I‘ve cracked the code of "Da Vinci Code" hypomania

HOLLYWOOD HERESY
by PETER J. BOYER
Marketing “The Da Vinci Code” to Christians.
Issue of 2006-05-22
Posted 2006-05-15
Inthe three years since the publication of Dan Brown’s “The Da VinciCode,” a best-selling suspense novel with pretensions to seriousscholarship, the work has inspired a vast literature of refutation,including dozens of books and numberless essays disputing the story’score contentions. The Internet, intrinsically hospitable to such apurpose, has grown a busy marketplace of “Da Vinci” debunkers,anticipating the big-budget film version of Brown’s tale, now arrivingin theatres. Prospective moviegoers who have spent time at a Web sitecalled The Da Vinci Dialogue, the most polished of these efforts, havebeen informed that the story is deeply anti-Christian, a pseudo history“fraught with inaccuracies” and “spiritual tripe.” They have beenoffered the opinion that, of its type, the book was only “moderatelyengaging,” attracting fans who were easily gulled and perhaps just abit dim.
What is striking about these assertions is thatthey are part of a marketing project paid for by Sony PicturesEntertainment, the studio that has invested more than two hundredmillion dollars in producing “The Da Vinci Code” and distributing andmarketing it worldwide. When Sony acquired the rights to the book, inJune of 2003, it was the property that Hollywood most dearly coveted, acertain blockbuster with sequel potential, and the reportedsix-million-dollar deal that Sony made with Brown was seen as atriumph. The article in Daily Varietyannouncing the deal suggested no hint of possible religious controversyin the “Da Vinci Code” story, describing it as a murder mystery with“clues to a 2,000-year-old conspiracy encoded in the paintings ofLeonardo Da Vinci.” John Calley, the Sony executive who made the deal,described the book as a “page-turner” and a “thrill ride” that seemedto have been written for the screen.
If, in retrospect,Hollywood seems to have been oblivious of the risk of the film’sarousing religious ire, it was only reflecting the attitude that hadgreeted the publication of the book. Reviewers had generally praisedthe novel, calling it a brainy entertainment and, as sales piled up,marvelling at its broad appeal; somehow, the provocations at its heartwere almost uniformly overlooked. Brown’s puzzler plot proceeded from athesis that Christianity as we know it is history’s greatest scam,perpetrated by a malignant, misogynist, and, when necessary, murderousCatholic Church. “Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christis false,” one of the book’s main characters declares.
Twodevelopments soon brought that aspect of “The Da Vinci Code” intosharper focus, and changed the dynamic of the Sony project. One was therealization by Church leaders that Dan Brown’s legion of fans includedmany of the Christian faithful, and that a large proportion of thembelieved that some—or, perhaps, even all—of the book’s assertions weretrue. The other development was unfolding just a few miles west of theSony studios, in an editing room in Santa Monica, where Mel Gibson wasfashioning an early version of his sanguinary vision of Christ’sPassion.

Thereis nothing outwardly ominous about the building at Lexington Avenue andEast Thirty-fourth Street, a handsome seventeen-storyred-brick-and-limestone tower, that is the American headquarters of thePrelature of Opus Dei. But when I asked a nearby shopkeeper about theplace he grew apprehensive. “Opus Dei, dude—I’m scared of thosepeople,” he said. “In all honesty, I read something in ‘The Da VinciCode’ that disturbed me as a Christian. This self-mortification, thisself-mutilation, where they tie this band around their thighs and hitthemselves in the back with a rope. You know, that shit’s crazy, dog.”
Sucha comment suggests that the Catholic Church and other Christian leadersmight be justified in their concerns that readers of “The Da VinciCode” are taking the book too seriously. The shopkeeper’s commentreferred to a character named Silas, an albino Opus Dei “monk,” whosezealous piety expresses itself as sadomasochism and a willingness tokill (even a nun) for God. It is through Silas that Brown introduceshis readers to the practice of corporal mortification—self-inflictedpain as an avenue to deeper spirituality—and the devices employed toachieve it, a barbed belt worn around the thigh (called a cilice) and aknotted rope (the discipline). In one scene in the book, Silas,preparing for a night of doing God’s dirty work, strips naked andcinches his cilice until it cuts deeper into his flesh, then repeatedlywhips himself until, “finally, he felt the blood begin to flow.” Thenhe goes out and vandalizes a church and commits another murder, for thecause.
