Film in brief: The Golden Compass

[narcasse]

Having heard plenty of negative comments about this film I was actually surprised to find that it wasn’t quite as terrible as it could have been, which is to say that it was... alright. Not atrocious but not particularly impressive either. Moderate and almost bordering on the bland would probably cover it and it’s really not the best of measures when I can watch a film and tell that huge chunks of the story have been left out even though I’ve not yet read the novel it’s based on.

I don’t really have much more of a comment to make on the matter because the film itself was quite forgettable. The fight scene in the second half was a bit tedious for something so darkly lit though I suppose the dæmon explosions were a nice way to illustrate a fight dramatically without excess blood splatter and the music was a little on the poor side but other than that there wasn’t much more too it. I would have liked to have heard a little more of the Magisterium’s propaganda because the film seemed to suggest that they were doing what they were doing because they were the bad guys and that’s just what they did which seems rather unrealistic since even if there are some who are at it because they can; usually the villains tend to believe that they’re doing the right thing. Since Lyra lives in some alternate reality Oxford I can’t complain about her accent either and other than twitching slightly at the Panserbjørne culture as a general fantasy stereotype or wondering if a La Esmeralda would turn up there was hardly much else to complain about. Though that appears to be the general theme of the film; moderation in everything to the point where there’s nothing worth troubling yourself over.


Interestingly, from a quick glance over the trilogy plotline I’m not at all seeing cause for the complaint that the entire story is anti theism particularly. Having spoilered myself completely, the fact that it’s the first angel to emerge from the Dust that gets destroyed at the end seems to play more on the theme of suggesting that even angels shouldn’t attempt to presume to know divine will and impose their own order on it. The matter of the doorways between worlds seems very much to be a case of arguing that you ought to work within the means that you’ve been given rather than trying to substitute something else and that it’s no good thinking that you can escape your situation by just running off to somewhere fantastical rather than dealing with it. All of which doesn’t strike me as very anti theist at all because if anything it’s an argument that no single individual should think themselves greater than a divine power that has deliberately given every individual free will and the means to personal growth. Guidance can be offered but nobody can make decisions for anybody else when it really comes down to it and whether you take that to mean that everyone is equally valid as an individual without bothering with theological considerations or whether you take it to mean that a deity has granted everybody the potential to grow as individuals through the exercising of free and thus to attempt to curtail that free will is an affront to said divine creator, it all essentially boils down to the very same thing.

From a theist standpoint then there really would be no reason for the film to be objectionable since it can be taken to reinforce the notion that divine will is beyond mortal comprehension and that people should continue living as best they can and from an atheist standpoint it’s exactly the same thing just lacking the divine will bit.

Of course if anybody’s objecting I suppose it’ll be those folks who like to place restrictions on spirituality and would like to believe that conduit with the divine is something that humanity can tax and limit in some odd hierarchy. Though the thing there would be that there’s a good deal of difference between some villain attempting to limit a layman’s understanding of the divine deliberately and said layman going to a religious authority to assist in his understanding because said authority, having studied and dedicated an entire lifetime to such things, would probably know how to better explain the matter to him. All of which makes me wonder if there’s some deliberate Vatican conspiracy going on where they’re actually using some very skilled tactics in condemning films like The Golden Compass and The Da Vinci Code knowing that it’ll promote interest and thus discussion and questioning of actual human behaviour. Because what each case really seems to get at is the necessary goodness of human endeavour regardless of arguments over little theological details and as curious as that may sound, I really am getting suspicious because as much as he may look like some manner of Sith Lord; Herr Pope is by reputation a very clever man indeed.

Comments

[7veilsphaedra.livejournal.com]

This was the main part of my objection with the censorship issue in Catholic school libraries:

"...if anybody’s objecting I suppose it’ll be those folks who like to place restrictions on spirituality and would like to believe that conduit with the divine is something that humanity can tax and limit in some odd hierarchy."

