THE GOLDEN COMPASS
Archived from December 8, 2007
Yesterday Julianne and I went to see The Golden Compass.
This is a very important movie in several key ways. First of all, read the books. They are amazing. They are by Phillip Pullman, who wrote them as a direct response to Narnia. He has been very open with his feelings about children's fantasy literature--namely, that it is all bullshit Christian propaganda. Like we just keep telling our children variations of the Jesus story over and over again. Take Jesus, mix him with a dab of misogyny, a pinch of racism, and you've got your fantasy epic.
The "journey" or "quest" narrative that we are all so familiar with is always a boy's story. Remember how they had to essentially make up girls to put in Lord of the Rings, and even then there were only two and you saw them like three times in the 47 hours of those movies? Which is more than you see them in the books, to be fair. For those of us girls whose souls always yearned for the Romantic quest, there were essentially no role models, so unless we wanted to relate to the women who fall in love with the heroes and are then left behind or killed, we had to content ourselves with stories about boys. I was one of these girls. The "journey" trope speaks to me on a very deep level. I started reading the Dark Tower when I was 9. It's also a boy's story, although a woman does become a major player in the 2nd book. Still, a boy's story. It starts and ends with a boy. It is uniquely tied up with a boy's thoughts, his feelings, his past (a 2,000 page book of flashback proved this). The child whose birth fulfills a prophecy; a boy or man who is swept up into an epic universal struggle of Good against Evil; books with cool talking animals in them who kill lots of people; these have traditionally been about, and largely for, boys.
Then you get Phillip Pullman. Pullman is a Brit. He hates Narnia. He hates Narnia because he sees Narnia as veiled Christian propaganda of a particularly insidious sort. He also hates Narnia because of its sly reinforcement of deeply fucked up gender roles. You will remember, for example, that in the beginning of the 2nd Narnia book, it is revealed that Susan no longer believes in Narnia, and is thus no longer able to accompany her siblings into that magical world where they are all kings and queens. This warding-off of Narnia is specifically tied to Susan's sudden interest in stockings, lipstick, and boys--things that are deemed so stupid as to be actually offensive to her siblings. And that is the last we hear of Susan, until I think maybe she somehow makes it onto the Dawn Treader so she can go die with Jesus/Aslan in Heaven-World.
I, of course, LOVE the Narnia books. But once you've read a Phillip Pullman interview where he talks about them, you'll never be quite the same.
So Pullman sat down and wrote his own children's fantasy adventure epic. It's got it all--enormous battle scenes, other parallel universes, double-crossing, talking armored bears, cool gadgets, a child born who fulfills a prophecy and must journey forth not knowing what it is they must do. Except in his book, the child is a girl. And the thing that is destroying the universe is THE CHURCH. And this is made explicit in the books (it's somewhat cloudy in the movie, thanks no doubt to hysterical pandering to the insane Christian right in this country. But still, you can tell what's going on). Furthermore, what the church is doing--their evil machinations that must be stopped by our hero and her rag-tag band of misfit friends (which includes Sam Elliot, but we'll get to that later), is trying to KEEP PEOPLE FROM GROWING UP, SO THAT THEY NEVER EXPERIENCE A SEXUAL AWAKENING.
This is very, very intense. In Pullman's universe (or, one of them), people's souls are manifested outside their bodies in animal form--called "daemons." In the book he spends a lot of time describing these daemons and their role in shaping this society. The daemons of children can shape-shift---changing into any animal form they want. But as you reach a certain age, your daemon "settles," choosing the form it will hold for the rest of your life. This puberty metaphor is the central issue of His Dark Materials (the name of this trilogy). Your daemon "settling" = you have become a man/woman. "When a person's daemon starts to settle, that's when they begin having nasty, uncomfortable thoughts," says Mrs. Coulter, one of the story's many villains. It is the view of the church that these nasty dirty thoughts must be stopped, and then there will be no more war, no more strife--the implicit message being that if people are kept in a childlike state, they will be easier to control.
So, the church is sponsoring scientific research into a process called "intercision," which we slowly realize is this horrible machine that can actually CUT the invisible link between a child and their daemon, thus disabling the process of aging that leads eventually to "doing it." This turns the child into a semi-zombie, who curls up on the ground crying and begging for their daemon, who is never heard from again. Intercision separates you from your SELF. The enormous facility where all the world's kidnapped children have been taken to serve as guinea pigs in the intercision experiments is a huge structure, and inside it is all sterility and vacant stares.
what we find out in book 3 is that Lyra's task---her eventual act that will save the universe--is actually to have a sexual awakening, and then have sex. Since she is the prophesied child who is somehow linked to the Beyond, her rebellion against the church and its evil attempt to destroy Sex sets the rest of us free. Now THAT is intense. Instead of destroying a girl for having sex, Pullman celebrates it as the thing that will save humanity.
Anyway, I could go on and on (and have, many times) about the amazingness of these books. Please buy them and give them to any children you know--both boys and girls. If the stories we tell are influential to the way our personalities are shaped, and I believe they are, then we have to start telling different stories. I grew up without a Lyra to read about, and had to make do with boys, who I related to and empathized with. But nonetheless, it plants a seed in your brain--a seed that makes sure you know that YOU will never go on a journey/quest to save the universe.