Brown employs the Silas character to convey animpression of Opus Dei as the cultish, invisible hand within theCatholic Church, a view that is held by many, both inside the Churchand out. Opus Dei is a unique community, begun in 1928 by a Spanishpriest named Josemaría Escrivá, who envisioned a world made holier by acadre of deeply pious laypeople committed to expressing their spiritualdevotion through their everyday work in the secular world. That,Escrivá believed, was truly God’s work—opus dei.Members undertake rigorous theological and spiritual formation,something like that of candidates for a religious order, with acritical core (about twenty-five per cent) pledging celibacy and livingtogether in gender-segregated Opus Dei centers, such as the building onThirty-fourth Street. (The women’s portion of the building is enteredfrom Lexington Avenue.) Opus Dei now has eighty-seven thousand membersworldwide, with about three thousand in the United States. (Itstraditional rival, the Jesuits, an order of Catholic priests andbrothers, claims about twenty thousand.) A little more than half themembers are women, and the great majority, called “supernumeraries,”are married and, apart from the intensity of their devotion, leadconventional lives.
A sizable proportion of Opus Deimembers, under the guidance of a spiritual director, voluntarily takeup the practice of corporal mortification, wearing the cilice for twohours most days and using the discipline. (Both items are produced inmonasteries.) Father William Stetson, who runs the Catholic InformationCenter, in Washington, D.C., and who joined Opus Dei in themid-nineteen-fifties, when he was at Harvard Law School, says that helearned the larger meaning of corporal mortification the first week hejoined. “I understood that what was being demanded of me was anascetical practice,” he says. “Not just the cilice and the disciplinesbut an austerity of life, living in the middle of the world.” Stetsonand others frequently point out that corporal mortification, which mayseem a throwback to medieval mysticism, was not uncommon even amongrecent exemplars of spiritual piety. Mother Teresa of Calcutta wore acilice and used the discipline, telling her Sisters, ‘‘If I am sick, Itake five strokes. I must feel its need in order to share in thePassion of Christ and the sufferings of our poor.”
PopeJohn Paul II particularly favored Opus Dei, and in 1982 accorded thecommunity the status of “personal prelature,” a sort of worldwidejurisdiction unbounded by the geographical lines that define a diocese.Members are extremely loyal to the Pope, and to Church orthodoxy. DanBrown’s novel portrays Opus Dei as a powerful force for regression,which is exactly how the prelature is seen by Vatican II-eraprogressive Catholics, whose hopes for reform (such as the admission ofwomen into the priesthood and a more liberal policy on contraception)have long been frustrated. As John Paul neared death, Father RichardMcBrien, of the University of Notre Dame, a consistent liberal voice,said that one of his complaints against John Paul was his affinity forOpus Dei. “Opus Dei is as close to a fascist organization [as there is]in the Catholic Church,” he told me last year. “They’re a very, verydefinite, militant, ultra-conservative group in the Church, who arebasically trying to undo the work of the Second Vatican Council. Inthis Pope, they had a willing ally, because there was a quid pro quo.They gave him a lot of money and a lot of support for his efforts,going way back, to support the Solidarity movement in Poland. And theyhad a great influence in John Paul’s pontificate.”
Thatdeeply critical view of Opus Dei is reflected by Brown in “The Da VinciCode,” except that Brown’s quid pro quo involves an Opus Dei bailout ofthe Vatican bank, repaid, in part, by fast-tracked sainthood for FatherEscrivá. (The Vatican canonized Escrivá in 2002.) Opus Dei insists thatthe “Da Vinci Code” portrait of the group is malicious nonsense, butthe larger worry is how much of the rest of the book readers will takeas gospel. “The distortions that ‘The Da Vinci Code’ has in it aboutChrist, the Church, Christianity in general are a source of deeperconcern than any misrepresentation of Opus Dei,” Peter Bancroft, thegroup’s national communications director, says. “The Church won’t standor fall on whether Opus Dei exists or not. But whether Christ is divineis central.”
