summer project #4
Music: Spandau Ballet: The Singles Collection (1985)
Everyone I know has that "Oh Shit!" look as the first day of class looms; scrambling we syllabae-ize and finalize course packets. Both of my preps are done, thankfully, though I need to re-research my lectures for next week. Regardless, my hope is to knock-out a new draft of my and Tom's essay on The Da Vinci Code. Tom has already drafted 17 pages; now it's my turn to add my signature and a few moves. Here is the introduction to tease the curious (all two of you!). Hopefully I'll get around to writing sections on mystery and alchemy this weekend.
When Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ opened on August 12, 1988, approximately 10,000 Christians gathered outside of Universal Studies in protest.[1] The film was banned by the Vatican and condemned as blasphemous worldwide because of a fantasy sex scene between Jesus and Mary Magdaline,[2] and despite a number of cooling attitudes among evangelical Christians about the film, until relatively recently, the movie was the most famous of a long line of "blasphemous films" condemned by religious groups and authorities. As the debates over the inclusion and exclusion of the gospels are apt testament, the textual suppression to affirm clerical power has always been a recurrent theme in the history of Christianity.[3] In our time, however, the most well-known, blasphemous texts have been deliberate feats of fiction. Before Last Temptation, William Peter Blatty's best selling novel The Exorcist, as well as William Friedkin's gut-wrenching filmic version in 1973, provoked charges of blasphemy from religious authorities (as well as catalyzed a full-blown exorcism-heavy religious trend, the deliverance movement).[4] Seven years after The Exorcist controversy, Umberto Eco's most unlikely bestseller The Name of the Rose--along with Jean-Jacques Annual's filmic version in 1986--reignited a popular obsession with blasphemy. Two things were common to all of these condemnation controversies. First, each book and/or film surfaced a close relationship between sex and spirituality, whether sexual relations were between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Satan and little girls, or monks and peasants. For many Christians and certainly the Holy See, blasphemy is the sexualization of the sacred (Jesus, innocent children, and so on). Second, each novel or film generated waves of "phantom criticism," which concerns the condemnation of a text by biblical historian or Christian apologist without having ever read or seen it.[5] In the scene of contemporary popular culture, it would seem blasphemy and phantom criticism are dialectical counterparts.
In light of the well-known controversies of these three novels and films, when Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code hit bookshelves in 2003, few were surprised that phantom critics would begin denouncing Ron Howard's heavily hyped--and almost universally panned--filmic version before it hit theatres in 2006. What apparently made this text so heinous was that Brown embedded a radical sub-text about the "real [sexual] life" of Jesus within a page-turning, puzzle-solving mystery: Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children. Yet unlike the previous novels, Brown's The Da Vinci Code has sold over 60 million copies worldwide. The sheer pervasiveness of the enterprise surrounding the novel even led the Vatican to appoint an official Da Vinci Code debunker: this blasphemous book is the first to ever have "an archbishop dedicated to debunking its contents."[6] As a representative of the Catholic church, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone yoked the global ubiquity of the novel its influence: "There is a very real risk that many people who read it will believe that the fables it contains are true . . . . It astonishes and worries me that so many people believe these lies."[7]
Insofar as the suggestion that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a family is not a new one, then, what are the "fables" and "lies" advanced by The Da Vinci Code (hereafter DVC)? Brown argues that he did not make the stories revealed in the novel up himself, but culled (some allege plagiarized) them from two well-researched, controversial alternative histories of Jesus, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln's Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982) and Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince's The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ (1997). What Brown adds to the "fantasy" of The Last Temptation of Christ is an alternative history of Jesus in which Mary Magdalene was the Holy Grail herself, carrying Christ's seed and creating a bloodline that extends to present day. What seems to make the DVC so much more blasphemous than its forebears, however, is that the Jesus-Mary connection and the Holy Grail twist are not presented as a "fantasy" within the fantasy world of a novel, but a possible truth embedded within the vehicle of fiction. In this essay, we are concerned with this gesture of burying a presumed "truth" within a fictional ruse, a gesture that we characterize as fundamentally "alchemical."
In what follows, we are not primarily concerned with the "true history" of Jesus Christ. What we are concerned with is why this admittedly fictional text that tacitly claims a true, alternative history of Jesus (Brown's protests to the contrary) has threatened the Vatican and other Christian leaders so much more than any of its predecessors. Film commentators, church authorities, credentialed historians, local ministers, and fundamentalists of every persuasion seem to have gone collectively berserk over this text, and we are interested in advancing at least a partial explanation.[8] Our provisional answer is twofold: First, we argue that part of the reaction concerns the way in which Brown builds mystery with promises of extra-textual truth. For example, the novel opens with a statement headed in boldface as "FACT:"
The Priory of Sion--a European society founded in 1099--is a real organization. . . . The Vatican prelature known as Opus Dei is a deeply devout Catholic sect that has been the topic of recent controversy due to reports of brainwashing, coercion, and a dangerous practice known as "corporeal mortification."[9]
Although the latter "fact" is verifiable, the former is a complete fiction; the Priory of Sion was a secret society hoax fabricated by Pierre Plantard, a French prankster, in the 1950s.[10] Regardless, opening this way suggests the novel is a vehicle for a secret truth, precisely the function of alchemical rhetoric for centuries. Second, we argue that the controversy surrounding DVC does in fact orbit a blasphemous truth that is hardly a secret: religion and sex are intimately related. Yet, as we hope to show, things are much more complex than reducing this relation to historical paganism, for depth psychology promises a deeper insight. Read on, curious reader, and we'll take you deeper into the mystic.
Notes
[1] "Can Religion and the Movies Mix?" BBC News Online (20 Feb. 2004): para. 20; available http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2420305.stm accessed 25 August 2006.
[2] Xan Brooks, "Last Temptation Writer: Mel's Passion is Medieval." Guardian Unlimited (23 March 2004): para. 7; available: http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,12589,1176024,00.html accessed 25 August 2006.
[3] Need source here.
[4] See Joshua Gunn, "The Rhetoric of Exorcism: George W. Bush and the Return of Political Demonology." Western Journal of Communication 68 (Winter 2004): 1-23; and Thomas S. Frentz and Thomas B. Farrell, "Conversion of America's Consciousness: The Rhetoric of The Exorcist." Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 40-47.
[5] Just as with the film version of The Last Temptation of Christ, protests of the film The Da Vinci Code began long before the film was ever released. Need source here, further explanation?
[6] "Vatican Appoints Official Da Vinci Code Debunker." Guardian Unlimited (15 March 2005): para. 1; available http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1438297,00.html accessed 25 August 2006.
[7] "Vatican Appoints," para. 4.
[8] We need to cite a number of examples--tracts, published articles, etc., that berzerkily denounce the book.
[9] Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2003): 1.
[10] Pat Donnelly, "Da Vinci Details: Fact and Fiction." The Gazette (Montreal; 13 March 2006): E3.