i have neither read nor seen the da vinci code. until i saw, and, for a change, paid attention to a trailer of the film earlier this week (i space out during trailers), i had no idea what the big brouhaha about DVC was. one more conspiracy film about the vatican? big deal. you must by now know what the heresy of DVC is. if you don’t [SPOILER], here it is: jesus and mary magdalene got married and had children; this fact was concealed by the church through systematic erasure of evidenciary documentation. i think it’s pretty much it, though i’m not sure. as i said, i haven’t read the book.
this is politically complicated for me. i am a practicing catholic who feels a genuine sense of belonging to the church. the political complexity i encounter in discussing this issue does not stem from finding the church’s boycott of DVC ridiculous or from being ready to a) ignore it and b) criticize it publicly, but from doing so in a blog where no one shares my religious views (or holds any religious views at all, as best as i can tell). however, i do want to discuss what’s going on with this movie, so i’ll appeal to your decency and ask you to keep this conversation from becoming a free-for-all against the catholic church (kinda like what y’all did against scientology in the MI3 thread).
i am perplexed by catholics’ reaction to this movie. are other christians reacting in the same way? i don’t think so. doesn’t jesus “belong” to them too? why aren’t they upset that his virginity is being questioned? i realize the book claims that the conspiracy centers on the vatican, but from the little i’ve seen, it doesn’t seem to me that this is what catholics are upset about. they are upset that jesus’s virginity should be impugned.
there are many films that depict the vatican as a nest of vipers, and many that revisit the story of the gospels, adding and subtracting in the process. have they all been boycotted with such fervor? ultimately, i need to ask, what is the significance of this boycott?
DVC is a work of fiction. i don’t see any reason to boycott a work of fiction just because it departs from the orthodoxy of my religion. trying to understand the church’s reaction, though, i found that the only rational explanation for boycotting the film would be in order to stop practicing catholics from leaving the church. this presupposes that the church has found that, indeed, practicing catholics have stopped attending church upon reading the book. is this the case?
a less rational but understandable explanation is that, in a time in which issues of monogamy, divorce, homosexuality, abstinence, celibacy for the priesthood, and sexual molestation of children on the part of priests worry the church so much, a film that questions christ’s celibacy touches a very sore spot. the catholic church’s obsession with sexuality has always striken me as self-defeating at best, prurient at worst. as foucault explains rather convincingly, sexual repression hides, or is equal to, sexual obsession. as a catholic, i find this worrisome. and the world — the media, public opinion — is fully picking up on this. the sex abuse scandal was a poignant counterpart to the stern anti-sexuality agenda of the church.
i’m fine with a church that wants to keep its priests celibate. i don’t have a problem with this. no one is forced to become a priest, and there is something to be said for the full dedication to god and the community a celibate priest can give. not that the church is couching this in practical terms, but whatever. and i don’t have a problem with the priesthood’s being reserved for males. this may change in time, but things don’t bother me as they are. maybe i’m just used to it. in any case, there is plenty room in the church for women, and the influence of women on doctrine has been exercised pretty regularly in these last 2,000 years. but it does seem high time for the church to let go of sexuality and get back to the things jesus was so keen on: poverty, justice, a deep relationship with god and our fellow human beings, community, love, forgiveness, patience, a profound spirituality, a faith that gives meaning to the troubles and vicissitudes of life. the da vinci code should, it seems to me, barely register on the radar screen of a christian who lives the christian life to the full.
From what I’ve read Christians in the states are using a different strategy. There are many publications which trade on the novel’s popularity, dispeling certain plot points while also recuperating the “Christian” lurking within the pop culture consumer (I think this is a unique response to such a runaway blockbuster, but I’m not sure it is necessarily original . . . can anyone else think of a novel or film that has inspired so many ancillary–parasitic even–texts). I’ve also read of one company that has produced a DVD for distribution to churches (as well as being available via the internet); congregations can watch either before or after seeing the film and the DVD is being utilized as a vehicle to move people closer to the Biblical “truths” with which the film and novel have taken liberties. There is a really popular professor of religion at the school where I teach who has done a lot of research into this phenomenon; she’s even taught a first-year seminar on the novel the various discourses circulating around it.