Although I will qualify that point, having attended a different Catholic high school for my last two years of public education in Canada, where we had reading/discussion groups on as varied topics as Buddhism, Carlos Casteneda, Teilhard de Chardin, Plato, Nietzsche/German School, Blavatsky, and some of the French School under the catch-all banner "Philosophy" (Is Buddhism really a philosophy?) ie., not all Catholic systems are restrictive or regressive.

The last few points about how censorship kerfuffles give the oddball hierarchy something to do and something to make the rest of the uninterested population aware of its incipient busy-ness which basically amounts to free advertising, are good ones. Humourous, too, if the truth of it wasn't so damned exasperating.

[reichsfreiherr.livejournal.com]

My high school library wasn’t so much the issue (I can’t recall if we had a copy of the Torah but we certainly had a copy of the Qu’ran and so on) but rather the teaching structure, though that hardly restricted what we could look into in our own time. The entire institutional structure from individual church congregations up to the Christian 6th Form was more of the issue for me since it really did implement an excessive filtering not only of whom you attended school with but who you socialised with outside of that and how you did so. Even contact with Anglicans was seen as something quite different and strange because you grew up in your congregational community, socialised with other Catholic families, went to the Catholic infant and junior schools which all fed into the Catholic high school which had it’s own 6th Form (which only had one non-Catholic student at the time I was there even though it was billed as a Christian 6th Form and thus accepted all denominations) and thus you simply didn’t have reason to be in contact with non-Catholics for the most part. I know there are plenty of schools that are ostentatiously catholic but don’t filter by religion but the schools I attended did which created a very insular sort of community.

I remember reading somewhere that the Opus Dei organisation had an influx of interest after the release of The Da Vinci Code so I suppose all that’s needed now is some film that stirs up interest in the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith and maybe in a generation or two the College of Cardinals will be looking at a bit of an influx of very traditional Cardinals.

[7veilsphaedra.livejournal.com]

Perhaps that is more characteristic of schools in England. Because Catholic Schools are funded with taxpayer money in Canada, they cannot refuse students outside the religion.

I'm not surprised by Opus Dei's numbers being reinforced rather than diminished by DVCode, but the people who are drawn to it would've been involved with one lay brother/sister organization or another, I think. The shame of it is at least some of those lay organizations have some practical use in the service community. A friend of mine points out that most churches are used as social clubs and there isn't really all that much wholesale belief in what they teach.

[reichsfreiherr.livejournal.com]

I keep coming across that phenomena online which is an interesting contrast since Catholic schools in the UK are funded by the diocese, though you do get the occasional school that’s Catholic in name but accepts all entrants who are prepared to pay their extortionate fees. And the implication has always been to turn one’s nose up at the latter.

The only thing that makes me wonder is the presentation of Opus Dei in that film because it certainly wasn’t presented in a terribly friendly light. Though I suppose if the name is mentioned then people can easily go look up the real thing. Your friend may well be right in some cases though comments like that are forever making me wonder at a childhood of religions indoctrination. Everybody else who ever mentions that sort of thing seems to have had a much less regimented time of it which probably means I should be grateful for my narrow escape from the prospect of Holy Orders.

[7veilsphaedra.livejournal.com]

It could well be that you did have a narrower escape than most. In my mother's mother's side of the family, which is where all the Catholicism comes from, 3 of the 6 daughters became nuns --- all the oldest ones. But I'm pretty sure that had to do with the reality of pioneer life in western Canada, in which girls had such limited choices. The Church offered them, not only an education, but an opportunity at a higher education, whereas if they had stayed in those tiny farming communities, they were resigned to the farming life (during the Depression) and a baby a year until their bodies wore out. I found it interesting that the moment the Vatican II Church put more of an onus on nuns to work for the Church and pay back some of its investment, all but 1 of them left. Again, in many ways, the actual exploration of spirituality --- however that may have looked --- was secondary to social considerations.

