Upsetting Day: The Magic Christian

When I was but a lad, knee-high to a very tall man’s knees (average child-height, you might say), my Papa finally took the whiskey bottle out of his mouth long enough to teach me something I’m still glad to know. For the sake of the family honor, I should add that he didn’t have a drinking problem, just a debilitating fear of cups. Tap water dribbled down his stupid, sober chin as his lips formed the words I shall never forget - “Hey, let’s watch The Magic Christian.”

My tiny mind kicked into gear, eager to decipher the meaning behind the cryptic title. “So, what, like, Jesus?” I asked, “or just a really devout magician?” “What’s the difference?” Dad said with a broad wink and a chuckle. We basked together for a moment in the warm feeling of shared father-and-son smugness. I took a deep pull from my sippy cup full of the whiskey that he’d emptied from the whiskey bottle to make room for his water. “Anyway…” I trailed off, staring into space and intentionally unfocusing my eyes. I think that was the last time he and I really talked.

Welcome to Laserdiscs in the Rain.

What do Dr. Grant, Saruman the White, still-at-large rapist Roman Polansky, one of the Pythons and a goddamn Beatle all have in common? Weiners sheathed in lily-white skin aside, the answer is this movie, which also features an uncredited Yul Brynner performing “Mad About the Boy” in drag, which, casting-wise, is such a wig on a hat on a hat on a hairless head that I couldn’t bring myself to cram it into the previous sentence - and I haven’t even fucking identified the main character yet.

That would be Peter Sellers (The Pink Panther, Being There, There’s a Girl in my Soup!), widely considered one of the premiere comedians and actors of his era. We’re talking Dr. Strangelove himself, plus like nine other characters from that movie. I’m pretty sure he played the conference table.

Sellers, who championed the film, was a big fan of adapting books into movies, black humor, and satirizing capitalism, three passions that conspired to make him think this project would be a good idea. Spoilers: it wasn’t. If you saw Triangle of Sadness, it’s a lot like that, but if it were written in one sitting by a college sophomore on adderall whose idea of what constitutes saucy language is decidedly 1969.

Of course, to truly understand the degree to which painting the word HUMP on the wall totally fucks with the pigs and wrecks their systems of oppression, we’ve got to go back to the beginning. And, in the beginning, the studio knew they wanted someone from Monty Python, so they went and got the best one, John Cleese. Waxiest too!

After that, they knew they wanted a Beatle, in part as a meta-joke about their movies Help! and A Hard Day’s Night, which had a wacky, countercultural tone similar to what they wanted to capture with The Magic Christian. Naturally, they first approached the best one, John Lennon, for whom the part was originally written. They got Ringo. Hey, you can’t win ‘em all.

Then Ringo was like, “‘oy mates, can I get a song on the soundtrack?” and they were quite wisely like “absolutely not. About what, an octopus? Settle down.” So they got Badfinger to score the movie instead, a band Paul had recently taken under his - wait for it - wings. From Ringo’s point of view, that’s kind of like asking if you can be Best Man at your friend’s wedding and they say they’d rather use it as an opportunity to test out the robot they’ve been tinkering with in their garage.

You can tell right away that you’re in for biting satire, on account of the first thing the narrator does is define “money,” but, humorously, they hold on a shot of some lady who apparently weighs ten pounds. This is called “poetic irony,” like when Phoebe sang “Smelly Cat” at Central Perk. In this case, Ringo plays a smelly cat who likes to kick it in the local park, where indeed he sleeps and lives. At the top of the film, Peter Sellers, established as the richest man in the world, Guy Grand, “saves the cat” when he decides on a whim to adopt the unhoused man as his official son and heir. Oh boy, two of the wealthiest entertainers walking the face of the Earth are going to tell us why money is bad!

The first and only lesson Guy has to impart is that “everyone has their price.” The rest of the movie is a series of escalating rich guy pranks designed to prove that to Ringo, who already believed it at the beginning and didn’t seem to care particularly. He kind of Ringos around with Pete and watches the pranks unfold, occasionally interjecting to say something less handsome and talented than the other Beatles would have.

He never plays the drums, but on the bright side he never sings either. Back on the dark side, Ringo does at one point play an oversized and therefore extra-shrill recorder while Daddy Grand molests a harp wearing what 1969 imagined virtual reality headsets might be.

This is, of course, right before Peter Sellers talks about how the bible is bullshit while doing skateboard tricks in his mansion. You can’t see it under his pristine white turtleneck, but he’s got a “How do you do, fellow kids?” tattoo on his chest and a “Born 2B Edgelord” on the back.

