THE DA VINCI CODE
SIGNIS issued a press release from Cannes after the screening of The Da Vinci Code which opened the Festival.
Cannes 17th May 2006.
‘MUCH ADO ABOUT VERY LITTLE.'
A film which, finally, the Church has little to be concerned about.
Many Christians from different backgrounds and sensibilities were anxious about the release of the film of The Da Vinci Code, directed by Ron Howard. However, far from being a cinema masterpiece, the film is simply a popular entertainment. While the early scenes set us on an exciting treasure hunt, the wordiness of the drawn out twists of the later part of the film will disappoint many cinemagoers.
A film is something that no one need be afraid of. It is a personal or a commercial venture. The novel attempted to persuade its readers that some dubious hypotheses and some mumbo-jumbo theories were true. The film wants rather to please everyone and not upset them too much. The writers have added quite a number of dialogue exchanges which downplay the more controversial statements of the novel about the Church, the divinity of Jesus, the role of Mary Magdalene and even Opus Dei.
The media controversy which followed the publication of the novel has led to an enormous impact from the promotion campaigns for the film. We hope that the Church can benefit from this phenomenon in explaining the theological foundations of faith and the hopes of all Christians.
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SIGNIS STATEMENT THE DA VINCI CODE
Peter Malone
17-5-06
Further questions and considerations on The Da Vinci Code
1.WAS THE FILM WELL MADE?
The film is, first and foremost, a visualising of the novel.
The locations are one of the most important features: Paris, the French countryside, London, Edinburgh are shown to great advantage and will please audiences. There is attention to detail in the Louvre, Saint Sulpice, the night streets of Paris, Westminster Abbey (with Lincoln Cathedral standing in for the Abbey interiors), the Temple Church in London, Rosslyn Chapel.
The cast is commercially strong, although Tom Hanks delivers one of his more stolid performances as the mid-40s academic, reciting ‘facts’ and suggesting alternate hypotheses in a very po-faced manner. Audrey Tautou is tres francaise as Sophie. Ian Mc Kellen obviously relishes his role as the villain, giving it more flair than Dan Brown might have imagined. Jean Reno does his weary and earnest policeman turn and Alfred Molina is the heterodoxly orthodox bishop. Paul Bettany has to snarl, writhe and erupt violently as Silas. They bring the characters to melodramatic life.
The film includes many flashbacks. Some are to the early life of Sophie Neveu and some to a well accident suffered by Robert Langdon when he was seven leading to adult claustrophobic dread. We see more of the sadistic treatment of Silas when he was young.
There are also some ‘historical’ flashbacks to Mary Magdalene pregnant, leaving Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion and giving birth to a daughter in France; there are brief re-creations of Templar battle activity and some sinister papal dealings. The brief flashback to squabbling bishops at the Council of Nicaea looks ludicrous. There is also an alarming flashback to the persecution and execution of witches by the Church. The style is desaturated colour, unpolished digital style photography that suggests art work, both painted and sketched.
Ron Howard has not been afraid to offer many subtitled sequences for a general public. The French characters speak in French to each other. The Opus Dei bishop, Silas and The Teacher communicate in Latin.
Akiva Goldsman has kept quite closely to the plot outline of the novel. However, he and the screen doctors have been seriously at work taking notice of church responses, especially the negative criticisms of ideas, hypotheses and conclusions, and have introduced a great number of modifying pieces of dialogue, suggesting that many of the statements made by characters could have different interpretations or be wrong. This means the film causes far less concern than the novel. However, the basic ingredients of hypothesis and ecclesiastical cover-up are all there.
For those familiar with the plot line and the issues, the film will satisfy as a fairly faithful rendition of the book. Those who read the book and were irritated may be somewhat mollified. For those who have not read the book and for whom the issues are unfamiliar and bizarre, or esoteric nonsense, they may well be baffled – and laugh, as did the first Cannes Festival press preview audience at the solemn utterances of how Sophie was in fact the Grail and the direct descendent of Jesus.
So, a Gnostic potboiler and some re-writing of history.
2.DOES THE FILM STAY CLOSE TO THE NOVEL?
As indicated earlier, the film retains the basic outline of the novel and the central characters and action. To this extent, it is very close. The flashbacks mentioned are a development from the novel.
The main difference is the introduction of so many sections of dialogue which throw some doubt on the claims about Jesus’ divinity as a doctrine being imposed by Constantine on the Council of Nicaea. There are also some questions as to the historical validity of the Gnostic Gospels and a Gospel of Mary Magdalene. The contemporary Vatican is distanced from the secret goings on of the secret French Catholic society which wants to protect the church (even by murder) from the claims about Mary Magdalene. Opus Dei is not villainous as in the book. Rather, some members behave in a sinister way. Could anyone really think that Silas, with this behaviour, is in any way typical of the organisation?
3.OPUS DEI?
