Mrs Gee and I enjoyed a rare escape to the magic lantern show where we watched The Golden Compass, the cinematic adaptation of Philip Pullman’s novel Northern Lights, the first in the His Dark Materials trilogy.
Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.
Not that the film itself wasn’t a fine spectacle. The acting was fine. Nicole Kidman was terrific, as she always is. The improbably named Dakota Blue Richards was smashing as the heroine Lyra, and anything with Serena in it, even as a giant talking bear, will acquire a certain class. But I got the impression that these fine people were trying to animate a game of squash played, perforce, with a dead rat as the ball.
The problem was not the film, but Pullman. The reason is that His Dark Materials is a one-track religious allegory, in every way as unappealing as C. S. Lewis’ dreary narniacal rambles.
In the same way that C. S. Lewis smacks you round the gob with his relentless Christian proselytizing, Pullman assaults one constantly with his dyspeptic, nihilistic, misanthropic, horribly cynical, and above all ‘knowing’ atheism.
As entertainment, such monomania quickly becomes dull. Moreover, in the same way that Pullman’s people are always accompanied by talking furry critters, the cinematic result of religious allegory seems to be films that involve – nay, demand – talking animals. And I just hate that. For that reason (among others) The Golden Compass was as big a yawn to me as The Lion, the Witch and the … oh what was it? Oh yes, the Wossname with its wearisomely loquacious menagerie. (And next year I learn that we’ll have to endure Prince Crapsian. Oh, Joy, but not Surprise). Ever since the days of Aesop, talking animals have been the vehicle of choice for the heavy-handed delivery of moral tales.
It’s a long time since I read the book, The Northern Lights, on which The Golden Compass is based, so perhaps it’s a problem with the script. The bottom line is this – the whole Good vs Evil schtick is unconvincing because the baddies (the Authority and the Magisterium – that’s God and the Church, geddit? No? Oh, go back to sleep) are so unrelentingly monolithic.
And not only that, we learn so little about them. Why are they so hellbent on doing in their opponents, with no sign of remorse or second thoughts? And, anyway, what are the ‘teachings’ that would be threatened by the knowledge of the existence of this ‘schmutz’ or ‘dandruff’ or whatever it was? Precisely why was this so important? What exactly did the alethiometer to do with it all? And how would the Magisterium square all this with using this ‘schmalz’ to conquer other Universes? It made no sense whatsoever except as a very base and crude attack on religion which, as we all know, is a terribly right-on thing to espouse these days. Oh, do change the record, dear.
At least the acting in The Golden Compass was better than in The Lion, The Witch and the Frankly, My Dear, I Don’t Give A Damn. Lyra is a pleasingly perverse rebel-made-good whose rogueish charm shows that there can be no hope at all for the utterly nauseating Pevensie children (and that Looseat Pevensie – well, I just want to stick her head on a pike). I had hoped (rather than expected) that in the film version, Jadis, the Snow Queen, might have been frightening, or mildly titillating, or – whisper it soft – a little bit sexy, but the anaemic Tilda Swinton was about as sexy as a wet Tuesday afternoon in Romford and as terrifying as a mildly premenstrual nursery-school teacher (to think what Nicole Kidman could have done with that part).
Gimme Tolkien every time. Although he was deeply and sincerely religious, unlike Lewis and Pullman he did at least have the grace to keep his religion out of his fiction, and did his very best to stay away from strict allegory, at least where religion was concerned.
But most importantly, the quality of morality in his legendarium, in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, is not static, and this is the biggest contrast with both Lewis and Pullman. (Yes, I know that in The Scroll, the Goat and the Oldsmobile Edmund Pevensie sold his soul to the premenstrual nursery-school teacher for thirty pieces of Turkish Delight, but that’s not moral ambiguity – it’s a by-the-numbers allegorical plot point, put there so that the dreadful Jesus character, yes, that’s him, the Conquering Lion of Zion, can buy him back with his life and get himself good and resurrected, Praise The Lord).
Tolkien knew that for a story to be engaging and believable, a tale that will draw readers in rather than rant at them from behind a megaphone, morality will have to be far more than a simple matter of good against evil (and any critic who claims such a simple polarity for Tolkien simply hasn’t read his work). Even the baddest of the bad started out as good guys – and the good guys can very easily go to the bad, and you, the reader, can explore how they went to the bad, and why, and use the experience as a measure of our own all-too-human foibles.
It’s up to us, the readers, to draw what lessons we can from what Tolkien intended, primarily, as a rattling good yarn, designed initially to amuse himself, rather than anyone else (perhaps this explains the general absence of ‘knowingness’ in The Lord of the Rings – the very light authorial hand). Perhaps the inherent moral ambiguities in Tolkien – the choices he offers us – explain the enduring appeal of his fiction.