The premise of Brown’s story is that Jesusof Nazareth was, in the words of a “Da Vinci” character, “a great andpowerful man, but a man nonetheless. Amortal.” The Brown theology—asserted, lecture style, in speeches by twoof his main characters, both scholars—holds that Jesus was aproto-feminist married to Mary of Magdala, his favorite disciple andthe mother of his offspring. This Jesus preached a message that was inharmony with goddess worship, and the early Christians practiced alife-affirming faith devoted to the “sacred feminine” until, in thefourth century, a Catholic power play replaced this true Christianitywith the patriarchal, sin-and-atonement version. According to Brown,the softer Christianity’s books were burned by the Church, as were fivemillion of its more assertive women—“female scholars, priestesses,gypsies, mystics, nature lovers,” and the like. Even so, this originalChristian Church could not be wiped out, and left clues everywheretelling of the sacred feminine—not only in Leonardo’s work (the artistwas in on the secret) but even in church architecture. (The entrance ofa Gothic cathedral, one of Brown’s characters observes, is like avagina, “complete with receding labial ridges and a nice littlecinquefoil clitoris above the doorway.”)
While secularcritics and Hollywood producers plainly saw Brown’s story as a mysterythat happened to have some religious material in it, the Church saw thebook as an anti-Christian (and, particularly, anti-Catholic) polemicdisguised as a beach read. As church leaders, Protestant and Catholic,increasingly heard questions from their congregants about “Da Vinci”postulations, book sales skyrocketed—to date, more than sixty millioncopies have been printed, in forty-four languages—and Sony set out tomake the movie. The Christians were broadly united in their oppositionto the book, and to the movie, but badly divided on the question of howto deal with it.

MainstreamHollywood has an orthodoxy of its own, upheld in some quarters asinsistently as that of any church, and by the fall of 2003 Mel Gibsonhad come to be regarded as a deeply misguided, perhaps even dangerous,heretic. His movie about the arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Christwas still in the cutting room, but Hollywood already knew more thanenough, from accounts of a bootlegged screenplay, to render judgment.Gibson’s vision of Jesus’ last hours, reflecting what he considered aliteral reading of the Gospels, offended progressive Christianscholars, Jewish groups concerned about anti-Semitism, and secularopinion writers. For people in the film business, an even greateroffense, perhaps, was Gibson’s putting his own money into the film—onethat used relatively unknown actors, speaking lines written in deadlanguages. This seemed the act of someone who had truly lost hisbearings, and Gibson began to feel the sting of ostracism in acommunity that had once given him a Best Picture Oscar. Major studiosshunned the project; producers were quoted anonymously as saying thatthey wouldn’t work with him again; and he was snubbed at his BeverlyHills cigar club.
But it was still the movie business,which meant that somewhere in all the negative publicity there was amarketing opportunity. Gibson seized it, through the services of a mannamed Paul Lauer, a Catholic who sensed that opprobrium aimed at Gibsonby the press and by Hollywood people could be leveraged to Gibson’sadvantage. Lauer worked the Catholic network, arranging privatescreenings of “The Passion of the Christ” for friendly archbishops andKnights of Columbus chapters, personally attended by Gibson. Lauerurged Gibson to reach out to evangelical Protestants, who had long feltestranged from popular culture, and who now embraced the Hollywood starfor standing on their side of the culture divide. After Gibson showedclips from his film to a convention of Pentecostals in Anaheim, membersof the crowd laid hands on him and prayed for his success. Gibson’sfilm became a Christian cause, and when it opened, on Ash Wednesday,2004, church groups that had bought ticket blocks filled the theatres;some houses were sold out for several days. “The Passion of theChrist,” scorned by critics and rejected by establishment studios,provided Gibson with a revenge that spoke clearly to Hollywood—adomestic box-office return of three hundred and seventy milliondollars.