Interesting that The Da Vinci Code, which has received overwhelmingly poor reviews, made nearly $30 million on Friday (with about a $70 to $75 million weekend estimate). I think the second weekend will determine what, if any, fuss this film will generate.
I’m kind of fascinated by the popularity of the book (and, probably, the film), as well. Couple quick thoughts:
–The book’s first huge wave of popularity was coincident with the release of Passion of the Christ. And I’d bet that a goodly number (or maybe it’s godly) of folks were fans of both. This initially struck me as irony or contradiction, but….
I think the two represent a literalizing or maybe materialist sense of “faith” that seems central to much American protestantism. I.e., both texts, despite surface-level foci on textuality (whether Aramaic or Art), are all about getting past the ‘code’ to find the solid, unequivocal truth. My mom brought this up with me–she enjoyed the book a lot, and I gave her a hard time, asking why she was so into blasphemy. And she seemed surprised by that interpretation — what she liked was the idea that there were answers. No ambiguity; if you pay enough attention, there are answers. That, despite again the surface’s seeming assault on certain tenets of the faith, seems to be what many (American?) Christians seem to enjoy.
–Then again, a lot of people who like conspiracy theories say they really want to get to the (real) answers. But I would say (blah dee blah) that the allure is as much about not knowing the answers. I pitched this at a colleague’s class, in a course she taught on DVC. Maybe what is appealing is that the book parallels the pleasurable, significant mysteries of faith–that we don’t ever know for certain, that we are constantly reading the signs for deeper messages, and so on and so on. I.e., the book’s content may be “troubling” to certain visions of faith, but the book actually performs kinds of reading which correlate strongly with many people’s experience of faith.
That’s just a couple of quick thoughts. I am probably not going to see this–the book bored me. (I read one of Brown’s previous novels, and found it passably interesting, but then DVC seemed a replay and it stopped passing.) But I find the whole discourse around the flick/book really intriguing.
Didn’t Irving Wallace raise these hackles back in the ’70s? Wasn’t his _The Word_ (or some title like that) about Jesus’ marriage, recovered?
jeff, i haven’t followed any news for, like, three months. is the movie aggressively addressed by all christians or just catholics? neither of you does, in fact, distinguish between christian denominations. does anyone know?
I mentioned in passing Protestantism; my sense–from the news, as well as more anecdotally–that it’s the Catholics most enraged or outraged by the film. There have, however, been more sweeping challenges from multi- or a-denominational groups, all given some broad name like “Christians for Family Values” or the like. The film is read as part of the on-going attack on Christianity and its beliefs (which fired up so many around Passion of the C last year, as well.) The most recent New Yorker had an article about the DVC debate, or “debate”–as the article noted that the studio in some ways courted a certain version of the controversy, seeing it as good publicity and/or a way to head off bad publicity.
Still, my point about American protestantism was coy about denominations. What I’m really getting at are certain I think cultural distinctions–a faith that is American in sensibilities, often anti-Catholic. I would bet a buck that the book’s vision of Catholicism plays well in such groups, and that its “challenges” (to certain beliefs) again seem less crucial than its confirmations (of certain approaches toward belief and interpretation).
I can name two other religious flicks which got fervent boycotts: 1) Godard’s Hail Mary, but I am one of 37 people who saw that; there were literally more protesters than filmgoers when I saw it, and I walked out so fucking bored I wanted to protest. 2) Last Temptation. That boycott seemed broad and mainstream; that film’s consequent difficulties at the box office were, the New Yorker alleges, determinative of the studio’s plans for marketing the “controversy” over DVC.
The ‘theories’ in DVC have been around for a while, and there have been pop/pulp thrillers that have taken some kind of challenging revisionism to christian and/or catholic tenets. But I think DVC is getting a lot more flak because it’s such a phenomenon.