And perhaps why, in Tolkien, you get all kinds of ‘speaking peoples’, and even the occasional talking tree, but very little in the way of talking animals.
Henry – I re-read Northern Lights in anticipation of seeing The Golden Compass, but after the response the film has had, haven’t bothered to see it.
I too remembered the book as heavy handed, but when I came bacj to it, I found that it was because I read the whole trilogy, and it’s the last book where he really goes over the top. The first is, in fact, much less obvious in its downer on religion/the church and a great page-turner of an adventure.
Incidentally, why is it The Golden Compass? Not only is the alethiometer not a compass (it’s a mcguffin, and the weakest part of the book), but why change a perfectly good title for the American audience? Was it something like the famous Madness of King George III where they allegedly dropped the III to avoid the confusion of it being thought to be a second sequel? Or the transformation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to the Sorceror’s Stone presumably because Philosopher was too hard a word? Either way, it’s bizarre.
Well, since we’re Yank-bashing, or at least indulging in Schmollywood-hate, Terry Pratchett tells the following story about a long-abandoned project to film his story “Mort”:
“A production company was put together and there was US and Scandinavian and European involvement, and I wrote a couple of script drafts which wet down well and everything was looking fine and then the US people said ‘Hey, we’ve been doing market research in Power Cable, Nebraska, and other centers of culture, and the Death/skeleton bit doesn’t work for us, it’s a bit of a downer, we have a prarm with it, so lose the skeleton”. The rest of the consortium said, did you read the script? The Americans said: sure, we LOVE it, it’s GREAT, it’s HIGH CONCEPT. Just lose the Death angle, guys. Whereupon, I’m happy to say, they were told to keep on with the medication and come back in a hundred years."
In fact, I know that American cinema-goers are a lot brighter than movie execs give them credit for – and in many cases they’re actually brighter than the movie execs (not hard).
Far be it from me to disagree with Dr Gee, but I rather liked the film – and more so the books. To be sure, the source material lacks the depth (and length!) of The Lord of the Rings; and yes, Pullman’s in-yer-face Church bashing can at times be a little wearing, even to a card-carrying atheist such as myself. Nevertheless, it is IMHO a corking story, well told. And it’s adaptation to the big screen, while not without its flaws, is reasonably successful. We have some fine acting (as indeed you acknowledge), and a plot that does not dwell overly on the philosophical bent of the author – no doubt to the dismay of many Pullmanites, who would surely have liked to have seen more, not less, tweaking of Big G’s beard (a different Big G, that is).
Talking animals? Well yes, these can often be tiresome in the extreme, but in this case their inclusion (in book and film) is no Disney-style crowd-pleasing sop, but an imaginative representation of the different and difficult facets of youthful personality. (OK, this doesn’t include the bears, so my arguments are far from airtight…) I suggest that this was handled extremely well in the film, given that the literally split-personalities of the story had ‘unfilmable’ written all over them. And they didn’t induce in me the waves of nausea that accompany the more commonplace cinematic anthropomorphising of the animal kingdom – we are not talking about ‘cute animals behaving like people’ here, but ‘cute representations of actual people’ (an acronym waiting to happen, eh, Henry?).
Whatever the allegorical aspirations of the original books, I think that one has to look quite hard to see evidence for this in the film itself, or approach the film armed with prior knowledge of where Pullman was originally coming from. As you say, the Authority and Magisterium are not really explained, but so what? For those familiar with the books, you still have the (dis)satisfaction of reading into these entities and their behaviour the author’s apparent assault on God and Church; but for the rest, you get mysterious kid-snatching, imagination-suppressing baddies that follow in a grand tradition of cinema villains. Think the rulers of Vulgaria in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the (at least initially) nebulous character of He Who Must Not Be Named in the Harry Potter franchise, or even Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Bond is just a big kid, after all).
It’s not to everyone’s taste, but let’s remember that we are talking about a bit of light entertainment, and entertainment (in book and film form) that is aimed mainly at a young audience. It’s certainly not world-and-myth building of the type exemplified by Tolkien, but then it never claimed to be. And I for one am looking forward to the next instalment.
Finally, let me also put in a plug for the big-screen reappearance of Claire Higgins (Ma Costa in The Golden Compass) – best known in my circle as the female lead, Julia, in Clive Barker’s ‘spiritual’ masterpiece, Hellraiser. And note that this particular franchise went on to spawn seven sequels (and, coming soon, a remake of the original): suck on that fat one, J.R.R!!!
Ayeah. And how many sequels did Confessions of a Window Cleaner and Police Academy have?