Great helium (6/14/06)
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The Da Vinci Code. [Ron Howard, 2006. Written by Akiva Goldsman, from a novel by Dan Brown.]
When the curator of the Louvre is found dead on the floor of his own museum — naked, adorned with a pentagram, and with his limbs fanned out like Leonardo’s famous drawing of the Vitruvian man and a cryptic message scrawled in blood beside him — stalwart representative of
CSI: Paris Jean Reno calls on Harvard professor and renowned Symbologist [whoa, does that sound heavy] Robert Langdon/Tom Hanks, either to weigh in with an opinion or [in view of his prior acquaintance with the deceased] to take the fall, it isn’t clear which.
As Hanks stares aghast at this grisly spectacle, at any rate, major-babe “police cryptologist” [no shit?] and granddaughter of the deceased Audrey Tautou bursts in upon the scene, bonds with our hero forthwith [Forrest Gump meets Amelie: here is a marriage made in heaven], conveys to him sotto voce the outlines of the rapidly-burgeoning plot against him, and, after the first of their several escapes — a rather perfunctory carchase notwithstanding [how can you stage a carchase in Paris without driving down those stairs?] — accompanies him in a strangely unhurried tour of the art-historical highlights of Paris and London — strangely unhurried, since our heroes are harried the while by a network of conflicting conspiracies which seems at first so vast, so all-encompassing, that everyone on the continent of Europe must be working for one side or the other if not both at once — though it reduces, presently, to a contest between the Dark Lords of the Sith, aka the Catholic order Opus Dei, here represented by Darth Bishop Alfred Molina [master] and Darth Albino-Assassin Paul Bettany [pupil], and the Jedi Knights Templar aka Priory of Sion, a secret society which seems to be handling legal affairs for the estate of Christ. [Or something.] To this last predictably Everybody Who Was Anybody has belonged, notably Da Vinci himself, Isaac Newton, Alexander Pope, [Athanasius Kircher, Benjamin Franklin, Christian Huyghens, Dante Alighieri, E. Pluribus Unum, F. Scott Fitzgerald, G. Gordon Liddy, H. Alexis Zarkov, I.I. Rabi, Joe Bob Briggs, Knute Rockne, Lindsay Lohan, Mary Shelley, Norman Bates, Otto von Bismarck, Sir Philip Sidney (and other heroes of that kidney), Quentin Tarantino, Roger Rabbit, Salman Rushdie, Tex Avery, Ultra Violet, Vladimir Putin, Willy Wonka, Xander Cage, Young Frankenstein, Zeppo Marx], and [most recently] the art historian whose illuminated stiff we stumbled over in the opening scene. [I think this is supposed to explain why he was murdered, but don’t ask me how.]
Hanks and Tautou doggedly burrow their way to the bottom of a stack of puzzles — most purportedly devised by Leonardo himself and involving the interpretations of the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper and the passwords [mysteriously not in Latin or Italian but in English] that unlock the Da Vinci version of the Enigma machine — to the treasure buried beneath them all, which turns out to be the nature and location of the Holy Grail: one of those Secrets Entrusted Only To A Few which cannot be revealed without threatening the foundations of Christianity, the viability of the international financial system, etc., etc. — indeed [given Dan Brown’s rather shaky grasp of scientific principle] probably the stability of the elementary particle vacuum and the continued existence of the universe.
All this might be more impressive did it not so strongly remind us of Umberto Eco’s
Foucault’s Pendulum — albeit without the intellectual playfulness and postmodern irony that rendered that work so memorable, and minus most of the occult encyclopedia Eco managed to incorporate into his plot, viz. the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone, the immortal Comte de Saint-Germain, the Illuminati [though Brown seems to have polished them off in the last novel] the Freemasons [though he’s supposed to get to them in the next], the Kabbalah, etc., etc.— Not to mention the obvious influence of the numerous adventures of Indiana Jones, from whom the authors with evident malice aforethought have borrowed themes, situations [e.g. knights buried in the catacombs], camera angles [recall how we discovered that “X marks the spot”, e.g., and compare the corresponding shots here], and even speeches [cf. not-entirely-trustworthy scholar Ian McKellen’s peroration to Hanks regarding the distinction between studying history and taking part in it; this is just the bent archaeologist in
Raiders, “the Ark
is History”] — though not, alas, chases by car truck boat blimp and runaway tank, evil Nazis, castles with hidden rooms, buried temples boobytrapped by forgotten gods, earthquakes, hurtling over cliffs, walking on air — i.e., the entertaining parts. — Indeed the only guy with a whip here flays himself, which certainly takes all the fun out of it. — And I still cannot believe these bozos passed up the chance to stage a chase through the sewers of Paris: can’t anybody here play this game?
