This weekend is the opening of the film adaptation of “The Da Vinci Code”, Dan Brown’s best-selling novel. Ron Howard brings it to the screen. The book was fun, and Dan Brown’s most notable skill as a writer became clear right at the very end: every prejudice you take into the book will be used against you. Think the Catholic Church is nothing but a long-running conspiracy? You’ll feel like you’re vindicated, right until the end. Think that every member of Opus Dei is some kind of lunatic bending Catholicism to a wicked end? You’ll be the smartest and most insightful person on the planet, right until you finish the book.
The point is, the book reveals that the long chain of events that come to a head that fateful night in France was set in motion by a singular, power-hungry man who bends the devotion of a twisted member of Opus Dei to his will. Of course, while there is a well-reasoned series of clues in this work of fiction, leading to the alleged resting place of the “Holy Grail”, it’s never actually clear whether the long tale of this artifact is true, or just true enough in the mind of a Harvard professor. Ultimately, the book’s biggest virtue is that it calls you to question the basis of pure belief: belief in the absolute infallibility of the Bible, the motives of the early Christian church, and in the evidence pointing to the existence of an artifact without ever actually finding the artifact itself (in the book, the existence of the Holy Grail is only inferred through clues and the word of members of organizations, never by direct scientific observation). It’s the great IRONY of “The Da Vinci Code” that a scholar, a man of reason and maybe even science (in his own mind), accepts the clues placed in his path by fallible people, and takes the reality of those clues as evidence for the existence of the Grail itself – not very scientific. In trying to challenge belief, Dan Brown invokes pretty bad science.
What we must all remember is that while books like “Le Miserables”, “The Brothers Karamazov”, “The Fountainhead”, and, yes, even “The Da Vinci Code” contain challenging ideas, they are ultimately embedded in a fictional tale bent to meet the ideas and needs of the author. The book is a vector for these ideas, delivering them into your head. If you blindly accept them, it’s really your own fault. Ideas are not vitamin pills to be swallowed, but a rich and lusterous meal to be savored for a long, long time before they are, ultimately, digested. It’s a little silly that so many people buy into ideas wholesale, just because they challenge other long-established ideas.
What I like about “The Da Vinci Code” is that, like other works of fiction, it causes us to engage in a discussion that we might never otherwise have thought to start. Was Jesus a real person, or an allegory in Himself? If he was a martyred rebel leader, immortalized by his followers in the 200 years following his death, could he have a bloodline that lives on to this day? How did the modern Gospel come to be constructed? Nobody should fear questions like this, but rather use them as an opportunity to have a frank and insightful discussion. Jodi, for instance, has used the buzz over this book as a real chance to explore the Gnostic texts; the recent unveiling of the “Gospel of Judas”, a pretty weird text, made it even clearer that the accepted Gospel was a distillation out of many writings, some with alternate interpretations of events.
I find it a little silly, if not a little unnerving, that there has been a “call for a global boycott of the movie”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/05/14/MNGKLIRPU41.DTL by some members of the Catholic Church, among other organizations. Fear of ideas is the kind of thing that created the great, and ultimately hated, totalitarian states in history. One need only look back to the last century at Eastern Europe and Russia for evidence that suppressing ideas and opinions crushes, and ultimately unravels, a society. Sometimes, I wish America would learn from this.
Rather than a boycott, why not do what some pastors are doing: encourage parishioners to go and see the movie, then go out for coffee and engage in a discussion of the ideas presented in the film (or the book, if you can read). Treating a work of fiction so seriously, either by completely accepting its arguments or by completely shunning them, leads down a dark path that abandons all reason and invites the very demons of fear, uncertainty, and doubt into your society.
