Posted on 12/13/2007 9:14:59 AM PST by goldstategop
Like Japan's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, "The Golden Compass" (an atheist's stealth attack on faith) was unleashed on December 7.
Unlike Yamamoto's attempt to sink the U.S. Pacific Fleet, there isn't much bang to "The Golden Compass." The $150-million blockbuster is as flat as cola left in a glass overnight.
The first in a planned cinematic trilogy intended to rival "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" and "The Lord of The Rings," "Compass" may turn out to be the "Heaven's Gate" of juvenile fantasy films.
The movie is based on a series of children's books ("His Dark Materials"), by British writer Philip Pullman, that are rabidly anti-faith. Pullman is an atheist who makes Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens seem calm by comparison.
"I don't think it's possible there is a God," Pullman opines. "I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief." "My books are about killing God," and "I am all for the death of God."
In this regard, Pullman brings up the rear of a very long line. The death of God has been a cherished goal of French revolutionaries, German philosophers, Soviet commissars and the architects of Nazi genocide. (Hitler confessed that genocide was an act of deicide -- that by killing Jews, he intended to prove the non-existence of God) -- not to mention Hollywood scriptwriters and the current crop of proselytizing atheist authors.
"The Golden Compass" is a devious project that has enlisted powerful allies. Everyone from Random House (publisher of Pullman's books) and Barnes and Noble to brand partners like Coca-Cola and Burger King have a big stake in the movie's success.
So as not to offend families at the outset, Pullman's message has been downplayed to the point where most of the story's anti-religious elements were removed from the script.
While the books make it clear that the evil Magisterium is a Calvinized Catholic Church (demonstrating Pullman's grasp of theology), in the movie, it's an ominous authority bent on global domination, whose motives are murky.
Still, there are echoes of the books' anti-religious theme. Agents of The Magisterium refer to certain ideas as "heresy." Unknown to most 8-year-old moviegoers, "Magisterium" refers to the teaching authority of the Catholic Church embodied in the episcopacy.
If "The Golden Compass" succeeds, Pullman's agenda will be up front in the next two installments.
Director Chris Weitz (the genius who brought us "American Pie") told MTV MovieBlogs.com: "The whole point, to me, of ensuring that 'The Golden Compass' is a financial success is so that we have a solid foundation on which to deliver a faithful, more literal adaptation of the second and third books. This is important: whereas 'The Golden Compass' had to be introduced to the public carefully, the religious (anti-religious) themes in the second and third movies can't be minimized without destroying the spirit of these books."
Thus, the movie is chock-a-block full of cute, talking animals (external reflections of the human soul), armored polar bears, valiant flying gypsies, good witches, and even poor Sam Elliot typecast as the wise, folksy ole hombre (but looking like he'd rather be in a sequel to "The Big Lebowski").
"The Golden Compass" (movie, not book) may be mostly innocuous. It's also insipid. As the wicked Mrs. Coulter, agent of The Magisterium, Nicole Kidman looks and feels as sinister as a Vogue model. This is thin gruel next to Tilda Swinton's menacing, manipulative White Witch in "The Chronicles of Narnia." Even the young heroine (actress Dakota Blue Richards) comes across more bratty and petulant than spunky. Its lack of luster is reflected in receipts. "Compass" bombed on its opening weekend. In the U.S. and Canada, the box office was only $26.1 million -- compared to $65.5 million for "The Chronicles of Narnia" on its first weekend out, and $33.3 million for the recently released Disney flick, "Enchanted."
There's nothing tentative about Pullman's books, which the author proudly declares are about "killing God" (exactly what happens in the final volume of his trilogy).
Various characters instruct young readers that: "The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all," and "In every world, the agents of the Authority (Magisterium) are sacrificing children to their cruel god!"
The Magisterium experiments on children, separating them from their animal spirits (called daemons) and turning them into zombies, in an attempt to create a more compliant, docile populace. Sounds like public education.
Mark Morford, who spews for the San Francisco Chronicle, is a huge Pullman fan. (In an October 24 commentary, the columnist sounds like he wants to have the author's child.)
