Conspiracies Theories and the Illiterate

In 2003 a best selling novel, second in a series, titled: The Da Vinci Code was released to the masses in a chart-topping feat of literature. I was in high school. Now, it probably wouldn’t surprise anyone to know that I was never the most popular guy at the time. I was pretty quiet and when I made any noise at all it was only to get attention from those around me. But for the most part I seemed to fall into the background of whatever crowd I was in. Youth group was one such place. And while I didn’t seem to find my voice until college, even being in the background of the action, I still noticed and had a watcful part in the climate around me; namely, the disappearance of a young man without provocation or incident.

In the summer of 2004 I was set to ship off to Point Loma to take part in a program where I would be made into “college material.” Before leaving I found that red headed young man and asked him the most obvious question anyone would have asked:

“Where did you go?”
“I don’t go to church anymore.” He answered
“Why don’t you go to church anymore?”
“Because I read the Da Vinci Code.” he replied.
“You mean the fictional novel?”
“It may be fictional but Dan Brown says at the beginning that he based the book on history”

Not the most advanced dialogue I have ever had but I was perplexed nonetheless. What could this book contain that so thoroughly debunked Christianity for him? I put The Da Vinci Code out of my mind until the spring semester of 2006 came around when a movie trailer for The Da Vinci code was released on apple announcing the live action cover of Dan Brown’s bestseller. The church FLIPPED. Being an art major at the time, I knew my art history prof, Eugene Harris, had made a killing before the release of the blockbuster movie. He had gone on a speaking tour at churches all over southern California debunking The Da Vinci Code by pulling from his encyclopedic knowledge of the artist himself and outlining the film’s discrepancies. The movie was released summer of 2006 and grossed hundreds of millions to the protest of the American evangelical church.

A year later I finally watched the movie which was trumped up as the greatest media threat to the church in years. To my utter surprise I realized the movie was literally nothing more than a really really really good movie. I went and confronted my professor who held fast to his belief that the movie was denouncing Christianity and promoting paganism. To no avail, he repeated that Dan Brown wrote in his forward that the book is based on historical events and, therefore, was debunking Christianity through twisting history. I was left to watch, during department chapel, as my professor gave his 30-minute stump speech against the Dan Brown novel turned film to the entire art department. The charged words Eugine used to describe Dan Brown’s personal character still rang in my ears as I ate my dinner that afternoon. The second major ideological encounter I had had in my life over this fictional work left me wondering, again, “why?”.

Last night my mom and I were watching TV and we came across the Da Vinci Code on TNT and I asked her if she had seen it. She had never heard of it. I was floored. The movie, which held a place of such controversy, had never even wandered into her field of vision before!

I told her about the whole controversy surrounding it and how I thought the public had drastically misunderstood the intention of the writer. It told her about Eugene Harris’ speaking tour. I told her about the church flipping out and staging protests and denouncing filmmakers and the writer (some condemning them to hell). I told her of the young man who left the church after reading the novel. Nothing. She hadn’t heard of any of it. So I asked her if she wanted to watch as I point out the implicit point of the movie. She did and I did.

The beginning of the movie starts with a classic literary Marken sandwich in which the main character is giving a monologue while the catalyst for the adventure is taking place. The Dr. in symbology Robert Langdon is speaking to an audience on the study of symbols and how they both have been distorted over time and define our lives. He concludes his speech by posing a question: “How do we find truth through the layers of historical distortion?” The church mistakenly interpreted this movie as a treatise against faith. It read the movie as an illiterate. Dr. Langdon meets a young and beautiful cryptologist named Sophie. As they adventure together to find the secrets of Da Vinci he is revisited by the pain and trauma of his past. Sophie works to calm him down by employing a technique that her mother had done for her just before her parents died. In effect she enters into pain and suffering to alleviate the suffering of the Dr. She assumes a messianic role suffering on his behalf.

Eventually they meet a self-described cripple who is a conspiracy theorist with a PhD. A man who goes by a clandestine code name “teacher.” Now Dan Brown is very intentional about the imagery he chooses (since his book is circling around symbolism). This “teacher” who is a cripple paints the church’s history in a very different light than it is normally discussed in. In his description the teacher talks about the Gnostic gospels as being suppressed by the church. Dan Brown’s overall outline of church history was correct. However, Brown fails to accurately describe the Gnostic gospels. Brown has the teacher describe them as works that deny Jesus’ divinity. In actuality, the Gnostics, for the most part, deny Jesus’ personhood. They deny Jesus’ body.