THE MOVIE:
Well, the movie was great. And I am upset, because it's getting mixed reviews. And I'll tell you why I'm upset: The movie, in its flaws, feels exactly like Lord of the Rings in ITS flaws. There are too many plotlines and characters jammed into too short a space of time, because if you were reading the book it would take you DAYS to encounter them all. Like Lord of the Rings, this movie has a lot of awkward fantasy stuff ("I AM SERAFINA PEKALA, QUEEN OF THE CLAN OF NAA''RRRSGOD" or whatever). Like Lord of the Rings, it takes place in another world, populated by strange creatures, some of whom talk the Queen's English. Like Lord of the Rings, it involves a rag-tag band of heroes trying to accomplish a sort of goofy task that if you weren't a huge fan of the books you could possibly think was kind of dumb-sounding. And like Lord of the Rings, everything is very overwrought, with people delivering really intense monologues about the universe, and immense inter-species battle scenes, and everyone taking things very seriously.
I imagine that the negative reviews of this movie will mostly point out "flaws" that are apparent in Lord of the Rings, is my point. But since Lord of the Rings has this storied, noble lineage, everyone was willing to overlook it, or to say "well, that's how a fantasy epic works." And since The Golden Compass has such an apparent political message, I fear that certain people who suck will use that as an excuse to deride things that in another film would be held up as virtues.
For me, it was a very powerful experience to watch a big, tough, bloody fantasy epic whose main focus was a tiny little foul-mouthed girl.
I would also like to point out that the studio initially wanted to change Lyra to a little boy, claiming that "more people can relate to a boy than to a girl." I don't know who successfully fended this off, but they deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. That shit is the worst thing I ever heard.
I also love how the first book is essentially a deep romance between this girl and a gigantic talking polar bear named Iorek Byrnison.
The movie got a lot right. It captured the feel of the book, it managed to convey the book's anti-religious-dogma message, it got Lyra right, it got the daemons right (there was some initial fear that the daemons would have goofy, Jar-Jar-esque voices, e.g.). But the thing it got most right of all, the thing that actually made me cry a little bit in the theater, was our friend Iorek Byrnison.
Iorek Byrnison is of course voiced by Sir Ian McKellen, so I already knew things would be okay. Iorek Byrnison is a bitter exiled prince, living in a dirty shack in a dirty human outpost, mending metal objects and getting paid with whiskey. "They gave me whiskey to drink until I fell asleep, and then they stole my armor." Iorek Byrnison is kind of scary at first, but once he recognizes Lyra's inherent virtue and joins her on her spirit quest, he quickly gets back on the path to moral righteousness. However, he never even begins to descend into "cute animal sidekick" territory. Iorek Byrnison is a noble warrior prince. There is no chuckling, no gentle cuffing of human chins. There is only armor and courage and Doing The Right Thing. "Are you afraid?" Lyra asks Iorek as they are traveling to a haunted cabin on the edge of a frozen lake. "No," replies Iorek, "but when I AM afraid, I will MASTER MY FEAR." Holy shit! When he fights King Ragnar, voiced by Ian McShane! IAN MCSHANE! I laughed so hard (with delight). They surely do not pull any punches in that fight scene, so to speak. Let's just say that somebody's jawbone gets torn off and goes flying across the snow. These are not books for babies.
Iorek Byrnison is lifetime friends with Lee Scoresby, who is played by Sam Elliot, in full on Lebowski mode. Scoresby's daemon is this amazing jack rabbit named Hester, and they both inexplicably have Southern American accents. It is so great. He flies around in this huge hot air balloon, shooting the shit out of people and making adorable statements to anyone who will listen. He calls Iorek Byrnison "amigo." It is so weird and fabulous.
The stuff with daemons is really cool. How your daemon settles and then reveals something about you with its final form---because as children, we are still changing. But at some point you become who you are, and your daemon stops shifting. And there is lots of stuff in the book about this process. Some people being ashamed of their daemons and wishing they were different--like maybe your daemon becomes something ungainly, and it embarrasses you because your daemon is a reflection of yourself. So some people bicker with their daemons and don't want people to look at their daemons, which is very interesting psychologically when you think about how the daemon is really just the person--not a different entity at all. But then some people are stoked on their awkward daemons, like, "yeah, my daemon is this cool poisonous viper, because I am so evil," and that's fine with them. Or, he tells stories about people whose daemons settle in a form that severely restricts the rest of their life--a sea captain whose daemon settles as a dolphin, thus meaning he has to stay on a boat for the rest of his life (you aren't able to get more than a few yards away from your daemon). Trouble and conflict within the Self, but manifested on the outside where everyone can see, and go, "isn't that a shame."
There is this amazing part where Mrs. Coulter strikes her own daemon. It is a pretty mind-blowing scene, when you try to piece out all the psychoanalytical stuff going on. She's looking at a picture of Lyra, and her daemon (a scary golden monkey) comes up and tries to pull the picture out of her hands to get her to stop obsessing over it, and she responds by slapping him hard and knocking him off the table. Then he starts crying and she picks him up and soothes him, saying, "I would never hurt you." Her own handprint is on her own cheek. A soul at war with itself. Gnarly!
Anyway, everyone should go pay to see this movie, because you vote with your dollar and this is something we should all vote on. We should vote YES on these kinds of plots featuring women and not Jesus. We should vote YES on political allegories that are not supportive of the shitty status-quo. And, perhaps most iimportantly, we should vote YES on IOREK BYRNISON.
Thank you.
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