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| The Golden Compass - "a lovely fascist fable" |
| 2007-12-04 |
| Tom Smith, "The Right Coast" I read The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife as well. I would have read The Amber Spyglass, but some kid filched my copy. The Golden Compass has now been made into a move coming out this week staring Nicole Kidman, and it is quite justly in my view drawing the ire of various Catholic organizations. The linked to analysis in the previous sentence does a better job than I will, but any thoughtful person has to recognize that the book is an attempt to malign religion in general, and Christianity and Catholicism in particular. . . . The main point of this post, however, is to point out an irony. The villains in the Golden Compass and sequels are the Catholic-Nazis -- a fair characterization of the book's point, since anytime you have villains running concentration camps with medical experiments, that is psychic charge you are invoking. But in fact, if you want to experience the flavor that contemporary fascism would have when translated into first rate children's literature, you cannot, in my view, do better than Pullman's series. To be fair, I am not saying Pullman is some sort of neo-Nazi. I think his invocation of fascist themes and memes is probably unconscious. It is just that similar jobs tend to call forth similar tools. The European fascists generally and the Nazis in particular very much wanted to cut off the influence and ultimately destroy the Judeo-Christian God and the Church in particular. They had political reasons for wanting this, but also ideological and (weirdly) religious reasons. Not all of the Nazis were devotes of the occult, but many of them were, and the ones who were not very much understood the importance and power of building a fascist mythos which could motivate and inspire people. To put together their ideology, the Nazis pulled out of the great cesspool of European ideas a lot of nasty things that would have been much better left alone, but among them was the idea that Christianity, which they saw as nothing more than a kind of Judaism, severed people from their inner Nature spirit, their pagan, let's-run-through-the-woods-naked sort of thing. When Pullman has the Church taking children to camps to sever them from their daemons -- their animal-embodied-soul-mates that every whole person in his alternative universe has -- he is just parroting in kid lit form the old canard you could have picked up in a hundred disreputable places in Bavaria or Vienna in the 1930's. Or in the "global warming" Luddite community yesterday afternoon. Another interesting parallel between Pullman's imaginative vision and that of those you might call the "esoteric fascists" is the blending of the occult and science. For those of you who don't want to read books on this stuff, think Hellboy. If you do want to read books, read anything by the very valuable Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. In Harry Potter, the magic is at worst morally neutral, often comic stuff. In LOTR, there is good and bad magic, but the good guys are good for the right reasons. Narnia, of course, is merely Christianity. Pullman's picture is a lot creepier. It is much more like the occult science one comes across reading about the 20th century fascists, with their fascination for both high technology, advanced physics and occult powers. Call me old fashioned, but mixing together weird physics and the occult just creeps me out. It makes me think of the "perverted science" that Churchill was right to worry about. I concede this is a subjective impression. More obviously, all of this, "eschew Christianity, children, and get in touch with your inner bear! It is powerful, and not the same sex as you are!" is pure New Age rubbish, which in turns owes a lot to the neo-paganism our jackbooted friends did so much to popularize and, one would have hoped, though vainly, discredit. Thus here is my larger point. The anti-modern, anti-religious, and anti-American fervor coming out of Europe these days, very much including the UK (and some culturally advanced spots in the US), is not what a lot of people seem to think it is. The Pullman books I view as rather typical. I think the standard view is to see anti-Judeo-Christianity as an aggressive secularism, that just doesn't want religion shoved down throats of good little atheist children who just want to learn evolution and get into a good university and go on to work in a big corporation someday. If only it were so. People have this Whiggish idea that first there was barbarian darkness, then Christianity, which was OK in its ways for civilizing things somewhat, but now it is time to move onward and upward already to a new, cleaner, more hygienic and more rational world, where bad old superstitions are respectfully laid to rest. If only history were so orderly and kind. Unfortunately, the daemons won't stay in their cesspool. People, or