By Mark Lawson (THE GUARDIAN, 19/05/06):
Let me begin by making clear that this opinion column contains opinions and that readers should not be misled into thinking that these views are facts. The column might also, however, intermittently contain facts, and it is important that these should not be confused with opinions. In order to guard as far as possible against misunderstanding, this article will classify sentences according to a simple code: O for opinion, F for fact.
The need for such a disclaimer paragraph had never occurred to me until this week. Travelling in America, I watched a discussion on NBC's Today show about whether the producers of the movie The Da Vinci Code should submit to a request from religious lobby groups to begin the film with a caption pointing out that audiences are watching a work of fiction (F).
René Magritte made quite an artistic career from comic mislabelling - by asserting, for example, that a pipe was not a pipe. But American culture seems - without any comic intent or, at least, none that is deliberate (O) - to be threatened with a rather more literal trick of description: this movie is a movie (O).
It's true that cinema is used to stating its qualifications. All films include in their credits a version of the legally protective phrase about resemblance to real people or events being unintentional (F). Strangely, this statement prefaces even works based on real events or people, with the result that additional explanation is now given in the genre of faction; for example, Paul Greengrass's United 93 (about the 9/11 flight that crashed in Pennsylvania) flashes up a caption reporting its sources (F).
Such films, though, employ the language of documentary, and so call for clarification. The Da Vinci Code is a farrago based on legends. As the actor (O) Tom Hanks pointed out during his American television appearance with Sir Ian McKellen and other cast members, it was openly marketed as a novel and so the millions of readers of the book have been given a hefty hint of the work's fictional nature. If Dan Brown had written the book in the style of journalism (a common fictional device), then there might have been confusion among those troubled enough to be confused. But Brown told his tale in a prose so far from reportage (indeed, from any recognisable form of English) that the book telegraphs its own incredibility on every single page.
But the fact is (O) that the calls for a cinematic recantation result not from a fear of confusion but from the current American terror of giving offence. In a nation where it was reported yesterday that the most popular new name for baby girls is "Nevaeh" - the word "heaven" spelled backwards (F) - religious beliefs, which are properly a matter for that variety of opinion called faith, have been redefined as fact (O). American believers seek the disclaimer in case a notional cinemagoing moron were to give Brown's bad book more credence than the Good Book.
Yet their concern is probably already unnecessary. Among the most common complaints of American movie reviewers has been that the film drastically tones down the novel's revision of Christianity, presumably because the studio was already responding to the sensitivity issues that habitually afflict the country's culture. This seems a pity because the only commendable element of Brown's book was his intolerance of dogma (O).
The very fact that America's leading breakfast programme was even discussing the question of whether Americans needed to be warned that movies may not be true revealed one major difference of attitudes between the US and the UK. But the conversation itself revealed another (O). Pressed on whether the disclaimer was really necessary, Sir Ian McKellen suggested that perhaps there should be a warning printed at the beginning of the Bible saying that some of that might be fiction; for example, the walking on the water (F - what McKellen said, I mean. The miracles are a matter of O).
Already remarkable as the only leading movie actor who is gay (F!), Sir Ian here achieved another singularity in Hollywood. It is impossible to imagine any major American actor now daring to suggest on national television that a holy book might not be fact (O).
At the time of Sir Ian's previous biggest movies - the Lord of the Rings trilogy - there were no calls for the films to start with a card pointing out that Middle Earth and hobbits were fictional; although it is regrettably quite possible that there were some Americans who believed Gandalf and Bilbo to have lived.
Putting a health warning on The Da Vinci Code is equally silly. What is remarkable is that a debate over the risk of fiction being mistaken for fact should have arisen over what is possibly one of the most preposterous novels ever written (O).
No, I wish to reclassify that opinion about the ludicrousness of the Da Vinci Code as F. In fact (O), let's end with a simple coded message to the book and the film and to those who insist on taking any of its nonsense seriously: FO.