Representatives of Opus Dei requested Sony Pictures to add a disclaimer to the film print stating that the treatment of the organisation was fictitious. Sony declined.
However, the equivalent of disclaimer has been incorporated into the screenplay. In the film, it is not really Opus Dei who are the villains ordering murders to protect the Church. Rather, it is individuals who do belong to Opus Dei but do not represent it. Bishop Aringarosa (which means ‘red herring’) takes the responsibility for this. He also belongs to a very secret and secretive group of church personages who are the ecclesiastical equivalent of the Priory of Sion – who are more in the vein of the followers of Archbishop Lefebvre in their doctrinal attitudes than of Opus Dei. Bishop Aringarosa condemns ‘cafeteria Catholicism’ and his goal is the protection and purity of the Church.
A scene is inserted where the Bishop is interviewed (just after we have seen Silas whipping himself and removing the chain – dug deep into his leg and drawing blood – that Opus Dei members wear for some hours a day. The bishop points out in his interview the different kinds of members of Opus Dei and the limitations of their penitential practices.
4.IS THE FILM MISLEADING?
The word often used in recent statements from Opus Dei is that the novel is ‘misleading’. That is a useful word because it is true and because it does not sound defensive.
Once again, the screenplay has inserted a number of statements and questions, spoken by the authoritative Robert Langdon that serve as warnings to make the audience careful. He refers to ‘sifting the truth’ from the documents and theories. He gives a mini-lecture on the ‘re-writing of history’ and ‘historical distortions’. During his opening presentation on art, he display different slides to the students asking them for the subjects only to show a fuller picture to show Poseidon’s fork rather than the devil’s and what looks at first glance like a Madonna and child is Osiris. He then remarks that the mind sees what it wants to see and does not see what it does not want to see. He also explains that a picture is worth a thousand words: ‘but which words?’.
There is already an extensive industry concerning the theories underlying The Da Vinci Code. Websites proliferate, with the Opus Dei site registering hundreds of thousands of hits. Evangelical Christians have produced an overwhelming number of articles, pamphlets, books, CDs and DVDs answering the difficulties. They have taken it as an opportunity for dialogue about significant theological and historical issues. Several Catholic hierarchies (Scottish and US, for instance) are releasing their own DVDs on the occasion of the film’s opening. The US Bishops conference video is called Jesus Decoded.
As indicated, the screenplay is at pains to suggest to the audience that there are alternative positions on all the controversial areas. The Vatican and Opus Dei are not presented as the villains of the drama.
Issues which could preoccupy some viewers:
the hypotheses veer away from the four accepted Gospels (except in some discussions about the Last Supper) and put all the narrative emphasis on apocryphal and Gnostic Gospels of the 2nd or 3rd centuries (or later) without acknowledging that it was a common enough practice in the early church for writers wanting to fill in the traditional gospel stories with more colourful detail to invent their own Gospels and ascribe them to a New Testament personality. They often gave names to unnamed Gospel characters – it is only in this period that names like Salome, Dismas, Longinus first appear. Some writers wanted to illustrate their particular spirituality of hidden knowledge being revealed to them by the Holy Spirit or to advance the status of particular Gospel characters. These latter were Gnostic Gospels.
the hypothesis that Jesus was merely human, certainly a great prophet, and that this was the thinking of the early church until the 4th century – which ignores the writings of John and Paul, many of the early writers like Justin or Iranaeus and the records of theological disputes before and leading up to the Council of Nicaea where Constantine did not impose the divinity of Jesus on the participants. (Actually, the 4th century church was still divided for many decades on opinions on whether Jesus was equal to the Father or subordinate (the widespread heresy of Arianism), not a Constantine-unified Christianity throughout the Roman Empire.)
the hypothesis that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus, pregnant at the time of the Crucifixion and fled to France where she gave birth to a daughter. This is all much later speculation.
Stories of the Grail – which did not emerge until the early Middle Ages with the tales written by Chretien de Troyes. These became popular and encouraged several more books on the Grail and locations where it was taken (to Spain, to Glastonbury in England where Arthur’s knights could go on quests). The screenplay suggests that Christian faith is centred on the Grail as the cup of the last supper – which would be news to most Christians.
The development of the code of the Grail, that it be interpreted not as SAN GRAEL (the holy vessel) but as SANG REAL (the holy blood). Sir Leigh Teabing explains this with power point illustration in the film.
This has led to the hypothesis that Mary Magdalene was the Grail, holding the child of Jesus in her grail-womb, the vessel of the holy blood royal. Which is where Leonardo da Vinci comes in with the speculation that John in his painting of the Last Supper is really Mary Magdalene, linked to Jesus in a feminine V space, thus establishing the Sacred Feminine – which means that Mary Magdalene’s story was suppressed in favour of Peter’s authority in the early Church. She should have been the leader of the church – which, of course, means male cover-up and a 2000 year old lie.
