Monty Python and the Life of G

As we’ve all discovered, living in the middle of a pandemic does many strange things to your sanity, chief among them being going out of your tiny little mind with boredom, the other being running screaming for something comforting and reassuring.

Which brings me to Monty Python.

I recently discovered the entire four seasons of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Life of Brian, as well as the documentary Almost the Truth were all available on Netflix, so I’ve been both entertaining and soothing my brain with hours of nostalgic comedy ever since.

I can’t remember about three things from my childhood: Lord of the Rings, Star Wars … and Monty Python. And Thomas the Tank Engine. Four things. Oh, and G-Force. Can’t forget G-Force, man I loved that show. Five things … look, I’ll start again.

I couldn’t tell you when I first watched the Pythons, though it was maybe somewhere around the ages of eight to ten, thanks to my British-born parents' love of the series. My parents, like Michael Palin and Terry Jones, went to Oxford, so they were THE target audience for the Python’s brand of Oxbridge humor.

We had all the episodes on Betamax, being the cutting edge of video technology at the time and far superior to silly and inevitably destined-for-the-dustbin-of-history VHS, and a shelf full of books including the Big Red Book (with its blue cover), Dr. Fegg’s Nasty Book, the Brand New Monty Python Book, the scripts for both Life of Brian and the Holy Grail. All the vinyl records, too. From about the ages of 8 to 18 then Python was a constant companion, which was nice to have for a kid who went to six different schools in the eight years of elementary school. (Incidentally, I discovered that one of those schools—Sir Frank Markham Comprehensive in bracing, exciting Milton Keynes—has since been demolished, to which I say: good riddance)

In high school, I used to listen to Python tapes over and over again with a group of friends at parties. It was a godsend for an otherwise cripplingly shy, awkward, timid, dull and awful child-slash-teenager. With a single quote, you could make the room laugh! As the only British one, they’d ask me to do the voices. I still recall the look of stunned horror on the face of the uninitiated when they asked me to do “Ms. Nigger-baiter’s just exploded!”

So, this has been my own kind of 30-year reunion with the group.

Side note: Apparently nostalgia running in 30-year cycles is an identified popculture phenomenon, as people who consumed entertainment as kids become culture creators as adults, but let me just quickly reassure you that I remain as unproductive and unoriginal as ever.

Half a century after it was first broadcast, a lot of it has aged rather well. Monty Python is superficially silly, silliness without any point beyond its own silliness, but that’s ensured it hasn’t aged the way a lot of satire has.

On the other hand, a lot of it doesn’t hold up now precisely because I spent those first 10 years memorizing every routine. The Parrot sketch, the Argument Clinic. I do expect the Spanish Inquisition, I do. Their appearance was precisely the thing I was anticipating, really. Some of the sketches go on for too long or take too long to set up, and you start to recognize the set-pieces or concepts they re-use over and over: Sports but silly, man who speaks oddly, man getting angry at shopkeeper, and so on.

It’s the stuff you don’t remember anymore that delights. There’s a skit with John Cleese and Graham Chapman as pepperpots talking about a penguin on top of their television, and you can see them both fighting desperately to keep a straight face. It’s such a human moment.

The two movies hold up better, I think because the jokes are of a more consistent and higher quality. I know everyone says you’re supposed to think Life of Brian is the better film because it’s more coherent, with a single strong storyline, and the jokes are more biting and satirical, but honestly, I find that for all the jokes it’s a rather depressing movie. The bare-bones outline is this: Young man in crushingly pathetic existence gets recruited by political extremists, captured during a terrorist attack and then crucified. That’s just dark, man, no matter how spot-on the Judean People’s Front and what-have-the-Romans-done-for-us bits are.

The incongruousness of the final jaunty number, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”, is of course precisely the point of it but it’s also kind of frustrating to me—you’ve just spent 90 minutes showing me how crap life is, how the hell am I supposed to look on the bright side now?!

Whereas Holy Grail is yes, less a movie and more a series of sketches loosely strung together with a common theme and characters, it’s true, but it’s also a far more straightforwardly silly affair. I don’t really want to think about what’s wrong with fanaticism and blind belief at the moment. I just want to laugh. There’s that kind of youthful innocence to the Holy Grail, it’s a movie that doesn’t really want to teach you any Deep Message or Truth about the world, it just wants to have a giggle. And the jokes, especially in the first half, are some of the best the Pythons ever wrote—“Strange women lying in ponds” still gets a smile.