Eight months after “The Passion” arrived, theborn-again President was reëlected over Hollywood’s candidate, greatlyhelped by the alliance of evangelicals and Catholics who had flocked toGibson’s film. Suddenly, people like Paul Lauer and A. Larry Ross, thepublicity man for Billy Graham and Rick Warren, who helped with“Passion,” were getting calls from producers, asking their advice onhow to market their films. Scripts were vetted for content that mightoffend Christians, who had become the hot new market segment. Producersbegan using terms like “Christian values” without irony.
Itwas at this moment, in November, 2004, that Sony moved towardproduction on “The Da Vinci Code.” The studio had hired Ron Howard todirect the film and Tom Hanks as its star, safe choices who were notlikely to botch the project’s blockbuster inevitability by going arty.But the environment had changed dramatically since Sony acquired theproperty. Dan Brown’s best-seller was now under steady assault, itstheology attacked by a series of books bearing titles such as“De-Coding Da Vinci” and “Breaking the Da Vinci Code,” whichdeconstructed Brown’s scholarship and convincingly refuted many of hiskey claims (such as Christ’s divinity having been decided by thefourth-century Council of Nicaea, on a close vote). Brown’s artscholarship was also broadly assailed. The Timespublished a critique of “The Da Vinci Code” by the Renaissance artexpert Bruce Boucher, who gently mocked Brown’s “shaky” grasp of thehistorical Leonardo (pointing out, for example, that the artist’s namewas not “Da Vinci”). Boucher concluded his article by suggesting that“The Da Vinci Code” might make a better opera than a film, offering theold advice that “if it’s too silly to be said, it can always be sung.”
Suchconfutation was notable, because the ostensible veracity of Brown’shistory, if not his theology, had been part of the book’s allure. Brownhad asserted this veracity both implicitly (through the device ofassigning historical exposition to his fictional scholars) andexplicitly (beginning the book with a “fact” page that erroneouslyasserted, for example, that his shadowy Priory of Sion—“a Europeansecret society founded in 1099—is a real organization”). Book reviewershad praised his research, and Brown, in promoting the book, vouched forits validity; he told Charles Gibson, on “Good Morning America,” thatif the book had been nonfiction his factual assertions would not havechanged.
Meanwhile, Sony’s fortunes seemed to have taken adownward turn. In 2003, its Ben Affleck–Jennifer Lopez movie, “Gigli,”had tanked embarrassingly, and two big-budget sequels, “Bad Boys II”and “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle,” had not met expectations. Thewhole movie industry was entering a prolonged box-office slump. Sonyneeded “The Da Vinci Code” to be a hit, and it could not predict how anangry and motivated “Passion” constituency might affect the film’s fate.
Sonydecided not to take any chances. As it began to devise its marketingstrategy for “Da Vinci,” it hired the services of Sitrick &Company, a public-relations firm that specializes in reputationsalvaging. The firm, whose unofficial slogan is “If you don’t tell yourstory, someone else is going to tell it for you,” worked with RushLimbaugh after his revelation of prescription-drug addiction, and withthe comedian Paula Poundstone when she was charged with childendangerment. Sony wanted Sitrick to manage any potential “Da Vinci”fallout. “It’s not that big studios don’t like controversy,” AllanMayer, Sitrick’s managing director, told Variety.“What they fear is a controversy that gets out of control. Andcontroversy gets out of control when people start using a movie as atennis ball in their own match.”

DarrellBock, a research professor of New Testament Studies at the DallasTheological Seminary, was on sabbatical in Tübingen, Germany, lastsummer when he received an e-mail from a Sony representative wishing todiscuss a project connected to “The Da Vinci Code.” This seemed odd,because Bock was the author of “Breaking the Da Vinci Code,” the attackon Brown’s scholarship, which had also reached the Times best-seller list. Bock agreed to meet with the Sony representative when he returned to the U.S. that fall.
