulently anti-religious, while the British film director Peter Brooke has made a number of films that are highly sympathetic to religion.)

[3] As a teenager growing up in 70’s Britain, Monty Python’s Flying Circus was a defining cultural production for me. My generation was constructing itself partly as a reaction to the war generation of our parents, unable to grasp the sacrifice they made, and seeking our own identity and sense of importance. The Monty Python TV series exactly captured our struggle, characterised by a rejection of our parents’ values, and in particular the rejection of traditional religion. However, a spiritual awakening in my late twenties has allowed me to re-assess and challenge the received prejudices promoted in secular cultural productions like Monty Python. I now see that as a British public schoolboy I accepted a form of unthinking atheism (not that I am now an unthinking theist). Thirty years later I have come to call that particular form of atheism ‘Monty Python atheism,’ in recognition of its particular nature and historical background.

[4] On the surface of it The Life of Brian (Terry Jones 1979) and Dogma (Kevin Smith 1999) are two equally satirical films. Both have run into controversy, and both have cult followings, though The Life of Brian with its 20-year headstart and (arguably) superior filmic qualities is in a different league: it still lists in the top 80 British supermarket video titles. I suggest however that there is a fundamental difference between the two films: that Dogma is engaged with the spiritual, while Monty Python is disengaged. Although Terry Jones claims that the 2004 re-release of the Life of Brian was an unashamed exploitation of the aftermath of Mel Gibson’s The Passions of the Christ, in fact it had been planned long before. The 25th anniversary release has prompted re-evaluations of the film as varied as those that accompanied its debut in New York in 1979. EMI, its original financiers, had pulled the plug on it because of its potential for blasphemy. The production was rescued by $4m worth of funding from ex-Beatle George Harrison, and premiered in New York, because it was thought that the freedom of speech and religious choice enshrined in the US constitution would give it a safer passage than in the UK. No chance! It was denounced as blasphemy by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, the Lutheran Council, and the Rabbinical Alliance of America, and was widely picketed by protestors. Its British launch invoked a milder but still vigorous campaign to ban it, spearheaded by Mary Whitehouse and supported by writer and journalist Malcolm Muggeridge. He was invited to a BBC2 chat show with Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark, to discuss the film with the Python team, resulting in an angry exchange, later summed up by John Cleese: ‘I always felt we won that one by behaving better than the Christians.’

[5] Let us see why the Life of Brian should be considered as spiritually disengaged, in contrast to Dogma as spiritually engaged. Brian himself is not in fact cast in the role of Jesus, merely living a parallel life that accidentally happens to end in crucifixion. Brian is not the least spiritual or religious, drifting instead into a political movement intent on freeing the Jews from oppressive Roman occupation. After an abortive raid on Roman authority we find him fleeing from centurions, landing via surreal alien intervention in a local marketplace. We see preachers of various kinds lambasting gullible passers-by with nonsense dressed up in Old Testament clichés, as Brian haggles for a false beard. Desperate to evade the soldiers who are closing in on him, he also takes a gourd from the wily market trader, whose parting remark to the camera is ‘Oh well. One born every minute,’ setting us up for the theme of the coming scenes: that of gullibility. Brian lands up leaving the conspirator’s den by the back door as the Romans enter by the front, only to find himself on a precarious balcony above the market preachers seen earlier. It gives way, causing Brian to fall and dislodge one of the preachers, who neatly disappears into an amphora, leaving Brian standing to the applause of the small audience in front of him. As a centurion looks on suspiciously, Brian is forced to preach. Ostensibly taking his cue from the ravings of the surrounding preachers, he falteringly starts to mouth some platitudes that sound suspiciously like the sayings of Jesus. He fares badly against the heckling of the crowd and is further distracted as the Roman guards march by (after their unsuccessful raid on the den). He manages the sublimely comic: ‘Blessed are they … who convert their neighbour's ox, for they shall inhibit their girth …’ and then hops off his ledge as the danger recedes. In an entirely convincing theatrical moment, the crowd now decides that Brian has a secret, which he won’t divulge to them. ‘Is it the secret of eternal life?’ asks one of them, and the tide turns fully in his favour. ‘Tell us, Master, tell us,’ they plead with him, and follow him as he vainly tries to get rid of them. The gourd becomes a holy relic, and soon a vast crowd chases the fleeing Brian out of the city. There is an immediate schism between followers who worship his gourd and followers who worship the sandal that he abandons in his haste – in other words the Monty Python team contrive to ridicule all that is religion in just a few memorable shots. What follows drives this home, as the desperate longing of the crowd for religious instruction – their gullibility – is further exposed. 