It’s also, I think, a more visually interesting movie than Life of Brian, possibly thanks to Terry Gilliam being the co-director. Apparently, the rest of the Pythons got so irritated with his focus on the look of the thing over getting the jokes that they got Jones to direct their other two movies on his own, which is a bit of a pity, I think. Just the mise-en-scène, pardon my outrrrageous accent, you know, the camera angles and the shot composition and the delightful grottiness of medieval England make it the more interesting movie to watch.

The ending is, of course, complete crap, with the whole thing just suddenly coming to an abrupt

The Old Guard

Title: The Old Guard
Director: Gina Prince-Brythewood 
Screenplay: Greg Rucka 
Network: Netflix 

[somber music playing]

Previously, I kind of facetiously suggested there was no point in reviewing anything, as various audience segments each consume entertainment for wildly different reasons, and their aims or intentions often do not align with those of reviewers, critics, award judges, or other gatekeepers of cultural quality. What I had not considered, and what I’m now—after watching Netflix’s latest action-caper “The Old Guard”—forced to consider, is that I omitted one case in which reviewing is at best pointless and at worst counter-productive: What if the product itself isn’t meant to be that good?

After “Titan”, “Mute”, “Extraction” and now “The Old Guard”, I’m starting to get the feeling that what Netflix is aiming for is not excellence, but a kind of good-enoughness, sufficiently competent and well-made that it elicits just enough delight among a target audience segment, but done on the cheap, taking few risks, skimping on script in favor of visuals. And it’s hard to critique something that doesn’t feel like it was ever meant to be that great anyway. It’s the brainless summer action blockbuster minus the block-busting and available year-round. It being good or bad feels almost beside the point.

[suspenseful music playing]

“The Old Guard” stars Charlize Theron as “Andy”, Andromanche the Scythian, an unkillable, fast-healing immortal along the lines of the Highlander or Wolverine or Deadpool or Hayden Panettiere’s character on “Heroes” and yes, this concept is precisely as tired and worn-out as Charlize’s cynical Andy.

Aside from a few flashback scenes in some rather unfortunate Xena cosplay, the story focuses on Andy and her team of three other centuries-old immortals, guy (Marwan Kanzari), other guy (Luca Marinelli) and slightly shifty guy (Matthias Schoenaerts) as they battle Martin Shkreli-esque pharmabro Steven Merrick (Harry Melling), who wants to turn them into lab mice for the development of new drugs based on their DNA. A new wrinkle occurs when a US Marine deployed to Afghanistan (KiKi Layne) suddenly discovers she, too, is immortal.

[Frankie Ocean playing]

The plot is utterly predictable. The team is double-crossed in precisely the way that you expect, by the person that you expect. After we learn that immortality sometimes wears off, the person you expect to become mortal again does. When the team is captured, they are rescued by exactly the person you expect in precisely the way you expect. While one was previously encouraged to switch off one’s brain for action movies, in this case it becomes almost mandatory. To the point where it feels almost like a deliberate choice.

For example, they say the famous Nigerian Prince Email scam was written in a suspicious, fishy, blatantly scammy style in order to turn off anybody with half a brain, as the scam’s targets were the truly naïve and stupid. Anybody else was a waste of the scammers’ time, so they set up the scam so that the audience would self-select: Only those staggeringly dumb enough to fall for it would bother to respond.

And the cynical part of me wonders if that’s what’s happening here. I’d like to believe Greg Rucka, the man who wrote the original comic book on which the movie is based, is capable of coming up with an original twist or plot point. Yet the movie is absolutely, totally laser-focused on not surprising you in any way, shape or form.

[electropop music playing]

The dialog is dull and utilitarian. The fights are jerkily shot and confusingly edited, and feature the Wickensian headshotting we’ve already seen ad nauseum in three John Wick movies, not to mention Netflix’s own Extraction. Theron essentially reprises her Furiosa role from “Mad Max” albeit with a better haircut, but the others of her team make little to no impression at all. They all behave exactly like a modern action-movie Special Forces team, and nothing at all like 1,000-year-old warriors.

Side note: Why do these people need to eat and sleep? Doesn’t the not-dying bit prevent you from starving or suffering from a lack of REM? What happens if you cut their heads off? The implications of their abilities largely go unconsidered, save for a flashback sequence in which Veronica Ngo’s character is chucked into the sea inside an iron coffin, to drown and revive and drown again for eternity. It’s the one genuinely creepy scene in the whole movie, and one I was hoping was going to power the plot, but nope, bog-standard baddies it is (Ngo’s character reappears at the very end in an obvious set-up for a sequel).