The cripple is ultimately exposed as the teacher who has been feeding the church information so that he can play them to their own demise. He was using the church to set a group of guardians (who are keeping track of Jesus’ bloodline) into motion. By guiding the church the teacher was really causing them to accidentally expose the identity of the heir of Christ and thus destroying the violent church that he saw proceeding from her history. In essence, he was trying to unearth the truth from the depths of historical distortion to free people from faith. The cripple’s physical handicap reflects Browns portrayal of his inner handicap.

Now Sophie and Dr. Langdon are being chased by both the Roman Catholic Church and the French police. They hide in a darkened French park, a place of sin where people seem to go to indulge in their vices. They find a man about to indulge the heroine crack pipe. They pay him for his belongings so they can utilize his lighter and he leaves while they find their next clue. The Catholic Church, which is partially being manipulated to it’s own demise by the teacher, is also motivated by the prospect of being able to cover up it’s grave sin. The church is represented in this movie by a bishop and a monk which share a connection in their past by the monk’s sin and guilt. The bishop’s pardoning of the monk exacerbates this motif by employing him to repeat the church’s historical sins. The monk is sent out to do the bishop’s bidding by assassinating the priori guardians.

Now Dan Brown had been using male female imagery all along in this movie. The male imagery, or the blade, represents the church of Peter that isn’t the true church; the female imagery, or the chalice/holy-grail, represents the true church that Christ descends through the bloodline. The monk (male) is confronted while destroying church property by a nun (female) who was originally ignorant of his sinister nature but becomes wise before her demise. This serves as a foreshadowing sub plot to illustrate the male church confronting the female church.

Dr. Langdon and Sophie discover the true identity of the cripple. He states his true intentions as he threatens them with their lives. While they both believe in the truth of the grail they do not agree on the necessity of it’s downfall (an important point the American church missed when watching this movie). Langdon bests the cripple mentally and the teacher is sent to jail. Langdon and Sophie come to find that she is the last heir of Christ. They have no physical proof of this since they never found the grail. But they are aware of the bloodline, which is proof enough for them. Before Sophie is whisked away to meet her new family they share a moment of reflection about faith and the importance of faith. She asks him what he would do if he were the embodiment of the case against the church. Dr. Langdon goes into a monologue about the importance of faith. He notes that while Sophie can perform no miracles there’s a chance that the man in the park may never touch a crack pipe again; and ever since he first met here he doesn’t experience panic at being in confined places anymore. He expounds upon the idea that the historical truth isn’t really relevant when someone is recovering from drug addictions. Faith seems to help people cope with loss or helps them recover from addiction which is, indeed, a good thing.

The movie ends with Robert Langdon realizing in a moment of FAITH that he knows where the grail is hidden. He finds the final resting place of the grail in the Louvre. He NEVER gets to see the grail, but kneels at the spot in FAITH.

The American church didn’t understand this movie at all. The American church did dialogue math. In dialogue math, if a character makes a negative statement more than once about the church, the movie (in this equation) is anti-Christian. Since this movie had a lot of anti Christian statements made by the villain the movie went from being anti-Christian to being a threat to the church. Because of their illiteracy they missed the much more crucial and nuanced point that the movie was trying to make. A point that was actually, in a certain way, pro-Christian. In fact, I’m surprised that the church didn’t realize that the majority of extreme anti-Christian lines were given to the villain! The church was illiterate and because of its ignorance it’s actions and repercussions of those actions were extreme. I’m reminded of my art professor who went on grand speaking tours and how he characterize Dan Brown as such an evil man. All because he was illiterate. I’m also reminded of the young man who used to go to my youth group. Someone who thought that the story was based on real historical facts. Someone who didn’t pay attention either the fact that the book was a work of fiction, nor did he pay attention to the fact that the book was taking a pro-Christian stance. This because he also was illiterate.

Plato once said the greatest statement of wisdom is to admit ones own ignorance. A large number of people didn’t take their own ignorance, their illiteracy, into account. Because of this a pretty harmless book and movie was exacerbated into a cultural event with far more efficacy than it ever would have been otherwise. Now I don’t really agree with the point this movie was trying to make but I wonder what effect this movie would have had on people’s lives if people had treated this as nothing more than a fun summer blockbuster. I also wonder what events lie in our future because of similar cultural illiteracy.