Howard film has winning formula

I try not to make predictions, as they’re inevitably
wrong. The last three predictions I made were that “The
Aviator” would beat “Million Dollar Baby” for
Best Picture, that John Kerry would beat George W. Bush for the
presidency, and that UCLA would beat Florida for the national
championship.

It seems the only predictions I can correctly make are those
that are so obvious they blur the line between prophecy and common
sense, like picking USC over UCLA in football for the last two
years. It is in this frame of reference that I predict “The
Da Vinci Code,” which will be released in theaters on Friday,
will be an enormous success.

But the details aren’t as obvious as they seem. The vast
majority of talk you hear about the film relates exclusively to its
religious implications as a sort of anti-“The Passion of the
Christ” attempting to undermine Christian theology.

Pastors either want their congregations to boycott the film or
see it so they can denounce it. One California pastor has given
members of his congregation Starbucks gift cards and free movie
tickets so they can take people to see the film and then buy them
coffee and explain what’s wrong with everything they just
saw. While amusing, this will not affect the success of the film.
Instead, “The Da Vinci Code” will make more money than
any other movie this summer because it embodies what writer John
Seabrook of The New Yorker calls “nobrow” culture
““ meaning neither highbrow nor lowbrow.

Anyone who has read “The Da Vinci Code” can see that
the book is sophisticated enough in its sense of art history to
attract readers who only read literary novels while simultaneously
entertaining enough to attract readers who want to be entertained.
The book ““ and by proxy, the movie ““ reflects the
blending of highbrow and lowbrow culture in exactly the postmodern
way Seabrook describes in “Nobrow,” his book on the
subject.

Seabrook argues that the division between
“highbrow,” or elite, culture and
“lowbrow,” or mass-produced, culture has collapsed,
leaving the world only with a composite nobrow culture in its
stead. The film version of “The Da Vinci Code” is
attracting media attention for its religious implications ““
highbrow ““ and its teaming-up of Ron Howard and Tom Hanks,
the creative team that brought us “Splash” and
“Apollo 13″ ““ lowbrow. Only in a nobrow culture
could that sentence exist and make sense.

Though I doubt he realized it at the time, Dan Brown created the
perfect example of nobrow culture when he wrote “The Da Vinci
Code,” and the book’s ensuing popularity comes as no
surprise to me. Modern popular culture can’t escape its
hybrid perspective, which explains why I could compare the Oscars,
a presidential election and an NCAA sporting event in the first
paragraph of this column.

“The Da Vinci Code” essentially merges high and low
culture to create a product with enough accessible reference points
to interest anyone with a pulse, without prioritizing any of them
or isolating potential consumers.

The success of “The Da Vinci Code” will come as a
result of such a dichotomy. Subjective taste doesn’t matter
with this film because it includes everything. In a Los Angeles
Times story about the film, Gary Poole, a Chicago-based pastor,
said that “it’s probably going to be an awesome
movie,” referring to its entertainment value while ignoring
its religious perspective. Distinctions like that only reinforce
the film’s status on top of the nobrow Everest.

In a New York Times story about the film, director Howard
compares the experience of filming in the Louvre to filming
underwater for “Splash” or in a weightless atmosphere
for “Apollo 13,” ultimately deciding that he and Hanks
“appreciate this as much as those experiences.”

In other words, working with the most famous painting in the
world is the approximate cultural equivalent to taking a swim or a
particularly exciting flight in an airplane. Without a brow to
raise or lower, the cultural stratosphere is equal and
balanced.