Life of Brian · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Far at the back of the crowd on the mountainside, too far to actually hear, a small group is doing its best. The man up front has said something about the meek, and then something about the peacemakers, except that at this distance it comes through as "blessed are the cheesemakers." A helpful neighbour clarifies that this is obviously not meant to refer only to makers of cheese, but should be taken to embrace all manufacturers of dairy products. Nobody up front will ever know. The joke is a matter of physics. Peter Biziou shoots the Sermon on the Mount at the true scale of a biblical epic — the hard Tunisian sun, the deep vista, the distance a real crowd would stand at — and it is precisely that seriousness, that refusal to signal comedy, that makes the mishearing land. The image plays straight. The silliness is entirely a product of how the crowd reads it.

That gap between what happens and what a crowd makes of it is the whole engine of the film, and it happens to be one of the cleaner illustrations you will find of what Deleuze calls the relation-image, or the mental-image. Most cinema runs on the sensory-motor circuit: a man sees a situation and acts to change it. The relation-image works differently. Its meaning isn't in the action on screen but in the relations a third party holds between things — and that third party is usually us, the audience, supplying the connective tissue that makes a scene mean. Life of Brian externalises that third party and drops it into the frame. The crowd is the audience, and it is the crowd, not Brian, that manufactures every ounce of significance. Brian barely does anything. The people around him do all the interpreting, and they do it wrong.

Watch how they read. Brian, fleeing followers he never wanted, loses a sandal. In the time it takes to hit the ground it stops being a shoe and becomes a sign — hold the shoe aloft! Others, working from a slightly different rule, decide the true path is to remove one shoe and hop; a third lot take up the gourd. This is exactly what Deleuze means by a mark: an object that carries meaning only through a customary chain, the logic of when you see X, expect Y. A sandal means nothing. A sandal in the hands of people primed to find a messiah means everything, and means six incompatible things at once. The gag isn't that they're stupid. It's that belief is a reading habit, and once the habit is running it will convert any object into scripture.

Deleuze pairs the mark with its disruptor, the demark — the anomaly that breaks the habit and forces a new reading. Brian keeps trying to be a demark. He tells the mob to sod off and think for themselves. "You are all individuals," he shouts, and the crowd chants back, in perfect unison, "Yes, we are all individuals" — until one small voice adds "I'm not." Even his attempt to break the spell gets folded straight back into doctrine. "He has spoken to us out of his arse" is the same machine running on pure noise. The habit is stronger than the sign. Nothing Brian can do will demark him, because the meaning was never in him to begin with.

There's a name for what the crowd is doing, and it's one of Deleuze's most hopeful ideas turned here into something bleak and very funny. Fabulation is the act of a people telling itself into existence — subjects caught in the act of legending, inventing the story that will make them a community. Deleuze prizes it as the seed of a people to come. Life of Brian shows fabulation's dark twin: a crowd legending an ordinary man into an authority because it wants an authority, and the wanting does all the work. And note what this same crowd cannot manage. Set against the messiah-hunger is the revolution — the People's Front of Judea, the Judean People's Front, small clusters of solemn men in colonnaded ruins who agree on everything and will not merge. This is Deleuze's other political axiom made literal: the people are missing. They cannot cohere into a people because they cannot stop subdividing into acronyms. They invent a saviour by accident and fail to build a movement on purpose.

The film earns its epic look by theft, and knows it. It reused Zeffirelli's Tunisian sets from Jesus of Nazareth, borrowed the processional grandeur of Ben-Hur, and aimed its sharpest parody at the reverent tableau staging of The Greatest Story Ever Told — that distant, hushed Sermon is the exact register being punctured. When the condemned all claim to be Brian to save him, Spartacus's selfless "I'm Spartacus" is inverted into self-serving farce: "I'm Brian, and so's my wife." What Terry Jones and the Pythons did, extending the sketch-into-story discipline they'd found on Holy Grail, was build a comedy whose real subject is signification itself — how faith, authority and revolution are all just crowds reading. So watch it again, but stop watching Brian. Watch the people behind him deciding what he means. That is where the film lives, and it has not stopped being true.