Dear America, We Need To Talk About Dan Brown

I finally got around to reading ANGELS AND DEMONS -- or if you prefer, I used the excuse of going to Rome, where the book is mostly set, to see what the rest of you have been reading all this time. (I previously used a rainy Sunday afternoon as an excuse to plow through and quickly forget THE DA VINCI CODE.) There will be massive spoilers for both of these books coming up, so if you care about that now, disengage.

I think it's so cute that we've all been going around pretending these books are about Religion and Deep Thinking. Really! Because they are really about sex -- those who fight for it and those who fear it. Guess which ones are the good guys? Oh, you naughty reading politic, you.

Think about it: In THE DA VINCI CODE, Robert Langdon, champion of secular life, fights the mysterious elite Opus Dei to keep word from getting out that Jesus had sex, and likely not just once in order to save a kitten from falling off a cliff. In ANGELS & DEMONS, Langdon believes he is fighting a murderous re-incarnation of the Illuminati, who are magically able to Do What Computers Can't(1), but actually in protecting a sexy nuclear scientist he is defending her questionably defined project against the legendarily sex-panicked(2) Vatican, particularly the late Pope's right-hand man whose life is totally wrecked when he finds out he is the late Pope's biological son and thus tainted by original sin despite the cold embrace of the church.

Oh yeah, and about that sexy nuclear scientist, alias Vittoria Vetra. This was a character of Denise-Richards-in-Bond-movie levels of disbelief, who is described as "smouldering" not five pages after finding out her father has been brutally murdered. Really? She can't have a few minutes of tear-stained messedness? And unfortunately her magnetic appeal is filtered through Robert Langdon, which makes him seem like a guy who would use personality tests on women in bars. "You're standing in a room... what color is that room? It's okay, I'm a symbologist." Oh, but it's okay, say his defenders, because he's sexy too. But saying a guy has a "swimmer's body" isn't the same level of objectifying as mentioning over and over how great at yoga someone is where it makes no sense to do so, only you know what that means. That means she's hot! Any community yoga class will disavow you of this notion quickly.

After an interlude of pseudoscience I dearly wish I could pick apart, Langdon and Vetra find themselves racing through Rome trying to stop the supposed Illuminati killer from slaying people in symbolically appropriate ways throughout Rome. One of their stops is the church which holds Bernini's "St. Theresa in Ecstasy," which in the book has been shoved aside by the super-prudish church despite being specially commissioned for them because it is Just Too Hot. Having visited the Vatican Museums I can confirm that the church probably just didn't have room for it among their collections of copied Greek stuff, stolen Egyptian stuff and paintings everyone else forgot about. But Brown lovingly describes how the statue looks like she's in a less than spiritual ecstasy, and her testimony sounds more like a one-night stand than a prayerful vigil. Well, maybe to modern eyes it does, but surely if the Vatican had doubts about her purity it wouldn't have canonized her in the first place. And forcing the figure of St. Theresa to act as a piller for Brown's sex-is-good thesis seems kind of insulting to the religion from which she has sprung. I'm not Catholic, I'm just sayin'.

Thanks to chapters from his point of view, we know the killer is not only a super-mean dude, but he also gets his kicks from tying up and violating women (particularly in brothels, but he doesn't seem that picky). This is Brown going "Oh no, I don't mean all sex is okay, which only strengthens my argument!" If only he had really gone all-out on this line of thinking and made Vetra a sexy lesbian won over by the redeeming love of Ben Affleck. But we're supposed to believe that the Pope's chamberlain, a celibate man among celibate men, would enlist this clearly predatory guy in order to further his own ends even though he would likely be horrified by the outcomes. This is where the science of the book makes its regrettable bow, and the concept of Vetra and her late father being able to create matter is supposed to be such a threat that it forces Pope Jr. to protect his celibate reserve by employing someone whose mores are almost opposite to his. Naturally, the killer later goes after Vetra, who would be his next victim (because she's sooooo hot), only Langdon saves her, for which his reward is sex from her. Heaven (ha?) forbid she just shake his hand and invite him to a press conference.

All this is to say that I didn't exactly enjoy ANGELS AND DEMONS, although being unable to sleep on the plane I whizzed through it. Knowing that Ewan McGregor has been cast as the extremely sex-negative former assistant to the Pope makes me almost want to see it, if only to balance out the times I have inadvertently seen him in the altogether onscreen. (3) But I think it's funny how the controversy has focused on the Vatican's refusal to allow on-location shoots because they're "still mad" about THE DA VINCI CODE and the whole Jesus-having-sex thing -- a narrative which only confirms what Brown is trying to do in his books, which is pit his sex champions (Ron Howard, in this case?) against the censoring powers that be. If the Church is not compliant, he must be onto something! Or, you know, they just decided it would be too much of a hassle to have Tom Hanks, McGregor and Ayelet Zurer (Vittoria Vetra) running around in their much visited sites for weeks with large amounts of photographic equipment.

Are we hung up more on sex as a country, or more on religion? I think we would like to believe ourselves to be the latter because it reflects better on us than the former -- after all, we're just being philosophical! Of course, the correct answer to this question is, "yes," but this will not appear in Brown's new novel THE LOST SYMBOL, due out this fall. In fact, I'm willing to call it right now: The lost symbol is some kind of cosmic booty-call Bat-signal (4) whose existence is supported by some sweet Gaia-worshipers and all but destroyed by a nefarious league of nuns. (5) Quick review without reading: The nuns were better than the albino and the possessed Vaticanite.

(1) Langdon knows the Illuminati killed a dude because they used their special perfectly symmetrical seal to brand him, a seal that cannot be reproduced via computer. Really? That's your whole proof?
(2) In college I once tried to get into a seminar called "Sex Panic." I'm still a little bitter I didn't get in, if only for the excuse to shout "Sex!! Panic!!!" on main campus.
(3) Only one worth watching is "Velvet Goldmine."
(4) Dear Google searchers, you're welcome.
(5) But if this were actually true, I would read this book, because who doesn't want to read about a league of nuns?