My colleague who teaches is herself a person of strong faith, and she was fascinated by the book but moreso by the phenomenon; her class (and many of her talks about it, to local congregations) zero in on the problems with the book’s religious history while also attending to some of the ways it opens up interesting debates (about women’s role in religious history, about institutionalized religion, about our pop culture and its impact on faith) she thinks are worth having.
And I apologize, Gio–your post/queries are not directly addressed by my comments, even here. You are obviously coming at it with personal stakes. My own stakes are, yes, different–I’m a committed atheist. But I got here from initial Catholic upbringing (with a father who, like half the Catholic guys he grew up with, thought he’d be a priest), then a pretty strong family commitment to Baptist church (Northern, less scary variety of baptists), and lots of conversations with a my dad as my beliefs (and his) have evolved. I have had long, frequent debates–still do, in fact–with my uncle, a Jesuit-trained ex-priest-in-training who sees Catholicism as the last best hope against descent into moral decay in America. Another aunt is a hell-and-brimstone Lutheran, who sees that moral decay, but sees Catholicism linked to it–is antiDVC but not up in arms the way her brother is. I guess my take is not so much un-religious (‘though I am decidedly that) as meta-religious: I found my break from faith to be very hard, and I have been all my life surrounded by these strong yet conflicting, even contradictory belief systems and believers. So I am coming at this with a strong personal stake in the nature of faith and doubt, and that’s what appeals to me about the phenomenon of DVC. Sorry for hijacking or sidetracking your initial post….
first you mock her religion and now her accent? how low will you go, reynolds?
I can go much lower, Anbar. Arban. Narab. Whatever the hell it is.
I have a theological question–after Jesus was reborn, then what did he do?
Why shouldn’t a nice Jewish boy get married and settle down, raise a few kids. But would it kill him to call his mother once in a while? And I say to him, Mr. Big Shot, you may have died and been reborn and saved mankind, but don’t forget who cleaned your dirty diapers. King of Kings you weren’t when you were begging for a puppy. And don’t get me started on that Mary Magdalene, the way she keeps a house, it’s a shame.
Why didn’t anyone get in a tizzy when the book came out? Why now? Is it because film is a mass media, whereas buying The Da Vinci Code in an airport and reading it on the way to Hawaii is a private thingy?
Maybe I am forgetting something…was there protest over the book? Or did Passion steal all the thunder?
What I like about The Name of the Rose (book and film) is William of Baskerville’s unconcealed love of crime solving (hence his name). The film is about uncovering the truth, yes, but there’s a kind of “whee! isn’t this fun?” feel to it all. Eco’s book is hyper self-conscious; I have neither read The Da Vinci Code nor will I see it (maybe on DVD), is it self-conscious? I bet no, but then again I bet on Barbaro.
there is nothing self-conscious about the book, which i read on vacation last year. it is a page-turner but it is ludicrously badly written. so bad, that you cannot even philosophically say of its mega success that at least it is getting people to read. i’ve seen better writing on soup packets. but the plot is compelling for a bit and then you have to make your way to the end (which i can’t say about most soup that comes in packets). i couldn’t say, however, if i thought it was that much worse than the life of pi, the recent booker winner which i read on the same vacation.
the book read like it was written to be made into a movie. as such i was not surprised to read recently that brown had his own version of the screenplay that the filmmakers passed on.
getting upset about popular culture representations of their holy figures is not restricted to catholics, of course. even the hindus have gotten into the act in recent years. i always find it strange when groups that are dominant in the cultural context where the perceived insult appears take on the position of victimhood–there is a difference here with the satanic verses affair, and also the recent mohammed cartoons controversy, where a large part of the anger had doubtless to do with where and for whom the representation was produced/consumed. but the da vinci code is about christianity and is being read and watched by christians in predominantly christian countries.
wasn’t there also some protest in the 70s over the life of brian? “he’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!”
Yes–Brian took some hits from the Moral Majority, which Python then exploited in their advertising.