In case you haven’t caught on to the pattern yet, this movie is primarily insufferable rich guy shit LARPing as subversive and revolutionary. It really is just prank after prank, all with the same moral - if you pay people enough, you can get them to do unpleasant things. It’s Fear Factor without Joe Rogan, which admittedly does sound like an improvement. I mean, lying in a tub full of cockroaches, fine, but to have to interact with Joe Rogan? There’s no prize pool big enough, my alpha-brained friend.

If you’ve seen the Simpsons episode where Homer gets raped by a panda, you’ve already basically seen ninety-eight percent of The Magic Christian. If you haven’t, congratulations, you know how to get off a train before it jumps the rails and kills everybody. The actual pranks in question range from the totally mundane, like tricking a rich lady into using foamy shampoo or paying a Shakespearian actor to whip out his hog onstage…

…to the absolutely cuckoo-bananas, like buying a hotdog in such a bizarre way that it makes the vendor’s sodas explode…

…to swapping people needlessly only to violently abduct their mark for a techno party DJed by a septuagenarian droog in a bowler hat.

But I don’t need to explain this all to you, you get satire, you’ve read Swift. Orwell would take one look at this and be like “yeah, satire, you nailed it. Someone get me an elephant to shoot.” In case you’re still not onboard with the revolution, they make sure to dive right into the race issue without hesitation or forethought, and tackle it with a similar degree of tact.

It’s not the word you think it is, but it’s still real bad! Still, sometimes a racial epithet or two is the price we pay to make a trenchant point about intersectionality and colorism. For example, have you ever noticed how black people’s heads always be this way, and white people’s feet always be this way?

But I know what you’re thinking: I must have Ringo and Peter’s opinions on the gays. Surely they have some thoughts on the gays, right? RIGHT?! I don’t know man, let’s ask Austin Powers.

That time it’s exactly the word you think it is.

Oh, I almost forgot to say, this movie also taught me all the British terms for weed, which include, but are not limited to:

• Damnable wog hemp

• Scurrilous bog-a-bong

• The greenie weenies

• Thatcher’s pubes

• Lorrie

• A right ghastly bother

• Her Royal Highness Marigold Jane XVII

• Doupe (pronounced “dope”)

• Stemmy-seedies

• Yankee slaw

• The blimey

• Bob’s your vicar

• A bit of the cheeky bloody mugging me off

• Pot

Eventually The Magic Christian does get around to satirizing the wealthy, with all the panache of someone brainstorming a political cartoon off the top of their head. What if he eats fancy food, but like, he doesn’t even give a shit?

What if they pay a cop to eat a parking ticket? That would be hilarious and super satisfying!

Oh, no, wait, dude. Dude dude dude…what IF…what if, dude…they BLEW UP ALL THE CHURCHES IN THE WORLD?

Is that too pointed? Too satirical? We don’t want the audience spontaneously rioting in the streets. Oh well, to balance it out we can just add a scene where Guy’s money enables him to do some wild shit, like buying and then cutting up a Rembrandt. It’s completely off-topic vis a vis “everyone has their price,” but at least it makes the rich guy seem fun and likable. That’s what we were doing, right, humanizing the wealthy?

Everything finally culminates in the maiden voyage of the eponymous Magic Christian, a luxury superyacht for the ultra-rich. Naturally, Guy has bought everyone on the staff out at an outrageous price, ordering the captain to drink the whole time…

…a guy in a gorilla suit to hurl the captain off the boat even though he’s explicitly in on the prank…

…and a bunch of life vests that blow up way too big when you pull the cord, which is admittedly extremely funny and probably the best gag in the movie (except for the dowager lady’s foamy shampoo of course, they really owned her ass).

Just when all the rich people think they’re going to drown, the world falls away and the whole cruise is revealed to be fake. In reality, they’re all in a big warehouse with the words “SMASH CAPITALISM” painted on the wall.

Yep, that’ll do it! In case that doesn’t do it, they then pay the rich people to fish for money in a big vat of shit and piss and blood.

Finally, their important work complete, our heroes use the last of their cash to bribe a cop to let them sleep in the same park Ringo started out in.

Two things to point out here. First, that’s not what shit and piss and blood look like when you mix them together. TRUST ME. Secondly, a movie about a rich guy who decides to follow an unhoused guy around and learn how the other half lives is both a more interesting and infinitely cheaper story to tell. Instead of “everyone has their price,” you could have said “everyone deserves dignity.” That’s a more nuanced idea, though. Paying rich people to swim in shit might not be as insightful, but it’ll definitely move more tickets, and this is a business after all. I guess everyone has their price.

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