The Media Research Center has an interesting new report comparing the MSM’s coverage of The Da Vinci Code compared to its coverage of The Passion of the Christ.
THERE’S A NOTABLE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO.
Is anyone shocked?
Category: Culture
A Most Ingenious Paradox
Down yonder, a reader writes:
I would like to see someone write a long article on the strange combination of traditional values like patriotism, family and a faith that plays right alongside praising infidelity, praising being drunk and Tim McGraw’s ambivalent song about abortion. There seems to be a strange disconnect among Country singers and their fans who can sing along with Restless Heart’s "Why does it have to be wrong or right?" one minute and then switch to "Believe" by Brooks and Dunn the next.
It’s like reading Cosmo and Inside the Vatican and not seeing any conflict.
Weird.
I think I can shed some light on the paradox. The reason for it is very simple: Country music is a form of folk music.
Folk music, by definition, reflects the interests of a particular people or "folk." Since there are saints and sinners in every group, folks music invariably includes songs that appeal to both. By its nature, folk music is broadly reflective of whatever the particular folk is interested in, which includes things like their religious lives, their families, their romances, their jobs, their frustrations, and their entertainments. The particular mix of these topics will vary from culture to culture and from time to time even within a particular musical tradition, but the same topics show up over and over again, just in different ratios.
Folk music can be distinguished from more selective musical traditions which are more polarized topically. Religious music–particularly those song that are sung in church–for example, is very, very narrow topically. Perhaps it’s the most narrow genre of music that shows up in each culture since it is devoted to the holy, which by definition is set apart from the ordinary.
Children’s music is also quite narrow in topics because its target audience is only just learning about life and the music created for children is focused on what children are interested in (e.g., animals, the jobs of the adults they see around them) and what is considered appropriate for them at their age.
Classic rock and roll, which received its foundational imprint as music for mid 20th century adolescents and young adults, is also narrower in topic than country music since its target audience hasn’t really come to terms with life as adults. It’s also marked by the obsessive interest of young males with a few particular topics (e.g., dating, sex, cars, rebellion against authority). It also shows notable traces of the particular era in which it was formed (e.g., songs about drug abuse rather than alcohol abuse).
Country music received its foundational imprint as music for traditional American adult society, which has historically been rural and religious. This means that you get some songs that are heavily religiously themed but also songs about sin. Since people struggle with their sins, you get some songs that reflect the struggle ("Why Does It Have To Be Right Or Wrong?"). Since people also give themselves over to their sins, you also have songs that glorify sinning ("Get Drunk And Be Somebody"). Since people get hurt by others’ sins, there are songs about that, too ("Your Cheatin’ Heart"). And there are songs that morally censure sinning ("Wreck on the Highway"). And songs from the perspective of those hurting under their own sins ("Honky Tonk Blues"). And songs that worry about whether people will escape from their sins ("Will The Circle Be Unbroken?").
You even get some songs that are like something from a Flannery O’Connor story (e.g., the Dixie Chicks’ "Goodbye, Earl" or Rock County’s "Turn It On! Turn It On! Turn It On!").
It’s a big, complex mix because folk music reflects the lives and struggles of the folk it represents. It includes both the good and the bad, leading to the paradox of amazingly powerful spiritual songs right next to ones glorifying sin.
That’s not to say that people to whom the folk music is addressed like all of the songs in the tradition. Religious country music fans frown on the glorify sin songs. Irreligious country music fans may roll their eyes at the religious songs. But the mix is there because the music represents a folk and the folk itself is mixed. Some fans appreciate both kinds of songs because both reflect their lives and aspirations.
The paradox seems particularly striking if one is used to music that is topically more narrow (e.g., used to only religious music–which has the holy stuff but leaves out the sin-oriented songs–or used to rock and roll–which is more oriented toward the sinful stuff and tends to leave out the holy most of the time).
But the paradox of modern country music is normal in folk music. If you go back and listen to 19th century American folk music, the exact same themes are there: You’ve got explicitly religious songs and ones that hit the standard life and sin themes. "Ol’ Rosin the Beau" glorifies a reprobate who dies and goes to hell and drinks whiskey with the devil. "Soldier’s Joy" has alcohol/drug abuse in it ("It’s 25 cents for the morphine/It’s 15 cents for the beer/It’s 25 cents for the morphine/Gonna drink me away from here"). The original, pre-War version of "Dixie" has adultery in it ("Old Missus married Will the weaver/William was a gay deceiver . . . Old Missus played the foolish part/She died for a man who broke her heart"). "Sweet Betsy From Pike" has implied extramarital sex and possible illegitimate preganancy in it. "Buffalo Gals" and "The Yellow Rose Of Texas" are about being attracted to the opposite sex. "Cindy" is about the opposite sex being attracted to you. "Lorena" is about lost love and missed opportunities. The "Boatman’s Dance" is about glorifying a particular job/lifestyle.
