Mental health warning, indeed

[mdlbear]

I can't decide whether the organization described in this article from Ireland Online is misguided, stupid, or willfully ignorant, but they appear to be completely serious.

A group of Christians determined to address what they claim are the myths of The Da Vinci Code are to offer the Irish public a mental health warning on the film before it hits cinema screens.

Hope Ireland, made up of Catholics and Protestants, will run an information campaign in a bid to expose author Dan Brown\u2019s best-seller as nothing but cunning fiction.

The group, supported by Church of Ireland and Catholic clergy and members of the secretive Opus Dei organisation, claims The Da Vinci Code does not know where the boundaries between truth and invention lie.

Which part of "fiction" didn't they understand? (From Gary McGath.)

Comments

[finagler.livejournal.com]

Ooh! New contest! Submit your proposals for how the warning label should read!

[jilara.livejournal.com]

What, a novel is FICTION? I am shocked, shocked I say! I suppose the next thing is to tell me that Tom Clancy writes fiction, too. What is this world coming to?

Seriously, though, I wonder about the discriminatory powers of audiences. I've met people who think Arizona exists in some continuum right out of a John Wayne movie, so hey, maybe pseudo-historical epics like "Elizabeth" must depict real events, right? And since The Da Vinci Code deals with conspiracy, anyway...

I thought the best sendup of the Da Vinci Code was on the History Channel, where they sent Josh all over investigating its premises, on "Digging for the Truth," then hit you with the punch line toward the end: most of the research material used for the book was a 1960's forgery that had been thoroughly debunked very soon after it appeared.

[nolly.livejournal.com]

The problem is, in part, that he apparently claims in the intro or foreword that all the documents and rituals decribed are historically accurate. (I'm paraphrasing a bit here.) While that is documentably false, it lends an air of authority to the book.

[mdlbear]

Sort of like the intro to The Lord of the Rings, in other words. "...the following is a true and accurate copy of the Red Book of Westmarch, ..."

Right.

[nolly.livejournal.com]

Sort of, but not really. So far as I know, there is no Red Book of Westmarch, nor has there ever been. Brown talks about real-world documents, like the Dead Sea scrolls -- and makes false statements about both the date of their discovery (he says 1950s, reality is 1947) and their contents (he mention other gospels, or something like that; in reality, they contain only older manuscripts -- books of Jewish law and prophecy and historical records pre-dating Christ, as I recall -- I know there are no writings dealing with Christ.)

I'll note that I've neither read the book nor done extensive research on the matter, but the preacher at my church has been addressing some of these issues in his current Sunday morning sermon series. (Mainly so we know what to say if/when we run into folks that swallow the story.)

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

It's amazing how many people seem to have trouble telling the difference. Including Brown, it seems.

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

Couldn't we have a coalition to warn people that it's a terrible fucking book?

I mean seriously. That would've done wonders for my mental health.

[mdlbear]

Haven't read it myself, but I probably will just to see what all the fuss is about.

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

Be warned. It's really terribly written. Man oh man did that man need an editor. Also his characters are stupid. I spent a lot of time shouting at the CD player (I had the audiobook) about what idiots these people were.