But there is, undoubtedly, some sort of spiritual connection for some people. I don't know how they maintain it under the weight of all that creed and ritual, but there was a time when I was very attracted to Catholicism, especially the Marion worship aspect, something which I just as freely and easily extended to Quan Yin or the White Tara, hosts of Hindu Goddesses --- so it wasn't the Catholicism, so much as an embodiment of wisdom/compassion or the concept of the Thrones that I was interested in at the time. Even with spirituality itself, the church was secondary and, well, somewhat irrelevant. In fact, they were a nuisance in that they kept getting in the way of the actual spirituality. Anyway, that was then ...

[reichsfreiherr.livejournal.com]

I do wonder sometimes if part of the attraction to Catholicism is the heavy weight of ritual that it seems to involve and it’s very easy to find that ritual and protocol gets in the way of any actual spiritual progression. One of my clearest memories of Catholic services involves the priest in gold vestments with the Eucharist being carried in procession while some altarboy had the job of swinging a censer about after all. And I can’t even remember which service that was or anything particularly relevant other than the trappings, and I also can’t shake the annoying feeling that Catholic services have melded with media representations of Greek Orthodox ones in my head.

[madame-parker.livejournal.com]

Pullman really got heavy handed with the anti-religion in the third book, the Amber Spyglass, to the point where it was hard work to get through the last ten chapters of the novel. It left me quite angry that I had to work through all that hate from the author in order to get to the end. I enjoyed the first book the most but he get's long winded and angry the futhur you get into the rest of the books. As is my habit these days, I shall wait for the film to come out on DVD, I enjoy films better that way.

[reichsfreiherr.livejournal.com]

That’s disappointing to hear. Even if he was stridently anti-organised religion I would have hoped that he’d have kept calm about the matter because there’s nothing like hammering your argument down angrily to give your opponents fodder to simply discredit your arguments entirely. Moderation, pleasant demeanour and even praise for your opponent can really be all it takes to keep them off balance and allow you to deliver a decisive killing blow after all.

[madame-parker.livejournal.com]

Pullman hates C. S. Lewis with a passion, he wrote His dark Materials in order to be the anti Narnia novels and if I'd known that before I read his novels, I wouldn't have tried so hard to work my way through the last book.

While I agree that C. S. Lewis pretty much hits his readers over the head with the religion and that he's as heavy handed about it as Pullman is with the anti-religion, that doesn't mean that you're going to make readers suffer through your issues. This interview with Pullman pretty much says it all about the way he thinks;
http://www.surefish.co.uk/culture/features/pullman_interview.htm

[reichsfreiherr.livejournal.com]

That article is certainly interesting, even including the hilarity of the Daily Mail’s opinion, but the only particular fault I can find with Pullman’s views in it is his take on the ending for the Narnia novels. Not being terribly versed in Narnia canon since I’ve not touched the books since infant school or there abouts, from what’s given in that interview I’d argue that possibly Pullman misses the point that having had their grand adventure the children can’t go back to the real world because what they could share is too fantastical and unbelievable to others. It’s very much a case that other characters would have to make their own way to that understanding of Narnia rather than being taught about it as an alien concept, since by travelling to Narnia the children have become part of a specific epistemic community that may or may not be believed by others who haven’t shared the same group-forming experience.
Of course I do see what Pullman is saying and that seems to reflect his annoyance at the idea that spiritual growth can be mandated by authorities or that it can be deliberately kept secret from the wider population. As bitter as he may seem, I have to respect his view that society needs to deal with the tangible rather than ignore what can be changed for the better while retreating into a belief in the hereafter instead. I can’t argue with that after all because that’s my standpoint too in so far as I may choose not to believe in a higher power but that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t live as humane a life as possible. And if at the end of the day it turns out that I’m wrong and a single divinity exists I don’t believe that I’ll be faulted for one detail against the way I’ve tried to lived, likewise if the opposite is true then I’ll be able to go into void knowing that I’ve at least tried to do my part.