Morford is borderline delirious over Pullman's work: "The nefarious thing the books aim to kill is, well, religious authority. It's about the destruction of dogma. It's about power, about who wants to control and manipulate life on Earth; it is about blind, ignorant, even violent adherence to insidiously narrow codes of thought and belief and behavior, sex and desire and love. This, of course, is the God of organized religion. This is the false deity that promotes numb groupthink and inhibits growth and abhors the feminine divine... the same paranoid, dreadful God that votes for George W. Bush because, well, he will smite the icky gays and protect us from vile pagans and Buddhists and Muslims and feminists and frumpy genius atheist British writers."
Secularists never want to control or manipulate, which is why we have the progressive income tax, campus speech codes, hate-crimes legislation and the cult of global warming.
It's revealing how the God-haters always get around to whining about constraints on their sexual behavior. They long for the happy days of Canaanite frat parties, when sex was purely sensual and people rolled in the proverbial hay with men, women, children, domestic animals and every imaginable combination thereof -- much like San Francisco today.
That's what feckless middle-class parents are supporting when they schlep their kids to see "The Golden Compass" and buy them boxed sets of Pullman's trilogy for Christmas. How's that for irony? ("Mommy, why does the Catholic Church want to turn me into a zombie?")
Hollywood has been bashing believers for decades. In movies like "V for Vendetta," "King Arthur," "The DaVinci Code," "Kingdom of Heaven," "The Saint," "The Name of the Rose," and "The Magdalene Sisters," Christians are portrayed as vile, violent (but also cowardly), sadistic, hypocritical, greedy, lustful and intolerant, with marked totalitarian tendencies.
Compare the number of movies that depict Christians positively (I saw only one this year -- "Amazing Grace") to those that show them as mutants.
There is no more powerful force for inculcating values (especially in adolescents) than Hollywood, witness a Barna Group Survey, released in September ("A New Generation Expresses its Skepticism and Frustration with Christianity").
The survey found that only 3% of non-Christians (mostly the never-churched or those who've fallen away from the faith) had a favorable impression of evangelicals, versus 25% of the Boomer generation. Most of the former view Christians generally as judgmental (87%), hypocritical (85%), old-fashioned (78%) and too involved in politics (75%).
As a result, while non-Christians are less than 25% of adults over 40, they comprise fully 40% of Americans 16 to 29. Barna observes that this is not a passing trend which will change as the youth of today mature. "While Christianity remains the typical experience and most common faith in America, a fundamental recalibration is occurring within the spiritual allegiance of America's upcoming generation."
You can thank Hollywood for that. More than any other institution, the entertainment industry shapes our attitudes about everything from fashion, politics and personal conduct to religion.
I just saw a photograph of Arlington National Cemetery in the snow, with Christmas wreaths resting against row upon row of headstones. Courage and loyalty don't come from Bruce Willis movies but from the faith symbolized by those floral displays.
Pullman understands this, writing: "The kingdom of heaven promised us certain things: it promised us happiness and a sense of purpose and a sense of having a place in the universe, of having a role and a destiny that were noble and splendid; and so we were connected to things. We were not alienated."
But now that God is dead (or at least on death row), Pullman finds, unsurprisingly, that, "I still need these things that heaven promised, and I'm not willing to live without them."
The British novelist believes that all can be achieved in a "republic of Heaven" -- a this-worldly, secular utopia.
This is the delusion of Jacques-Rene Hebert (with his Goddess of Reason), Marx, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, advocates of psychotherapy and other proponents of the isms that have dominated the past two centuries. All end at the gates of Auschwitz, the steps of the scaffold, in an icy gulag, at the doorway of an interrogation cell or on a psychiatrist's couch at $150 an hour.
Pullman has created a world with talking spirits in animal-form, flying witches, warrior polar bears and a compass that detects the truth. But without God there is no magic (what the Lion Aslan calls "the deep magic").
Not surprisingly, Pullman detests C.S. Lewis' children's classics, calling the series "cruel," "unjust" and "anti-life" (not to mention that Lewis is a better writer).