And the same is true of folk music in other times and cultures. Back in the Middle Ages they had all kinds of religiously themed songs, but they also had drinking songs they’d sing in the taverns. And songs about romance and sex and loneliness and hardship and everything else that is part of the human condition.
Because that’s the paradox of true folk music: It reflects the paradox of the fallen human condition.
As to the paradox of why particular singers will sing both religious songs and those that glorify sin, the answer to that is simple also: They’re doing what singers have always done . . . trying to make money.
Incidentally,
MUSINGS FROM A CATHOLIC BOOKSTORE ALSO HAS A DISCUSSION OF THIS GOING.
The 4400
I basically don’t watch TV any more. Most TV shows–even ones that I like and intend to watch–don’t motivate me to tune in each week. So what I’ve done with such shows is to just watch them on DVD when they come out.
That way I don’t have the hassles of commercials or having to tune in each week or being frustrated by cliffhangers (except for the season finale).
That’s the up side. The down side is that I also have to wait a really long time between getting to see seasons of the show, but it works for me.
I’ve just started watching the second season of The 4400, which just arrived in the mail, and so far I’m pleased. The opening episode is two hours (well, 90 minutes) long, and it serves as an effective reintroduction to the premise and cast of the show–though the first few minutes of it were a little rough given how long it’d been since I saw season one.
You may not have heard of The 4400 since it’s not getting that much publicity, but here are the basics: It’s a show that airs on the USA Network and–like other USA Network shows (such as Monk)–it has really short seasons (12 episodes in the second, and even less in the first). But they’re trying to do quality rather than quantity, which is what is important to me.
The show was co-created by Rene Echevarria, who was one of the best writers on Next Gen and DS9. It also has Ira Stephen Behr as a regular writer. He also was one of the best Next Gen/DS9 writers. It was their names which got me to watch the first season, and I wasn’t disappointed.
The premise is that, beginning in 1941, a bunch of people–4400 of them (big surprise)–were abducted, apparently by aliens (though we’re later told that isn’t the case) and then returned–all at the same moment–in the present day.
When they were returned, the government did the only sensible thing: It locked them up.
But eventually it was determined that they didn’t seem to be a threat to themselves or others, and so they were released. The government’s still watching them, still trying to figure out what’s up with the whole getting abducted and then being returned all at once thing. It’s a good thing that the government’s watching, because a few of the 4400 start manifesting unusual abilities that even they don’t understand or know why they have.
The writing on the show is quite good, and Echevarria and his team have avoided some of the obvious traps that a series like this could fall into. The government is not persecuting the 4400. It’s acting reasonably. We don’t have an evil government versus righteous 4400 plot. This isn’t a standard good versus evil show. Both members of the 4400 and the normal population are shown being good and bad, helpful and creepy.
That ambiguity is the stuff that human drama is made of.
Let me give you an example of a really nice bit of writing from the series pilot episode, which shows insight into the human condition:
One of the guys we see get abducted is an American serviceman in the Korean War. When we meet him, he’s not aware that he’s about to be abducted, and with an especially good reason since he has other things to worry about at the moment: He’s getting the snot beat out of him by fellow American servicemen.
Why are they doing that?
A clue is found in the fact that he’s black and they’re white and it’s 1951, just after the integration of the armed forces.
Now the standard, easy thing to do in the writing here would be to chalk the snot kicking incident up to simple, straightforward racism: They’re bigots who view him as sub-human. But that’s not what happens.
Instead, as his fellow servicemen are leaving, one of them turns to the gentleman and says: "We treated you like an equal. . . . But that wasn’t good enough for you."
All of a sudden we’re not in familiar territory anymore. They’re not the kind of simple, unadulterated bigots we were expecting. They were willing to treat him like an equal–or at least they thought they did so.
So what was it that sparked the incident?
We find out when they leave and the serviceman looks at a photograph of himself and his white girlfriend.
