Could the DaVinci Code possibly be that bad a movie, under the direction of Ron Howard. Okay, so the man that brought us “Cinderella Man”, “A Beautiful Mind” and “Apollo 13” has to have a flop every now and then, but shit, Opie Taylor would even make a better movie than this.
Or is it really that bad? It has been criticized as being “too wordy”, by both critics and audiences. Sounds to me like, maybe, cerebral, perhaps? But wouldn’t that describe “A Beautiful Mind”? Of course, to be fair, that movie was never touted as a blood durdling, action packed thriller, exactly. But could DaVinci really be that dull?
Howard has been described by former associates as a “literalist”. When filming Apollo 13, he reportedly insisted that it seem exactly like it would have appearred when the real Apollo 13 blasted off, reminding the crew that this was space flight at a primitve stage. Well, that makes nothing to me but sense. He was reenacting history, after all, dramaticized for sure, but certainly not Captain Piccards Enterprise.
Now, I’m not insinuating that critics, or more precisely the papers that publish them, are succumbing to pressure from the Roman Catholic Church and Opus Dei to present this movie in a less than stellar light, though they have certainly voiced many objections to the subject matter of the film.
I am wondering, nevertheless, if they aren’t subjecting themselves to a bit of subtle internal wariness, and giving in to it. After all, the media has to a large degree been accussed of engaging in various wars on Chrisitanity, and Christmas, and Easter, and Christians in general, for years now. Not that they actually started the war. No, to a great extent that war has been fought out between such varied interest groups as the ACLU, AU, Focus On The Family, and other directly concerned parties. Who actually instigated the war, the party that drew first blood, isnt exactly clear yet to me, but the media has, for the most part, been caught in the crossfires, and have sufferred collateral damage. Sure, a number of media opinion columnists and analysts took upthe challenge, in some cases on the side of the onward Christian soldiers. Sometimes against them. In a lot of cases, they have been in denial of the implications of the conflict.
In almost all cases, they seem now to be sufferring from a marked case of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. In a great lot of these cases, reaction to thismovie might be one symptom of this condition.
5 comments:
Someone once argued that most members of the news media are liberals, and that the actual outcome of this was that they give entirely too much credence to conservatives while trying to be fair.
I have always been of the opinion that they are mostly liberal because of teir profession, and the overall feeling that Democrats and liberals in general are beter at looking out for First Amendment rights, freedomof speech and press.
And truthfully, objectivity of the press is actually a fairly recent innovation, relatively speaking. Didn't really come about until about the World War II era.
Now it is suppossed to be the standard, and I think it's a good one. There's a differenceof course in covering the news and in analysis and editorializing. Both are valid aspects. Yet, both seem to be criticized for each one either being too much like the other, or in some cases not enough like the other.
I think the media is actually pretty moderate, but portraying them as liberal makes anyone who's actually liberal look like a extremist nut job by comparison. The media seem to share in the assumptions of most of us, albeit often slightly better informed and with a nice research department behind their scripts.
As for culture wars, well, monotheistic scriptures are pretty much the best designed foundation ever for training a group (1) to be persecuted, (2) to resist persecution, and (3) to take full advantage of all power that comes their way. First, they characterize anything at odds with their exclusive religious perspective as something that should be fought, and most probably, obliterated. (Starts in Exodus, gets reemphasized in most scriptures following, including the New Testament and the Koran.) Next, they all portray capture, exile, marginalization, and ridicule. They actually train the believers to expect and understand these conditions, and give them effective strategies to counter all this. It's part of why the authoritative monotheisms are so damn hard to just ignore out of existence. Finally, they all portray an idealized communities of believers that one should try to recreate. In Hebrew scripture, there is the kingdoms of David and Solomon. In Christianity, there's Jesus small band of disciples and the various stages of the early church. For Muslims, there is the ummah and the early Caliphs. When you have the power, the message goes, you should try to implement these "ideals."
I contend that monotheisms probably almost always fired the first shots in culture wars.
And as for the media, well, they're suckers for publicity as much or more than anyone else, and a great many in the media are probably unreflective members of mainline Protestant denominations, cafeteria Catholics, and Reform Jews. People like that tend to expect us all to be "reasonable." They harumph and look deeply offended if anyone dismisses, parodies, or deeply alters traditional religion, but they also see no conflict between any of this and totally modern life. This seems to be the dominant point of view on so-called "liberal" media outlets like Air America and NPR. With some exceptions, they're mostly about pandering to religious sensibilities and placating all that subconsciously held info most monotheists carry in the back of their head in good times: devils are in the corner, they can destroy our moral foundations, they can take the good times away if we relax our standards. Yeah, there's some truth in the fact that standards have to be consistent, but they also have to be examined. However, most people aren't comfortable with the examination, so the media tends to shy away from it: it doesn't sell very well. Sometimes they slip it into the corners, and the Da Vinci Code itself is an example of that. But the Da Vinci Code is something that makes people with common assumptions most uncomfortable of all: not a fight for or against religion, but a lean towards different religion.
Most people, in my experience, tend to assume that irrational traditions are good and rational critique is good, but new and exciting symbolism and religious experience must be the sure road to hell. It's probably no wonder that, so far as I can tell, the only thing anywhere at any time that's overturned religious convention in a big way and given new religious insights a chance has been violent imposition of new beliefs, obliteration or integration of the signs of the old one, and imperial patronage to sustain the institutions of the new. That's true of every major "world" religion, including Chrisitianity (Constantine and his successors), Islam (Muhammed himself and his successors), and Buddhism (Ashoka, some Chinese emperors, and other SE Asian monarchs; but notice how the fragmented sponsorship in this case has led to a much weaker and more fragmented institution, by comparison). Everything else is just a matter of upholding ancient traditions, which blend and fagment over time. Everything else is Paganism, really, the natural religious tendency; a slow morphing of beliefs and irrational symbols into useful traditions and therapeutic practices.
To me, the real value of the Da Vinci Code is that it hints at ways to integrate Christianity into a more inclusive and diverse (and ultimately, positively Pagan) religious perspective. It does it casually, in a way that can alter subconscious assumptions without really challenging surface beliefs. It manages to do that in part because it makes so many lame assumptions that are never examined, and because it's clearly not great literature or the foundation of a religious movement itself. There is a reason why monotheism's most ardent practitioners react to that and insist on analyzing the crap out of it: if the subconscious assumptions change, they will loose their power and their faith will simply become part of a less consistent and more diverse melange of beliefs, no longer centering around monotheistic scriptural absolutes.
It can only be hoped that they're right to worry and that we are slouching back to a more pluralistic, less dogmatic, and more diverse religious life, albeit at a glacial pace . . .
Fondfire, I really enjoyed this comment, but to tell you the truth, I think you should try to expand on it some, and then try to get it published, at least as a guest op-ed piece, in a major publication. This was really good and thought provoking, and to tell you the truth is too good to be a mere comment on what I have to humbly admit is a very obscure blog. That being said, I really thank you for your input, and glad to see you here.
Maybe I'll try to at least adapt it to be a blog entry of my own.
Thanks for the encouragement, though! Part of why I decided to start blogging, anyway, was to try to get some more practice with presenting my thoughts in writing and gathering feedback as to how that was going. Otherwise, I'm just going off on e-mail lists that nobody reads, anyhow . . .
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