The previous post was by way of clearing the tubes before having a go at this idea. During my last trip I read The Davinci Code and was not greatly impressed, especially by the writing. But then, I already knew a fair bit about the background information from which it was drawn. I had a copy of The Holy Blood, Holy Grail when it came out 20 years ago, and I've twice been to Carcassonne, in part because it fascinates me the length to which people will go to find sources of power or protect a secret.
But from a publishing perspective, Davinci's Code appears to have missed the boat in another, more interesting way. In a bookshop on Friday I noticed that the Code is no longer in the top 10, but De-Coding Davinci: The Facts Behind the Fiction of the Davinci Code is. Along with another Decoding Davinci by a different author and the Holy Blood. And suddenly it came to me; the book business should be looking at the DVD.
Consider what we get on a DVD, mostly because the capacity of the disc far exceeds the data requirements of the film alone.
There's the "making of..." documentary, interviews with the stars, the writers, the producer and the tea lady. Then there is the alternative ending, maybe a couple, then promotional clips and movie trailers and the inevitable out-takes. Then there is the associated web site, the fanzine websites, the critical websites and more. What's more, the added material gets at least as much viewing as the original film. I think because we have ceased to see films as simple artefacts that exist in and for themselves. We know there are tricks in the telling of the story, we want to know what they are, we know there is a wider context and we want to look into that as well.
In fact, the denser and more extensive the connections we can make with our knowledge, the more we like it. Try this for size. On Sunday I listened to an ABC Movie programme called Movie Time which looked at a documentary called Morning Sun, about the effect on the Red Guards and the Cultural revolution in China of a Russian film of an English book about an Austrian revolutionary hero called the Gadfly, the film was dubbed into Cantonese and became an icon of the Cultural revolution. If that is not densely populated enough, you can check out the film's (Morning Sun's that is) website where there is more background material and an excellent photo gallery of related material.
Now, in producing a book, whether it is the Da Vinci Code or the new Tom Clancy (especially including his latest with General Zinni), there is a vast amount of research behind the work, research that is barely alluded to in passing, or does no more than inform the plot, or constrain and authenticate the dialogue. Work that, until now would never be seen again. But now we can contemplate the possibility that the research, the drafts, the excisions, the critiques, can all become part of the published work.
One of the most memorable books I've ever had was Richard Ellman's biography of James Joyce, not because it was great writing necessarily, but because it’s dense, detailed and complex content made my reading of Ulysses that much more enjoyable.
We are communication-based beings, we live by, work by, entertain ourselves in complex, dense webs of information whenever we get the chance (what do you think the endless conspiracy theorists are doing but weaving context out of disparate, usually disconnected data, and we love it), the ICT revolution lets us mainline that stuff, is it any wonder it has been so unpredictably successful?
Now if only the publishers will catch up.
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