Simply controversial

The controversy and hype around the release of the much-awaited film The Da Vinci Code has simply added to the book’s popularity. Although the film was a flop with critics worldwide, it was a huge success in cinema box-offices.

According to KRS, during its three-week period of exhibition, The Da Vinci Code is this year’s number one box-office film.

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Comments about the film:

Nathan Sammut

I think The Da Vinci Code is a thought-provoking book that popularises controversial ideas by presenting them in a simple but intellectually entertaining and stimulating way. It provides an easy relaxing read with a fast exciting plot that keeps you wanting to read more. I liked it.

On the other hand, the film is rather disappointing and is a disservice to the book. Many details highlighted in the book are either skimmed through quickly or are omitted altogether. Contrary to the book, the film is not thought-provoking and the suspense is not built in such a way as to stimulate curiosity.

Paul Farrugia

The film was definitely not worthy of the hype that built around it. I enjoyed the film for what it was but it end was rather dragging and it was a bit too melodramatic at times.

Andre Delicata

I’ve just finished reading the controversial book today. Literary-wise, it’s utter tripe. Its narrative is akin to a Hardy Boys mystery story. Weakly constructed and panders to the reader’s expectations: highly predictable, it can clearly be classified as a Barthesian text of pleasure. Dan Brown isn’t a patch on Agatha Christie. I suppose it’s ok to read on the daily commute, but otherwise I wouldn’t recommend it as essential reading. If you want something light but riveting, Harry Potter is much better.

Matthew Calleja

The film wasn’t too bad. Its ending was different from the book’s but it was enjoyable. However, I preferred reading the book to watching the film.

Stephen Apap

Unless you read the book, it might be difficult to understand what is going on in the film. You can’t really enjoy the film without having read the book first. The book is excellent, but the film isn’t really all that good.

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‘Unpalatable’

The success of The Da Vinci Code “can only be attributed to the increasing number of reading illiterates, not to mention the writing ones,” according to Maltese author Frans Sammut.

Mr Sammut, a former headmaster, is known for his novels il-Gagga and Samuraj and recently wrote a critique on the book The Da Vinci Code.

“What I, as a writer, have found unpalatable about the whole Da Vinci Code affair is that pulp fiction masquerading as a culturally relevant input may enjoy a semblance of a big-time literary event and that its emboldened authors can get away with murder by jumping on the freedom of expression band wagon.”

In his critique, Mr Sammut mentions a number of fallacies in the book.

The first fallacy is that Dan Brown claims he has “penetrated a dark central mystery ensconced in Leonardo’s artistic representation of the life of Jesus and disclosed that the marriage of Jesus to Mary Magdalene had been hushed up for two millennia by a clandestine clique within the Church.” The whole story plot is made more credible because the main character of the book poses as a historical researcher.

Another fallacy in The Da Vinci Code is that beliefs upheld by early Christian heresies were not hidden or covered up by the mainstream Christian Church, according to Mr Sammut

“They were simply rooted out leaving behind them surviving fragments which were subsequently maintained in secrecy by surviving members,” he said.

The third fallacy is that “despite Dan Brown’s claims that a team of researchers had assisted him in unearthing the secrets maintained by Christian orthodoxy,” the author was accused of plagiarism.

Brown was accused by Michael Baigent and Co, authors of the 1982 bestseller The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, of plagiarism and taken before a court of law.

Mr Sammut pointed out that although Brown won the case, the defence lawyers “had to concede that while there was no doubt that Dan Brown had read their book, the idea that Jesus married Mary Magdalene was neither new nor their exclusive discovery.”

The fourth false claim is that Brown’s pretensions are the first to claim that Jesus did not die on the cross. Mr Sammut explained that a number of books “written by much finer writers” already used it as the main plot.

According to Mr Sammut, a fallacy Brown may not have been concerned “has to do with the Jesus dynasty starting in his alleged marriage to Mary Magdalene and ending up in the Merovingian kings of medieval France.”

Brown’s shortcomings in the literary world are complemented by his “abysmal knowledge of art and the history of art,” concluded Mr Sammut.

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The un-coding

The release of the film The Da Vinci Code is a golden opportunity for the Church to start a dialogue and clarify the important questions related to its message, according to director of the Institute of Pastoral Formation, Fr Fabio Attard.

The Institute of Pastoral Formation (IFP) compiled booklet titled “Un-coding Jesus Christ”, which attempts to clear any misunderstandings raised in the book The Da Vinci Code.

“It is true that we do not approve of the book, but we are not going to condemn it. Instead of burying our heads in the sand, we took the opportunity to see the issues brought up in the book and answer them with the truth,” he said.

Fr Attard pointed out that although the book is a work of fiction, it is a clever amalgamation of truth and fiction, which are not distinguishable.

The booklet answers questions about the meaning of Leonardo’s paintings, the development of the New Testament writings, the varieties of interpretations of Jesus in the early centuries of the Church, the place of Mary Magdalene and the feminine in the Church and the relation of the Knights Templar.

According to the booklet, Brown’s novel has caused such a stir because it hurts the religious sentiments of Christians in a clever way.

The book casts doubt on fundamental tenets important to Christians such as the origins of the New Testament and the divinity of Jesus Christ.

Unfortunately, modern culture is ill-equipped and is not able to distinguish between fact and fiction, said Fr Attard.