Europeans anyway, keep wanting to shed their clothes and run through the trees. St. Boniface chopped down Thor's oak tree, but there seem to have been acorns everywhere. The thought here is like Chesterton's, that when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything. But "anything" seems to be what sprouts up from what has been laid down, decade after century, on the smelly, and actively decaying floor of bad old Europe. I mean really, if you have a weakness for this sort of thing, why not just take the little guys camping, and lose the neo-pagan mythos brainwashing? Just a suggestion. Nothing like camping to sell you on the virtues of modernity. No, I am not saying that if your kids go to see the lovely Ms. Kidman (definitely a draw in my case) in the Golden Compass, they will come home to start doing weird science experiments in your basement and start saying that the Christian god should be killed. Kids are smarter than that, for one thing. Most of them. On the other hand, you do not have to be the crazed, rosary clutching Catholic fanatic of Hollywood's paranoid imagination to think there is something, in fact several things, pretty darn creepy not far below the surface of Mr. Pullman's oeuvre. My hope is that the movie will bomb, and Hollywood will have to go back to less alluring efforts to corrupt the young. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #8 Compass put my 17 year old into a deep funk when he was 14. We won't be going, renting or buying. If you were out to make money at Christmas Time with Childrens Sci-FI, A Wrinkle In Time would have been a pretty sure bet. It also would have capitalized on the recent death of the author. If you wanted to stay away from Christian morality, producing an updated version of the White Mountains by John Christopher or the Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin could have also parlayed parent nostalgia into profit. The beautiful part of free speech in America is that listening is not mandatory. Hopefully te theaters will be empty and the sound of one hand clapping will be the financier slapping himself in the forehead. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2007-12-04 23:35 |
| #7 I couldn't finish the book---I definitely not going to see the movie. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2007-12-04 21:09 |
| #6 I would ask all the anti-Christian bigots out there writing books and making movies to please list all the enlightened, benevolent, rights-respecting atheist-controlled societies that have existed. Let's see, um, Soviet Union? No. Mao's China? Guess not. Khmer Rouge Kampuchea, the NKors? Errrrr.....not them either. Since the rise of atheism to predominance in Europe and in certain sectors of America (education, infotainment) has there been a concomitant increase in rights and free speech and diversity of ideas and tolerance of other people's religions (like - gulp - Christianity), or a decrease? Get back to me, 'k? Because from where I see it, Christian societies at least have a chance of being decent ones. There hasn't been a decent atheist society in human history. And I predict there never will be. |
| Posted by: no mo uro 2007-12-04 17:43 |
#5 Gregg Easterbrook, ESPN's "Tuesday Morning Quarterback," says:TMQ asked in August whether the three Golden Compass books would carry their very strong anti-Christian view onto the silver screen -- the first big-budget installment opens this week. In the Golden Compass trilogy, God is both a fraud (a space alien pretending to be divine!) and the source of every evil in the universe; Christianity is "a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all"; God has created not heaven but hell and sends all souls, even those of the righteous, to hell; Christian churches are run by corrupt power-mad conspirators whose goal is to abolish pleasure in life; the quest of the astonishingly competent English schoolgirl who is the trilogy's heroine is to locate ancient magical objects that will allow her to kill God and free the world from religion. |
| Posted by: Mike 2007-12-04 17:13 |
| #4 If this film tanks at the BO (because by all early accounts it sure stinks like it), one can't help but begin to wonder how much longer Hollywood can continue this pace of commercial flops. (Although it was recently pointed out to me that while it failed miserably to meet expectations, Lions for Lambs did manage to make a profit-- just barely. And by profit I mean when you don't take any marketing costs into account when looking at the numbers.) |
| Posted by: eltoroverde 2007-12-04 16:23 |
| #3 Well, I'm not planning on seeing it one way or another so... someone let me know. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2007-12-04 15:16 |
| #2 Oh, boy! Another box office blockbuster!! |
| Posted by: tu3031 2007-12-04 14:16 |
| #1 I have not yet seen the movie, but I recognise a deliberate smear when I see one. |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2007-12-04 14:00 |