[6] The Life of Brian also satirises political struggle, mainly through ‘Reg’ the leader of the People's Front of Judea, caricatured through utterances typical of a 60’s British Trades Union leader. Yet the struggle to overthrow the Romans remains credible throughout the film, whereas at no point does religion remain so. In fact the Life of Brian is consistent with many secular commentaries on Jesus that either depict him as a political revolutionary or castigate him for not being so. What is consistently and relentlessly conveyed is the absurdity of religion at best (through the gullibility of the crowd) or the viciousness of it at worst (through such scenes as the stoning). The crucifixion scene at the end of the film, set to the song, ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,’ came in for much criticism as the height of irreligiosity. Given the comic genius and cultural status of Monty Python in Britain, it is no surprise that schoolboys like myself simply absorbed the secular atheistic values of such films. However, I now see the crucifixion scene in a different light: rather than being simple mockery, it hammers home the point of the film, that secular values should have no truck with the idea that religion offers hope even in death. Dogma on the other hand conveys quite different values, suggestive I would maintain of the difference between UK and US culture.

[7] Kevin Smith, a practising Catholic, wrote, directed and acted in Dogma after a series of satirical film successes that established his name and created a considerable sense of anticipation for the new film. It also attracted hostility and denunciation not that different to that which accompanied The Life of Brian (Christian crowds demonstrated outside US movie theatres, protesting against the ‘blasphemy’ in Dogma). On the surface it is much ruder than Brian, replete as it is with scatological and onanistic references. Dogma is the story of two fallen angels seeking a return to heaven, and a worker in an abortion clinic who turns out to be the ‘last scion,’ destined to thwart the angels. She is directed to her task by the ‘voice of God,’ Metatron, and abetted by two losers with the bad language and moronic adolescent sexuality. The point of the film is that dogmatic adherence to received biblical truths creates contradictions that make for absurd dramatic possibilities, the playing out of which in the film illustrate their absurdity. Yet almost universally the critics have conceded that it is a deeply knowing film, and has led some of its attackers to counter it line by line from the Bible. Smith shows us that Biblical dogmas create comic absurdity when taken literally, but demonstrates again and again that behind them are profoundly important spiritual questions.

[8] Compared to Brian, Dogma is therefore orders of magnitude better informed about issues in Christian thought, but this alone does not make it spiritually engaged. Instead, it is the way that it deals with such issues as idolatry and wonder that make it religious in its motivation, and to which many audiences and critics have responded favourably. Dogma provokes thought in a way that is therefore a far cry from the promotion of secular values in Brian. Turning first to the issue of idolatry, we find Loki (the Angel of Death) forming the intention early in the film to punish those behind ‘Mooby the Golden Calf,’ Disney-type entertainments conglomerate. Loki’s exile to earth, along with his fellow-angel Bartleby, was in fact enforced because he refused to carry out further acts of divine vengeance. He now feels the time is right to go back to his calling, particularly as Mooby’s dominance in contemporary culture is a direct challenge to religion. Hence we are set up for a confrontation with the Mooby Corporation boardroom, leading to their extermination. Bartleby tells the CEO: ‘You and your board are idolators,’ and then explains the gravity of their offence: ‘You are responsible for raising an icon that draws worship from the Lord.’ Loki then carries out the punishment in laconic fashion.

