“The DaVinci Code” — did I watch the right movie?

  • I remem­ber an Sat­ur­day Night Live rou­tine from the 80s spoof­ing the pres­i­den­tial debate between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis. Dana Car­vey did his usual fud­dled and idi­otic Bush floun­der­ing through two min­utes of debate time with noth­ing at all to say. When he was fin­ished and the mod­er­a­tor asked Dukakis if he wanted to make a rebut­tal, all he could say was, “I can’t believe I’m los­ing to this guy!”

    That’s the feel­ing I got when I finally broke down and watched “The DaVinci Code” last night. It’s such old, old news at this point that I don’t even need to go into how deeply insult­ing its poetic license is. But here’s what I didn’t know — its poetic license isn’t even poetic. What I mean is, that movie’s just bad. And this has been inde­pen­dently ver­i­fied by Greg, who was never as con­cerned by its irrever­ance as I was. Yep, I just asked him once more, since he’s sit­ting right next to me on the couch. He invokes the say­ing that he says physics pro­fes­sors use to com­pletely dis­credit each other’s work: that’s not even wrong.

    And I won’t waste time just try­ing to express how unfor­tu­nate Tom Hanks’ hair is, or how annoy­ing the hop-skip-flop pac­ing is, or how inex­plic­a­bly poor Ron Howard’s direc­tion is. Because I don’t think it’s their fault. Moviemak­ers can occa­sion­ally make great movies from bad books — Spiel­berg did it with “Jaws” — but only when they get to basi­cally re-write the thing. With the book being as big a deal as it was, it’s for cer­tain that wasn’t possible.

    So a bad movie that came from a bad book — weak char­ac­ters, poor sto­ry­line, truly cav­ernous plot holes, limp end­ing. I feel like Michael Dukakis — I can’t believe we lost to these guys. Why did any­body ever buy the book in the first place?

    I think it’s really more of a tes­ta­ment to people’s deep long­ing for mys­ti­cism and gnos­sis — secret knowl­edge, accent on the secret. And maybe to the line of Secret Society/Brotherhood/Order malarkey that starts with the Knights Tem­plar (or maybe just with the leg­end of them) and went on to lend an unde­served power to freema­sonry and the Mor­mon church. That Secret Order stuff even­tu­ally frag­mented into the myr­iad Fra­ter­nal Orders that we have around today (Moose, Elk, Shriners, Lions, Rotary etc. etc.). And the power of them is gone. I know there are Ortho­dox Web-pages out there decry­ing the ills of freema­sonry — for that mat­ter there’s a Chick tract as well — but there don’t really need to be. The Ortho­dox Church is not los­ing great num­bers to them these days. And we note that no one is mak­ing a DaVinci Code decry­ing a hier­ar­chi­cal plot car­ried out by the Elks.

    The secrets are all gone now. If you wanted to know any­thing about the quasi-sacred rit­u­als of the masons or the Mor­mons, you can find numer­ous places on the inter­net to read all about it. The masons are aging out, as are most of the other fra­ter­nal orders. That line of pure curios­ity that made these things seem larger than life has been tapped out, and it’s actu­ally more sur­pris­ing than any­thing else that even the pure heresy of say­ing that The Big Secret was a blood­line of Jesus Christ and Mary Mag­da­lene man­aged to briefly resus­ci­tate that lively, sala­cious interest.

    And all the time, the biggest mys­tery of all goes on and on. Isn’t it tragic really? Peo­ple live their life now and never seem to notice the ques­tions that beg an answer — why are we here? where are we going? what is it for? The DaVinci Code gave wrong answers, but they were such weak wrong answers that they never would’ve sat­is­fied an intel­li­gent inquirer. The Church hasn’t been silent for 20 cen­turies — an invi­ta­tion into the deeper mys­ter­ies is always there for any­one who will take it.

    It just seems like the way peo­ple are right now and maybe have always been. They didn’t want the right answer, because the right answer would have required a response, even if it was just to bend their knee. They wanted imi­ta­tions, and weak ones were accept­able. Worth read­ing, worth gab­bing about, worth shelling out $8 to see.

    Well, we can all say we lived through this one. And that’s the best argu­ment some­times, just to be who you really are and not go away.


    Related posts:

    1. The peo­ple speak to “DaVinci”
    2. Phony gospels give me the blues
    3. A gay Mus­lim movie
    4. A bit dis­ap­pointed with the Getty exhibit
    5. Becom­ing Ortho­dox by Peter E. Gillquist

    January 13th, 2007 | Grace | 6 Comments |

6 Responses and Counting...

  • mark 01.13.2007

    Some peo­ple liked the movie, some did not. Not unlike Chick tracts, The DaVinici Code is purely a work of fic­tion and heresy. After read­ing the book, I thought the cast­ing of the movie was disappointing.

  • Grace

    The cast­ing was a prob­lem. And who’d have thought it, with Tom Hanks and Ian McKel­lan. But one of the prob­lems was that their styles absolutely didn’t com­ple­ment each other. Ian McKel­lan makes every­thing larger than life; Tom Hanks makes every­thing acces­si­ble. And the main actress just wasn’t up to their level. Oh well.

  • Erica

    I own that Dana Car­vey dvd and I com­pletely under­stand the parallel.

    “I can’t believe we’re los­ing to these guys.”

    Though, they’re los­ing to us in the King­dom of Heaven. :)

  • Symeon

    I saw the movie recently too. You can read my response here: http://symeonsjournal.blogspot.com/2006/12/davinc…

  • Grace

    Erica:
    Preach it, sister!

  • This Side of Glory » Blog Archive » Evi­dence that rein­forces Chris­tian­ity is never news (apparently)

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