Angels & Demonizing: 'Fiction With an Agenda is Propaganda'

Warning: This post divulges the entire “Angels & Demons” plot. If you haven’t seen the movie and intend to, go no further for there be spoilers…

People whose opinions I respect have defended A&D as not being anti-Catholic. This is probably due to the end of the film which delivers a trumped up moment of warmth and reconciliation between Tom Hanks’ Robert Langdon character and the Church in the form of a new Pope. From my perch, this moment is a subtle but devious cherry on top of a blisteringly unfair and wholly dishonest attack on the Church.

Serial adulterer Martin Luther King, Jr.

One way to dishonestly destroy someone or something is to repeat only the negative about that someone or something. DreamWorks has just announced a new film about the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. and were it to focus solely on King’s extra-marital affairs no one would argue that the movie was anything other than a propaganda tool produced with the goal in mind of assassinating his character.

Now, DreamWorks could do this and hide behind the defense of “telling the truth.” After all, there’s little doubt King was involved with women other than his wife. But to focus solely on that aspect of King’s character without allowing for the full context of the great man’s life is pure, 100% character assassination.

The lie isn’t in what’s spoken – the lie is in what’s unspoken.

During my A&D screening I noted a hash mark each time an obvious swipe was taken at the Church. About 40 minutes in I had counted nine – most of them delivered by our protagonist played by Tom Hanks, some of them gratuitous and having nothing to do with the story. These criticisms included charges of the worst kind of intolerance, outright murder and what ends up being the film’s central talking point theme – a fear of scientific truth.

Rather than get sidetracked, let’s just stipulate each criticism is accurate (though they’re not). But it doesn’t matter, because… None of the enormous good the Church has done over the last 2,000 years is ever mentioned. So even if the filmmakers are right on “the facts,” they’re telling no less of a lie. Intentionally omitting all the good the Church has done intentionally creates a false impression no reasonable person would get if the film provided the full story.

In other words, all Director Ron Howard has to say is that Martin Luther King, Jr. was an adulterer.

Another cinematic sleight of hand used to affirm the negative is the fairly common device of putting the worst face possible on an institution by carefully crafting the character chosen to represent it. We’ve seen this a hundred times before with cold, calculating businessmen, yee-haw Southerners, overly-aggressive soldiers, wormy CIA directors…

A&D uses two characters this way.

The most notable is Commander Richter, played by Stellan Skarsgard. He’s a security officer whose zealous dedication to the Church is established immediately, and we know he’s the face of the Church because he’s the one charged with protecting it.

Naturally, he’s written and portrayed as a jerk – an intolerant, overbearing prig who’s not only unlikable, but so intolerant of outsiders like Robert Langdon it ends up interfering with how he conducts his job.

Howard only gives Richter a single opportunity to defend his Church, and here’s that lame attempt after Richter finally tires of Langdon’s unrelenting, snide comments [paraphrasing]:

“My church feeds and cares for millions, what does yours do? Oh, that’s right, you don’t have a church.”

Of course, Richter’s not allowed to say, “…and what does Harvard do for millions of starving people?” because that would actually make a pretty good point (Langdon’s a Harvard Professor). Instead, the line is used to show Richter’s holier-than thou attitude with a side order of intolerance towards non-believers.

Worse, Richter’s never once allowed the opportunity to reveal a generous spirit or moment of real humanity. For a reel or two we’re led to believe Richter might be the arch-villain, but when it’s revealed he’s not, he dies the same pious tight ass we were introduced to.

The second face of Ron Howard’s Church is Camerlengo Patrick McKenna, played warmly by boy-faced Ewan McGregor. But this character is another classic trope in the Leftist propaganda film canon: the set up for the ideological sucker punch. At first we’re led to believe McKenna is an example of what the Church really is and all the things Richter is not: patient, tolerant, open, kind to outsiders, unafraid of modernity… That is until the final ham-handed twist when McKenna is revealed to be the arch-villain.

And what are his motives for planning and committing a number of horrible murders?

In a nutshell, McKenna is afraid of science.

This ideological sucker punch (positioned squarely at conservative Catholics) is that Our Guy – the only sympathetic face of the Church – isn’t really. Ron Howard twists McKenna into something horrifying in order to further a lie. And at this point in the film, Howard has effectively left the whole of the Catholic Church without even a single sympathetic representative.

From all of this, it’s reasonable to come to the conclusion that the filmmakers have an axe to grind with the Church based on science, but this is yet another Leftist head feint.

A&D isn’t about moving the Church towards a more pro-science position because the Church already is pro-science and the filmmakers know it — just like the Democrats and their allies in the media knew President Bush was pro-science. But just as it was with Bush, this charge of anti-science is not being hurled to convince the Church to become pro-science, it’s being hurled as propaganda to marginalize the Church outside the mainstream by convincing as many people as possible that this “superstitious” institution with an “indefensible history” would rather see them die young than give up outdated ideas and traditions.

Like Bush, the Catholic Church does not oppose stem cell research, they do, however, oppose embryonic stem cell research. This isn’t an anti-science position, this is a pro-don’t-kill-human-life position, and much more defensible than animal-rights activists who want to impede science to save bunny rabbits. But what the Democrats did to destroy Bush, Howard does in his cinematic attempt to destroy the Church: he intentionally morphs opposition to embryonic stem cell research into opposing “stem cell research,” giving himself cover to cry “anti-science.”

And so through the alchemy of half-truth and obfuscation the most effective kind of propaganda is created…

The kind that sounds just true enough.

Finally, to reaffirm his straw man really does exists, Howard tacks on a warm closing scene that portrays the Church as evolving into an institution more open and accepting of scientific truth.

Some may have gotten the fuzzies from this moment, but the Church is already open and accepting of scientific truth and to say it could be what it already is… Well, let’s just say that if “Angels & Demons” was as clever at storytelling as it is at spreading lies, it might have been a watchable movie.

UPDATE: Responding to those who find cowardly refuge in the “It’s only a fictional movie” argument, a reader summed it up beautifully in the comments: “Fiction with an agenda is propaganda.” — I’ve also changed the title to reflect that perfect sentiment.