DaVinci Code

marite · May 24, 2006, 9:46pm

Dean J;

I’ve heard of people doing so with TDVC and so has the Vatican. But I always wonder whether people do so with the idea of confirming their belief in a book or just to see the real setting for some narrative they know is fictional, kind of like people visiting the Universal Studio backlot.

I recall visiting a historical site where a popular movie was shot. Instead of explaining the history of the site, the guide kept saying “and this is where scene … in the movie… was shot.” And some tour members who had obviously seen the movie, nodded excitedly in recognition. But they knew the movie plot was not real.

In the window of a Cambridge, MA laundromat, there is a sign “this laundromat was featured in Love Story.”

nedad · May 25, 2006, 5:38am

Marite, I have to agree with the thing you posted on this one. I believe the Catholic Church has every right to point out the hundreds of historical and other factual errors in the book. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was a vicious 19th century anti-Semitic forgery written by Russians that purported to show Jewish plots to take over the world. It was revealed as a hoax but is a best-seller in Muslim world to this day. I can imagine what would happen if a movie was made of it, showing (for example), Jews killing Christian babies for their blood. The DVC will remain in print forever, and millions of people will believe it (this is NOT to say that it should not be published - I believe in a free press, and it’s fiction - but it would be disingenuous were anyone to say that the Vatican or Catholics in general overreact if they worry about this book and its effect on the future. It’s not about “blasphemy” - so what if the book says Jesus isn’t divine - but fear of the rise of hatred etc).

While CC readers are intelligent and know Brown’s book is fiction, you would be stunned at how many people believe it’s true - that the Catholic Church, through any means necessary including murder, has hidden the “truth” of the “real” gospels, suppressed Mary Magdalene etc. This - despite the fact that Mary Magdalene is a SAINT in the Catholic Church, and that the “other gospels” were written centuries later and have no more effect on the “foundations of Christianity” than us finding a 1940s document telling us that the Founding Fathers were gay, because we can tell by the songs on their ipods! (and those “gospels” were never hidden but were discussed in various writings).

I have no objection to the publication of the book, but other than the fact that the Louvre is in Paris, I couldn’t find a thing in the book that was historically accurate. There are hundreds of things that are false, but it would take a gazillion posts to cover them (umm, like “The Vatican” didn’t exist in the 4th century!). For example, Brown carries on that 1970s canard that the church burned “millions of women as witches,” when non-Catholic feminist scholars, Oxford historians etc agree that 1) the number was more like 40,000; 2) most were killed in Protestant countries; 3) they were executed by civil authorities, not the church, when capital punishment was far more used than it is today; 4) 25% were men; 5) many were turned in by other women; 6) none were killed for being midwives; etc. etc., etc.

Many things that are false in the book - a myriad of “facts” about art history, etymology, church architecture, etc. ad infinitum, are just moronically stupid and ignorant. I mean, for heaven’s sake, has anyone seen Leonardo’s (not “da Vinci”, any more than Mother Teresa’s name is “Of Calcutta”) painting of John the Baptist? It looks even more feminine than his painting of John in "The Last Supper. " But others - especially the libel/slander against Opus Dei - are very disheartening. I can’t imagine making a movie about, say, the NAACP, saying that their real purpose is to murder whites, but it’s secret so we think those murders are just unsolved, etc. There was no reason Brown could not have used a different name instead of a real organization with real people.

The worst problem I see among college students (at a nonelite school) is skepticism about knowing anything. No matter how many facts they are shown, even irrefutable ones (example: Brown claims no one believed Jesus was divine before the Council of Nicea, when there are many, many letters and writings of the early Christians, not to mention the letters of Paul dating from 50 AD, that say Christians DID believe this) - these students say, “Yeah, well, that’s what YOU say but you can’t REALLY ever know.” I find this depressing and astonishing. We know EXACTLY what was debated at the Council of Nicea (not whether Jesus was divine, but HOW) and we know that the vote was overwhelming (like 250 to 2!), yet these students still say, “But you don’t really know!”

