Hollywood A.D. (After Duchovny?)

“At the same time, Hollywood A.D. is not quite as cynical as it claims to be. As much as Micah Hoffman might have been a huckster who used his artistic skills to extort money from Cardinal O’Fallon, the script suggests that Hoffman found something genuine in his forgery.”
Let’s start by noting that ‘Hollywood A.D.’ aired in 2000 and Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’ was published in 2003. Duchovny thus proves that there is not a single ‘secret’ contained anywhere in the whole of Brown’s truly crap novel!
That said, Duchovny’s Cardinal O’Fallon reacts to the supposed Gnostic Gospel in a way in keeping with Brown’s less than earth-shattering ‘revelations’. As clever as Duchovny’s script is for ‘Hollywood A.D.’ it suffers from the same weaknesses as Brown’s calamity of a novel.
Simply put, there isn’t a Catholic Bishop or Cardinal anywhere in the world who would feel threatened by a Gnostic Gospel.
Jesus is generally thought to have been crucified around 30 A.D. Mark’s Gospel, probably the first, was written around 70 A.D. Matthew and Luke appear in the 80s and 90s. St. John’s Gospel, probably the last of the four to be written, dates from around the 80s also. This means the four canonical gospels were written roughly a hundred years before the first Gnostic Gospel – generally thought to be ‘The Gospel of Thomas’, which dates from early to mid 2nd century.
Even if Micah Hoffman’s texts were historically genuine – written in the 2nd century rather than the 21st – they simply would pose no threat to a Cardinal of the Catholic Church. One reason Brown’s novel is crap – besides the truly awful writing – is that it is ‘all sound and fury signifying nothing’ (cf. Macbeth Sc.5). Why should a text written over a hundred years after the death of the principal character be taken as more authoritative than those written within a decade or two?
Besides all that, there isn’t a Cardinal of the Catholic Church who hasn’t heard the stories of Jesus and his supposed life after the crucifixion. Nothing that some supposed ‘Lost Gospel’ has to say would come as such a shock as Cardinal O’Fallon seems to experience in response to Hoffman’s forgeries. It’s an old, tired idea that rarely achieves anything accept revealing the extent of the writer’s ignorance of the subject of his story.
One wonders if, that all being said and done, this type of story isn’t trying to be more radical than them0vieblog.com gives it credit for. Films like ‘Stigmata’ (1999), TV like ‘Hollywood A.D.’ even trashy novels like ‘The Da Vinci Code’ act as a kind of Chinese water torture, slowly over the years eroding the edifice of the Catholic Church, leaving the Micah Hoffman’s of this world free to declare, “I am become Jesus Christ.” Hoffman doesn’t so much find something ‘genuine in his forgery’ – as them0vieblog.com reckons - as he becomes his next, best forgery.
The Catholic Church is the last bastion of the establishment. What greater glory for ‘one of the original Weathermen’ and ‘the original Yippie’ than to be the one to shake the very foundations of the church as Joshua rocked the walls of Jericho (cf. Josh. 6). It is why all this fool-hardy nonsense with gnostic gospels persists – not because of any great truth revealed, but because they hold out hope to those who must destroy to feel meaningful, to undermine the beliefs and hopes of others in order to find the freedom of their own.
No bomb in the crypt is ever likely to bring down The Church. But, it is hoped, a constant drip of Gnosticism will eventually weather away the very foundations upon which the Church is built. ‘Hollywood A.D.’ is every bit as cynical as it would seem to be for only with the undermining of the traditions of the Church will the new traditions of self-referentiality truly be free to dance with zombies.

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