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Saturday, May 20, 2006
Michael Novak didn't much like the DaVinci Code, notes Instapundit. Says Novak:The one thing that really shocked me was the movie's underlying intention, stated several times with great clarity: the depth and passion of its anti-Christian, anti-monotheism craziness. To say the movie wishes actually to be the anti-Christ would only sound extravagant; still that is the constant and underlying message. But later, he notes:So The Da Vinci Code will not exactly be stating any new thesis that secular people don't already accept. What it may succeed in doing, however, is to make dramatically manifest the silliness, madness, and love of illusion in what being secular means, at least to these film makers. It is for this reason, perhaps, that so many secular critics have found this movie repellent. Although it seeks to mock Christians and Jews, it actually makes a purely secular view seem absolutely batty. Novak is usually a relatively sane individual, but here he's as crazy as Jesse Jackson reviewing a white man's movie about Harlem. The assumption that the secularists come off bad by accident but the Catholics on purpose tells us how Novak feels about Hollywood, not what the story actually offers.
Those of us who read thrillers for fun, as opposed to for getting our Catholic sensibilities in a lather, will recognize most of the tricks of the trade in the DaVinci Code. One of the biggies is that friends turn out to be enemies, enemies turn out to be friends and there are bad guys on both sides to keep the heroes guessing. The DaVinci Code pits the dark forces of secularism against the dark forces of Opus Dei Catholicism and suggests to us that when the freaks who love ideas but care little for people start driving events, everything goes down the crapper and innocent people get their lives messed up in the tussle. Just the same as Jack Ryan dealing with corrupt bad guys at the CIA when he goes after drug lords in Patriot Games.
We're avoiding spoilers for the six remaining people who don't know the story, but suffice to say that the ending offers more possibilities than suggested by Novak's shrill rant about variable truth. Robert Langdon, skeptic of Catholicism, can't shake the idea that God - indeed, Jesus - brought him through the most terrible night of his life, but all Novak can hear in Langdon's choosing to believe, rather than doing so of necessity, is Pontius Pilate asking "What is truth?" A decade and a half ago, I greatly admired Michael Novak's push to let people behind the Iron Curtain choose a life of faith over the godless Marxism into which they were being indoctrinated. But this former hero of spiritual freedom seems to have lost his sense and reason, so prepared was he to lead the charge to save the Catholic Church even before the opening sequence began.
posted by gbarto at 6:29 PM
Coming soon...
The DaVinci Fuss
Back when I was a lad, some Muslims made real arses of themselves over a book called The Satanic Verses. The book, it must be said, ranged from crude to cynical to breathtakingly beautiful to just plain incomprehensible. In short, it was Salman Rushdie unleashed. The West was rightly horrified when this book brought a death warrant for Rushdie issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini himself.
With The Last Temptation of Christ and The DaVinci Code, not to mention Piss Christ and the elephant dung Madonna, we've gotten a look at how Christians do when it's their faith catching flack. The answer is that Christendom, at large, does much better. Still, you can see by the bulging forehead veins that some Christians wish they weren't so damn civilized about these things. A useful antidote for those fearful for their faith would be to go see the picture. They would walk away reassured that a) maybe the movie doesn't cut so sharply as the book, b) maybe the book didn't really cut that sharply and c) the Dan Brown enterprise doesn't really measure up to the task of overcoming the faith that moves mountains.
It's worth noting that the purpose of the Dan Brown enterprise, at any rate, is not to destroy faith anyway. Its purpose is to make money. If you're going to write multiple books with the same basic plotline - as Mr. Brown suggested he does, in sworn depositions - you'd better have something exciting to drape over that skeletal framework. All that Dan Brown has done is to discover there's one large, misunderstood and mistrusted organization that pushes more buttons than the American intelligence apparat, namely the Catholic Church. Brown's earlier thrillers featured a hoax to prop up NASA funding and an effort to stop an NSA intercept program that makes today's news look like small potatoes. The books were nicely done and sold well enough. But then came Angels & Demons and The DaVinci Code and Brown found out where the real money was.
