Anti-Narnia on the Screen

Now that Philip Pullman’s imaginative, fascist-tinged Golden Compass is coming to theaters everywhere, I see that Tom Smith (the law professor, not the milblogger) has much the same view as I did a couple of years ago. In Professor Smith’s words,

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.

I’ll be interested to find out how the producers of the movie have handled the last few pages of The Golden Compass, where Lord Asriel, sounding as megalomaniacal as an intoxicated gauleiter, advances his cause by torturing a small boy to death. At that point, the reader doesn’t know whether Asriel is a hero or a villain. The movie audience is unlikely to be in the same state of doubt. How will kids react if the counterpart to Dumbledore, Gandalf and Aslan speaks and acts like the Asriel of the book? I doubt that the film makers want to find out. Will Hollywood’s talents for sugar-coating and watering-down be equal to the challenge?

Comments

[Nospam]

I reserve the benefit of doubt until I either see the movie myself or read the book. From what I can gather from reading about it, "The golden compass" is fantasy. Those who cannot separate fantasy from reality should certainly avoid it.

Nazis are socialists, not fascists - words mean things so long as they are used correctly.

The description of "the church" is likely the Roman Catholic Church - which as an Orthodox Christian, I am no fan of either. The Roman Catholic Church has comitted plenty of evil deeds and is responsible not only for the explosive growth of atheism but, most modern heresies as well. If a fiction author writes something that reminds us of something real, it is just what it is. As far as I can tell, the story does not criticize Judeo-Christian morality but rather the tyrannical outcome of the unholy marriage of church and state. The more man gets involved in something, the less it is about God.

[Donna]

Nicole Kidman said recently that the book's atheism has been watered down considerably by the filmmakers. I would say that it would be prudent of Hollywood to back off on releasing a blatantly anti-religious movie just in time for Christmas, but on the other hand, this is the same industry that thought Americans in wartime would flock to see films depicting US troops as racist murderers.
More atheist news via the Corner (the miltitantly godless sure are getting lots of pixels these days, aren't they?):. Richard Dawkins penned a rather incoherent defense of sexual infidelity for the WaPo. The article, and his many approving fans, confirm what I've always suspected was true: sinning without guilt, not "reason" or outrage at the horrors of the Inquisition, is the primary attraction of atheism.. Atheists become incensed if you suggest that they are less ethical than believers (and certainly there are ethical atheists and unethical people who sit in pews every Sunday). However, atheism permits one to move the goalposts around. "Honey, yes, I'm sleeping with the next door neighbor, but if you're hurt and jealous, well, you really need to move on from that outmoded Judeo-Christian morality and jealousy. You're the one with the problem, not me."