Ace of Spades has a good review of the Da Vinci Code here. Not the movie— the book. One thing I hear about both of them quite a bit is that the book wouldn’t have been such a success if not the outcry against it, just as the movie wouldn’t have been such a blockbuster for the attention brought to it by the public outcry to boycott the movie. Well, maybe so, in the case of the book. But as far as the movie, I doubt public criticism had much to do with it. And the idea that “it’s just a FICTIONAL movie or book so people should lighten up” is a pile of crap.
Whether or not YOU think the Da Vinci Code is stupid fluff and shouldn't be taken seriously, hundreds of thousands of people do take it seriously. It's sold more than 40 million copies in hardcover and I can tell you from experience in my classes that it is taken very, very seriously by tons of college students, especially female college students. This movie was a blockbuster waiting to happen, as the Left Behind books might also have been had they received the hype, production values and talent behind the Da Vinci movie. True, the book sucks. It was still very popular– nobody should be surprised that a movie based on it is very popular as well. And anyone who takes even a brief look at the book knows that at the beginning it claims that all the historical facts about Christ, all the historical facts about Da Vinci, all the historical facts put forth in the novel are TRUE, period, no equivocation on Mr. Brown's part.
I'm sure your teachers taught you the difference between science fiction, historical fiction and so on. The belief that a book cannot serve or be intended to serve as an argument for a certain position simply because it is a work of fiction is completely unwarranted on at least two grounds. First, the idea that a work of fiction cannot be intended to move people into holding a certain position makes no sense. There is nothing about the definition of the term "fiction" that would suggest that it is incapable of doing so. Second, throughout history, works of fiction have purposefully and successfully been used to do exactly that.
The dialogues of Plato, Galileo and Hume are fiction. Each contributed to creating the intellectual atmosphere in which we breath today. Ayn Rand's novels are fictional… But I'm sure you've noticed that, like Dan Brown's novels, they are also polemical. So is Michael Crichton's novel on environmentalist fanaticism, The State of Fear. So was Harriett Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which Abraham Lincoln with just a bit of exaggeration claimed set off the Civil War. Fiction can be as powerful as, if not more so than, any other medium. This has been recognized since virtually the beginning of written history– Plato advocated censorship of poets in the Republic for exactly this reason.
Maybe some are making too big a deal out of this movie and maybe it'll be blown out of the water by X-Men: Last Stand when it comes out. But the "it's just fiction so chill out" fallacy is pure drivel in any case.
