National Treasure

A movie that speaks to a Declaration of Human Independence

I simply adore the movie National Treasure. I only recently found this movie during my quest to know more about secret societies, lost treasures, human history, the history of America and the undiscovered secrets that lie everywhere.

I often find that movies reveal far more truths than their fictional story lines might insinuate. You might even say that this is the goal of some movie-makers - to hide the truth in plan sight.

From the characters to the clues, this movie has it all. A story about a quest to an unknown destination - and discovery - complete with good and bad guys, mystery and mathematics, old and new.

We humans have this insatiable desire to know things and to solve puzzles. Some of us more so than others. I can’t think of a single person who isn’t fascinated by the mere idea of secret societies (the Templars) and the mysteries of our past. Many of these secret societies are alive and kicking today, and I personally have no idea what secrets they guard, or why they guard them. But I’m sure it’s juicy.

One thing I know many humans guard is their self-pronounced claim to title.

For those who haven’t watched this movie, it involves the hunt for a lost treasure of incalculable value. It starts with a scene with Christopher Plummer as the grandfather of a child (Ben Gates) who wants to be a Templar Knight after hearing his grandfather’s epic tales of treasures hidden. It’s kind of weird how their surname is Gates.

The Knights Templar were the guardians of the treasure, and had hidden it from the British so that it didn’t fall into their hands.

And so it was. He knights his grandson and gives him a single clue passed down to him, so that one day he might find the lost treasure.

The Secret lies with Charlotte.

Charlotte turns out to be a very old ship buried under ice and snow in the northern part of our Earth. Ben as an adult treks there with the group of men that will reveal themselves as the bad guys, and a young genius named Riley who geolocates the ship. They find the ship and discover a gunpowder barrel held by the long-dead body of the former captain of the ship. Inside it, they discover a pipe carved out of ivory. It is the first clue, and turns out to be a key. The key.

Ben pulls the pipe apart into component parts, one of which is a cylindrical piece that is etched in a particular way. He coats the cylinder with his own blood to use it as ink.

He rolls the cylinder down a piece of paper to reveal to riddle.

The legend writ

the stain affected

the key in Silence undetected

Fifty five in iron pen

Mr Matlack can’t offend

Fifty five in iron pen Mr Matlack can’t offend. Timothy Matlack was the official scribe of the resolution that fifty five men signed: the Declaration of Independence. To make the map “un-invisible” they needed to reveal it using mild acid and heat. The stain affected.

So this first riddle ends up revealing that there’s an invisible map on the back of the Declaration of Independence - a document signed by at least 9 Free Masons - that might ultimately lead them to the treasure.

And from there, it just gets better. A plot to “borrow” the Declaration of Independence is formed by Ben and Riley, and the bad guys - each in their own ways.

The race was on.

I don’t want to ruin the movie for those who haven’t seen it yet, so I won’t continue with the play-by-play, and it’s actually not why I wanted to write this article. I wanted to make commentaries about Human independence.

Beyond books lies the riddle’s key: intuition, spirit and infinite beauty.

In order to decipher the riddle in the movie, it required far more than book smarts: it required intuition, open-mindedness and faith. And incidentally, a little blood. The good guys in the movie are always one step ahead because - in my opinion - they are acting with true intelligence. True intelligence is sometimes slow, always integral and always benevolent.

Interestingly, the bad guys do reach every step in the path to the treasure - not by solving the riddles and clues - but by riding the coat-tails of the good guys. They “achieve” but not by wits: by cheating. The good guys end up winning (and the guy gets the girl) because they are guided by intuition and a desire to succeed guided by benevolence - not to become rich.

There is such wisdom in this plot.

It strikes me how well they write in the middle-men as well. The FBI and the cops whose role is to maintain “order” and to “find the people who stole the Declaration of Independence” are merely lost followers: watching it all play out like an unreachable cupcake high up on a shelf. These players are portrayed as truly unimaginative in that they couldn’t see that it wasn’t about stealing some document; it was about the fact that the good guys needed it for the quest. The theft was merely incidental.

It leads the watcher to wonder about the “alternate value” of what are deemed invaluable documents and ‘treasures’. Are they valuable for the reasons we are familiar with, or do they have more authentic and truthful meanings? Are they valuable for their words and history, or are they perhaps maps or keys?

N.B. The Mummy movie does this as well. Puzzle boxes aren’t puzzle boxes - they are keys.

The combination of riddles and the way in which the writers so cleverly lay out a Free Masoned path to the treasure for the characters to find is just so compelling.

My favorite clue was the one that lead to a cast shadow of the Independence Hall Steeple - a cross - onto an opposite wall that pointed to a brick with a Free Mason logo on it. The brink contained the “early American X-ray specs” made by Benjamin Franklin, and these specs were necessary to reveal hidden messages on the map on the back of the Declaration of Independence.

The vision to see the treasured past.

The treasured past means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Some think it means money. Some think it means patriotism. Some think it should be left in the past: buried and forgotten.

I personally think the quest is the most exciting part. The use of the creative mind in combination with intuition - and help from others - is just so mathe-magical.

The thing I love about this movie is that it covers so much about the Human role in this ultimate quest. Riley, the young guy, is the counter point to the shared desire of Ben and Abigail. He’s kind if a Debbie Downer, but oh so cute and smart. Ben and Abigail are both very patriotic - almost romantically so - and in the movie have the strength of character to understand what being patriotic actually means. They value the Declaration of Independence both for what it was, and for what it also was:

A bond to freedom, and A map to treasure.

It’s also great how Ben’s character is portrayed as a brutally honest guy. No fear of ridicule, even when he first tells Abigail that the Declaration of Independence is actually a treasure map and some bad guys were going to steal it. I think the writers wrote this into Ben’s character because they knew that brutal honesty is the fastest way to an endpoint. The endpoint is always the truth. Lying simply delays inevitability.

And even though Abigail’s character is full-on rule-following, she also knows deep down that it’s far more important to break the rules than to succumb to them to hide the truth.

The truth is often hidden by rules.

This becomes obvious as she moves very quickly from being a bureaucratic document protector, to being the one who reveals the Declaration of Independence’s secrets using lemon juice and a blow dryer.

Sometimes, you have to step over the silk-braided rope in order to find the truth.

In the end, they find the treasure and give it to whom it belongs: the People. The wealth of kings distributed equally to museums, archives, and historical institutions so that it could be preserved and shared publicly for all Human enjoyment for centuries to come.

Now if only the technocratic empiricists could be this intelligent?

Awesome movie. Very patriotic. Very compelling. Very wise. Very benevolent. Very sweet.