The Da Vinci Code: Not the First Film to Bash the Church
The movie The Da Vinci Code is getting a lot of slack from the Catholic Church lately, but remember this isn’t the first film to make the Church upset. Remember Medium star Patricia Arquette in the film Stigmata?
The Roman Catholic Church has a bee in its miter over The Da Vinci Code. Opus Dei, a little-known and relatively modern Catholic organization, is baring its teeth at Dan Brown, and Ron Howard — director of the forthcoming film version of the 45-million bestselling book, is besieged by demands to alter his final cut — or at least insert a disclaimer — to make nice with the powers that be.
You’d think nobody had ever made a movie that challenged the status quo before.
The truth is, we have gone through this several times in the past generation whenever someone creates a pop culture artifact that seemingly undermines established orthodoxies of faith upon which our entire society is founded.
Before The Da Vinci Code argued the sanctity, let alone the sanity, of a male-dominated society, several other films ruffled communal feathers on the topic of God, Jesus and the concept of the Holy Trinity.
The last time was a little over two years ago, when Mel Gibson’s odd, cinema-verite style The Passion of the Christ outraged Jewish groups as being anti-Semitic.
For that matter, it upset a lot of other people, too. Namely, historians and Biblical scholars, who found Gibson’s movie misleading, even though it went to great lengths to offer authenticity.
UCLA philosophy scholars Douglas Kellner and Rhonda Hammer argued The Passion was little more than pornography: “Indeed, The Passion presents a pornography of violence with savage beatings, brutality, and torture as extreme as any in S&M porn films. The narrative also contains suppressed homoeroticism, fetishism of body parts from the reverently portrayed foot washing to obscenely violent flaying and scourging of flesh.”
This time around, it’s the likes of Opus Dei who are adamant about playing down their use of “corporeal mortification” as little more than an extension of prayer and abstinence.
But with movies, nothing is real. So why all the fuss?
From Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, to Rupert Wainwright’s Stigmata, to Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal, movies have challenged the Trinity, the Bible and the establishment church for years. Perhaps what makes a difference now is the ascent of fundamentalism and increased polarization of the Right and Left. Combine that with the box-office potential of Tom Hanks and Ron Howard, and a cheap horror film like Stigmata quickly fades.
Arguably, Stigmata (1999) put the boots to the Catholic Church to a much greater degree than The Da Vinci Code. The film starred Gabriel Byrne as a scholarly priest, and Patricia Arquette as a secular hairdresser who suddenly finds herself bleeding from the hands and feet. Tortured by nightmares and given to scrawling strange words on the walls, the hairdresser would seem to be possessed.
The priest tries to rid her of Satanic influence, but soon realizes she may be channelling the spirit of someone much different.
Stigmata went farther than even The Da Vinci Code when it challenged the whole raison d’etre of the Catholic Church as God’s will, and suggested the Vatican was in possession of the lost Gospels of Christ himself, who wrote in his own hand that God could not be found within four walls — but outside, under the sun, in the bosom of the natural world.
Surely the idea Christ didn’t want a physical church is as offensive to believers as the idea that Jesus had a wife. But because Stigmata was marketed as a horror film, no one cared.
Similarly, The Last Temptation of Christ got a lot of ink before it opened for suggesting Jesus had carnal knowledge of a woman. But the minute it tanked at the box office for being a complete bore, the whole issue disappeared altogether.
Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal featured a priest who had regular sexual encounters with a woman, and depicted representatives of the Roman Catholic Church as humourless bureaucrats eager to cling to power.
Not so in the 1991 British comedy The Pope Must Die(t), a film in which Robbie Coltrane (Harry Potter’s Hagrid) plays a near-defrocked priest who is mistakenly sent to the Vatican. In the process, he spreads such blasphemous concepts as the use of prophylactics.
No one cared about The Pope Must Die(t) or Stigmata, and because Jesus of Montreal played in French to an audience of mostly lapsed Catholics, no one took notice.
One thing that is clear is our fascination with the story of Jesus and the rest of the Bible. They are recurrent themes that filmmakers have contemplated from the moment celluloid first rolled through a camera.
Some films affirm accepted truths about Christianity and organized religion — think of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. Others challenge them.
But one thing remains constant: People are eager to know more, and to understand more, about faith and the concepts of belief that underpin so much of our current world order. Via The Vancouver Sun
Tags: the da vinci codes, medium, medium dreams, patricia arquette, stigmata
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