Unkindest cut of all, the same themes of the secret of the catacombs [the magic underground], ancient brotherhoods [Freemasonry, the Templars], and the nested set of Chinese puzzle-boxes at whose center lies the buried treasure — among others — were all if not more ably handled then at least better packaged to sell popcorn by
National Treasure. And though admittedly the Fibonacci numbers would never enter into a Jerry Bruckheimer picture, he does know how to make an action movie.
Which this, alas, is not. Indeed what passes for action in this turgid opus consists mainly of talking heads trying to pass off whole metric tons of leaden exposition as dialogue: “This must refer to the Eiffel Tower —” — “located on the Seine River in Paris —” — “ancient capital of the French empire, with a population in 2005 of 2,144,700” — “and the location of the Louvre, the most famous art museum in Europe” — etc., etc. — For once one must feel relief the romantic leads don’t get it on.
And the Big Reveal, the revelation of the innermost mystery — not to give away anything unknown to the novel’s sixty million readers — is that a very mortal Nazarene married and fathered children; married, in fact, the reputed prostitute Mary Magdalene, and founded a royal dynasty whose descendants can be traced to this day — against whom the oneholyCatholicandapostolic Church, sensing a threat to its very existence, has been ceaselessly conspiring; and that the current heir apparent to the estate of Christ is, in fact, Ms. Tautou herself. — In other words the burden of this absurdly elaborate contrivance of a plot is a conclusion most of us were able to draw on our own long since, namely, that Audrey Tautou is proof of the existence of a benevolent God.
Nonetheless this ridiculous spectacle has provoked no little moral and theological outrage. For there is, after all, the forbidden suggestion that Jesus had sexual intercourse; not to mention the implicit attempt to restore the feminine principle to the godhead, the accusation [even if fictional] of a coverup dating back a couple of millenia, the challenge to the authority of the Church [even if that monolithic power has long since been divided and diffused], and the not entirely inaccurate characterization of Opus Dei as a bunch of fascist whack jobs who like to whip themselves.
But the reaction is absurd.
After all, no one really knows whether Jesus chose to do the horizontal bop, and if so with whom. It all happened two thousand years ago. And whatever did happen was immediately seized upon by a horde of manipulative scumbags to advance their own agendas; and they’ve been energetically fucking with it ever since.
It is, of course, their spiritual heirs who are screaming blasphemy. And as usual they have everything backwards.
Because it doesn’t matter about the loaves and the fishes, the water and the wine, the lame getting up to walk, the blind gaining eyes to see, even the Resurrection.
Because about all that, who knows? [Ms. Tautou daintily tries her weight upon the water, wets her foot, shrugs a Gallic shrug, and smiles an enigmatic smile.] — Indeed who cares? — I have seen miracles, the fall of the Berlin Wall for instance, and they have left me no wiser than before regarding the nature and properties of the Deity.
No. What rings most true, what stands out even at the distance of two millennia, is the part about the Master’s disciples scurrying for cover at the first sign of trouble and leaving him to suffer on the cross alone. Kept company by a couple of his female relatives, and the hooker that he saved from stoning. That part I believe, that part makes sense. And really I don’t need to know any more.
For if love alone could save the world, this is where it would have to begin: with the lepers and the outcasts, the downtrodden, the pariahs; with the pimps and the bitches and the hos. With the girls who work the pole. That is what is beautiful about the story of Magdalene, and that is what saves this otherwise silly sack of shit from utter risibility: the beautiful closing shot of Hanks, his final puzzle solved, framed within the inverted pyramidal structure that now decorates the Louvre, suspended, as it seems, in a geometrical matrix, between the heavens and the earth — praying over the grave of the patron saint of hookers. One can imagine no more elegant tribute to the inscrutable vision of the Divine Architect, who has embedded the carnal mystery in a vast articulated enigmatic dream of mathematical form — in a riddle no one has yet deciphered.
____________Come fly with me (4/11/06)