The BBC and “60 Minutes” both revealed that the “Priory of Sion” that Leonardo was supposed to belong to was a 1950s hoax created by a French anti-Semite who planted stuff in the British Museum so it would look medieval - and the guy ADMITTED HOW HE DID IT - and yet ALL - yes, 100% - of the 40 students I asked STILL believe it is a real, secret society!

So there are my problems. I read the book, admit it was a page-turner, but very badly written (I threw it across the room about 200 times!). But what bothers me is the book’s ability (proven ability, judging by the surveys) to turn people against the innocent, to pour into the culture a huge, monumental number of ridiculous errors in history, art, etc., and worst of all to foment a culture of epistemological skepticism of the worst sort (no flames about HEALTHY skepticism please - you all know what I mean!).

(PS - I found the movie terribly bloated and boring, and Council of Nicea scene utterly and completely ridiculous. Funniest of all was when during Langdon’s “lecture” on “symbology” he flashes an ancient image of mother and child and asks what it is, and the audience says something like “Madonna and child,” and Langdon says no, - it’s a pagan goddess. The people gasp — Good Heavens! Now we get it!! the Christian image must be…copied!)

(Also, many Jews hated the book’s anti-semitism. The claims about the Temple prostitutes and the meaning of the post-renaissance name “Jahweh” - which Brown thinks is an ancient word - are ludicrous, as is the statement that everything in Church ritual was taken from pagans, when those things were adapted from Judaism. )

(Finally - anthropologically speaking, the few cultures that worshipped a “Goddess” as the high god - some anthropologists even say that there may have been only one such culture - also brutalize women. They were MORE likely to be misogynist because the women were looked at as dung, unable to live up to the beauty of the Goddess. )

marite · May 25, 2006, 6:49am

Nedad:

Of course, the Catholic church has every right to object. But I still think that if it had just shrugged, the book, and especially the movie, would not have gotten so much free publicity. And for the Catholic church, the timing of its objections could not be more disastrous, coming in the wake of disclosures about not only sexual abuses among its clergy but cover-ups of such abuses. So a lot of people are far more willing to pay heed to conspiracy theories than might have done a few years ago. Additionally, skepticism about claims of papal infallibility and the pope’s supposed ties to Opus Dei is similarly fueling resistance to the church’s opposition to the book.

At any rate, I have not found the interest to read TDVC myself. I read Elaine Pagels’s articles about the Gnostic Gospels when they came out in the NYRB many years ago and found them enthralling and believable.

Finally, for more on any publicity is good publicity, one might look at the case of Harvard. Two years of bad publicity, with its president being criticized, with its faculty being attacked for being feministas, radicals, fossils, what have you–and the result? A higher yield than ever before.

mini · May 25, 2006, 11:21am

Hasn’t worked for “higher yield” for priests. ;)

marite · May 25, 2006, 11:24am

Mini: LOL! That one is a doozy. But the bad publicity means the rules have changed for priests. They haven’t for TDVC or for Harvard.

garland · May 25, 2006, 12:50pm

Nedad–nice post. I listed in another thread my issues with the book (ridiculous level of error presented as fact, and really, really bad writing) but you did it better.

And your main point is a very important one: the inability to think critically about presented information, disguised as “skepticism”.

yesterday, my H was going over a biology test he’d given in a class he’s long term subbing for. It’s an inclusiion class, so there’s also a special ed teacher. She misunderstood one question, drawn directly from the textbook, and so she thought the wrong answer was correct. When my H pointed to which was right–she announced to the class that there were different ways to interpret, and this was a good example, so either answer was correct.

No, it wasn’t! The sentence in the book was clearly written, (a non-biologist, I had no trouble figuring out what it said.) But instead of admitting she was wrong, she opted to go with, well, no one really knows. This is Science! for gosh sake. It was clear fact.

