For whatever reason, last weekend I had this compelling urge to watch The DaVinci Code again, even though the book was awful and the movie was worse. So, I stopped in at Blockbuster and picked it up. Sure enough, the movie was still terrible. Even with the assumption that it was a work of fiction, and suspending all knowledge of the facts they butchered, the movie is a mess. Tom Hanks is still wooden, the plot is disjointed, and the ending is, well, boring.
But, either some people believe this crap, or they assume that if people will believe anything they see in a documentary (it apparently worked for Al Gore, but that’s another story). A couple of days after watching Code, I came across an interesting article about a new documentary, Bloodline, which is apparently a documentary asserting the myth that Jesus and Mary were married, and had a child named Sara.
Apparently the “guts” of the story is that in the late 19th Century, Berenger Sauniere became a priest in the small French village Rennes le Chateau. Suddenly, he started spending lots of money, even though he was known to be quite poor. Obviously, he must have known of some mysterious secret and was blackmailing the Pope. Obviously. And, since Rennes le Chateau’s history includes the Templars, we obviously know what that secret was.
It’s obvious.
The real truth, while interesting in its own right, isn’t the stuff of dime novels or badly done movies. While Sauniere apparently had some wealthy supporters, he was also tried for charging for masses, as a fund-raiser to pay for the church and community building projects. His sin, apparently, was that he was a capitalist. One hundred years later, he could have had his own TV show. But, alas, timing is everything.
Now, some 50 years later, an enterprising fellow named Noel Corbu purchased Sauniere’s home and opened a restaurant. Hoping to attract some free advertising, he began suggesting that there were mysteries surrounding the poor dead priest. The story from here on out is much more interesting than anything Bloodline probably comes up with, involving conspiracy theorists, fraudulent documents and some very poor researchers who didn’t realize they were relying on complete fiction. It’s more like Pink Panther than Da Vinci Code.
While I’m sure Bloodline will attract an audience, the bloodline and holy grail myths, I’m afraid, are as flaky as French pastry.
