CULTURE SHOCK:The function of parody used to be to mock bad art, but now that it has become the dominant cultural mode, is serious work possible at all? asks Fintan O'Toole.
THE SCENE IS set in a small clearing in a dense and dark forest. The air is rent by the harsh crunch of metal on metal and the primitive grunts and cries of men in combat. There are close-up shots of huge swords swinging and clashing. Two knights cased from head to toe in the armour that makes them more mechanical than human are fighting to the death. A sword is thrust through the visor of one of them. Bright red blood gushes out in a gaudy fountain, as a horrible reminder that these are not, after all, creatures of metal. But the exaggerated flow of blood is also weirdly funny, turning the apparent realism of what has gone before into an absurd joke.
Monty Python fans will immediately identify this scene as the first part of the famous Black Knight sequence in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which culminates with more spurts of blood as John Cleese has each of his limbs cut off in turn. Except that what I've just described is not from that film at all. It's what is, or used to be, one of the great opening sequences in cinema history, that of Robert Bresson's 1974 masterpiece, Lancelot du Lac.
Bresson's film, a short, spare narrative of the last days of King Arthur's knights, told with minimal dialogue and a visual style that somehow combines a brutal realism with poetic grandeur, has long been one of my favourites. When it finally came out on DVD last month, I couldn't wait to watch it again. It had simply never occurred to me that the Pythons had parodied it so brilliantly that the stark, sombre, tragic mood on which it depends is invaded by the clowns from the very start. The effect is like being at a funeral Mass for a dearly beloved friend after someone has told you that the priest is wearing a thong and a Superman T-shirt under his vestments.
It's a moot point whether or not the parody is deliberate. Pythonologists have never mentioned Lancelot du Lac as an influence on The Holy Grail and the sequencing of the two films is too close for the Python project to have been conceived entirely as an exercise in extracting the urine from the great French auteur. (Lancelot du Lac had its premiere at Cannes in early May 1974, and The Holy Grail went into production later that month.) But the similarities in the visual and editing styles between the Black Knight sequence and the opening of Lancelot are far too close to be merely coincidental. So, arguably, is the way the sound of coconut shells, standing in for horses' hooves, picks up on Bresson's heavily symbolic soundtrack of creaking armour, cawing crows and neighing horses.
In any case, the experience of watching Lancelot is now fundamentally altered. This certainly has a lot to do with the particular nature of Bresson's style. His minimalism requires an absolute purity of engagement on the part of the audience. He creates a world and a mood, and anything extraneous - especially humour - will destroy it. The high-toned tragedy of a film like Lancelot, rooted as it is in the Romantic French theatre of the 19th century, is peculiarly vulnerable to the effects of parody. But the whole thing did get me wondering whether something larger is happening here - whether, in a postmodern culture saturated in pastiche and parody, Bresson's kind of seriousness is possible at all.
Historically, the function of parody has been to mock the aesthetically afflicted. From Don Quixote's devastating burlesque of chivalric quest literature to Swift's brilliant take-off of the moralising busybody pamphlet in A Modest Proposal, and from John Dryden's MacFlecknoe to This is Spinal Tap, its function has been to drive out bad art by mockery.
One of its preconditions has been that the parody is actually superior to its object. John Dryden is a much better poet than the object of his ridicule, Thomas Shadwell. Cervantes is remembered long after the writers he lampooned are forgotten. This is because the parodists wrote out of a fundamental seriousness and in defence of what they thought art should be.
What happens, though, when parody becomes ubiquitous? In the YouTube universe, where every song, every movie, every speech, spawns an instant array of caricatures, travesty has become the dominant cultural mode. It is no longer a critical intervention in a cultural war. It's just an automatic gesture, a reflex action.
The paradox of parodies is that they are now more likely to hurt good art than bad art. Dumb heavy-metal bands weren't laughed off the stage by Spinal Tap and crap disaster movies weren't driven from the screen by Airplane!. Austin Powers isn't James Bond's nemesis, just his warm-up man. In a post-ironic age of retro fads and tribute bands, parody becomes a kind of homage, giving us permission to enjoy rubbish in a camp, so-bad-it's-good way.
But it does hurt some kinds of good art. Much - Shakespeare, for example - is so rough and robust that it is utterly impervious to parody. Some, like the mainstream of Irish literary modernism from Joyce onwards, is so playful and knowing that it gets its own self-parodies in first. Some, though, works in a mode that demands a single, pure, controlled tone. It has to be viewed with an entirely straight face. Laughter kills it. Maybe there's a rough, Darwinian justice to killing off whatever cannot survive parody. But I miss the time when it was possibly to be moved by work that took itself completely seriously.