Now it all makes sense!
His fellow servicemen are bigots! But they’re not the simple, stereotypical bigots we were expecting. They’re a bunch of "separate but equal" bigots. Their racism isn’t simple, unalloyed hostility towards black people. It’s tempered in a way that makes them and their motives–and the writing of the show–more complex.
And it’s a fully believable moment that shows insight into the human condition: This kind of thing could and did happen in 1951. We have an example of racist evil in this scene, but it shows more subtlety and thus deeper insight into human psychology than the simple, comic book racism we’re used to seeing on screen.
There’s also a nice bit when the serviceman is returned–along with the other 4400–in the present day: As he’s sitting in the detention center with the other returnees, he’s reading a magazine and he exclaims: "What? The Secretary of State is colored!"–at which point another character, abducted years later, walks by and corrects him and says, "Black."
(What would have been even better here is if another abductee then walked by and said, "Afro-American" and then a third walked by and said "African American." That also would have showed the evolving racial situation, but the writers didn’t go in that direction.)
Once he is released from the detention center, the serviceman has culture shock at seeing a genuinely integrated society and as being treated–for real this time–as an equal and one who can cross racial boundaries and isn’t expected to remain separate. But he gets over his culture shock and is able to fit in to 21st century society . . . at least as well as a member of the 4400 can.
That shows you the kind of writing you can expect in the series. It’s more complex than the run-of-the-mill, hackneyed stuff you’d get on most shows of the type, just as Echevarria’s and Behr’s scripts were better and more complex than typical Star Trek stuff. Now that they’re freed from the (amazingly tight) shackles that Star Trek writers were under, they have a chance to spread their wings, and I’m enjoying watching the results.
It’s the same kind of situation as with Battlestar Galactica–where DS9 veteran Ron Moore got the chance to spread his wings.
The second season opener–the only ep I’ve watched so far–has some nice touches as well.
There is, unfortunately, a violent, Fundamentalist zealot in it, but I can accept that since some Fundamentalists would react negatively to the 4400 in real life (and the one in the show is able to cite a verse from Revelation that does sound like the events of the series).
(Also like Battlestar Galactica, there are interesting religious themes in the series, that I’m curious to see how and if the writers will pay off.)
Summer Glau (River from Firefly/Serenity) makes an appearance as a mental patient and does her usual excellent job playing a mentally disturbed young woman.
Jeffrey Coombs (Weyoun from DS9) also has a cameo, which may turn into a regular part. It’s nice to see him without prosthetic makeup.
And an H. P. Lovecraft book plays a significant role at a crucial moment in the plot.
STICKS HICKS NIX DIX CHIX
Since I was talking about music earlier today, I may as well touch on this story as well.
To the left is the cover of the Dixie Chicks’ new album, Taking the Long Way, which is their first new album since they shot off their mouths in a spectacularly rude way at a specutacularly bad time that was sure to alienate their country music audience.
GET THAT STORY IF YOU DON’T KNOW IT.
They could have recovered from that, but instead they issued a string of smouldering non-apologies and eventually appeared–bizarrely!–on the cover of Entertainment Weekly stark nekkid with inflammatory words and phrases painted on their bodies.
That ain’t really the country thing to do, and their fans turned their backs on them.
Now, personally, I don’t care if they hold the opinions of President Bush that they expressed in England. I’m not happy with President Bush, myself. But to say what they did (that they’re ashamed that the president is from Texas) when they did (in wartime) where they did (on foreign soil) to whom they did (Euro liberals) was sure to hack off the people who bought their records, and following it up with a bunch of non-apologies and bizarro stunts LIKE THIS (skin warning!) was utterly contemptuous of their core audience.
In other words, they were alienating their base.
So, three years later out comes their first new album and their label starts pitching it to country music stations and with news stories being written with headlines like "Dixie Chicks Return To Country Radio."
So have three years changed things? Is all forgiven? Will their country fans start listening to them again?
A precondition for forgiveness is repentance, and with defiant, in-your-face songs on the album like "Not Ready To Make Nice"–a contemptuous stab at those who were offended by their actions three years ago–it’s clear that the Chicks have some repenting to do if they want to be forgiven by their country fans.
Good.
I used to listen to their songs–I particularly liked "Goodbye Earl"–but the Chicks showed themselves to be a bunch of spoiled girls who have never grown up. I have no interest in listening to their songs because I will have no ability to enjoy them until they can adopt an attitude other than contempt for those who gave them their success by buying their albums and supporting them and their careers.