[another misplaced musical cue playing]

There isn’t much nice I can say about the rest of it, I’m afraid. The score, as I’ve hinted, is intrusive and rarely fits the mood of the scene. Thematically, it’s a bit of a mess: The preciousness of human life, how fleeting it is, ah me, oh my, such pathos, now let’s go murder 50 faceless goons with headshots that totally go SPLAT all over the walls.

The action is frequently preposterous—upon discovering her rapid-healing abilities, Layne’s squad-mates immediately turn on her. Why? Andy abducts Layne from a US army base in Afghanistan in a Humvee. How? Layne drives about a creepily empty London, streets totally deserted, until after the big escape and then cops and a crowd show up. What? I’m not a fan of the Cinema Sins style of criticism and searching for “plot holes” but this movie simply constricts itself in nonsensical plot lines.

[Gummi Bear viral song from 2007 playing]

But none of it matters. This is a movie for all the Charlize Theron stans out there. Your queen kicks ass. Yeah! In what feels like a deliberate shot at macho action-movie tropes, she’s a lesbian, Marwan and Luca’s characters are a gay couple, the new addition to the team is a black woman, the bad guy is a white dude with an army of white dudes in cop gear. I can tell the online discourse for this movie is going to be dominated by the presence of these elements. If representation matters to you, then all the headthumpingly dull plotting and wooden characterization probably won’t make any difference. If SJW-ness or whatever are your personal bugbear, no number of killer action scenes would have saved it.

It just has to be good enough to get a pass with its target audience, and they’ll defend it to the death. A thousand words of mine aren’t going to change any minds one way or the other. So I’ll stop.

Wither Cyberpunk?

Hello and welcome back. Today, we’re taking a break from milquetoast white middle class takes on socio-political issues and getting back to what I’m really good at: Nonsensical waffling about deeply nerdy shit. That’s right, today we’re going to talk about cyberpunk.

Here’s what I said about the genre back in March:

Cyberpunk is a wonderful genre, so fun, so full of cool gadgetry, bass-ass mofos, gangsters, mercs, techno-blitzkrieg action, neon, rain and bare buttocks gyrating to electronica. I love it, really I do. But damn is it a limited, self-referential genre.

It is. It’s a narrative straight-jacket capable of telling about three possible stories, all of them involving a hacker, a gun-toting mercenary and a prostitute with a heart of gold. Spoilers: They all die and live happily ever after.

That said, it’s surprising how long and how well the genre has survived since it downloaded itself into the public infosphere back in the early 80s. In the 90s it was rebooted through Neal Stephenson’s books and the Matrix trilogy, the Shadowrun RPG as well as William Gibson’s Bridge trilogy (peak Gibson, to my mind), then saved from the Y2K bug by things like the “Blade Runner” sequel or Richard Morgan’s “Altered Carbon” series (covered here, here and here), which later became a Netflix series (here and here). Everything from “Black Mirror” to “Love, Death and Robots” owes a deep debt to this genre.

And it keeps going. Pandemic willing, we are currently four months away from the November 19 release of CD Projekt Red’s latest game, “Cyberpunk 2077” (which I wrote a little about here) and its promise of infinitely customizable genitalia. A tie-in anime has also been announced, slated for release in 2021. Cyberpunk has never been hotter, or cooler, or whatever your desired ambient temperature may be.

The question is, Why?

Why does this genre, so evidently a product of a very specific place and time (my bedroom, circa 1990) continue to enjoy such popularity?

Part of the reason cyberpunk is enjoying a revival, as British author Adam Roberts suggests in his blog Morphosis, is probably because kids like me who grew up in the 80s are now in positions to make creative decisions about what gets made, and we’re all feeling a little nostalgic for some babes, bikes and Blade Runner.

Another part of the reason may be pure fashion. Black never goes out of style. William Gibson’s seminal novel “Neuromancer” published in 1984 gets a lot of the credit for kicking off the genre, but it’s worth pointing out this was actually two years after both Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga series “Akira” (movie-fied in 1988) and Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner”, which together established a set of aesthetics that have survived the intervening 30 years as a shorthand for effortless dystopic cool.

It’s the aesthetics that have stuck with us more than anything, but I’m not sure those alone explain the longevity of such an (apparently) niche genre. To be sure, the fact that cyberpunk gives artists a fig leaf to cover the fetishization of gratuitously bloody gunplay and large-breasted girls is attractive to some. That doesn’t explain, for example, Altered Carbon’s use of the genre to explore themes of resistance to power and control though, or Blade Runner: 2049’s more mournful contemplation of the definition of self.

