Today I watched the Ron Howard film of Angels
And Demons. I've read the book, but Dan Brown
is such a bad writer that the ending of it and
who the villain or villains were left my mind
an hour after reading it (that is a backhanded
way of saying that Dan Brown writes the literary
equivalent of Chinese food), so some sense of
mystery was preserved while watching the movie.
More, in fact, than while reading the novel,
because Dan Brown is such a hack writer that
he cannot help but telegraph his punches so
much that anyone with an IQ over 50 knows what
is coming 50 pages before it arrives.
That said, Angels And Demons: The Movie is a
great deal better than Angels And Demons: The
Pageturner. The primary screnwriter, Akiva
Goldsman, somehow managed to turn Dan Brown's
wooden dialogue into non-wooden-enough dialogue
to entice Tom Hanks to reprise his role as
Robert Langdon, and even entice Stellan Skarsgård
(who loathes Dan Brown almost as much as I do)
into appearing in the movie.
So, bottom line, it's watchable. The *other*
bottom line, for readers of Fairfield Life, is
that it's pretty much a must-see if you want
to ever approach understanding the arcane and
beyond-rationality machinations a cultist will
go through to protect his belief system.
In this film, you actually have two cults. One
is the Illuminati, a mythical organization that
may, in fact, have been mostly mythical. The
other, of course, is the Catholic Church. Its
longevity as a cult is so profound that some in
this reading audience bristled the moment I
referred to it as a cult. But of course it is
one. So is any major religion. The only difference
between a minor cult like TM and a major cult like
the Catholic Church is time, and the number of
followers (and their attendant checkbooks) the
cult can draw into its aura, and more important,
keep there.
The similarities I see in the film between the
Catholic Church (and in particular the Vatican)
and the TMO are *not* in terms of dogma. It's
more of a look and feel thang. I see Cardinals
in their red robes parading smilelessly through
the halls of the Vatican and I cannot help but
think of TM Rajas in their white robes parading
smilelessly through the holy halls of Vlodrop.
I see Stellan Skarsgård as the head of the Swiss
Guard (the fanatical group of police who guard
the Pope) and I cannot help but think of the
Germans Maharishi assigned to the same task in
Seelisberg. I see the Camerlengo and I think
of Bevan Morris.
It's about resonance for me, not an exact match.
What Dan Brown *is* good at (besides writing cliff-
hangers at the end of each chapter to keep you turn-
ing the pages) is capturing the look and feel of
a place and its inhabitants, and what that look and
feel says about the *minds* of the inhabitants.
In the film, Robert Langdon (Hanks) is the ostensible
rational man, the person who describes his feelings
for God as, I'm an academic...my mind tells me that
I will never understand God. [My heart] tells me that
I'm not meant to...faith is a gift that I have yet
to receive. That honesty grants him access to the
Vatican Archives, and the solution to the mundane
mystery. But not the metaphysical one.
In my humble opinion, the primary difference between
the long-lasting cult of the Catholic Church and the
ephemeral, gone-within-one-generation-after-the-death-
of-its-founder legacy of the TM movement, will be the
attitude expressed by Nabby recently in his (essentially)
Let them eat cake rant, expressing no concern at all
for the unwashed masses. The TM movement is so full
of itself, and so full of its puny, self-important
self, that it failed to follow the rules of all long-
lived cults. That is, you have to at least *pretend*
to care about the unwashed masses. It violated MMY's
own dictum about putting the cart before the horse
and thought that if it put on enough pomp and circum-
stance that reverence from the masses would follow.
The Catholic Church, for all its mistakes, has lasted
for 2000 years after the death of the spiritual teacher
it was founded to revere. Mark my words...at the rate
it's going, the TM movement won't last ten years after
the death of its founder.
