These People are All Nuts
Back in my college days, my family and I once traveled to Toronto to take in what was then called the Canadian Open tennis tournament. Our visit happened to correspond with the Toronto opening of “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and protests of the film were front page news.
One of the local newspapers ran a photo depicting a crowd of visibly distraught Christian fanatics gathered outside a theater. They either knelt or fell, exhausted, to the ground, tears streaming down their grimaced faces, and raised their hands to heaven in anguish. In the middle of the crowd was one man, the only human depicted who appeared to retain any grasp on sanity. He stood stoically and held a large sign bearing the words “These people are all nuts,” or something similar. I’ve tried for years to locate a copy of that photo. It spoke volumes.
This morning, the lead news story in St. Louis is coverage of various local protests associated with the premier of a film called “The Da Vinci Code”. The movie, a multimedia presentation created by the assembly of a sequence of photographs projected onto a screen with sufficient rapidity as to create the illusion of motion and continuity, is based on a novel, or a fictional prose narrative of considerable length, typically having a plot that is unfolded by the actions, speech, and thoughts of the characters.
You already knew that, right? Remember that time when your church bussed you to the theater to see that Mel Gibson thing? It’s kind of like that, but with a different plot.
This time, however, the usual suspects are aghast. Why?
The novel embraces the technique of blurring the line between what’s real and what’s not. Its opening page sets out three assertions it presents as facts, which form the foundation for the rest of the book.
As the film version of “The Da Vinci Code” opens Friday, church leaders are distressed that many Christians are so poorly educated about their own faith that they can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction.
Witt said casual readers unfamiliar with church history could be duped into thinking that the book’s “facts” are indeed factual when they’re not.
You know, folks, if your flock is so ignorant and their faith so tenuous that the public display of a work of fiction might undermine it, you have far bigger fish to fry than blasphemous films.
No Responses to “These People are All Nuts”
“These People are All Nuts” has generated no comments.You may post a comment below.