A basic rule of getting along in life for public figures is "Don’t show contempt for your base."
That’s a principle Mr. Bush ought to learn if he’d like his reputation to fare well in the long term, too.
The Many Faces Of James Darren
See the guy in this picture?
That’s Moondoggie from the Gidget movies, and it’s Gidget he’s standing next to.
Moondoggie was played by a teen idol of the day known as Jimmy Darren (who was popular enough that he later appeared in animated form on The Flintsones as Jimmy Darrenrock.)
As part of his teen heartthrob career, Jimmy recorded a number of albums.
But he moved out of this phase of his career (as teen idols tend to do). He tried to move on to more "serious" roles, like this one . . .
Here he is as Dr. Tony Newman, one of two time-travelling scientists on the Irwin Allen thriller TV show, The Time Tunnel.
I recently blogged about the release of the DVDs of that series, which I was a fan of as a boy.
This was the role in which I first became aware of Jimmy Darren, though I had no clue who he was in real life any more than I did any actors I saw on TV at the time.
During this period of is career he also went for "serious-er" roles than that of a time-travelling scientist, such as Pvt. Spyros Pappadimos in The Guns of Navarrone.
I like The Guns of Navarrone, but I was oblivious to Darren’s role in it, too. It wouldn’t be until he started performing another role that I really became aware of who he was.
That role–which is the one for which I’ll always best remember him–is this one:
Here he’s appearing as the holographic 1962 lounge singer Vic Fontaine on Star Trek: Deep Space 9.
This was a great role for him! It drew on his musical and sci-fi background and he did an absolutely outstanding job as a suave, wise, strong, and (once in a while) vulnerable lounge singer who could really sing.
There was also some irony to the role since in the imaginary 1962 world that Vic inhabited, he sang at a Vegas nightclub and hung with members of the Rat Pack like Frank and Dino and Sammy–and in real life the actor Jimmy Darren was a close friend of Frank Sinatra.
The Vic Fontaine role came along at an important point for Darren and allowed him to re-enter the kind of musical world that he had worked in at the beginning of career. His role on DS9 proved so popular that not only did he become a virtual regular on the show (in more than one sense of the term), it also re-launched his career as a singer.
After the show he started recording albums again, and a number of his older ones have been re-released.
In fact, there’s ten of ’em on iTunes for download right now (search on the term "James Darren").
I haven’t heard all ten, but if you enjoyed his singing on DS9–or if you just like really well-sung American standards in the Frank Sinatra/Mel Torme tradition–then I’d like to recommend one album in particular: This One’s From The Heart.
This is the first album he did after DS9, and as a thank you to the fans of the show who would form a key part of its purchasers, it includes virtually all the songs he sang as Vic Fontaine–only this time without them being interrupted for story or covered over by dialogue or cut short for time.
Here’s the playlist of standards it includes:
"The Best Is Yet To Come," "Come Fly With Me," "That Old Black Magic," "All the Way," "It’s Only A Paper Moon," "I’ve Got the World on a String," "You’d Better Love Me," "Sophisticated Lady," "Just In Time," "I’ve Got You Under My Skin," "The Way You Look Tonight," "Here’s to the Losers," "You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You," "Dancing in the Dark," "Night and Day," "I’ll Be Seeing You," and "Satin Doll."
That’s quite a lineup! And Darren’s rendition of these songs is excellent.
I have a bunch of the same songs done by Frank Sinatra, but despite Sinatra’s undeniable mastery of this form of singing, I find that I enjoy Darren’s versions better. Darren’s voice has a more velvety quality, like Mel Torme’s, compared to Sinatra, and this makes it warmer. This kind of Rat Pack singing requires the singer to project a kind of strengh through his voice, but there are different kinds of strengths, and if you listen to Sinatra’s voice he at times projects a cruel streak.
Darren, by contrast, projects a friendliness and warmth, even when the song would lend itself to a cruel treatment. For example, a personal favorite are the songs "You’d Better Love Me" and "Here’s to the Losers," both of which have to be handled just right or the singer comes off sounding aloof and arrogant. That’s how Sinatra might do them. But in Darren’s hands, "You’d Better Love Me" sounds friendly and playful and "Here’s to the Losers" sounds compassionate and optimistic.