It’s the same kind of thinking that is resorted to by Holocaust deniers and creationists–don’t bother me with facts, I like my interpretation better. And calling it fiction doesn’t change this, when it starts with an introduction that all the facts are true as presented.

marite · May 25, 2006, 12:54pm

I thought that all interpretations are valid was a po-mo idea. Who would have thunk it’s been appropriated by extreme tradtionalists!

garland · May 25, 2006, 6:26pm

I’ve always felt that it’s worth hearing and evaluating other interpretations, with the key word being “evaluating”. Plenty of what is received wisdom is in fact, wrong; perceiving this is also critical thinking.

But this is definitely not the same thing as all interpretation being equal–and when po-mo got to those extremes, I opted out of grad school (well, that was one reason…)

Edit: but it’s too funny when “conservative” thinkers start resorting to it!

tenniscraze · May 25, 2006, 7:49pm

“I’ll add that while it’ll never be a favorite novel of mine, I think it’s a great airport/airplane book. (Whereas ANGELS AND DEMONS I wanted to throw into the fireplace, not because of any heresy but because it was Godawful.) Dan Brown is fairly mediocre as a writer but he does one thing well and one thing brilliantly.”

ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? Angels and Demons is by far the MOST EXCITING and BEST book i’ve ever read! It such a thriller!!!

ChuckNorris · May 25, 2006, 7:58pm

Angels and Demons was pretty mediocre, but Digital Fortress was hilarious. The expert assasin in the book uses a silenced revolver…enough said.

The Hassasin should have won. It was too much of a Hollywood ending.

marite · May 25, 2006, 8:01pm

NEdad:

You are right about people being gullible. And it’s not just the general public. Someone I know thinks he did not get a teaching job because he got an argument over a film that was set in the area and the period my acquaintance specialized in. The person with whom he had the argument, a specialist in another part of the world, was adamant that the film he’d seen was based on truth and got very irritated when my acquaintance said how unlikely the whole story was. Of course, it does not pay to argue with people who are in a position to offer or deny you a job. But it astounded me that a well educated man would fall for a movie line and disregard the opinion of a specialist in the field.

UVADeanJ · May 27, 2006, 10:42am

Well, I finally saw it last night.

Perhaps my ears were a little more tuned in to hear it, but they were careful to point out that the “bad guys” were “fascist Opus Dei” and to show a secret meeting of Bishops who didn’t want Rome to know what they were doing.

I was prepared for a sweeping generalization about the entire Church.

Anyway, if I hadn’t read the book, I think I would have thoroughly enjoyed the movie (but isn’t that always the case?). There were points when it got a little silly with the fast “tidying up” of details, but overall, I think it was a good adaptation.

I wonder how many tourists are looking for clues around Paris and London these days. Oh well.

marite · May 27, 2006, 11:11am

Maybe it’s replacing tourists moving en masse first to the left of the Mona Lisa then to the right because they’ve been told that “she follows you with her eyes.”

When I was living in England, an artist had published a book full of clues about a buried treasure (it was for real) in Wales (where else but the land “Where Be Dragons?”). Whoever could find it would get a large prize. For a while the Welsh countryside was filled with adults armed with books looking for treasure.

ChuckNorris · May 27, 2006, 12:04pm

It will only last for a couple of months. People these days seem to have a short attention span.

coureur · May 27, 2006, 12:26pm

^^I wouldn’t count on it dying out that fast. My business colleagues in Marseille report that the countryside still gets invaded regularly by Brits and Yanks carrying copies of “A Year in Provence” under their arms. And that book has been out for more than a decade and was not nearly so popular as Da Vinci Code.

UVADeanJ · May 27, 2006, 3:40pm

Peter Mayle has kept the Provence books going. There have got to be at least five in his personal “series”, plus a few novels, all set in Provence.

My family is from Haute Provence (and I studied abroad in Cannes). The people and places in those books are all there. I think people searching out some of the things in Brown’s books will have some trouble.

DaVinci Code

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