Of the Narnia books, Pullman says: "I hate them with a deep and bitter passion, with their view of childhood as a golden age from which sexuality and adulthood are a falling away." (Sex again.) Besides God, this author of children's stories also hates childhood.
Magic is more than the miracles celebrated at this season (for Jews, the miracle of the menorah, for Christians, the virgin birth). The wonder is all around us. A flower, a sunset, a lover's kiss, a friend's embrace, the smile of a three-year-old -- these too are magic.
Everything in creation has a purpose. Doubt often leads to certainty. By challenging complacent faith, atheism can lead to a more mature belief.
For a half-century, Antony Flew was the world's most prominent atheist. An eminent philosopher, Flew was Dawkins before Dawkins -- Hitchens with an intact brain.
Beginning with his paper "Theology and Falsification" (which became one of the most widely read philosophical treatises of the 20th century), delivered at the Oxford Socratic Club when Lewis chaired the group, Flew argued passionately and persuasively for the non-existence of God.
The professor said that absent convincing evidence, atheism must be the default position. However, if I ever find that proof, I'll get back to you, Flew promised.
He did in 2004, announcing that he is now a deist. Among other factors, Flew observed that human biology can't be explained by evolution or accident but presupposes a prime mover. This argument is expanded in his just-published book, "There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind."
So there is hope for Philip Pullman. In the meantime, by challenging us (modestly), he will end by bringing some closer to God. And that must drive him nuts.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
“Last week, The Golden Compass bombed at the box office”
And that’s the best way to protest Hollywood...hit them in the pockets.
Ever read Eco? Do you regard him as anti-Catholic?
"I don't think it's possible there is a God,"
"I am all for the death of God."
Aren't these two statements are mutually exclusive?
Pullman's not an atheist. His books aren't about a world in which there is no God, they're about a world in which God is a fraud. Pullmnan is very much a believer in God, he just hates Him.
The 2nd statement presumable refers to the Death of God as a concept in the Nietzschian sense.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Bombed at the box office - Whaaaaaat? My TV just told me this morning that it was the #1 movie in the country...
Oh, da-da-da-dear - what to believe?
Good line.
Plus, this means the next two are basically locked out. End of the line for you, Pullman.
Not Catholic, but I liked the book. I wasn't even aware it had been made into a movie.
The evil characters in the book are Catholics, but then so are the good ones. It's set in a medieval monastery, what are the villains going to be, Buddhists?
I got nothing anti-religious or anti-Catholic from the book.
Being Number 1 at the Box Office doesn’t mean anything. If you made 5 dollars because no one else made more doesn’t make you rich.
The movie wasn’t very good.
This is an excellent article.
It lays to rest those here on FR who say this is “just a movie”. GC is a part of a plan to destroy the basis of belief in God. To say otherwise is to play the ostrich with his head in the sand.
Bombed in the sense it is doubtful it will make a profit. At 180,000,000 it has to do more than simply be number one. On top of 180mn. to make it they also spent 30-40-mn in advertising.
IMO Eco was profoundly pro-catholic at the end of ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’. And the NotR text wasn’t anti-catholic, however the film might have been.
But damn that man needs an editor. His text is so flabby. I skipped practically every other chapter of FP on the first read, and missed nothing important to the plot.
Yes, it did well compared with other movies this week, but at a pace that might make New Line think twice about sinking $200 million into a sequel.
From BoxOfficeMojo:
The Golden Compass pointed to $25.8 million on approximately 5,600 screens at 3,528 theaters, which was about average for a live action fantasy. The turnout was well below half that of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or The Lord of the Rings movies, and the picture was clearly gunning for that league with its reportedly $180 million plus production budget, high screen count and December release date. It was more on par with the less hyped Eragon and Bridge to Terabithia, albeit those pictures had much lower screen counts and more crowded release dates.Without the internet, this movie would have drawn much larger crowds and likely would have made money. Thank God that the old media no longer has a monopoly on information.
bttt
The way the studio and the movie's promoters are bending over backwards to intentionally water down and deceive the audience, an intended audience of parents and their children in the weeks before many in this audience celebrate Christmas is borderline criminal, sinister. And all because they know if they present the first installment as written, it would be a huge (more huge) turn off. Despicable.
