Outer Rim Territories

Duh! Vinci Code

Since this Duh! Vinci Code movie and book are all the rage again, my readers would appreciate a couple of responses to the book/film. (mostly negative.) First, from an atheist: Skeptic: Vol. 11 No. 4 Featured Article

Mickey Mouse and the Holy Grail Most rational persons will conclude that a book is wholly unserious when they read a passage such as the following from The Da Vinci Code: Langdon held up his Mickey Mouse watch and told her that Walt Disney had made it his life’s work to pass on the Grail story to future generations. Throughout his entire life, Disney had been hailed as “the Modern-Day Leonardo Da Vinci.” Both men were generations ahead of their times, uniquely gifted artists, members of secret societies, and, most notably, avid pranksters. Like Leonardo, Walt Disney loved infusing hidden messages and symbolism in his art. (261) The evidence for Disney’s involvement with the Grail and “the sacred feminine” is said to be found in Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and most especially in The Little Mermaid. It is indeed possible that Brown included this section as a warning to the reader not to take anything in this book seriously. But if so, he did it in a cypher so opaque — a reductio ad absurdum — that almost nobody has yet managed to decode it. This supposition is strengthened by the subsequent solemn pronouncement that the Age of Aquarius is about to dawn (268), as if this were some freshly-decoded development of a conspiracy, instead of a foolish and trite expression popular a generation ago. The rational person can enjoy reading works of fiction or science fiction, even trite fiction like The Da Vinci Code, without worrying excessively about obvious absurdities within the story. But a problem arises when a work of fiction explicitly claims to be more than a work of fiction, when it resonates with other widespread misinformation within the culture, and when 25 million readers are bamboozled by its specious assertions. The alleged “facts” in The Da Vinci Code are no more credible than those in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, from which they are taken. If you think of yourself as a skeptic you’ll do well to realize that very little fact is mixed in with Brown’s fiction.