My colleague informed me that the backlash against DVC emerged with the book, but became far more forceful as talk of it becoming a movie surfaced (almost instantly). She said there were actually strong coalitions between evangelicals and conservative Catholics–coalitions which initially popped up for George W., and then were exploited by the publicists for reaction to the mainstream hostility toward Passion of the C. So Arnab’s point about mainstream–this group is quite literally a force significantly driving the 2002/4 electoral politics. The anti-Catholic edge I discussed has diminished greatly in the last few years… but it’s still there, just more on the fringes.
Why did it occur? (This is more me, extrapolating, than my colleague, the estimable Deanna Thompson.) A) Someone is reading the trades. Like (too) many of us, a sense of how pop culture SELLS is as important as the texts — so when DVC got publishing buzz, immediately or coincidently tied to the inevitable film adaptation buzz, it got discussed as a “problem”. B) But that problem was whipped up by organizers–media and political consultants–rather than organically blossoming in the communities. I.e., as with Passion of the C, religious leaders send the messages to the pastors, who bring it up in sermons. (My grandmother-in-law is an evangelical, who was told both to vote for Bush and to see Passion in a sermon at her church. It may very well be that DVC has come up there, too.)
mike, i don’t know that any “problem” blossoms organically in communities any longer. all “problems” (big problems, discussed-from-the-pulpit problems, headline making problems) are manipulated. i don’t know if it’s just that i’ve lived mostly in miami and los angeles, but i feel communities are being squashed with the regularity of a juggernaut. not to sound too much like frisoli, but there seems to me to be a strong and focused political intent to keep people separate and isolated. i have this one example. the UM faculty (and this is a gosh-darned university, for goshsakes) had to fight several years ago for an all faculty listserve. finally, it was granted, but people need to subscribe voluntarily. needless to say, the listserve does not hold a prominent place in the welcome-to-UM faculty package, and we think the percentage of those subscribed hovers around 30 (we don’t know for sure, of course). there is basically no knowledge of the listserve among new faculty. as for the grad students listserve, some rule and regulation allows only for one email to be sent per week.
we are all whipped up into frenzies and then, quite regularly, whipped down into agreement.
yesterday, while i was falling asleep, i had a series of Deep Revelations about Life and one of them was about this blog. i realize that it is sad i should have a revelation about this blog in the few seconds between wake and sleep, which, being few, allow for a very limited number of revelations. why not a revelation about my career, my relationships, my place in the world? no, it was about this blog and other such things.
what i realized about this blog is that it is a textual blog, and that is the reason why my questions about the socio-political significance of the DVC protests didn’t spark a frenzy of debate. this is not a socio-political blog. it’s a blog about mediation, about texts.
now, i know that critical theorists, judith butler among them, have moved recently from mediation to politics, or at least tried to. since this movement happened while i was not paying attention, though, i’d like to ask you fellas if you know where it is this movement took/is taking place — meaning, in what books/papers/etc.
Gio,
I don’t know about others but politics without mediation sounds pretty dangerous to me. how can there be a clear cut distinction between the “socio political” and mediated texts?! DVC may not have sparked a frenzy because the controversy is so manufactured–as you say, it seems highly manipulated.
yeah, you’re right michael. but mediation without politics is equally dangerous, no? we’ll end up talking all over ourselves while rome goes up in flames, too busy discussing the symbolic implications of flames to go fetch buckets of water.
on second thoughts, i don’t think i know, michael, why politics without mediation (text) is dangerous. can you explain it to me?
I can’t think of any human relationship that isn’t mediated by complex factors, one of which being consciousness itself whose “form” (or maybe more accurately “formlessness” guarantees the separation of any subject from the phenomena at hand (in an idea I belabored shamelessly in my diss)….politics is especially complex and when it becomes a matter of “direct action,” falsely opposed to “talk” or “thought,” there is the very dangerous possibility of domination slipping back in, as “the real” and “the immediate.” An extreme case might be the SLA whose commitment to “direct” action resulted in a combination of hapless comedy, ineptitude, inflated rhetoric and messy violence paradoxically directed at the very “people” they kept abstractly claiming to represent as some kind of vanguard army.
but perhaps the SLA is an unfair example. I want to post more on this question, when I can think more clearly. But, Gio, thanks to you and John and Mike, I have spent the whole day thinking about action, mediation, melodrama and sentimentality.
