Insidious movies  The Golden Compass

Mind that Compass, It’s Out of Kilter
Borne on a wave of polemic, the colossal children’s movie starring Nicole Kidman is in theaters. It’s aiming for a clean sweep at the Christmas box office. Just another fantasy movie? Not really, since it’s based on a children’s trilogy full of insidious commonplaces, and a thicket of symbolism that needs to be approached with care…

by Edoardo Rialti

The beginning of December saw the release of The Golden Compass, the first of a children’s fantasy series based on the trilogy by British author Philip Pullman. Enthusiastic reviewers hailed it as a literary event unique in recent years. No doubt it is unique, but this is far from reassuring. Pullman’s children’s trilogy is a systematic retelling of the opening chapters of Genesis, but from Satan’s standpoint. In the author’s own words on the cover flap, “My sympathies definitely lie with the tempter. The idea is that sin, the Fall, was a good thing. If it had never happened we would still be puppets in the hands of the Creator.”

Against “Authority”
This is the tale of two children who combat a hateful and demented Celestial Tyrant who passes himself off as God and gets people to call him “the Authority.” The two kids manage to slay him, free the souls of the dead from a dark and desolate afterlife, and let them dissolve happily into the universe. In this they are helped and encouraged by a group of rebels. The rebels are: an armored bear, a former nun and a coven of witches, two homosexual angels and another ancient she-angel, melancholy and wise. The angel is unjustly slandered by the envious Celestial Tyrant, in whose retinue we find a corrupt, sex-hating Church, notable for castrating children and inflicting physical torments on its priests... We could spin out this charming list further for the delight of the various Dawkinses or Dan Browns.
Nicole Kidman, who appears in the movie version, swears she accepted the role of the perfidious Christian character Miss Coulter only after being reassured that the anti-Catholic slant had been “watered down.” But the problem with books like this goes a lot deeper. It can’t be dealt with by liberal admissions that the Church is not just a sink of iniquity or watering down certain themes and characters. (It seems the priests will not be shown wearing cassocks. Big deal!)

Falsehood under the
Christmas tree
The political correctness of the movie was donned, no doubt, in the hope of packing in the Christians. But it serves as an echo chamber for the falsehood embodied in the Pullman trilogy. No doubt many families will be persuaded to give their children the book, putting it under the Christmas tree, perhaps, if not actually in the crèche. The falsehood is that man finds his freedom by casting off the shackles of love that bind him to reality. All forms of dependence are swept away. The “Authority” is the hypocritical name of the tyrant, who hopes to make us good with rules and self-mutilation. There is nothing and no one to follow, and no path. The inevitable result is that after the gigantic rebellions recounted in the book, all the true and authentic questions, such as “Does God exist?” or “Why do we die?” are cut short and huddled away. Instead, we have to make do with a sort of decalogue of good resolutions that are supposed to allow us to live happily ever after. If we are good neighbors, there’s no need even to ask certain questions. Pullman, in the person of the former nun, has this message for his young readers: “There’s no one who worries, who blesses me if I’m a good girl or damns me if I’m bad. Paradise was empty. I couldn’t tell whether God was dead or had never existed. That’s how it was, I felt free and alone....”

Dismantling the image
Cultural battles are always symbolic battles, battles of images. A proposal to man is always embodied in a concrete and palpable reality. If you want to belittle or undermine such a proposal, the first thing to do is dismantle the image, bit by bit. We’ve seen it in all those commercials that mock the idea of men and women being different, or the insistence in certain movies that the family is repressive and harsh. This is because man “learns first through his senses what the intellect later fathoms,” as Dante tells us. If you’re going to attack religious experience, the easiest and most effective way is to invert the meaning of its images, confusing the issues. So perfidious witches who violate reality with magic become fascinating rebels. The great “Thou,” whom all higher cultures have always sought to represent as powerful and venerable, is ridiculed and parodied as a sort of crazed mogul. The trick is done. The positive experience of authority is confused with totalitarianism.
Pullman, with shrewd rhetoric, uses all the basic ingredients of fable: a mysterious and precious object, a company of heroes fighting for freedom against tremendous odds... But he inverts their meaning. Pullman’s work is truly dia-bolic (“divisive”) as opposed to sym-bolic (“keeping together”). He thinks we are free provided we depend on nothing and no one, meaning, ultimately, if we never really love anyone. Free and alone, mind. The “Republic of Heaven” replaces the perfidious “Kingdom of Heaven.”

As for Harry Potter...
Better miss it, in short. But don’t think you can swap the latest movie in the Harry Potter saga for Pullman. In reality, J. K. Rowling presents us with the same falsehood as Pullman, but more discreetly and subtly. At first sight, her books look rich in values. But they are detached from the source that would enable them to exist. They are no more than a façade or a way to shore up a Gnostic and pagan conception of the world. The image of the hero readers are again presented with is no longer–as in all fables in a healthy tradition–that of a normal boy caught up in an adventure. Instead, he’s one of the elect; he has to acquire esoteric knowledge that will enable him to defeat his treacherous opponent on his own ground. All this creates the idea that we can be great, good, and attractive only if we have certain powers, if we find the right spell to bend things to our desires…
All great stories, the great fables, teach you that your true weapon is not your own abilities but your heart, capable of saying yes to the great adventure when it knocks at freedom’s door. This is something that much of children’s literature tries to make us forget.