Not every song on the album is a winner to my mind. I don’t really like "Sophisticated Lady," for example. (It’s a slow song, and I have a constitutional aversion to slow songs.)
Growing up when I did, I didn’t discover this type of music until I was an adult. Back in high school, singers like Frank Sinatra were considered square, but when I grew up enough to appreciate types of music that weren’t popular with my high school buddies, I came to appreciate this genre.
Unfortunately, it’s a little hard to refer to because there isn’t a standard name for it. Some are calling it "classic pop" (i.e., the type of music that was popular before rock & roll). Others are calling it "pop standards." Or "lounge music." Whatever you want to call it, there’s just something comforting and classy about this type of music.
Overall, Darren’s This One’s From The Heart is an outstanding introduction to and example of the genre, and I’d heartily recommend it if you were a DS9 fan, if you’re a lover of this style of music, or even if you’ve never really gotten into this style of singing and would like to see what the fuss was about.
Enjoy!
Bad News, Everybody!
SONY hasn’t learned its lesson and has optioned two more of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon books for sequels to The Da Vinci Code.
The first sequel is the book Angels & Demons (which was actually published to no special fanfare years before The Da Vinci Code), which deals with the Illuminati and their plot against the Catholic Church and . . . are you ready? . . . killing people at the Vatican with antimatter!
Also, the pope has fathered a child out of wedlock with a nun, but to avoid breaking a vow he didn’t have sex with her instead used artificial insemination.
Obviously this pope had a degree in moral theology before becoming pope.
And a degree in canon law. (The vow is to not get married, not to not have sex; the latter is an entailment of not getting married. And it isn’t even a vow in unless he’s a religious; it’s a promise.)
And a real sense of fun. (I mean, he committed a mortal sin to have a child, and he didn’t even commit the enjoyable one.)
The next sequel–based on the book Brown is currently writing–is set in America and deals with Freemasons.
“Who Are These People And Why Do I Care?”
That’s the question I was asking myself thirty minutes into The Da Vinci Code.
Of course, I knew intellectually who the characters were before I stepped into the theater, but the film did next to nothing to tell me who they were and it did absolutely nothing to establish them as presences on screen who I should care about. They’re just emotionally null images who show up and start running around and doing . . . stuff.
Lots of . . . stuff.
Like . . . y’know . . . driving around in cars backwards in traffic really fast and looking at secret messages written in ink that only shows up in ultraviolet light and talking a lot about symbolism and God and getting shot at repeatedly and . . . and . . . and the Mona Lisa was in it, too! (For about five seconds.) . . . And there were a couple of churches . . . I think.
Oh! And the movie was set in France! Yes! I definitely remember that! France was in the movie!
The movie was a horrible, horrible mess. I mean, you may have thought that The Big Sleep was hard to follow, but that’s nothing compared to the mess that The Da Vinci Code is. The Big Sleep also has one big advantage over this movie: The Big Sleep is actually interesting.
Not Opie’s latest opus!
Man, is it boring! B-O-R-I-N-G!
Its boringness virtually overwhelmes its offensiveness. I kept yawning audibly through the whole thing.
It fails to establish who the characters are. It fails to establish their motives. It fails to establish why we should care about them. It fails to establish what they’re thinking. It fails to establish how they know what they know. It’s just a huge, sprawling, poorly-communicated mess.
And the overdramatic soundtrack is frequently shrilling overdramatically to tell you that this is a dramatic (!) movie because nothing you’re seeing on the screen is telling you that.
And somebody apparently spiked Richie Cunningham’s drink with a tab of acid, because there’s all these flashbacks and hallucinations and visions interrupting in the middle of sentences every five minutes, like when they’re going to Isaac Newton’s tomb and all of a sudden–for no reason at all, mind you–Mulder and ScullyLangdon and Neveu are suddenly surrounded by all these people from the 18th century, which only the audience (not the characters) can see.
Other film critics have talked about how there is no chemistry between Tom Hanks and the French actress who is in the Agent Scully role, but they’re not telling you the half of it! I mean, these two characters are so emotionally inert that from now on the nuclear waste management agency will be using their relationship to insulate spent uranium rods.
The only time the movie gets a little interesting is when Ian McKellan shows up as a walking anagram who hates the Church and is obsessed with the Holy Grail and injects a bit of humor into the movie.
He gets both of the movie’s intentionally funny lines.
