Life of Brian (1979)

Monty Python's Life of Brian arrives from 1979, a vintage that predates the cultural flashpoint under examination here. Its target is organized religion, specifically the New Testament era, which it lampoons with a troupe of white British men in multiple roles and a supporting cast of women whose primary function is to scold or be scolded. Brian Cohen, born next door to Jesus and mistaken for the Messiah, stumbles through Roman-occupied Judea pursued by followers he never wanted. The film's blasphemy is well documented. Its engagement with contemporary social consciousness is not.

There are flickers worth cataloguing. Eric Idle's Stan announces a wish to become a woman called Loretta and to have babies, a passage played entirely for laughs and offered as a punchline about revolutionary nomenclature, not as an affirming statement of gender identity. Judith, the rebel Brian pines for, has opinions and a temper, and Mandy Cohen, Brian's mother, dominates every room she enters. A brief debate about women's participation in the People's Front of Judea surfaces and then dissolves. None of this amounts to an agenda. The film's political energy is spent mocking the factional absurdity of independence movements, not the machinery of capital, and the climate goes unmentioned because the climate did not yet require mentioning.

Reg's speech asking what the Romans ever did for the people of Judea is a satirical set piece of real craft, and it deflates itself before the audience can mistake it for a sermon. The film's instinct is to puncture earnestness wherever it finds it, including the earnestness of its own heroes. It ends with men singing cheerfully while nailed to crosses, which is about as far from lecturing as cinema gets. What remains is a comedy of theological mischief, largely innocent of the markers we are obliged to tally, and all the better preserved for it.