“It is misinformed about Christianity, sadly ignorant of history, and clueless about the New Testament – its source, composition, preservation and translation.”

Dan Brown created all the hype around The Da Vinci Code. He is “boldly labelling fact what has been so totally refuted by the evidence and clear-headed scholars.”

One of the untruths put forward by Dan Brown is that Leonardo was a member of a secret society called the Priory of Sion. However, Fr Attard pointed out that the Priory was set up in 1956.

In the book, Dan Brown claims that the person depicted next to Jesus in Leonardo’s famous painting “The Last Supper” is not John but Mary Magdalene.

“This conjecture merely shows Brown’s lack of familiarity with “types” in the artistic conventions of the day.

“The Apostle John is depicted as a young, handsome, longhaired youth because of the artistic style of the time and not because Leonardo intended to paint a woman.”

According to The Da Vinci Code, the Holy Grail is not the chalice used by Christ in the Last Supper but refers to Mary Magdalene who carried the bloodline of Christ.

Fr Attard said that nowhere in the gospels is it mentioned that Mary was Jesus’ wife and the mother of his child. The booklet also pointed out that Dan Brown attempts to show that an evil-male-dominated, patriarchal Church erased Mary Magdalene’s prominence.

However, Fr Attard explained that if early Christian leaders were really determined to suppress Mary Magdalene’s role in their history, they would have erased every section in the New Testament where Mary Magdalene is witness to the Empty Tomb.

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Bizarre facts

The secret life of Leonardo da Vinci

Most scholars agree that even Da Vinci’s most famous pieces - works like The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and Madonna of the Rocks – contain a message that hints at a shocking historical secret which allegedly has been guarded since 1099 by a European secret society known as the Priory of Sion.

In 1975, Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci.

An Unbroken Code

There is a chapel in England with a ceiling with hundreds of stone blocks jutting down to form a bizarre multi-faceted surface. Each block is carved with a symbol, seemingly at random, creating a cipher of unfathomable proportion. Modern cryptographers have never been able to break this code, and a generous reward is offered to anyone who can decipher the baffling message.

Geological ultrasounds have revealed the presence of an enormous subterranean vault hidden beneath the chapel. This vault appears to have no entrance and no exit and the curators of the chapel have not allowed any excavation.

Someone is watching you...or are they?

The Louvre Museum in Paris is one of the longest buildings on earth. Walking around the entire perimeter of this horseshoe-shaped edifice is a three-mile journey. Even so, the Louvre’s collection of art is so vast that only a fraction of its works can be displayed on the walls. Inside the galleries, a multitude of security cameras watch over visitors. The number of cameras is so great that a staff of several hundred wardens would be required to monitor all of them. In fact, most of the cameras are fake.

Source: Dan Brown’s official website

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• The bestseller The Da Vinci Code was his first hit and became the first to be adapted into a film. However the first book Robert Langdon appears in is Angels and Demons.

• fictional Langdon’s alma mater is Phillips Exeter Academy, the same school that Brown attended.

• In a statement at trial in March 2006, Brown wrote that while he was growing up, on birthdays and Christmas, he and his siblings were led on elaborate treasure hunts to find their gifts, following cryptic clues and codes left by their father.

• Brown plays tennis, and writes in his loft, often getting up at 4am to work. He keeps an hourglass on his desk, to remind himself to take breaks.

• Brown has told fans that he uses inversion therapy to help with writer’s block. He uses gravity boots and says, “hanging upside down seems to help me solve plot challenges by shifting my entire perspective.”

• There is a brief appearance of Brown and his wife in the 2005 film Be Cool, in the front row of the audience at the Aerosmith concert.

• In the film version of The Da Vinci Code, Brown and his wife can be seen in the background of one of the early book-

signing scenes.

Source: askmen.com

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Background information

Dan Brown was born on 22 June, 1964 and was raised in Exeter, New Hampshire and is the oldest of three children. His mother Constance was a professional musician. Brown’s father was a prominent mathematics teacher, writing textbooks and teaching high school mathematics at Phillips Exeter Academy from 1962 until his retirement in 1997.

Brown graduated from Amherst with a double major in Spanish and English in 1986, and then dabbled with a musical career, creating effects with a synthesiser, and self-producing a children’s cassette entitled SynthAnimals. The collection of tracks included Happy Frogs and Suzuki Elephants, and sold a few hundred copies.

He then formed his own record company called Dalliance, and in 1990 self-published a CD entitled “Perspective”, targeted for adult market, which also sold a few hundred copies. In 1991, he moved to Hollywood to pursue a career as singer-songwriter and pianist. To support himself, he taught classes at Beverly Hills Preparatory School.

Brown’s first three novels had mediocre success, with fewer than 10,000 copies in each of their first printings; but the fourth novel, The Da Vinci Code, became a runaway bestseller, going to the top of the New York Times Best Seller list during its first week of release in 2003.

It is now credited with being one of the most popular books of all time (despite being heavily disparaged critically), with 60.5 million copies sold worldwide as of 2006. Its success has helped push sales of Brown’s earlier books. In 2004, all four of his novels were on the New York Times list in the same week, and in 2005, he made Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of the year. Forbes magazine placed Brown at Number 12 on their 2005 “Celebrity 100” list, and estimated his annual income at $76.5 million.

The Times estimated his income from The Da Vinci Code sales as $250 million.

Source: wikipedia