There is, I think, an ideological core to cyberpunk which still resonates with us, even 30 years later. The concerns the genre raises have not gone away, and indeed, have become ever more pressing.

What is the cyberpunk manifesto? Let’s have a look.

Tenet 1: Technology will become increasingly ubiquitous and invasive

The first and most important assertion cyberpunk makes about our future (looking forward from the 80s) is that we will become dependent on technology in every aspect of our lives.

Information networks will become connected and regulate everything from finance to consumption to politics.

In parallel, technology will also invade the body, leading to physical enhancement or even the total separation of mental and physical selves, but also a growing alienation and loss of control over ourselves. As your mind and body become increasingly digitized, you will suffer the same vulnerabilities as all digital devices—subject to manipulation and hacking.

Tenet 2: Privatization of everything and societal collapse

Cyberpunk’s corollary to the increasing colonization of every aspect of society by technology is that such technology will make it easier and easier for wealth and power to be accumulated in private hands, while public institutions grow weaker and weaker until they are effectively useless.

The lawless vacuum their collapse creates will be filled with private armies, mercenaries and assassins, drug dealers, sex workers, gangs, especially the yakuza, cyborgs and killer robots.

Tenet 3: It’s up to the lone-wolf antisocial rebel hero to save the day

The governments, the police, the corporations, and pretty much every institution you can name is either powerless or corrupt or more likely some neon-blended combination of the two. As a result, it’s up to individuals to fight back against oppression, exploitation and evil.

Okay, so that didn’t happen

At first glance, it seems easy to dismiss many of the predictions cyberpunk tried to make about the future of society.

Cyberspace, for example, has not become an immersive VR experience, but instead a Matryoshka collection of nesting screens growing paradoxically both smaller and more intrusive.

Governments have not collapsed, as electorates and oligarchs have increasingly turned to “strong men” clamping down harder and harder the more they sense the world is slipping from their grasp.

Japanese corporations, far from continuing to buy up larger and larger swathes of North America, have gone into retreat. Indeed, the 90s yellow-peril specter of Japanese domination (see Michael Crichton’s “Rising Sun” and Tom Clancy’s “Debt of Honor”, ’92 and ’94 respectively) now seems positively quaint.

Yet if you stop for a moment and look past the surface aesthetics and focus instead on what cyberpunk is actually saying, it’s clear many of these issues are very much still with us today.

Has technology invaded our lives? Are we dependent on it?

Ooh you betcha. Uploaded consciousness or total body prosthesis is still the realm of SF, but come on.

We all carry little rectangles of plastic and wiring that connect us 24/7 to a global information network of reaction gifs, porn, unhinged political tweets and inanely niche blogs. Social media is in the process of monetizing every aspect of our private lives. Facial recognition software and surveillance technology mean we are never truly alone. Your phone might be listening to everything you say. Your car is evaluating how well you drive, and telling your insurer. Your TV is talking to your fridge, and they think you’re a loser.

Technology has never been more omni-present in our lives, and despite appearances, I don’t think we’re any more comfortable with it than we were 30 years ago. We’ve just adopted a kind of learned helplessness, accepted that there’s nothing we can do to avoid it.

Have social institutions weakened? Are corporations becoming laws unto themselves?

I mean, come on. High-tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple or Microsoft are effectively ungovernable. Septuagenarian senators haven’t the faintest clue what these companies even do, much less how they might be regulated. Meanwhile health costs skyrocket, education fails to deliver either basic life skills or post-graduate employment, families are divided across Facebook battlezones, and ununionized workforces trapped in the gig economy Uber-drive in their spare time just to get by.

While corporations themselves have not accumulated power into the hands of faceless boards, that role has instead been played by the charismatic hero-CEO, the Jeff Bezos, Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world, the infamous 0.1% against whom even the wealth of the 1% pales into insignificance. Cyberpunk is worried about the way technology creates an inequality of information that in turn accelerates the inequality of wealth, and this is perhaps the defining characteristic of late-stage capitalism.

Lawlessness has absolutely been the result, as people slowly realize the way in which traditional power structures have been co-opted to operate to service the elite. Our cousins in the good ole US of Americuh are one month into nation-wide protests against the perceived failings of their police and judicial system. Just before that, gun-armed protesters were storming state capitals to demand a lifting of restrictions on economic activity. There is an increasing sense that systems don’t work, and it’s up to people to take matters into their own hands.

And I think that’s why we still have cyberpunk. The core unease, the sense that Joe, Jane and Gennefer average has lost control of the technology we use, and by extension of the societies we live in, has not gone away. It’s here, and it’s stronger than ever. And so is cyberpunk.