The DaVinci Code: Seeking Out the Sarcophagi

Let's face it: The DaVinci Code was certainly not the best novel to come out of 2003. Nor is it by any means the best movie of this year. I get as frustrated as the next guy when I think about the fortune Dan Brown has made off of this thing, especially when I come to realize how far off Brown is from actual history and how few members of the general public realize this. The mere fact that Brown’s title inaccurately uses DaVinci as a surname (even though the name literally means Leonardo is from Vinci) highlights the many Brown’s many historical faux-pas. Intentionally or not, Brown for the most part keeps his audience in the dark about what actually happened and what has been fabricated.

However, I do not intend to go over the all-to-frequently bypassed understanding of Brown’s novel and the newly released movie as works of fiction. Fortunately for me, countless reviewers have already taken the liberty of warning us against seeing these works as truthisms. Rather, I would like to emphasize that despite the enormous amount of unwarranted hype that has built up around the book and the movie, The DaVinci Code(s) really are important, not in the way that Brown shines new light on the past, but in the way that Brown invites us to recreate the past, or at least to reassess our understandings of the past. Brown has managed to open up discourse about the religious texts much of American society under the Bush administration has come to recognize as doctrine.

It seems that despite all of the information that is readily available to us, like the times before that marvelous invention known as the printing press, we have fallen back to a point of relying upon leaders to interpret information for us. Though The DaVinci Code is obviously a work of fiction, Brown’s references to real historical names and famous works of artwork force us, as the audience, to venture out of the cave, so to speak, to sort out the false from the real. What’s more, even if we do not take on this task, others have. As I mentioned earlier, it is hard to ignore The DaVinci Code not only because books and movie tickets have been selling like hotcakes, but because a discourse has risen out of Brown’s controversial re-examination of the Christian holy texts. The media has caught wind of the public’s interest in Brown’s books and have taken it upon themselves to investigate the “truths” behind The DaVinci Code to spoon feed to audiences who are not quite ambitious enough to get off the couch and into the library.

What does Brown help us to do exactly? Well, he helps us realize that a lot is at stake in reading history in a certain way. Viewing Mary Magdalen as a prostitute gives the Church power, according to Brown’s tale. Semantics are important, Teabing insists as he recounts the Church’s alleged manipulation of facts about Jesus and Mary. The way the Church instructs us to read the Bible is merely one way to read it and while Brown only offers only one alternative (as opposed to multiple ones), which for the purpose of his story is the actual “correct” way to read the Bible, Brown makes us aware in that we are not always given the whole picture. Though questioning truths will likely never reach the perfectly packaged ending that The DaVinci Code offers, it nevertheless important to critically analyze information we assume to be true. The DaVinci Code, despite its many flaws, serves as a reminder that those with power are not always showing us their whole hand and that it is our responsibility to seek out the skeletons in the closet, or the sarcophagi in the…well, I won’t spoil the fun, but you get the idea.