yeah, i guess the SLA is a bit of an extreme example (i had to look it up!)). but i do understand what you mean. i will get to that in a second. first, though, let me say that i think i didn’t make clear what *i* meant, and that was doubtless due to sloppy writing, which, as we all know, is often related to sloppy thinking. i think that, in his political text post, mike captured what i meant before i did. he said something about “talking about flicks as flicks.” to this you replied, “what else can we talk about them as?” i have been thinking about this a lot (thank you, too, and thanks to mike and john!) and i believe that what i was suggesting in my original post on DVC was to discuss it, not as a flick, but as a socio-political phenomenon. all of the discussion would have taken place outside the film and, in fact, would not even have required watching the film. so i guess that would have been a good example of not discussing DVC as a film, but as something else. no?
i’m happy this conversation is forcing me to think clearly about what i meant.
as for mediation, i think i was less deeply philosophical than you are being in this last comment. if you want to get into philosophy of mind, though, i will have to ask: once you introduce consciousness as a mediating element, how can there be any human behavior (possibly including even unconscious behaviors) that is not mediated?
Historically speaking, since the early seveties, films like DVC have become sub-industries unto themselves (with merchandising ploys, commercial tie-ins, marketing efforts). DVC is a film of enormous scale, and, like Jaws, Godfather Part II, Star Wars from decades ago, this film is, to use Thomas Schatz’s terms, a “social, industrial and economic phenomenon of the first order, a cinematic idea and cultural commodity.” But this is true of all films, really.
I’m a bit puzzled by the claim that we can (and do) talk about “flicks as flicks.” I think it’s difficult, if not impossible, to talk about a film like DVC (or any film, for that matter) except as something other than the film itself. It’s not that our discussion may go “beyond” the film, or “outside” the film. The film, or any text, doesn’t deserve a prepositional phrase. And it isn’t necessary to qualify one’s ideas about a film along the lines of “I haven’t seen it, but I think that…” One may think he or she is talking strictly about the film itself, but this is horse shit, right? What’s with the “inside/outside” stuff? I mean, how metaphysical can you get? What does talking “inside” a film mean?
And why is seeing a film a requirement for talking about it? Having not seen a film just means you are saying something different about it (no less valuable or interesting or pertinent). I suppose as former grad students, we still feel compelled to honor this thing called the “text”–which is, if you think about, just a necessary construct that asks us to purchase copies at the college bookstore, honor a syllabus, flatter a professor, legitimize tradition, what have you. I guess I’m feeling especially Kincaidian today.
two indian states have banned the film. the first was nagaland in the north-east. lots of christian converts there, so not quite as surprising as the second one, punjab. apparently fear of violence by christians in the state was cited. i didn’t even realize there were enough christians in the state to do any damage. more likely, i think, this is related to the fact that there were calls a year ago for a ban against a film that was deemed blasphemous to sikhism.
The phrase “talking about flicks as flicks” makes pretty good sense to me. Surely there’s a distinction in kind between saying of a given film that it grossed $20 million on its first weekend and saying of it that that it is boring. The first is Gio’s “as a socio-political phenomenon.” The second is what was intended by the phrase “talking about flicks as flicks”. I agree with John that the vocabulary of “internal” and “external” may not be the best way of making this distinction. And I certainly don’t suppose that it will be possible to make the distinction illustrated sharply. Maybe there will be a vague area between these two ways of speaking of a film, or maybe there are simply more than two ways that need to be recognized. But I’d be loath to give up on the distinction that my example illustrates.
However, once one asks what kind of narrative form “organizes” the typical 20-million dollar movie, the distinction between internal and external disappears. I agree that it’s still a useful distinction to make to indicate what aspect of analysis a particular discussion emphasizes–but each of the two approaches you mention implies assumptions about the other.
I’m not sure exactly why you think, Michael, that each of the two approaches “implies assumptions about the other”. One might say something internal that implied some assumption about something external, or vice versa. But must this always be the case?
