The Golden Compass

Well, what a lot of kerfuffle about a book being made into a movie. After reading this article in The Atlantic ("How Hollywood Saved God") and talking with my sis-in-law, I think the controversy about religion and anti-religion was a cover up for the real issue, sexuality. And we know that we don't talk about sexuality in this culture. So better to try and worry about whether the movie will turn people from the one true path... You DO already know I am opposed at the core of my being to organized religion so admittedly I am not a sympathetic audience to the would-be censors of movie and books. I actually went to see The Golden Compass movie and then came home and re-read the book--all in one day. Whew! I was really trying to pay attention and I just don't get why people are so upset. But anway, what I found more interesting and what also generated more conversation with S-I-L Joan was the way the characters were simplified in the translation from text to screen. Not surprising in some ways; after all, books are very hard to translate in all their subtlety. But just to take a couple of examples of relatively minor characters. In the book, it is the Master of Jordan College who tries to poison Lord Asriel, not the Magisterium. So he is a more conflicted being than we see in the movie where he is uniformly on the side of the good guys/gals. Late in the book we witness a conversation between Lee Scoresby and the witch Serafina Pekkala where he indicates, in the gentlest way, that he would really like to get paid for this work he is doing to help the good guys/gals because he is after all a businessman and is saving for retirement. Well that is not the portrayal in the movie where we are led to believe that he jumps in to help Iorek and Lyra at risk of life and limb just out of the goodness of his heart and pure friendship. So we started conjecturing about the possible relationship between these visual interpretations that presented people and issues in, shall we say, fewer shades of gray, and the propensity of our society (as witnessed by electing "you know who" twice) to view issues as black or white. Which is the chicken and which the egg? Is this part of what we lose as we move away from a culture that reads? Of course it's not that simple as my colleague Anne-Marie points out in her blog and as the recent article in the New Yorker by Caleb Crain affirms. But it sure makes you wonder.