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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In the three years since the publication of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," a best-selling suspense novel with pretensions to serious scholarship, the work has inspired a vast literature of refutation, including dozens of books and numberless essays disputing the story's core contentions. The Internet, intrinsically hospitable to such a purpose, has grown a busy marketplace of "Da Vinci" debunkers, anticipating the big-budget film version of Brown's tale, now arriving in theatres. Prospective moviegoers who have spent time at a Web site called The Da Vinci Dialogue, the most polished of these efforts, have been informed that the story is deeply anti-Christian, a pseudo history "fraught with inaccuracies" and "spiritual tripe." They have been offered the opinion that, of its type, the book was only "moderately engaging," attracting fans who were easily gulled and perhaps just a bit dim.
What is striking about these assertions is that they are part of a marketing project paid for by Sony Pictures Entertainment, the studio that has invested more than two hundred million dollars in producing "The Da Vinci Code" and distributing and marketing it worldwide. When Sony acquired the rights to the book, in June of 2003, it was the property that Hollywood most dearly coveted, a certain blockbuster with sequel potential, and the reported six-million-dollar deal that Sony made with Brown was seen as a triumph. The article in Daily Variety announcing the deal suggested no hint of possible religious controversy in the "Da Vinci Code" story, describing it as a murder mystery with "clues to a 2,000-year-old conspiracy encoded in the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci." John Calley, the Sony executive who made the deal, described the book as a "page-turner" and a "thrill ride" that seemed to have been written for the screen.
If, in retrospect, Hollywood seems to have been oblivious of the risk of the film's arousing religious ire, it was only reflecting the attitude that had greeted the publication of the book. Reviewers had generally praised the novel, calling it a brainy entertainment and, as sales piled up, marvelling at its broad appeal; somehow, the provocations at its heart were almost uniformly overlooked. Brown's puzzler plot proceeded from a thesis that Christianity as we know it is history's greatest scam, perpetrated by a malignant, misogynist, and, when necessary, murderous Catholic Church. "Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false," one of the book's main characters declares.
Two developments soon brought that aspect of "The Da Vinci Code" into sharper focus, and changed the dynamic of the Sony project. One was the realization by Church leaders that Dan Brown's legion of fans included many of the Christian faithful, and that a large proportion of them believed that some--or, perhaps, even all--of the book's assertions were true. The other development was unfolding just a few miles west of the Sony studios, in an editing room in Santa Monica, where Mel Gibson was fashioning an early version of his sanguinary vision of Christ's Passion.
There is nothing outwardly ominous about the building at Lexington Avenue and East Thirty-fourth Street, a handsome seventeen-story red-brick-and-limestone tower, that is the American headquarters of the Prelature of Opus Dei. But when I asked a nearby shopkeeper about the place he grew apprehensive. "Opus Dei, dude--I'm scared of those people," he said. "In all honesty, I read something in 'The Da Vinci Code' that disturbed me as a Christian. This self-mortification, this self-mutilation, where they tie this band around their thighs and hit themselves in the back with a rope. You know, that shit's crazy, dog."
Such a comment suggests that the Catholic Church and other Christian leaders might be justified in their concerns that readers of "The Da Vinci Code" are taking the book too seriously. The shopkeeper's comment referred to a character named Silas, an albino Opus Dei "monk," whose zealous piety expresses itself as sadomasochism and a willingness to kill (even a nun) for God. It is through Silas that Brown introduces his readers to the practice of corporal mortification--self-inflicted pain as an...
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