A few Christians have optimistically hoped that The Da Vinci Code might provide a potential opportunity for dialogue and discussion about Jesus with people who might not otherwise be open to such discussions. Yet if anything the film seems calibrated precisely to inoculate viewers against any such discussion — to leave viewers with a skeptical agnosticism about efforts to set the record straight is all part of the conspiracy, “what they want you to think” (or “we can’t be sure”).
The Da Vinci Code throws so much mud around that at least some of it is likely to stick in viewers’ minds. Was Constantine really a lifelong pagan who invented the doctrine of the deity of Christ and compiled the Bible as we know it? Did the Church really declare Mary Magdalene to be a prostitute in 591? Was Sir Isaac Newton really persecuted over his theories of gravitation, the way we all “know” Galileo was for his heliocentrism (or not)?
How many viewers will have any idea about all these questions? There are so many specifics, so much information, surely some of it has to be true, or is likely be true, or could be true. Or at least, “we can’t be sure.”
Most viewers will probably assume that Opus Dei doesn’t really have monk assassins (or for that matter any monks at all). Yet the general impression of something shadowy and unsettling about the group is likely to remain in their minds.
Beyond that, on an imaginative level, there is a sense in which the film’s relentless association of Catholic imagery — crucifixes, clergy, churches — with pervasive creepiness and depravity amounts to a kind of aesthetic slur that is hard to counter with mere arguments or talking points.
Astonishingly, after a 2½?hour seminar on the evils of monotheism, Christianity, and the Catholic Church, The Da Vinci Code tries to have its cake and eat it too, as Langdon suggests to Sophie that “What really matters is what you believe,” even questioning whether exploding the “greatest cover-up in history” would really be such a good thing after all: Does Sophie want to “destroy faith or renew it?”
It almost sounds as if Langdon is saying, “So Christianity is a lie — let the Christians have their lie, if that’s what makes them happy.” Whatever happened to “For 2000 years the Church has rained oppression and suffering on mankind”?
Is it possible to put all this aside and just enjoy the story as a thriller, an enjoyable yarn? I honestly have no idea how people can take that approach.
And in our hourly lurching between thinking this is just a laughably bad joke and (buttressed by A.N. Wilson and Greydanus) thinking that the anti-Catholicism comes across more seriously than ever…we present:
So Dark the Con of Dan…which looks like the best DVC-takedown site ever.
All information contained within this website has been poorly researched and/or totally invented. Rarely do we bother to read our work after it has been written.
Enter the Louvre Pyramid thingy May 2006
To my mind, the most ineffable gnostic secret of all is how such hooey has managed to capture the imagination of tens of millions of people all around the world. My best guess is that the book’s success has to do with its timing: Beset by faceless enemies and engaged in endless wars, perhaps we need the comforting certainty of the occult. The message at the heart of this story’s paranoid labyrinth is, ostensibly, an anti-clerical one: Jesus is no god but only a man, and the Catholic Church is little more than a transhistorical Cosa Nostra dedicated to covering up that fact. But despite its purported iconoclasm, The Da Vinci Code is at heart deeply religious, and monotheistic at that: It wants us to believe that there is one secret truth that can change history, that that truth is knowable, and that only through Tom Hanks can we know it. Our salvation depends on Forrest Gump.
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