One occurs when he is bluffing his and his manservant’s way past the police by telling them, "I’ve got a medical appointment that I can’t be late for, so if you are really that determined to stop us, you’ll just have to shoot us."
Then he jerks his head toward his manservant and says, "Start with him."
The other intentionally funny line occurs when McKellan has been unmasked as a villain (You weren’t expecting a spoiler-free review, were you?) and as he’s being bundled into a police car, he’s shouting hysterically about Tom Hanks: "That man has a map to the Holy Grail!"
Okay, you kinda have to be there for that one, but in context it was funny, and deliberately so.
That’s not the case with most of the funny lines in the movie. One of the best unintentionally funny lines is when Agent Scully is musing over the fact that Mary Magdalen’s sarcophagus has been moved and she says . . .
<overdramatic petulant French girl voice>The Church, did they finally . . . "get her"?</overdramatic petulant French girl voice>
Or when the Opus Dei cop tells another French cop who is a major character (his boss? his partner? his junior? his peer?) that he got a call from an Opus Dei bishop who told him that he’d just heard the confession of a killer named Fox MulderRobert Langdon and that’s why he’s so fanatically obsessed with catching Tom Hanks.
Some images in the movie are unintentionally funny, too, like when we get a flashback to the Council of Nicaea and it looks like a Renaissance-era, hypercaffeinated high school debate club complete with bleachers.
At what feels like the end of the movie we get a nice moment when Ian McKellan gets bundled off for being a homicidal nut job and you’re thinking, "Whew! Now that that’s over we can all get up and go home!" But NOOOOOOOOOOOO! There’s a whole nother sixteen hours in the movie that we have to sit through!
And in this sixteen hours we go back to the kind of boring, chaotic, poorly-explained, un-Ian-McKellanized . . . stuff . . . that dominated the first act of the film.
Like that conversation near the end of the film (only about three hours before the credits roll) between Mulder and Scully where Mulder is trying to convince her that she shouldn’t be so scientific and that what you believe is what is ultimately important and that if the audience claps its hands really hard then Tinkerbell will come back to life and maybe it’ll destroy or renew the Christian faith if she goes public with the fact that she’s the last surviving descendant of Jesus Christ (Sorry, if you didn’t want spoilers then you should have bailed when I outed Ian McKellan). Only he’s too convoluted for any of this conversation to make sense.
And then Scully ditches Mulder to go off with the secret sex cult that worships her (yeah, okay, I can buy that one) and he goes back to his hotel and starts shaving and he (dum! dum! dum!) cuts himself (hey, they’ve still got three hours before the credits; they have to fill it with something) and (I am not making this up!) he looks at the blood from his shaving nick and gets a VITAL CLUE (which makes no sense) to the location of the tomb of Mary Magdalen (who is buried in the Louvre, it turns out) and he goes out into the night running like a madman and . . . and . . . FAILS to find her tomb!
THE END!
Only it’s supposed to be a moving ending because he’s kneeling and maybe praying–or something–several hundred feet above her tomb, which he can’t see and only guesses is there.
And so the audience is left with bunches of unanswered questions like . . .
Why did Agent Scully decide to suddenly destroy her career as a French police woman for no good reason?
and
Who the heck was the bank manager working for when he decided to try and kill Mulder and Scully for no reason?
and
Did the evil albino who’s a hyper-religious Catholic know that Scully was a descendant of Jesus Christ–as seemed implied–or not–and if he did then why would a hyper-religious Catholic like him want to kill her?
and
Did that evil Opus Dei bishop know that Scully was a descendant of Jesus Christ–as seemed implied–and if so then how did he know it since her name had been changed and her identity masked to keep the Church from knowing that she was still alive? And why would he want to kill a descendant of his Savior?
and
Why did the French Opus Dei cop destroy the very piece of evidence that would have been most useful in a court of law to prove that Robert Langdon was the killer of the museum guy and then ruthlessly hunt him down for murdering the museum guy?
and
How on earth did the murdered museum guy have enough time as he was bleeding to death to strip nekkid and cover himself with ritualistic symbols in blood (and why would he do that, anyway?) and then think up a bunch of puzzles needed to write three secret messages in ultraviolet ink in different parts of the Louvre? And why was he carrying ultraviolet ink around with him to begin with?
and
Why would the museum guy go to all that trouble instead of just writing, "Please tell my granddaughter to go to Rosslyn Chapel and she’ll find a bunch of people who can tell her about her family. She doesn’t need to destroy her career as a cop and go on the lam from the law and put her life in danger repeatedly as she solves a bunch of superfluous puzzles. Honest!"?