It's fair to note that Dan Brown's moneymaking enterprise has had some help from a literary culture that is anti-Christian and highly secularist. You can sense the frisson the dimmer lights among the literati - from certain Borders clerks to low-rent intellects - get pushing a book that will upset Pastor Brown and his reading group. Those who buy in might be overdoing it though. When Brown's conspiracy theory plots targeted the American government, he wrote formulaic techno-thrillers. Now that it's the Catholic Church taking knocks, there are whispers that he might even be thought-provoking. Fortunately, the smart set seems to know better than to embarrass themselves this way, but there are antagonists and defenders alike who seem just a touch too excited over this stuff.
If you have read Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, there is little in Dan Brown that is new. If you made it through The Island of the Day Before (and Lord knows I didn't), there's probably nothing new. The difference is that Eco wrote for the smart set and made as much fun of the conspiracy theorists as the typical post-modernist does of people of faith. Perhaps it was this nuance that spared him the outcry The DaVinci Code has drawn, but the uncharitable might suggest that Foucault's Pendulum was just rather more than the typical AFA member was prepared to wade through. Not that I would suggest that, but others might.
So, what of The DaVinci Code, the Movie? Like everything in the Dan Brown enterprise, it is nicely done, well-paced and not a bad way to kill a Saturday afternoon. As Roger Simon would observe, it's first-rate hackery, a sort of hackery that is both underappreciated and harder than it looks to pull off. But speaking of first-rate hackery bordering on being something more... the director was Ron Howard and he knows a thing or two about pulling these things together.
The DaVinci Code, the Movie is on an even smaller skeleton than the book, and even so the ribs risk poking out here and there. But judged as an adventure mystery, rather than high art, it ain't half-bad. Tom Hanks and Audrey Tatou don't have the romantic chemistry that Robert and Sophie shared in the book - Hanks seems more older-brotherly - but there's a connection there that makes you root for the two of them together. Tibbing is a bit more cartoonish in the movie than the book, but the character is fun - you hope prison life won't be too hard on him. As for Remy, when he says he should have been an actor, you might have your doubts. But despite my initial reservations about the casting, the ensemble works as long as you think about what's onscreen instead of what's missing from the book.
I won't get into plotlines, either from the book or from the movie. I will note, though, that the questions the book raised about Christianity are watered down, especially in tone, while the closing dialogues - plus Tibbings' over-the-top the-truth-must-be-told bits - leave plenty of room for believers to exit the theater intellectually unblemished and free to follow the faith paths they were following. This is one time where we can truly say of a movie that points to controversial issues that it still is, indeed, only a movie.
The audience at the theater, too, seemed to treat it as only a movie. There was little in the way of gasping, hissing or oohing. There were a few chuckles in anticipation of plot twists that readers of the book were obviously waiting for - myself among them. Even the moment when Sophie Neveu learns the shocking truth of her heritage did not bring oohs, only thoughtful sighs - it's so nice that she's got some closure on that...
For those who are wondering whether to go see this, it is, as I say, the sort of first-rate hackery you'd expect from a Ron Howard-Tom Hanks production. Audrey Tatou is sweet and crosses the barrier from being "the French girl" into being a real person. And Ian McKellen makes a pretty good quasi-villain. If you are interested in the sordid secrets of Christianity, you're going to have to do the same god-awful source text reading I did in grad school. If you want to know about the dark rumblings that threaten to rend the fabric of our faith, you're better off googling Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye and Jesse Jackson. But if you're looking for an afternoon's entertainment and reading a book sounds like an awful lot of work, go see it. It's very nicely done, moves along well, the scenery is excellent and the background music swells in all the right places. For those of us who go to the movies for fun, not edification, it's actually pretty good fare. And besides, it's got to be better than Mission Impossible III, and you're in a lot less danger of funding a new Scientology center should you go to see it.
posted by gbarto at 6:02 PM
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
I hate to join the pile-on Bush crowd, especially at this moment, and especially by way of quoting a HuffPo commenter. But:The Bush Administration's treatment of Taiwan is another example of the charlatanism of its purported belief in supporting democratic nations. Who do they think they are kidding?! American corporations do not want to offend the Chinese market, and American banks fear for their stability should we offend China. It is high time to start being honest and upfront about REAL issues.
