The real Hollywood Left

      If even the marginal non-Hollywood productions remain determined by the family motif, where, then, are we to find true exceptions to its rule?

      In March 2005, the Vatican itself made a highly publicized statement, condemning in the strongest terms Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code as a book based on lies and which spread false teachings (for example, that Jesus had married Mary Magdalene and that they had descendants—the true identity of the Grail is Mary Magdalene’s vagina!), especially regretting the book’s popularity among the younger generation searching for spiritual guidance. The absurdity of this Vatican intervention, sustained by a barely concealed longing for the good old days when the infamous Index of prohibited books was still operative, should not blind us to the fact that, while the form is wrong (one almost suspects a conspiracy between the Vatican and the publisher to give a new boost to the sales of the book), the content is basically right: The Da Vinci Code does in fact propose a New Age reinterpretation of Christianity in terms of the balance of the masculine and feminine principles, that is, the basic idea of the novel is the reinscription of Christianity into a pagan sexualized ontology: the feminine principle is sacred, perfection resides in the harmonious coupling of the male and female principles . . . The paradox to be accepted here is that, in this case, every feminist should support the Church: it is only through the “monotheistic” suspension of the feminine signifier, of the polarity of the masculine and feminine opposites, that the space emerges for what we broadly refer to as “feminism” proper, for the rise of feminine subjectivity. The femininity asserted in the affirmation of the cosmic “feminine principle” is, on the contrary, always a subordinated (passive, receptive) pole, opposed to the active “masculine principle.”

      This is why thrillers like The Da Vinci Code are one of the key indicators of contemporary ideological shifts: the hero is in search of an old manuscript which will reveal some shattering secret which threatens to undermine the very foundations of (institutionalized) Christianity; the “criminal” edge is provided by the desperate and ruthless attempts of the Church (or some hardline faction within it) to suppress this document. This secret focuses on the “repressed” feminine dimension of the divine: Christ was married to Mary Magdalene, the Grail is actually the female body . . . is this revelation really such a surprise? Is the idea that Jesus had sex with Mary Magdalene not rather a kind of obscene open secret of Christianity, a Christian secret de polichinelle? The true surprise would have been to go a step further and claim that Mary had really been a transvestite, so that Jesus’ lover had been a beautiful ephebe!

      The interest of the novel (and, against the suspiciously hasty dismissal of the film, one should say that this holds even more for the film) resides in a feature which, surprisingly, echoes The X-Files where the fact that so many things happen “out there” where the truth is supposed to dwell (aliens invading Earth and so on) fills in the void, that is, the much closer truth that nothing (no sexual relation) is going on between the two agents, Mulder and Scully. In The Da Vinci Code, the sexual life of Christ and Mary Magdalene is the excess which inverts (covers up) the fact that the sexual life of Sophie, the heroine, Christ’s last descendant, is nonexistent: she is like a contemporary Mary, virginal, pure, asexual; there is no hint of sex between her and Robert Langdom.

      Her trauma is that she witnessed the primordial fantasmatic scene of parental copulation, this excess of jouissance which totally “neutralized” her sexually: it is as if, in a kind of temporal loop, she was present at the act of her own conception, so that, for her, all sex is incestuous and thus prohibited. Here enters Robert who, far from being her lover, acts as her “wild analyst” whose task is to construct a narrative frame, a myth, which will enable her to break out of this fantasmatic captivity, not by way of regaining “normal” heterosexuality, but by way of accepting her asexuality and “normalizing” it as part of the new mythic narrative. In this sense, The Da Vinci Code belongs in the series we are analyzing: it is not really a film about religion, about the “repressed” secret of Christianity, but a film about a frigid and traumatized young woman who is redeemed, freed from her trauma, provided with a mythical framework that enables her to fully accept her asexuality.

      The mythical character of this solution emerges clearly if we contrast Robert as its proponent to Sir Leigh, the counterpoint to Opus Dei in the film (and novel): he wants to disclose the secret of Mary and thus save humanity from the oppression of official Christianity. The film rejects this radical move and opts for a fictional compromise solution: what is important are not facts (the DNA that would prove the genealogical link between her and Mary and Christ), but what she (Sophie) believes—the movie opts for symbolic fiction against genealogical facts. The myth of being Christ’s descendant creates for Sophie a new symbolic identity: at the end, she emerges as the leader of a community. It is at this level of what goes on in terrestrial life that The Da Vinci Code remains Christian: in the person of Sophie, it enacts the passage from sexual love to desexualized agape as political love, love that serves as the bond of a collective. There is nothing “pre-Freudian” in this solution—it can only appear pre-Freudian if one accepts the crude normative heterosexual version of psychoanalysis according to which, for a woman, everything but “normal” heterosexual desire is pathological. For a true Freudian, on the contrary, “there is no sexual relationship,” no standard of normality, but only an inevitable deadlock, and the asexual position of withdrawing from the commerce between the sexes is as good a sinthom (a symptomal “knot” which holds a subject together) to deal with this deadlock as any other position.¹⁰

      In spite of this interesting displacement of the standard Hollywood formula, it would be, of course, ridiculous to claim that The Da Vinci Code belongs to the Hollywood Left. One has to look for the real Hollywood Left elsewhere—but where? Zack Snyder’s 300, the saga of the three hundred Spartan soldiers who sacrificed themselves at Thermopylae to halt the invasion of Xerxes’ Persian army, was attacked as the worst kind of patriotic militarism with clear allusions to the recent tensions with Iran and events in Iraq—are, however, things really so clear? The film should, rather, be thoroughly defended against these accusations.

      There are two points to be made. The first concerns the story itself—it is the story of a small and poor country (Greece) invaded by the army of a much larger state (Persia), at that point much more developed, and with advanced military technology—are the Persian elephants, giants and large fire arrows not the ancient version of high-tech weaponry? When the last surviving group of Spartans and their king, Leonidas, are killed by the thousands of arrows, are they not in a way bombed to death by techno-soldiers operating sophisticated weapons from a safe distance, like today’s US soldiers