and
Why would the museum guy write secret messages in ultraviolet ink on two of Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpieces, and even if he were going to do that, why didn’t he write the important message on the first masterpiece? Why write an unimportant message on the first masterpiece simply to lead his granddaughter to the second?
and
Didn’t Ron Howard realize that stories about solving puzzles are only fun if the audience has the experience of being able to solve the puzzles with the characters on the screen and that it’s no fun at all if the puzzles are so complex that the audience can’t solve them and only gets to watch the characters on screen repeatedly pulling the answers out of thin air?
and
What’s the point of telling the audience that a particular series of numbers is the Fibonacci series if you don’t tell the audience what the Fibonacci series even is? (I mean, I used to be a math major, so I knew the answer to that one, but it’s still bad filmmaking. Ron Howard was NOT making this movie with me in mind, I can assure you.)
and
At just what point did Ron Howard and Tom Hanks realize that they were giving a huge number of people a really strong disincentive to ever see a Ron Howard or Tom Hanks movie again in the future?
and
Why is the Mona Lisa so important that it’s in all the advertising for this movie, when it shows up for about five seconds and its only significance is that it got vandalized by the museum guy with ultraviolet ink?
and
Why is Leonardo Da Vinci mentioned in like two scenes in this movie when he gets title billing?
and
What the heck is the Da Vinci code, anyway?
SDG On DVC
Steven Greydanus’s review of The Da Vinci Code is up at DecentFilms.com. It has a lot of insightful stuff on it. Here’s a bit I find particularly so:
Ever since the book came out, members of the Catholic prelature Opus Dei — dismayed by Brown’s portrayal of the group as a fanatical, shadowy “sect” or “congregation” characterized by brainwashing, coercion, and self-mutilation — have been trying to get the word out that the book’s lurid fantasies have no basis in reality.
Insidiously, the film absorbs this message into the Da Vinci Worldview. In an early scene, when we meet Opus Dei Bishop Aringarosa (Alfred Molina, Spider‑Man 2), he’s on a plane rehearsing talking points intended to defend Opus Dei against critics. Opus Dei simply rejects “cafeteria Catholicism,” he says benignly, while his aide recommends he avoid sounding defensive. It sounds precisely like the message the real Opus Dei has been trying to put across — or for that matter what any serious Catholic would say about his faith. You see, that’s what they want you to think.
In a similar vein, protagonist Langdon has been subtly reworked from an outspoken proponent of Da Vinci esoterica into a more skeptical, ostensibly neutral scholar who mouths many of the objections Brown’s critics have been making, putting the burden of the Da Vinci worldview onto Teabing. Now we have Langdon arguing that the Priory of Sion is “a myth” and “a hoax,” while Teabing retorts, “That’s what they want you to think.”
A few critics have interpreted this as a concession to Christian concerns, but the actual effect is precisely the reverse: It essentially undermines critical objections by incorporating them into the film’s overall picture and then seeming to rebut them as Langdon is gradually converted to Teabing’s point of view.
Some Christians have optimistically hoped that The Da Vinci Code might provide a potential opportunity for dialogue and discussion about Jesus with people who might not otherwise be open to such discussions. Yet if anything the film seems calibrated precisely to inoculate viewers against any such discussion — to leave viewers with a skeptical agnosticism about efforts to set the record straight as all part of the conspiracy, “what they want you to think” (or “we can’t be sure”).
Thanks, Professor Bainbridge!
Tech Central Station is not often devoted to matters of theology, but Professor Bainbridge has offered
on the subject of The Da Vinci Code and the theological issues that it involves.
I was gratified to see that he quoted from the Catholic.Com web site and–in particular–a page from it that offers a tract of the early Church Fathers that I edited, demonstrating the early belief in Christ’s divinity.
How often do you get the early Church Fathers being quoted in a Tech Central Station blog entry?
Cool!
In the end, Prof. Bainbridge concludes:
All Dan Brown, Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, and that whole crew have
accomplished is getting richer by saying that "really foolish thing."
The Albino
Y’know . . . every time I hear about Silas, the albino monk assassin in The Da Vinci Code, I can’t help but thinking about . . . this guy . . .
That’s my mental image of Silas, but could he be the guy I’ll see in The Da Vinci Code on Monday?
Incontheivable!