Last week, The Golden Compass bombed at the box office. Phillip Pullman may believe a world without God can make moderns better.
If the movie is an idea of this world without God that he hopes for, well, it's a dark, sad place.
My daughter and her boyfriend went as the family scouts.
Their report “It wasn’t that good, save your money.”
We’ll wait until its at Blockbuster.
ZING!
I was talking about Name of the Rose but one critic called this movie a ‘Chronicle of Blarnia’.
I don't see him in black-and-white terms as anti-Catholic, but more as post-Catholic.
He regards all doctrine and teaching from a postmodern perspective: everything is symbolism and reducible to semiotics - he believes that those who look for actual eternal susbtance underneath the maze of signs are naive or self-deluding, as opposed to your typical anti-Catholic, who sees the Church as an evil, selfish conspiracy.
One of the things that's interesting about Eco is that he is a trained medievalist and was able to bring quite a bit of very authentic detail to Il nome, but the book reveals very little about one of the most interesting phenomena of the Italian middle ages: the Epicureans of Naples and Florence of the 12th and 13th centuries - a group whose very existence and social standing belies most assumptions about medieval Italy.
A true anti-Catholic would have had enormous fun with this topic.
It would be tremendous. The human spirit, struggling against the weight of formless oblivion, like Mr. Fantastic against those black, gloopy globe things!
Sadly, you and I know this will never happen. Over and above the poisoned leanings of the "Godless Compost", the author would never allow THAT to happen, and beyond that, you will never see a movie that depicts the failed mess that was Communism as the bloody failure it was. And yet, Hollyweird will pour 200 Million down the rathole that was this movie to slam God, knowing in their hearts that even if it is a money pit, somehow they can blame Gerorge Bush.
I would also point out that the film version with Christian Slater was much more reductionist and resorted to anti-Catholic tropes to portray situations and conversations that were much more subtle and ambiguous in the novel.
In his review of this film Roger Ebert said that the Magisterium as depicted in the film could allegorically just as well be the Soviet goverment.
The British novelist believes that all can be achieved in a "republic of Heaven" -- a this-worldly, secular utopia.
That's the trouble with most atheists. Whether Marxist or Randian, they simply cannot be content to live in the random, meaningless universe they claim to believe in. They can't be grateful (to whom?) that randomness plus zillions of years was able to produce as much as it did. Nooooooo, atheists want what G-d delivers, but they don't want Him.
I wonder if this "secular Republic of Heaven" involves getting "too involved in politics" or "totalitarian tendencies" or "telling other people how to live their lives" or anything like that. It couldn't . . . could it???
Naaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!
You all do realize I was being sarcastic? I heard that #1 claim on a commercial for the movie...
:-)
you also have to remember movies do not last at the box office.
compass will be gone in three weeks from most all theaters.
no way it will make its 180 million production let alone PR.
Well...ahem...of course I knew that.
Of course! ;-)
Aren't these two statements are mutually exclusive?
They are indeed.
Pullman's not an atheist. His books aren't about a world in which there is no God, they're about a world in which God is a fraud. Pullmnan is very much a believer in God, he just hates Him.
I think that pretty much describes all atheists (including the ones here at FR).
I read ‘The Name of the Rose’ in high school and liked it a lot. Yeah, the bad guys are Catholic, but so is everyone else in the book.
And I honestly didn’t find ‘V for Vendetta’ to be that anti-Christian either. Yes, it makes a few references to Britain being changed into a religion-based dictatorship, but the movie is amazing and has a really good message.
And I really must have missed the part where ‘King Arthur’ was bashing Christians.
I read ‘The Name of the Rose’ in high school and liked it a lot. Yeah, the bad guys are Catholic, but so is everyone else in the book.
And I honestly didn’t find ‘V for Vendetta’ to be that anti-Christian either. Yes, it makes a few references to Britain being changed into a religion-based dictatorship, but the movie is amazing and has a really good message.
