Jul 19
Philip Pullman and the martyred money bag
By a strange coincidence I finally got round to watching The Golden Compass on DVD at the start of this week, and then at the end of the week stumbled across this story in The Independent, in which doubt is expressed over the making of the sequel and Pullman blames the Christian boycott of his film.
Some readers will remember that I had little time for those voices calling for the boycott, and some critical appreciation, especially for the first two books in the trilogy, so I don’t post this as part of the “we hate Pullman” brigade.
However, I feel compelled to note that The Independent’s Arts Correspondent not only seriously misrepresents the overall storyline of the books, but buys big-time into the idea that the Christian boycott is the reason the film flopped at the box office (especially in the US). To be fair, Pullman only seems to see this as a contributory factor, but the journalist makes it the main story.
Here we have a strange alliance between Pullman and his Christian critics. It is naturally in the interest of the would-be boycotters to big up their power. Defy us at your peril, they can say, pointing to the low box office. And it is in Pullman’s and the studios interest to place themselves in the role of victim and martyr. See what these wicked religious fanatics have done to the cause of bold art by their repressive tendencies. It’s not our fault if we lost money on this film.
All this manages to miss the main factor. It really is a bad film. Its compression of the story line, with odd lacunae and laboured exposition denatures the narrative. The new vagueness about the nature of the Magisterium (toning down the anti-Christian polemic) makes the exposition about dust even more risible than it eventually turns out to be in the books. The first two books were powerful (though the last was a disappointment) and this film strips any real imaginative power from them in favour of set piece special effects. There are some quite good touches, and Dakota Blue Richards’ central performance as Lyra is brilliant, but neither the screenwriting team, nor the director seems to know how to handle the translation from print to screen.
My own view is that the influence of the boycott is negligible, if not counter-productive. Christians can increase box-office for films like the Narnia ones, or the Passion of the Christ, by effectively doing member turn-out drives. I’m doubtful that they can kill one. This was just a bad film. But the myth of boycott power suits everyone, including the studio. You’re much more likely to keep your job as a heroic martyr for some mythical freedom of conscience than an artistic and financial failure in the real world.
July 20th, 2008 at 2:42 am
Astute analysis. The film was bad, and for the reasons you state: too much story, very large concepts, too little time. But could the film have ever worked, no matter how well it was made? I too found the trilogy ultimately disappointing after a very promising start; it’s hard to get a stirring archetypal deep soul response to philosophical materialism even if you can write as well as Phillip Pullman. Who wants to know that at death they turn into dust which is used to fertilise some other life? No matter how much he despises C S Lewis Pullman must know he’s on a hiding to nothing when he compares his own works to the Narnia series: Narnia plugs into deep old themes that evoke hope and longing (Lewis’ term)with every chapter. Everyone want to believe that there is another, better world which will last forever, and in which the very heights of human consciousness are realised. Lewis’ job was to damp down the power of his archetypal material in order to make his rich repast palatable to the general public. Pullman’s task was to crank up the meagre soul rations he had to hand: his books didn’t pull it off, and the film even less so.
July 20th, 2008 at 8:43 am
Good insight. In a similar vein, the Sydney Morning Herald has carried a story called “Strength of US evangelicals is one of the big myths of our time”, which can be found at http://www.smh.com.au/news/michael-duffy/strength-of-us-evangelicals-is-one-of-the-big-myths-of-our-time/2008/07/18/1216163153159.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
July 20th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
I found the books rather disappointing after the hype surrounding the film. I was expecting some interesting and original anti-Christian polemic. What I found was polemic against some aspects of the institutional church that desperately need critiquing and have been critiqued before, rather than against Christianity per se. It certainly wasn’t polemic against Christianity as I know it. I also thought that much of it could also have applied to just about any other rigidly totalitarian system and only registered that it was specifically anti-Christian because I’d read an interview with Pullman that said they were.
I haven’t bothered seeing the film because it received such poor reviews, rather than because some branches of the church suggested I should boycott it. The last time I took notice of a suggestion to boycott a film because it was anti-Christian was when Monty Python’s Life of Brian came out and I was a long way from home and the only support network I had was in a fairly conservative church, members of which were picketing the cinemas. I have since learned to be fairly cynical about this kind of plea.