A Book about the Film Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life

Larsen (Monty Python’s Flying Circus), a film and animation professor at Brigham Young University, presents an exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting look at Monty Python’s last film, 1983’s The Meaning of Life. Larsen posits that the film is a pessimistic look at life during the time of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. For example, the film’s opening featurette of elderly office accountants rebelling against their corporate masters is a deep critique of America’s “financial dominance” of London, which created the conditions for Thatcher’s “strict sado-monetarist policies [that] had proven so effective at reducing inflation, but also reducing employment.” No line in the film is without comment (some lines get a tedious multiparagraph examination). A brutal look at hospital childbirth in “Every Sperm Is Sacred” is shown to be a part of England’s 1980s debate “about skyrocketing health care costs and the [National Health Service’s] seeming inability to control its spending or quality of care.” And the film’s final sketch, a parody of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, hammers on upper-middle-class Thatcherites diminishing the specter of Death by trying to treat him “as an adorable local.” Hard-core Monty Python fans will be thoroughly delighted, but those with a more casual interest would do fine sticking with the film. (Aug.)