Though I certainly do agree with you that many interesting questions may involve both aspects and may, as in your example, pertain to the interaction between them.
i saw the film two days ago with li’l pony and i must say it’s really bad. the pony claims that tom hanks cannot act. maybe so. i remember liking him a lot in the terminal. and i don’t know if ron howard has ever made a decent film. but this film is directed remarkably badly and tom hanks gives a very flat, boring performance in it. poor audrey tautou has a miserable role, and everyone else looks like they are pretty much mouthing their lines except for ian mckellen, who is the only reason we didn’t leave way before the film’s end.
you will be glad to hear that i was not tempted to give up the tenets of my faith, though i must say i never realized there was a “feminist” angle to the whole da vinci phenomenon that is indeed quite attractive. too bad ron howard decided tautou’s character, supposedly a scientist of sorts, should come across so helpless and useless, always literally, physically led by tom hanks. [SPOILER] the “problem” people are so much in arms over, it turns out, is not christ’s celibacy, but mary magdalene’s doctrinal prominence (mary, as in jesus’ mother, does have a large doctrinal prominence in christianity, but unfortunately the movie doesn’t mention her once, placing all the weight of women’s presence in the church on the suppressed mary magdalene).
i felt genuinely sorry for the opus dei, a serious and benign organization which gets quite a vile and vicious rap. i knew, and worked with, the opus dei when i was in italy, and i cringed inside for my friends of long ago. if dan brown really believed that the opus dei is so powerful and treacherous, he no doubt would have disguised it behind a pseudonym — at the very least fearing a lawsuit. that would have been in any case the decent thing to do. these are real men and women, who try to do good work and don’t bother anyone.
i was surprised by how badly the film is made. the plot holes are so many one stops paying attention after five minutes. are recent bestsellers’ adaptations always this bad?
anyway, save your dollars.
I saw this film last night and it’s rather forgettable. I’m surprised by the Church’s reaction partly because the film’s attitude toward religion is less hostile than it is unintelligible. It is not an attack on Christianity really but more an expression of a soft notion of “believe what helps you.” The extremists on the Pro-Church and anti-Church side cancel each other out, both being driven to extremes by their rigid belief in dogma. The film even disavows that these members of Opus Dei (the bishop and Silas) are representative of Opus Dei in general. I suspect for Catholics the film may be more upsetting and it seems to me that some of the charges against the church have a ring of truth to them: the stigmatization of sexuality, especially female sexuality; the general dismissal of the body and hence, of the physical world, in favor of a spiritual dimension; the reliance on an autocratic and secretive organizational structure, etc. But the film goes out of its way NOT to conclude that Christ’s divinity is only a matter of political expediency. The points about suppressed books of the Bible and the Council of Nicea’s ratification that henceforth Christ would be one with God are well-taken. But the film has its own wealth of misinformation–The Catholic Church did not direct a wholesale war on women, as it was mostly Protestant countries and communities that succumbed to the witch hunt mentality. The Knights Templar were executed in France mainly for financial rather than religious reasons, etc.
The whole structure of the film reminded me of the classic spy-thriller double cross–something like The Spy who Came in from the Cold–whose typical trajectory is to demonstrate that both dogmatic sides of a conflict are equally blinkered and much more alike than they are willing to recognize; the real victim of these dogmas are individuals whose freedoms are compromised. For this reason I’d have to say that the Da Vinci Code is religiously more of a New Age film than an anti-Catholic/Christian one.