And I really must have missed the part where ‘King Arthur’ was bashing Christians.
In other words, he's a typical human being from anywhere outside the Southeastern United States???
Okay, waw . . . I kid, I kid!
Its worldwide first-run gross was $749M.
The DVD was released yesterday.
His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass cost approximately 320M to produce and market worldwide so far.
Its worldwide gross so far is $84M.
LWW made 85% of its US gross in its first 5 weeks.
TGC is in deep financial trouble.
I think that pretty much describes all atheists (including the ones here at FR)."
I wouldn't say *all* atheists (there are a few who here who aren't consumed with bile), but I would include those who aren't honest about it, and like to mask their bile behind 'science' or 'concern for conservatism'. Sort of like those downplaying the actual theme of the books in the movie with a view to really 'sock it to the fundies' in the next two parts of the trilogy.
Pullman detests C.S. Lewis' children's classics, calling the series "cruel," "unjust" and "anti-life" (not to mention that Lewis is a better writer).
A considerably better writer, IMHO. Narnia has a touch light enough to wait for the reader to reach out for the theological underpinnings. Young readers unready for that intellectual challenge may enjoy the stories anyway with the exception of The Last Battle. Pullman's treatment strikes me as heavy-handed and unsubtle (disclaimer - I have read only the first and third books) - works of didactics, not delight.
The Narnia stories are the opposite of unjust, but it is apparent whence the accusation derives. The justice underlying the entire storyline is the source of the accusations both of cruelty and of being "anti-life." The life referred to is eternal, and the justice is in that individuals choose it for themselves...or not. Narnia is not a fantasy world endowed with permanence, but it is endowed with God.
Pullman's complaint that it is sexual awareness that makes Narnia inaccessible to the human children transported there is not entirely correct. Peter and Susan are told that they are too old to return not because they're ready to date but because they're ready to become adults, and contrary to Pullman and Morford there is a great deal more to do with adulthood than sexual activity. In the end one returns and one does not, and the reasons for it have little to do with sex and everything to do with responsibility. It is a free choice, neither cruel nor unjust.
The real difficulty with Pullman's treatment isn't that it fails as a fantasy, it's that it was never one to begin with. It is, in fact, a paranoid dystopia filled with talking animals whose congruence to our world is as deliberately attempted as Lewis's treatment was to attempt to avoid. It's actually (I thought) a lovely work of imagination entirely devoid of a soul, and not in the way that Pullman intended.
I don't actually see either of these two series concluded on the screen. Both of them focus on death, which is, one supposes, natural enough in theological fiction. One promises eternal life ever after within God; the other evokes the death of God and heaven on earth to follow. In each the intention of the author succeeds admirably. Which is truth is something that real people must decide for themselves.
I didn’t see “The Name of the Rose” as anti-religious or anti-Christian.
Why should people who believe the universe is ultimately meaningless have "concern" about anything??? And as for science--I must confess that the philosophy that regards science as a holy light dispelling the darkness seems to clash with the alleged claims of that science (life is objectively meaningless, all our beliefs are just brain chemistry, etc.). That's the "light" that must ever expand against the "darkness?"
How disingenuous of Ebert, since we know from the author's own statements exactly what he intended.
bump
Not in English, perhaps . . .Das Leben der Anderen is a German movie about that very thing, and the Germans should know.
Prize winning. English title: The Lives of Others.
Ebert stated what the books were and how the movie was different.
That old curmudgeon Kant examined that and in somewhat wordy and repetitive logic proved to everyone who was interested that it is possible even if it can't be logically philosophically (that's the strongest proof ever) proved necessary so far beyond question that some have thanked Kant for allowing the possibility even if it was grudging baksheesh so they'll just go away from the kitchen door.
That film is one of the ugliest, most anti-Christian, anti-Western Civilization propaganda pieces ever produced. What is the really good message? If it's freedom from tyranny, remember that the purpose of the film is to trick the viewer into defining Political Correctness (i.e., tyranny) as freedom.
I didn't see the movie (heard it was mediocre) but I liked the novel and didn't regard it as anti-Christian.
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