For those who would like a clearer exposition of this, the film does supply one: the speech that Ian McKellen?, as Sir Leigh Teabang, makes in the middle of the film. He truly believes it. Robert Langdon keeps offering cautions. Sophie is a sceptical listener.
The Priory of Sion, alleged to have been founded in 1099, a continuation of groups protecting the secret of the Grail. Many television programs have played interviews recently with the French originators of the Priory of Sion in the 1950s. However, prior to the plagiarism trial against Dan Brown in the UK earlier in 2006, Richard Baigent, co-author of the 1982 Holy Blood and Holy Grail, declares that underlying the fiction is a reality.
The press kit made available to journalists at the film’s release is quite open about the Priory of Sion being an invention.
The Knights Templar. There is a lot of truth in the portrayal of the Templars though speculation about their acquiring wealth from pilgrims to the Holy Land needs examining as does the lead up to their suppression in 1307. the screenplay lays the blame for this and their persecution on the Pope of the time who looks like a caricature villain in his non-speaking cameo. Equal or more time should have been given to King Philip of France who really wanted them suppressed and achieved this end.
Witches. Dan Brown gave a heightened figure of witches executed, more than a million. The screenplay gives the horrific but more accurate figure of 50,000 over several centuries.
5.IS IT MISLEADING TO MEDDLE WITH HISTORY FOR FICTION’S SAKE?
Authors do this all the time. Some readers with a bent for accuracy prefer to read history or watch documentaries rather than fiction based on history. (however, the writing or screening of ‘history’ is never as it ‘really was’; there is always a point of view, selection of what facts and events are included and what excluded; the criteria for choices means interpretation.). Other readers enjoy interpretation and a certain freedom of interpreting the facts and events for dramatic purposes. The validity of the interpretation is more important than complete accuracy.
It can be said that the Gospel tradition, from the preaching of Jesus to the preaching of the Apostles and the later writing down of the stories means that we should not be looking first and foremost for accuracy in the Gospel accounts but the validity of the truth.
Shakespeare did it, of course. And we all believe that Mark Anthony made a speech staring with ‘Friends, Romans, countryman’! In Verona, a tourist may visit the tombs of Romeo and Juliet (when one dismayed visitor noted, ‘They’re empty!).
Films about the lives of the saints receive this kind of treatment. Films on St Francis of Assisi sometimes tell the legendary stories of the Little Flowers of St Francis (Rossellini), or see Francis and Clare as the flower people of the 13th century (Zeffirelli) or present a traditional Francis for the early 1960s 1960s (Curtiz) or a more earthy Francis for the 1990s in the form of Mickey Rourke (Cavani).
It is the same with the even more numerous films about Joan of Arc, the action of the Dauphin and the presidency of the court of Bishop Cauchon (incarnated in Luc Besson’s version by Dustin Hoffman).
On a less saintly level, look at all the books and films and hypotheses on who was Jack the Ripper.
The Da Vinci Code has led to amusing imitations of a secular kind which nobody, it seems, has been tempted to think are true. The Legend of Zorro has a French aristocrat come to California with a power conspiracy for power. More to the point, the entertaining actioner, National Treasure, with Nicolas Cage has a similar Templar treasure story. This time, they transported their vast (by the look of it at the end of the film) treasure to the Americas. And where is the Code hidden? On the back of the Declaration of Independence, written in invisible ink. Has there been a rush, like that to Saint Sulpice or to Rosslyn Chapel, to Philadelphia?
Of course, the Da Vinci Code goes to some core Christian beliefs which means the hypotheses, however ill-based or however ludicrous, are taken more seriously.
6.IS THE DA VINCI CODE FAITH THREATENING?
No one need be afraid of a novel now matter who provocative? As with the Da Vinci Code, there are more than enough experts available, both Christian and secular, who have answered the claims and shown how some of them are hoaxes and others do not bear close historical, literary, art history, architectural history scrutiny.
It should be said, however, that cleverly portrayed fiction (and sweeping generalisations) have a great power to appeal and are an enticement to persuade. They work on our feelings more than on our brains – and they appeal to the conspiratorial and wary suspicion syndrome that most of us have. (I was taken aback when it was first pointed out that the figure of John looks more like a woman in Leonardo’s Last Supper and was ready for anything until the wily Sir Leigh Teabing, right in the middle of the press preview, asked Sophie Neveu if she noticed that Leonardo had painted only bread on his table. There was no cup or chalice! Ergo, he was saying that Mary Magdalene was the cup, she was the Grail.)
We all need to check our gullibility quotient. We all need to check our wariness of religious authorities, drawing on those we have disliked and generalising in our suspicions.
On the other hand, we have had the phenomenon of pious and devout people who prefer oil-weeping Madonna statues in suburbia or the likeness of Jesus’ face in a root of asparagus (a 2006 British experience) to the Gospels and concentrate their prayer there instead of to the revelation of the scriptures.
Actually, The Da Vinci Code has made us think
