The new king of Hollywood fast food: Dan Brown
By Michael Moriarty
web posted August 21, 2006
Dan Brown Films … or whatever he decides to call his movie factory… Armageddon Works, or Doughatrope Films … owes a great deal of its ideas, inspirations, "genre" and style to both Stephen Spielberg and Harrison Ford. Mr. Brown's works are really screenplays with a mountain of embarrassingly comprehensible stage directions. This virtual studio head's first script in the Langdon Series, Angels and Demons, is really Indiana Jones (oh, there are endless trips into the darkest catacombs of Rome), as eventually to be played, I suppose, by Tom Hanks. In Angels and Demons Langdon is posing as a Joseph Campbell type, forced, against his better instincts, to save the Vatican from the very evil and not so highly veiled designs of a sort of Bush/Clinton Type Empire. All that really stands in the way of the Third Way, Pax Americana is, unfortunately, Pope Benedict XVI and his pro-Life stance. If there really is a canister of anti-matter out there, a weapon far more destructive than the atomic bomb, I am sure Bill and George could get their hands on it.
Angels and Demons is followed by The Da Vinci Code, in which Langdon is the Joseph Campbell clone who poses as Clark Kent, but without a "changing room," so, therefore, no Superman. However, the mild-mannered Professor hooks up with a French-speaking Barbarella of sorts, one with more degrees in Art History than A. S. Byatt…you may not know of that very, very bright post-modern author but that's alright, Mr. Brown does….and they, like Indiana and his female partner, go questing for the Holy Grail. They, like Indiana, find it, but they, unlike Indiana, don't lose it. From that ultimate Secret we realize that this kind of Simone de Beauvoir Barbarella is really a Christ of the Second Coming. So, with all questions from all serious people answered, our entire reason for being determined in utmost clarity, I suppose the future adventures of Langdon and his Love Interests will be how to get Hillary Clinton elected.
Even though Dan Brown is hardly a theological scholar like Gary Wills, there are similarities. Mr. Wills always trots out his footnotes the way Dan Brown shows off his considerable research. Look beyond both and you find a pair of clergymen in the Church of the New Christ, the New Messiah that - according to Rev. Billy Graham, and as sermonized on by the newly anointed Rev. Bill Clinton, the Church of England and the United Church of Canada - approves of abortion and even, perhaps, euthanasia.
The job of getting the Senator of New York into the Oval Office depends upon how deeply enthralled Americans are with the idea of Female Supremacism. On the surface - we don't know how the very clever businessman Dan Brown really thinks about it - The Da Vinci Code takes the faith in the natural superiority of women into whole new supernatural regions.
That's my Hollywood Report on the commercial side of Rodeo Drive.
On its more "serious" side, Paul Haggis, author of Million Dollar Baby and Crash is a fervent Brechtian and told us so at the Academy Awards. Artists will be no "mirrors up to nature" any more - as Shakespeare saw them. Mr. Haggis and Company will hammer, hammer the truth into us .
All in all, the East Berlin psychotic, female boxer of Million Dollar Baby and her paid-off referee resemble the soul of Mr. Haggis more profoundly than either of the characters portrayed by Mr. Eastwood or his leading lady. I am not sure if Hollywood is aware of that yet……well, that's not Hollywood's job, to be aware. They are the manikins in the New World Order Department Store, merely displaying the new fashions of an increasingly "improved" human race.
In light of Mel Gibson's incomparable achievement earlier this month - bringing in more bad publicity for the Catholic Church than has the Inquisition and corroborating the American Jewish Community's assumption of profound malevolence as the true intent of his now infamous classic, The Passion of the Christ - you might place Mr. Gibson in between both the "Commercial" and the "Serious" Valleys of Hollywood, as Christopher Hitchens does very effectively.
Rather like Bill Clinton's synthesis of Christ and Sir Francis Galton of Eugenics, turning Jesus into the best spokesman for Planned Parenthood, Mr. Gibson has virtually synthesized Christ and Mohammed into a heretofore unknown brand of Catholic known as Osama bin Laden. That explains why Osama walks, looks, acts and dresses so like Jeffrey Hunter in The Greatest Story Ever Told .
It is Osama's belief that all Islam needs is a Sacrificial Lamb, such as Christ was. I am sure that he is looking forward to the Crucifixion the Western World has planned for him. Rather like Timothy McVeigh and his last words on the lethal injection table, "I am the master of my fate," this Lamb of Allah tries to claim for Islam the same kind of power Christ brought to the Catholic Church.
Since neither Mohammed nor, of course, Buddha, that other master of human indifference and forefather to Mao Zedong, felt themselves obliged to "strap-on" a bomb, they have left it up to Osama to complete the requisite walk up Cavalry. There is masochism and then there are the dreams of Martyrdom floating around the mind of Osama bin Laden. I would have left Timothy McVeigh in his jail cell, if only to make him not the "master of his fate." Likewise with Mr. Bin Laden. Were I President, I'd have him jailed for life and would pray that he lives a very, very, very, very long life, staring at his twenty-four-hourly engaged television set, at reports on the slow but unremitting emasculation of Allah.
Osama is at large and the secret admiration for him in the Arts Capitals of the United States, New York and Hollywood will place the Careerists of Third Millennium American Art into a category previously represented by Maurice Chevalier, the collaborating entertainer of Vichy France.
How foolish of me to think The Passion of the Christ was aimed at Osama's challenge to Judeo-Christianity, when all along it was the creation of Sedevacantism, the ultra-traditional cell within the Catholic Church that believes the throne of the Pope has been empty since Pius XII. If the momentum behind Mr. Gibson, so akin to that of the self-proclaimed Illuminati and their racial supremacism, continues, our greatest, bravest Pope, Benedict XVI, is in grave danger. May God protect him! 
Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Mary Christmas and Force of Impact. Moriarty is also running for President of the United States in 2008 as a candidate for the Realists Party. To find out more about Moriarty's presidential campaign, contact
rainbowfamily2008@yahoo.com.