The Other More Scrutable Code

There’s been a lot of furor about the historical accuracy of The DaVinci Code, but people are missing the real point – in this case, as with so much in popular culture, history is not the final aim.

The notion of history even intruded on the court case where the authors of a 1982 book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, sued author Dan Brown over using their take on the living descendants of Jesus. The court ruled that when it comes to historical information, copyright does not apply. The law itself is a good one and allows writers and other artists to use and adapt history to create new perspectives and ask fresh questions. Never mind that some people make a mockery of history in their subsequent works – the benefits of this freedom far outweigh the potential for idiocy and ignorance. But the funny part of the ruling is that it grants the ideas of Dan Brown and the Holy Blood authors the credibility of history and historians. I’m sure this would trouble most historians right away.

After all, what these writers have done is create a ludicrous or compelling (depending on who you are) narrative out of mostly circumstantial and tangential evidence. You could even argue that rather than adding to historical knowledge, these books are adding to our mythological base. Of course, devout Catholics, among others, object to this rearranging not just of history but of mythology. Seeing Mary Magdalene as more important than traditionally allowed changes the symbolic structure of the church and perhaps of belief itself. Meanwhile, others see the story as confirming what they have suspected all along – that the church has always been ready to subjugate or at least disregard women.

But I would just chime in here and say that it really doesn’t matter if these stories have any basis in truth. The fact that they are found compelling by contemporary readers and moviegoers tells me that the stories are important here and now. These stories have emerged and become popular because of a current struggle within the church as many women both working for the church and believing in the church are expressing doubts about the nature of its hierarchy and their position in it. The DaVinci Code is a gangbuster story because people are ready for it. It has done much to break the code of silence so many women have been bound to as members of the Catholic church.

And, of course, the affirmation of the feminine is of a kind with everything going on today in Western culture. It doesn’t matter if Mary was hustled out of the Holy Land to start an invisible family line in France. What these modern stories tap into is current desires and wishes. I’d even argue that these stories are only becoming hot topics now because 1982 (when Holy Blood first came out) was too early. The timing is better now. As with many ideas in popular culture, they are almost never ahead of their times – they are running side by side with them. The DaVinci Code implies that there is hope for change in the near future, but the change it hopes for has in many ways already happened, with women increasingly refusing to be dictated to by ancient and deliberately inscrutable authorities.