FLYING MOTHERS

My summer vacation ended with an evening with my sister and her husband who were visiting from Romania. To make up for the regret of having left our favourite holidaying spot in Norway, we were watching The Life of Brian... again. I have as yet to meet somebody who can laugh like my sister. Every time, and time again. And that in spite of the fact that her proficiency in understanding Monty Python's English is somewhat limited. This prompted a reaction from my husband, who was trying to figure out what my sister, Mana, was laughing at exactly. This went for Mana's husband too, only the reason why he was wondering had to do with the movie itself, which he didn't think was funny. His loss. My husband, who is wit incarnated, made a comparison. Said he: there are two types of people who resemble either cats or dogs in their approach to happiness; when the owners of dogs give them something, the dogs don't know what it is, but they want it - when the owners of cats give them something, they don't know what it is, but they don't like it. This is shown in the animals' body language: dogs wag their tails; cats frown. Once that opinion was articulated there was no need to understand Mana's motivation. Although she made sharp observations about the film - she always does - it became clear in our subsequent analysis of it that the genius of The Life of Brian is precisely to illustrate that we religiously follow what we don't understand and that we do that because we either do or don't like it. The film operates with a circuitous style that orbits around our fascination (I don't know what it is) with binary opposites (but I do/don't want/like it). Fascination is Medusa's laugh, and Mana's. Monty Python is the flying mother.