TheSony strategy, following the Sitrick model, was to try to turn thecontroversy over “The Da Vinci Code” to the film’s advantage. There wasno way to stop a Christian critique of Brown’s ideas, but, if leadingChristian voices could somehow be coaxed into an association with the“Da Vinci” movie, the criticism might seem less like an attack and morelike engagement. Many in Hollywood remembered the passionate reactionto Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988), whichproved to be a public-relations nightmare for Universal. It was better,to paraphrase Lyndon Johnson, to have the Christians inside thetheatre, discussing “Da Vinci,” than outside, picketing.
Theman Sony chose for the task of shepherding Christian leaders to theSony cause was Jonathan Bock, of Grace Hill Media, one of the new breedof faith-oriented consultants now thriving in Hollywood. It was he whohad got in touch with Darrell Bock (they are not related) last summer,and with several dozen other such leaders. Jonathan Bock, a formerstudio publicist, had a demonstrated ability to translate Hollywood tothe Christian faithful, and to explain Christians to movie people. Hehad a sophisticated understanding of the relatively small andinterconnected circle of Christian opinion leaders, especially those inthe new media. Where a studio executive might reflexively equate“Christian leader” with Jerry Falwell, Bock knew that, in importantways, this is a post-televangelist era; a few well-regarded Christianbloggers or scholars, fully conversant with popular culture, can haveas much impact as any broadcast Jeremiah.
Christiancritics, meanwhile, had yet to come up with a unified, coherentstrategy to protest the movie. On Palm Sunday, a powerful cardinalurged a boycott of the film, saying that the book was “full ofcalumnies, offenses, and historical and theological errors,” but therehas been no official Church endorsement of his call. Bill Donohue, thepresident of the Catholic League, and a usually reliable volunteer inthe culture conflicts, decided early on that he was not going toparticipate in any boycott of the film. “First of all, it’s a uselessexercise,” he says. “The movie’s going to be a box-office extravaganzathe first weekend or two. After that, if it’s a good movie it’llcontinue; if not, it’ll fail.” Donohue says that he is galled by DanBrown’s insistence on the book’s factuality, and that he has asked Sonyand Ron Howard to add a disclaimer to the film, labelling it asfiction. He says, “I have to be prudent. I want to win. This book hassold forty million copies. It’s got Tom Hanks, Sony behind it, RonHoward. To the extent that we can get the word out—‘Look, go and beentertained, this is good fun, but this movie is a fable’—to thatextent, that’s about as good as I can get.”
Thatambivalence made Jonathan Bock’s job—framing the dispute over the filmon Sony’s terms—much easier. In February, Bock launched The Da VinciDialogue, which contains some forty-five essays by religious leadersand Christian scholars questioning and correcting, in civil tones,various of Dan Brown’s assertions. Opus Dei declined to participate inthe site, but evangelicals have been eager to be heard. Darrell Bock,perhaps preëminent among the “Da Vinci” debunkers, contributed twoessays to the site, and says that the Christian participation in theproject reflects the community’s growing sophistication in dealing withpopular culture. “The Christian response this time around has beendifferent,” Bock says. “Rather than simply whining and complaining,although there are still elements that do that, there is a substantialgroup that says, No, on this one we’re going to engage. So we’re notgoing to talk boycott. We’re not going to protest, we’re simply goingto take the facts that were presented in this novel and we’re going toengage them, and we’re going to try to show people that there’s a good,substantive reply to what’s going on here.”
The theme ofengagement has come to define the Christian response to “The Da VinciCode” well beyond the Sony discourse. Ministers across the country havearranged discussion groups and courses of instruction tied to thequestions raised by Brown’s work, and even Opus Dei leaders now speakof it as a “teaching moment.” Sony is undoubtedly pleased by thisoutcome. If Christian leaders are speaking of “dialogue” and“engagement,” they are not saying, “Don’t see this film.” In the realmof damage control, that may be a serviceable definition of controllingthe controversy.

