It's been over a week now since I saw the film adaptation of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code", a movie that has gripped 'our' cultural consciousness for the last month in a ubiquitous, self-perpetuating and vice-like fashion, - in both senses of the term 'vice'.
Firstly, as an 'event' movie, -a "prestige picture" -, Ron Howard's latest film has existed as the centre-point of a leviathanic promotions campaign, which has clinched and clasped the global media (entertainment and otherwise) within its clamps with unabated ruthlessness (and efficiency). Operating on every platform from print media upwards, it has approached us at every possible angle, from that of scandal ("catholic outrage"), to legal (high-court plagarism circuses), to the fittingly trivial (Newsweek's "Tom, Hollywood hates Da hair" for example) and beyond. As a regular film-goer, I have been sitting through trailers for the movie since December 2005, and, as far back as october I can remember coming across television specials dedicated to explorations of the 'Da Vinci' myth, both serious (see Tony Robinson, BBC4) and otherwise.
Of course, none of this particularily revelatory, but does in some part help me to explain both the second metaphoric extension of the term 'vice' and, to a greater extent, my relationship with and towards both the 'Da Vinci' movie and the wider cultural 'phenomenon' that has disseminated around Dan Brown's novel. In discussing both the novel and film during the past week with a number of work colleagues, friends, casual aquaintances etc., a sense of this second application of 'vice' - as "immoral, degrading practice or habit" began to emerge as perhaps the central relationship that many people may have with the type of movies and novels that the Da Vinci Code, in its numerous manifestations, has come to represent. And yet, however melodramtic terms such as "immoral" and "degrading" may seem when considering one's relationship towards works of fiction, there is a certain sense that in consuming films akin to the Da Vinci Code (and to a greater extent literature, with it's loftier pretensions) the viewer/reader is engaging in a glorious rite of guilty pleasure, a riotously indulgent act of "slumming it", undertaken in contravention of our usually over-considered and all-too-precious taste formations.
Thus, it was with this internal logic in mind that I allowed myself to watch the movie, knowing all too well that in doing so I was adopting the role of the hypo-critic; the individual who all-too-knowingly decries a particular picture before seeing it, with all judgements based upon a personal distaste for saturation marketing and anything so over-whelming popular and yet intellectually and creatively moribund. Neglecting to book in advance for a saturday night showing, I ended up seeing it at the Finchley Road "Vue" at 11:30pm and predictably it played, for all 149 minutes, to a packed auditorium of anticipatory spectators ( many of which, it should be mentioned, had no problems getting telephonic reception, despite the sound-proof, lead-lined walls of the theater.)
Anyway, As I had hoped, the film was underwhelming; but you already knew that if you've read a paper in the past week. It was in parts entertaining, in the same fashion as those Nescafe commercials featuring two flirtatious individuals during the 80's and 90's were, i.e, each scene seam-fully flowed into the next, seemingly bearing (as did the commercials) only scant relation to any of those preceding, or indeed following it. Furthermore, any sense of urgency imperative to the thriller genre was cleverly negated by the film's propensity to abandon conventions of space and time throughout the narrative. On numerous occasions, the intrepid Hanks/Tatou duo, having swiftly escaped from the cluthes of the law /hooded assasin, suddenly found reems of time to discuss and deliberate over some of the great existential questions of our time, as well as nostagically contemplate their overlapping personal histories..all of which would have been acceptable, had not this kind of dalliance ever-so-nearly got them killed in previous frames.
So, to conclude. This week I indulged my pretensions and bought into the Da Vinci zeitgeist, before trying to intellectualise my hyposcrisy using some of the most rudimentary rhetorical tools available to a humanities graduate. Then, to revert to type, I went to see a reportory screening of "tony takitani" as adapted from murakami and felt much better, before failing to make meringues and instead eating ice-cream.
Next: "Smart-Aleck Blog"