What I find most disturbing is its strange emphasis on bloodlines–especially royal bloodlines–almost as though the film wants to represent the last gasp of the doctrine of European breeding. A friend suggested that the people who should really be offended are the Jews who would renounce the kind of iconic effigy that Mary Magdalene receives, representing her annexation by Christianity. Did the keepers wish to protect the purity of bloodlines? Why didn’t the descendants of Christ do a little race-mixing along the way? Were they horse breeders–Tatou’s character by Jesus out of Mary. Bred for a mile and a half. strong connections.
this is really helpful michael. some comments:
unlike other christian denominations, the catholic church is really fond of orthodoxy. i’m saying this without criticism. it’s fine by me. but i wouldn’t expect it to like a “believe whatever rocks your boat” attitude. not at all.
wow. i’m really impressed by your knowledge of history.
the point about the goodly individual caught between warring factions is well taken. i think it also makes the film rather boring. both tom hanks and tautou are wimpy characters, and it’s hard to give a shit about them.
your comment about bloodlines is really good. it really seems to be the political crux of the film. racial purity. ugh.
gio,
my knowledge of history is limited–I cadged some of these observations from a friend who knows much more than I do. and, no, I wouldn’t expect the Catholic Church to embrace what one character calls in the film “supermarket christianity” but the film itself is not hostile to Christianity itself, as some have claimed. I think the film might have gained something from actually being more of a direct assault on orthodoxy, rather than a kind of oblique nudge, that disavows much of its critique by making the Ian McKellan character a nut. And I was thinking of your socio-historical questions—there must be some reason why this story is such a notable worldwide bestseller and a mediocre film is wildly successful. Is it simply a pop culture blip or does it reflect widespread dissaffection with orthodoxy or a global obsession with conspiracy? Do people just like to read books about their faith or do they wish to see authority challenged. The equivalent questions arise on the Protestant/evangelical side with the success of the Left Behind series—is the large audience an expression of agreement with a (dangerous) apocalyptic world view or do people just like to see characters like the AntiChrist running around, as in a Stephen King novel.
Has anyone read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point? I wonder if one might find an answer there. I haven’t read it because I didn’t really enjoy Blink all that much. What I read of it anyway. Which was virtually none at all. My wife read it, though.
Doubleday’s marketing division is responsible for sales, but the book has become more than a bestseller. It’s become a phenomenon. If the folks in marketing wanted something more than a bestseller, more than a ton of sales, then they would have concentrated on finding the “tipping point”–the moment when this one particular book can become a household name, so to speak. I’d guess, then, that DVC‘s success can be traced to what Gladwell calls “connectors” (people who move about in wide social circles) and “salesmen” (people who exert soft influence on others).
An example: Jane B. is both a “connector” and a “salesman.” She moves about in wide social circles and exerts soft influence on others (everyone who knows her subconcsciously want to imitate her). She reads DVC, and suddenly everyone in her circle is reading it.
Pretty simple argument. Which is why I don’t like Gladwell, even though I haven’t read him. My wife has, but she exerts no influence on me.
That works for me . . . that and all of the three and four page chapters and the 1001 cliffhangers and the psuedo-intellectual gamesmenship and the way the novel continually transform “high art” into pulp fiction (oh and the religion collides with feminism angle). Still, I breezed through this novel Christmas 2003 because my mother and my wife had read it at the beach the previous summer and thought it was great. I thought it was crap. What surprises me is that while I was reading it, I never once felt like it would make a good film. The dramatic action was far too internal (all those codes to decode and paintings to unpack and problems to solve); the action of the novel was much more internal than external. I couldn’t imagine how a screenwriter would be able to open it up and find a visual means to express critical thinking and creative problem solving. Sounds like they were not able to do so.
i wish i knew more about this, but i suspect that “vast [insert adjectival phrase here] conspiracies” might be what appeals to people in times of great socio-political anxiety, especially if such anxiety is coupled, as is the case now, with a politically and socially enforced passivity on the part of the populace. if someone has read something about this i’d like to know where.
also, i would like to open my egg carton room blog, in which i never, ever write, to those of you who want to discuss books. i have a couple of books i’d like to discuss right now, but i just don’t like writing in a one-person blog. if you write me an email at gio_pompele@yahoo.com we can take it from there. i’m not even linking to the aforementioned blog because there’s nothing on it and, if it became our group book blog, i’d delete some of the entries anyway. suffice it to say it is one of those standard blogspot blogs, nothing fancy like this one. the only thing i’d like arnab to help us with is that nifty system that makes recently commented posts come on top of the list. that’s a great, even essential feature in a group blog.
books? what, now, I gotta read books?