Da Vinci Code
Okay, I’m getting annoyed with this whole Da Vinci Code thing. It is fiction, F-I-C-T-I-O-N, fiction. Only the nutjobs really believe that so much of the book is true. Unfortunately millions of people who ordinarily wouldn’t give the least bit of thought about it are going to flock to the movie and/or read the book just to see what the fuss is all about. I read the book partly because of this myself.
And my thoughts on the book? It started out really good. It was very entertaining and interesting. The main problem I had with it was that after a while, it was hard to get into the plot, because the book was so distractingly inaccurate when it came to the history of the Christian church. (And it was disasterously inaccurate about the history and formation of the Bible.) I don’t normally have any problem with sci-fi stories that have plots which take place in alternate universes or on wacky planets nearly exactly like ours, and I have no problem with suspension of disbelief. But this was ridiculous.
The book reminded me of a Francis Schaeffer quote from his book The Church at the End of the 20th Century:
[As] a sociological tool of manipulation, the book is magnificent. People are open to manipulation if they think they are hearing history in a way they never would be if they knew it was only fiction.
[…] Here under the writing of what sounds like history a whole adverse view of Christianity is manipulated in the reader’s mind.
The DaVinci Code? Not quite. Schaeffer wrote that in 1970 about The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron, and Hawaii, by James Michener, respectively.
As for the plot itself? Eh. I’ve read better Tom Clancy and John Grisham books. (Keir, I’m not surprised that you guessed the identity of The Teacher so soon; you were always much better at that sort of thing than I was.)
As far as the movie is concerned, I think I’m going to have to see it, just because I hear that Tom Hanks wears a mullet in this one. A mullet! Talk about blasphemy.
May 16th, 2006 at 10:47 pm
Um… some of that sounded awfully familiar. Must be some weird form of blog deja vu or something.
Oooo… I just discovered another Da Vinci secret! Mullet backwards is tellum or ‘tell um’ ( tell ‘em). The question is what is he trying to tell us with this mullet? Hopefully the movie will reveal all.
May 18th, 2006 at 10:54 am
Heh. That was my not-so-subtle dig at the plagiarism allegations.
May 18th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
That’s what I thought.
May 21st, 2006 at 7:43 pm
John, you’ll be so disappointed. I saw the movie and I really wouldn’t call that a mullet. So sad.
Otherwise the movie was pretty decent. I don’t know if it was better or worse than the book. It goes both ways. It seemed like the movie was trying to appease some of the pissed off Catholics by providing some opposing viewpoints that weren’t in the book. That was kind of amusing, but I’m sure they will still be pissed off.
The main good thing about the movie is that it went much faster when it came to the horribly obvious answer to the second cryptex. The characters were still pretty dense about it though.
The thing I really liked about the book that there wasn’t much of in the movie was all of the fascinating, if inaccurate, explainations of the origins of things. I should have written them all down when I read the book so I could look them up later. The ones I remember are Friday the 13th, the word “horny”, and bunny ears.
May 25th, 2006 at 10:27 am
Feminists are taking it somewhat seriously, which is no surprise — see http://hercode.org/ for one example. They say the book is fiction, but they are using it to springboard discussions of inequality in religion, and seem to implicitly take a lot of the historical stuff as fact. From the submitted stories, it’s clear that many of the women writing in are taking The Da Vinci Code as much more than fiction. Sad.