(Another repost from my own blog)
One of the many classic moments in Monty Python and the Holy Grail is when King Arthur confronts a peasant who insists that his community doesn’t have a king because “we’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune” while another peasant argues that they’re “an autonomous collective.” It’s funny precisely because we know those terms didn’t exist back in the days of chivalry While people in every era have similar basic feelings and drives, they express or define them very differently. There were medieval thinkers and undoubtedly peasants who disliked kings or dreamed of life without them but they didn’t use 19th and 20th century political terms to do it.
In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, we also get anachronism in the form of the anti-Roman resistance groups, the People’s Liberation Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front (Names IIRC). Resistance to occupying forces was certainly a thing in Judea but again, they didn’t use modern names like those. Here the point is not just the absurdity of the names; the film also mocks militant radicals of the 1970s and their constant infighting.
A third use for anachronism is more serious: To show that the past and the present aren’t that different (or Earth and the fourth planet of Betelgeuse, for that matter). People in the Roman Senate or Arthurian Britain discussing power politics in the same way we imagine modern-day American senators doing it. This can effectively drive home the point that we have more in common with the past than we imagine.
Ursula LeGuin argued that if you could put a scene in a fantasy novel into a present-day setting without changing anything but the names, the writer had screwed up and it wasn’t really a fantasy. I disagree with that though I agree that sometimes anachronism isn’t effective, just anachronistic.
I read a novel some decades back (written by an author since outed as a child abuser so I’m not naming them) set on a barbaric world where some women were rising up and demanding their rights. At first I was impressed by seeing them dealing with many of the same challenges women in the present day were. Then I realized that was all they were dealing with: on a planet where women’s rights are at the medieval level (i.e., not much), somehow the issues are exactly the same as they are on Earth. Oh, and centuries after our own time, Earth’s space force still can’t grasp that some women don’t change their name when they get married — the computerized records won’t accept it.
Anachronism. It can work for your story or against it, depending how well you use it.
(“People’s Liberation Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front (Names IIRC)”
It’s been a long time, bit iIrc, they worked the word ‘Liberation’ into the second name, too.)
“Ursula LeGuin argued that if you could put a scene in a fantasy novel into a present-day setting without changing anything but the names, the writer had screwed up and it wasn’t really a fantasy.”
I tend to agree – it’s a big part of why I don’t like the original Game Of Thrones, for example. (Not so much a present-day setting, but a real-world setting. It was based on the War Of The Roses, after all.)
I could never get into the series in book or TV form (TYG, who’s not into that sort of thing usually, liked both). The first book felt like people standing around declaring winter is coming and it’s going to be grim — did we mention it’s going to be grim? — for 500 pages.
Part of why I didn’t like it is because everything is grim. So, to me, it has no stakes – if the bad guys win, everything will be bad forever; but if the (less bad) guys win, everything will be bad forever.
That is a legit reason to dislike something. I have similar thoughts about the “grim and gritty” comics series I’ve read over the years.
it was the People’s Front of Judea, The Judean People’s Front, the Judean Popular Peoples’ Front, the Popular Front (of Judea) and the Campaign for Free Galilee
Thank you. If I get a spare moment I shall update accordingly.
Splitters!
Pound for pound, Holy Grail probably has more jokes (the peasant scene is a Python favourite of mine), but Life of Brian as an overall narrative is probably the best the team has written and is as relevant as it’s ever been. You’re all individuals!
They’ve said it was their most fun working together. I need to rewatch it.
“Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” is one of their classic moments, as witness it turns up in the stage show Spamalot (I watched my brother playing King Arthur in a regional production recently).