The Davinci Code

Sorry for the delay. Travel and deadlines.Anyhoo...The only time I watch movies any more is on airplanes. This time around I watched The Davinci Code. I'm not a Dan Brown fan, though admittedly I only got about 30 pages into Angels and Demons before I was required to hurl the badly-researched thing into the rubbish.But I was intrigued by The Davinci Code because of all the press it got and, of course, because it trashed the Catholic Church, which is, as you know, my favorite hobby. I knew the movie had garnered bad reviews and I wasn't expecting much at all, but, truth be told, I loved it. What's more, I think it's going to go down as a very important movie. Here's why.None of Dan Brown's ideas about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, patriarchy, feminism, and symbology are original. I used to swim in those waters when I was in college and even wrote a fairly pretentious multi-media play on the theme. Lots of non-fiction books have been written on the subject and apparently the authors of one in particular are suing Dan Brown. But Dan Brown alone has succeeded in popularizing the idea and I think he managed it by tapping into an already-existent vein of loathing for the Catholic Church. You really don't have to fictionalize extensively to depict as evil a bunch of robe-wearing old men who cluster in dank medieval buildings waving incense containers around while speaking in Latin. Dan Brown obviously despises the Catholic Church, but he didn't preach to us. He seduced us. Evil albino monks are scary but they're also fun. His genius was in turning the dour task of criticizing a patriarchal institution into a fun game of cloak and dagger. My guess is that most viewers will walk out of the theater with little more than the pleasant sensation of having diverted themselves for a few hours. But beneath the surface the ideas will germinate. And to a distressingly large segment of the American pouplation, those ideas are fairly radical:1) Jesus is not God's son.2) Christianity is a betrayal of Jesus' teaching3) Patriarchy is evilThe best memes of all are the ones you don't even know about, the ones that thrive in the dark waters of the subconscious. I think Dan Brown has created one of them. Kudos to him for it.P.S. I also watched the very funny teen movie, John Tucker Must Die and highly recommend it (though for different reasons than stated above).