[9] The issue of idolatry is one at the heart of all three Abrahamic monotheisms, but to the secular mind it conveys nothing of significance: why should it matter whether one worships with or without an image, when ‘worship’ itself is part of a rejected superstitious past? To those more sympathetic to religion and its Western historical development, idolatry is understood as a key issue for religious debate. The prohibition against it is at the root of all three monotheistic faiths, and the different interpretations of it are foundational to the split between Catholicism and Protestantism. The arguments around this issue – raging for millennia – are of no interest to the Python team, as they are not making arguments within religion, but against it. Though not necessarily Marxists themselves, they are inheritors of the mid-19th century British secularism that shared with socialists of the time the view that religion was root and branch an exploitation. Hence the crowd that follow Brian are shown to be gullible and exploitable, because of their lack of scepticism towards religion. At no point is the distinction made between a genuine and valid religious impulse, and a merely frivolous and sycophantic appetite for ‘religious’ distraction.

[10] Conversely, the film Dogma does not fall into the trap of conveying unexamined religious certainties. Nobody would suggest that it pursues religious subtleties like those explored for example by the monk Thomas Merton throughout his life, but it does tackle the broad issue of dogmatism, and other specific issues, including that of idolatry in a specifically American context. Mooby Corp.’s image-making – unsubtly conveyed in the gold-coloured toy calf – is an idolatry twice over because of the image and also because of the worship of money. Smith is making a connection between corporate imagery and religious idolatry that the secular mind would overlook (and which goes back to the Old Testament and events such as the episode of Jesus and the money-changers in the Temple).

[11] The secular viewer might be just as likely to oppose corporate greed as a religious one, but is likely to miss the ancient religious debate behind the Mooby boardroom slaughter. The dick- and fart-jokes, the random violence, and the sheer weirdness of the plot can offend the religiously-minded, and there is in truth not that much to offer them until the ending of the film. Yet the film builds out of its crassness towards an ending that is both sublime and deeply thought-provoking, asking questions within, and honouring of, the spiritual. The key plot element requires that Loki and Bartleby gain a ‘plenary indulgence’ for their transgressions, which would allow them back into heaven. By an opposing dogmatic structure their return would nullify the will of God and hence bring about a contradiction at the heart of existence which would annihilate the cosmos. The heroine (Bethany) aided by her unlikely gang of misfits, the ‘thirteenth apostle’ (the black Rufus) and the ‘muse’ Serendipity, must stop the angels reaching a particular church. In the final scene Bartleby runs amok, slaughtering onlookers, killing Loki, and is about to enter the church – and hence nullify existence itself – when Bethany rescues God (trapped as a dying man on a life-support machine) and allows ‘Her’ to come to the rescue. Although there is talk early on of God as a black man, God now appears as a white woman, played by the singer Alanis Morissette. She brings an extraordinary presence to the final scenes, first hugging the shamefaced Bartleby, and then sternly executing him with the power of Her voice. She then brings back to life the mortally wounded Bethany, causes a divine conception in her (Bethany was previously made infertile through a botched abortion), and skips off to smell the flowers and perform shaky handstands. It is a scene that is powerfully life-affirming, created through the personification of God as a young woman, through the personality of Morissette, and through the bringing of justice and peace at the end of a chaotic sequence of strife and carnage.

[12] In comparison the Life of Brian ends with the crucifixion of Brian and various convicts, singing ‘Look on the Bright Side.’ Some may see this as fitting comic humour, but under the surface is the message that religion’s certainty of life after death, of hope in the darkest hour, is a sham. The secular assumption conveyed in the words of the song, ‘For life is quite absurd, and death the final word,’ is Brian’s message. The scene mocks all those who hold a religious outlook on life, however much they might question dogmatic certainties: it contains no openness to other possibilities. Personally, though I think that The Life of Brian is a better film in many respects than Dogma, its ending leaves me with a stomach-churning emptiness, an irredeemably secular 20th century alienation, angst, ennui. Dogma on the other hand leaves me curiously uplifted, with an image of the feminine light of transcendence, with life affirmed. Despite film as a visual medium being part of an image-making often held in suspicion by religion, religion must surely welcome Smith’s attack on idolatry, and the rhapsodic and spiritual view of life at Dogma’s end. Finally, I would suggest that – through a complex set of diverging historical factors – we can understand the American Smith to be the natural inheritor of the Enlightenment Deism of America’s founding fathers, while the British Python to be the natural inheritors of the atheist materialism of Marx.