By: LeftCoast on May 16, 2006 at 08:36pm As someone who thinks Bush's democracy vision should be standard policy, not just rhetoric, I can't help but agree. What's really sad is I'm not even sure kow-towing to China makes sense on cynical terms.
China's banks are a mess. No one knows how big their obligations are to bail out state-owned (or politically directed) "enterprises". No one knows what their economy would look like if you took out the government propped up portion (which is backed by guns, not national debt, which royally screws transparency). The best places to invest in China (eg Shanghai) are those least under the thumb of the state-run economy, but there's no guarantee that party bosses won't ham-handedly clamp down and destroy that market potential if things get too free.
We are with China very close to where we were with the Soviets in the early days of the Reagan Administration. People who call themselves realists think China is too big to fail and too important to not do business with. I heard that story about the USSR when I was young. But any such enterprise, with the lack of transparency about what is real and what is government-supported fraud that I think there exists, is a paper tiger.
I don't think China will explode apart, à la the fracturing USSR. Ever shrouded in mystery, the Middle Kingdom of the Orient will probably present an unchanging image to the outside world even as it collapses from within. It may already be happening - with their guns and trade offers pointed outward and the people outside the coastal trading centers enslaved to an economic engine that makes goods but does not offer freedom - we might not know for years when the Chinese economy becomes a losing proposition. But I am fairly certain that China, like the USSR, cannot become the power its leaders would have it be so long as it is the aspirations of history and the leadership, and not the aspirations of its individual citizens, that are its guiding star. I'm not a market timer, but down the road, some people are going to look very smart for their decision to go short on China as everyone else was getting in line to invest. The U.S., sadly, seems to be joining France and Germany in signing up with the suckers.
U.S. policy, as a matter of principle, should support the aspirations of a Taiwanese people with a transparent economic system and a reasonably functional democracy. U.S. policy, as a matter of pragmatism, should be preparing for China's collapse and earning us the friendship of the folks best qualified and with the best contacts for filling the resultant vaccum and rebuilding in the resultant mess. It is a strike against the Bush administration that we're blowing it on both counts.
[By the way, the FP article that inspired the HuffPo post (its map omitted Taiwan altogether!) has this to say about China's stability:Pakistan's troubles are well chronicled. More surprising is China's slide in the index. With its economy booming, few analysts would classify China as a vulnerable state, and yet its index score dropped 10 points from last year. Why? China witnessed more than 87,000 peasant strikes and protests over land seizures last year, as well as mounting corruption and unemployment. China's cities have mushroomed in size, and those left behind have suffered as government services dry up and hungry developers grab land. Party officials must find new ways to mollify the masses while keeping the country's economic engine in high gear. Actually, I think, those land seizures and rising corruption point to efforts to cover over the government's inability to hold things together, as indicated by the other problems.]
