DA VINCI CODE
Daily Telegraph - April 2006

THE news this week that the Catholic Church is mounting a campaign against the film version of The Da Vinci Code is a welcome, albeit I suspect, ultimately futile development.

Recently I succumbed to morbid curiosity and read the book. I can now say I'm with the priests: The Da Vinci Code should be banned. Not on religious grounds but because the book is, without doubt, by ratio of popularity to quality, the worst that has ever been written in modern English.

In The Da Vinci Code when people ask questions they are “confused”. When something of great portent is announced wind “howls” in the trees. We are told three times on the first page that the murder victim is a curator.

Dan Brown's world is one in which English aristocrats still say things like “Well played, old chap” and librarians have “thick” horn-rimmed spectacles. Where every gunshot (and I mean every single one) “thunders”; and where a middle-aged academic bearing an uncanny resemblance to author Dan Brown manages to win the beautiful French “cryptologist” despite being a paunchy snob whose penchant for calling women “my dear” and recounting prurient descriptions of ancient sex rites would have earned him a swift kick to the balls in the real world.

As one who has a degree in the subject I can assure you that no art history professor of mine ever spent time looking for hidden symbols in Da Vinci paintings.
My lecturers were much more likely to be on paid leave, chaining themselves to a fence in Jabiluka, or conducting vital research into regional galleries in the tropical north and their relationship to the local snorkelling industry. The only arcane conspiracies in which they were involved stretched no further than three doors down the corridor and were ideological only insofar as they involved vicious personal vendettas stretching back to the Fraser years.

The Da Vinci Code is not merely mind-bogglingly awful. Many of the creepy fascist overtones seem to have slipped under the radar -- the conspiracies expounded by Brown and taken as fact by impressionable readers the world over were Nazi favourites and are advocated by neo-Nazis today.

This is a fact which will, no doubt, be as conspicuously absent from the film as it was from the novel.

What is really remarkable about the film, however, is that there is anyone left in the world sufficiently ignorant of the plot to constitute a worthwhile audience. Just in case, here's the twist: Jesus and Mary Magdalen had a baby. The “Holy Grail” is their “bloodline” from which the beautiful French cryptologist is descended. Oh, and Ian McKellen's character seems nice but is actually evil. Don't trust him.

The film of The Da Vinci Code will, I expect, be as awful as the book - if only because it stars Tom Hanks. But if you want to know the real conspiracy then I'll tell you: Hollywood can take shit and turn it into gold.

© Brendan Shanahan 2008