RIP Ter­ry Jones – In praise of Mr Cre­osote and The Mean­ing of Life

A ran­dom recent view­ing of the 1983 film Mon­ty Python’s The Mean­ing of Life left an indeli­ble image on my mind. It’s an image that had blurred a lit­tle from the time it was first imprint­ed there, way back in my ear­ly teens, when watch­ing a film like this was con­sid­ered a sub­ver­sive act to be savoured. (Prophet­ic side note: I first acquired the film on a VHS that came as a free gift with a take­away pizza).

This is a film that – for bet­ter and for worse – sup­plied you what now might be referred to in com­mon par­lance as ​“cursed images” – those dia­bol­i­cal visu­al con­coc­tions that are indexed in the mind in a shady sec­tion pro­tect­ed by lock and key. These are images that have nev­er been seen before and will nev­er be seen again.

I am refer­ring, of course, to the chap­ter about two thirds into the film which arrives with the title ​“Autumn Years”. It begins with Eric Idle singing a very wit­ty, Noël Cow­ard-esque piano dit­ty about the penis, before segue­ing into the main event – a meal enjoyed by the obscene­ly cor­pu­lent human but­ter-ball, Mr Cre­osote, as realised by Ter­ry Jones caked under sed­i­men­ta­ry lay­ers of gris­ly prosthetics.

For those who haven’t had the plea­sure of wit­ness­ing this grotesque cha­rade, it sees our ​“hero” wad­dling into a clas­sic sketch com­e­dy restau­rant dressed in a fig­ure-hug­ging XXXXXXXXL tuxe­do, and being served up every item on the giant menu. Creosote’s unremit­ting glut­tony is enabled by a toad­y­ing French wait­er as played by John Cleese. Bod­i­ly flu­ids gush like vol­canic hot springs, and a final ​“waafer-thin” after-din­ner mint becomes the det­o­na­tor that nudges Creosote’s phys­i­cal capac­i­ties over the top.

It’s one of the great gross-out set-pieces, cli­max­ing with Jones’ foul cre­ation bereft of inter­nal organs and cir­cu­la­to­ry sys­tem, but some­how still angry at the incon­ve­nience of the sit­u­a­tion. It’s a sequence that reach­es the point of tran­scen­dence the more you watch it, as the sense of phys­i­cal dis­gust at what you’re see­ing even­tu­al­ly gives way to the film’s earnest (if jok­ing­ly cyn­i­cal) philo­soph­i­cal inti­ma­tions regard­ing the rela­tion­ship we have with our own bod­ies, and how that rela­tion­ship can be cor­rupt­ed by unfet­tered capitalism.

Jones plays Cre­osote as unre­pen­tant and evil – an over­sized beast with no sense of how much space he’s actu­al­ly tak­ing up. Inter­est­ing­ly, he doesn’t give Cre­osote his own refined, posh accent, but more of a rough, North Lon­don work­ing class brogue, mak­ing him come across as a nou­veau riche ruf­fi­an who has no idea what to do with his wealth oth­er than con­sume it and build it into his own body. He dines alone, the sug­ges­tion being that a man like this would have no use for human com­pa­ny. It would be trag­ic if it weren’t so comic.

It’s maybe a lit­tle cheap to draw a con­nec­tion between this paragon of avarice and mod­ern cap­tains of indus­try who appear to want to amass mate­r­i­al wealth to a point where it becomes lit­tle more than a mean­ing­less met­ric, but it needs to be said. The bil­lion­aires of the world, sit­ting atop their tee­ter­ing mon­ey moun­tains, have more than a dash of Cre­osote in their blood – con­sum­ing every­thing in their paths and get­ting fat while those around them look on in dis­gust, wip­ing the flecks of blood and vom­it from their own soiled ball gowns. Even as they can take no more, it’s still some­how in our inter­est to feed them. How soon until they explode?

This is an idle mem­o­ry, one that seems sad­ly rel­e­vant now that Jones has passed after pre­vi­ous­ly announc­ing, in 2017, that he was suf­fer­ing from demen­tia. The sit­u­a­tion calls for hyper­bole, but it’s not over­stat­ing how great a com­ic per­former he was. The Mean­ing of Life unlocked a per­verse, per­son­al desire to con­sume images that would oth­er­wise go unseen in real life. On a DVD extra of my favourite film of all time, Play­time, I recall see­ing Jones remark that Jacques Tati made him realise that com­e­dy could be fun­ny and beau­ti­ful at the same time. The Mr Cre­osote sketch is def­i­nite­ly beau­ti­ful, in its own repul­sive way.