Yesterday I saw The Da Vinci Code. I did not read the book, but I have been assured the movie was faithful to the book. My first impression was that as long as you did not give its rather shallow and predictable theologizing any weight, the movie was an entertaining disquisition on the power of Utopian beliefs to create fanaticism.
For those who haven't followed the story, as best I could determine, the plot involved the efforts of an ancient order of protectors of the Catholic Church to find and destroy the Holy Grail, not the chalice so many would identify as the Grail, but the sarcophagus of Mary Magdalene, supposed wife of the mortal Jesus Christ, in order to prevent any of their descendants form ever "proving" their lineage through DNA testing. An equally powerful opposing group protected the secret of the Sarcophagus/Grail descendants of the Jesus-Mary marriage.
The story is further muddled by the idea that if only the Church had never abandoned, (or if it returned to), its original sources, the union between the paternal and maternal visions of God, we would be able to return to peace, love, and happiness, while as a "bonus", destroying the patriarchal power of the Catholic Church.
I can understand why some Catholics might find the movie offensive, but I found it very easy to not take very seriously.
Furthermore, if you take it with a very large grain or two of salt, the movie simply replaces the action of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and the humor of Monty Python and the Holy Grail with intellectual puzzles and verbal challenges.
The movie's sympathies are clearly with Tom Hank's "every man" and Audrey Tautou's vulnerable beauty and mortality as opposed to the fanatics of the Church looking to protect its monopoly on power and those who wished to "prove" Christ's mortality in order to save the world.
While the film maker, and presumably the book's author, clearly believe that the Patriarchal Catholic Church has derailed history for almost 2000 years, and that restoring the Feminine to redress the balance will restore humanity to a more humane course, they inadvertently reveal their own subtle, and probably unconscious, Utopianism which is at the core of much leftist and feminist thought. As usual with those whose view of history is limited by ignorance and ideology, history is presented as a one-dimensional single-caused series of events. The addition of secret conspiracies always appeals to those who find the idea terrifying that true randomness, luck, and human foibles are at work in our unpredictable world. Chance is always more frightening than paranoia. The paranoid believes that someone, somewhere, is in charge and controls events; to believe that chance determines events and that no one is in control is often much more terrifying.
The Da Vinci Code imagines that there are those who control the levers of power for secret, but well defined, purposes. This fits in perfectly with the needs of those who are frightened of chaos and find fault with the short comings of the very human people we all must rely on to give us some feeling of security in a very unsettled world.
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