Thatis precisely what annoys Barbara Nicolosi, a screenwriter and aninfluential Christian blogger, whose friendship with Jonathan Bock hasbeen strained recently. She says that when she first heard that Bockwas working with Sony on “The Da Vinci Code” she was optimistic. Bock’sconnection with the project suggested to her that Sony wanted tomollify Christians, and Nicolosi urged her friends and readers towithhold judgment on the film; perhaps Ron Howard and his screenwriter,Akiva Goldsman, would not use the name Opus Dei, and would make theassertions about Jesus and Mary Magdalene seem more speculative andless factual. Then, she says, someone slipped her a version of thescreenplay, and she realized that the studio’s effort to engage in adialogue with the faith community would be limited to the Da VinciDialogue Web site created by Bock. Nicolosi felt that Christians hadbeen sold out, as she proceeded to make clear on her blog. “Christiansbeing coaxed into writing anti-DVC pieceson a stupid web site . . . are meekly accepting that they are beinggiven ‘a seat at the table’ in some grand cultural discussion,” shewrote. “Duped! There is no seat, folks. There is no discussion. Whatthere is, is a few P.R. folks in Hollywood taking mondo big bucks fromSony Pictures, to deliver legions of well-meaning Christians intosubsidizing a movie that makes their own Savior out to be a sham.”
Nicolosisays that those participating in the Sony project are debating “onHell’s terms,” and she refers to the Web site’s contributors, some ofwhom are her friends, as “useful Christian idiots.”
“Ithink that was actually applied to me,” Craig Detweiler, a professor ofmass communications at Biola University, an evangelical college nearLos Angeles, says. Detweiler has written for the Dialogue site, and hasspoken admiringly of Dan Brown’s book—publicly posing the question “Howcan forty million readers be wrong?” Detweiler acknowledges that theChristian community in Hollywood is divided over the film. “I thinkthere are just very differing levels of offense taken at the novel,” hesays. “Some are able to sort it out and say, ‘You know what? It’s anovel, it’s fiction.’ And I believe that the average moviegoer andreader can figure that out.” He also says that the different responsessuggest a Catholic-Protestant divide. “The accusation that Jesus mighthave been married—to many people, that’s kind of an interesting notion.It doesn’t affect their faith significantly, one way or the other. Tosomeone who’s taken a vow of celibacy and put on a collar, that is avery large foundational challenge. So it’s understandable why that hasmaybe crossed a line for certain members of the Christian community.”
Nicolosi,who is Catholic, says that the divisions among Christians prove herpoint about Dan Brown’s book and the Sony movie. “It’s demonic,” shesays. “I’ve seen so much evidence, in the fact that people who werefriends five months ago are now totally at each other’s throats.”Nicolosi may yet have the last word; she has written a screenplay aboutthe life of the Opus Dei founder, Josemaría Escrivá, and she would behelped by a “Da Vinci Code” success.
If the movie is notthe blockbuster promised by the book’s performance, it will not be thefault of Sony’s marketing campaign. The studio has certainly deflected,or mitigated, direct criticism of the movie, which, by all indications,follows the book closely. The Catholic League will not get itsdisclaimer, and Opus Dei will be prominently, and darkly, represented.One measure of how well the campaign worked is that by last week Sony’stelevision ads for the movie carried the tagline “The mostcontroversial thriller of our time.”
As it happens, the“Da Vinci Code” experience has provided Opus Dei itself with a valuablemarketing tutorial. After initially considering a lawsuit against Brownor Sony, the prelature decided instead to take advantage of thepublicity. The red brick building at Thirty-fourth and Lexington hasbeen opened to reporters, and so many tourists stop by that theprelature began leaving recruitment literature by the front entrance.Opus Dei redesigned its Web site, making it more user-friendly, and hasposted a list of “Da Vinci Code” corrections. (Regarding Opus Dei“monks,” such as Silas, the prelature notes, “Like all Catholics, OpusDei members have great appreciation for monks, but in fact there are nomonks in Opus Dei.”) The Web site has received more than three millionvisitors, and Peter Bancroft, Opus Dei’s national communicationsdirector, says that some of the curious have now become members. TheSilas wannabes are generally screened out.
“It’s odd,really,” Bancroft says. “Every once in a while, we get an e-mail fromsomebody who’s really fascinated by the cilice and the discipline, andsays he would like to join up if he can use them. And that’s not thekind of person that we’re looking for.”
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