posted by gbarto at 10:59 AM
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
On the speech:
I'm ho-hum to so-so on large sections of it. But the ending section on assimilation got me, or at least these two parts:I believe that illegal immigrants who have roots in our country and want to stay should have to pay a meaningful penalty for breaking the law … to pay their taxes … to learn English … and to work in a job for a number of years. [my italics]
[snip]
Americans are bound together by our shared ideals, an appreciation of our history, respect for the flag we fly, and an ability to speak and write the English language. English is also the key to unlocking the opportunity of America. Whatever his other problems - and they aren't few in number on this issue, Bush gets issue numero uno (deliberate word choice): Coming to this country requires becoming an American and taking the necessary steps to integrate into our culture, not marching with Mexican flags and demanding that we create a "Little Mexico" for you to live in. Bush's focus on English, especially for a guy who campaigned in Spanish, suggests that they understand the really critical issue for our security: Making people who come here come into our system so that rival cultures aren't allowed to coexist and challenge our larger culture of freedom and opportunity. If the French had required their Muslim immigrants to learn French, go to school and wade through the dreary bureaucracy that is French life, Muslim teens would be tipping over cars over the changed job rules, not the burka issue. Progress after a fashion. And if we force our immigrants to learn English, likewise, they will have a better chance of participating in the best of the American experience while we are spared from having Tijuana slums on our side of the border.
In other words, while I'm really iffy on immigration reform - I think it needs to be strict, but I wouldn't trust the INS and its descendants to pick up my drycleaning, never mind determine how real human beings' lives will unfold. But on the culture note, I heard the right stuff, which gives me a little hope that they'll screw it up less than they otherwise might.
posted by gbarto at 12:48 PM
The TurkeyMom forwarded this. I think it's about right. Not to suggest, of course, that life has different rules when people with names like Kennedy are at issue...
LIBERTY "I know how to kill the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill and the illusions that inspire it. We need every citizen to spend a day at John and Pat King's Anvil Ranch in southern Arizona. The experience would create an overnight revolution in America's view of this domestic crisis. The Kings live every day with barking dogs, vandalism, guns at their bedside, trash on their land, and most tragically, human remains. The bodies of seven illegals were found on the 50,000-acre Anvil last year... During their April watch, Minutemen spotted 1,501 illegals on the Anvil, and of these the Border Patrol arrested 500. But it turned into a circus. ACLU volunteers showed up every day to monitor and harass the Minutemen, at times sounding car horns and flashing lights to alert the illegals that the Border Patrol was coming. This is the border crisis in microcosm—confused Americans rush to defend lawbreakers while ignoring, even demonizing, law-abiding citizens who suffer daily affronts to basic liberties on land their family has tended for 115 years... Ask yourself: Would the Altar Valley be a war zone if McCain lived here? If Kennedy's Hyannis Port compound were magically transplanted to southern Arizona, how long do you think it'd be before he rewrote his bill? The first time Kennedy saw 30 illegals dashing across his property, he'd trip over his Guatemalan lawn guy rushing to the Senate floor to demand enforcement. That's one of the American tragedies at play here, the abandonment of ordinary citizens by our country's elites, and most strikingly, the abandonment of the very laws they themselves have written."—Leo Banks
posted by gbarto at 11:58 AM
According to Instapunk, It took the MSM three years to bring George W. Bush's approval ratings down from their post 9/11 high to 52 percent on election day 2004. It's taken them just six months to bring him down another 20 to 25 points. They never forgot their mission. Says Instapundit,It's an interesting perspective, though it assumes a shocking degree of cynicism, partisanship and commitment on the part of Big Media. Actually, no. It requires a high degree of idealism, committment and a thoroughly blinkered worldview. I live in California, specifically the South Bay. Every time you go into a café, there's a small group in the corner muttering about life in a police state. Logically, they should be in prison, along with the lefty bloggers, if this were true (ask Hao Wu or Alaa before you make police state references). But the folks in the corner seem to earnestly believe this stuff. I think the media does too. And I think they believe they need to expose Bush to save the country, even the world. This allows them to a) cling to their ideas without looking at them critically, b) be the saviors of the world and c) be justified in whatever course of action they follow because of (a) and (b) together. This is the way most people live, from the mother who does things for the child's own good to the passive agressive employee who knows the company is out to screw him so taking home the coffee packets is okay. Why should reporters be any different?
posted by gbarto at 10:53 AM
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