What Is Wrong With 'The Golden Compass'?

As well as watching DVDs: 'Buongiorno, notte' (2003) and 'Zwartboek' (2007), I actually strayed out to the cinema to see 'The Golden Compass' (2007) which is based on 'The Northern Lights' by Philip Pullman (1995) the first in his His Dark Materials trilogy. I also saw Mark Kermode comment on it in his round-up of movies of 2007 and give it a rather lacklustre review. He prefers 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy (2001-2003) for their darkness and 'The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' (2005) for being more warm-hearted. In fact I think that the Lord of the Rings movies have a similar chumminess about them, the hobbits in particular are there to stand in for the perspective of children and you know they are going to win through despite the odds. Conversely, the first Narnia film has real moments of nastiness such as when the faun is frozen and also when the boy is told that he has betrayed his friends for sweets (something particularly cutting at the time the film is set, the middle of the Second World War). Kermode feels that 'The Golden Compass' lacks the positive elements of these other fantasy films, over-simplifying the novel. This can be said for all of these films, plus the Harry Potter series too. Basically you can make a decent movie out of a novella or a short story. Much of the Philip K. Dick stories turned into movies are not his full length work. In contrast Pullman's work like that of Tolkien and Rowling runs to hundreds of pages; Lewis's work is easier to adapt as his books are the length of the old-fashioned length novel (i.e. say 150 pages) not the doorstops of today. Whole sections of the Lord of the Rings novels are left out from the movies and in the Harry Potter movies there is similar cutting and simplification. That is why movies are adaptations. To come close to a novel you need to do a series.



'The Golden Compass' does make one mistake for younger viewers especially in our illiterate age in that there are a number of instances of foreign languages being used which need sub-titles which it was clear many younger members of the audience around me needed to have read out to them. In the UK the film is rated 'PG' - Parental Guidance which means generally even pre-school children can get in if with a parent; typically children attend movies that are the next rating up from their age, so 12 year olds go to '15' movies and 15-year olds to '18' movies and so on, something few people seem to take into considerationg when making a movie. Sensibly in 'Babe' (1995) the mice read out all the text on screen for the pre-literate members of the audience but I have not seen a similar approach used in other movies.



'The Golden Compass' has done poorly in the USA and there are possibly two reasons for this. I disagree with Kermode that it is because it lacks the passion of these other fantasy blockbusters.I think it is because the agnostic view the movie takes (and it is not atheist despite what people might say as it has angels and a heaven, it is just the structure of these is different to the model set out by Christian churches notably the Roman Catholic Church and this is why the Catholic League in the USA pushed for a boycott of the movie). The USA is a far more religious country than the UK. On a Sunday more people go to DIY stores than churches in the UK. Despite the increased popularity of faith schools this has not increased actual church attendance very much and religion actually remains irrelevant to the bulk of the UK population. The picture is very different in the USA, something the country is well aware of. The second thing is that 'The Golden Compass' is a very British movie. It does not move into an alien fantasy realm like The Lord of the Rings or the Narnia stories which sometimes have parallels with the USA or people can at least draw parallels to the USA. American citizens are generally disinterested and unknowledgeable about things which happen even a short way outside their borders so a movie set in Britain is not going to interest them, especially when there is really only one US character: Lee Scoresby played by Sam Elliott. Neither is it the twee world of Britain as portrayed in the Harry Potter movies. We know US audiences have difficulties with 'alternate worlds', the 'Sliders' (1995-2000) series notwithstanding, just look at the problems they had with 'Fatherland' (novel 1992; movie 1994). 'The Golden Compass' does very well at showing a different UK where not only do people have their souls (yes and they have souls so it is not atheistic) outside them in the form of 'daemons' (maybe this word and the fact that the animals look like familiars also caused problems for Catholic USA), but history has run a different course.



Anyone who knows Oxford and/or London will recognise many buildings shown in the movie but between them are many others that are alien. The style of the country is 1930s fashions mixed with a combination of steampunk and magic as the characters travel in airships and yet there are magical devices too. This is not as easily accessible as a world of orcs, hobbits, dwarfs and wizards which has become so well established in our psyche. In addition, what does come across from Pullman's work is challenging for the average audience member. In Narnia there is a simple message: an allegory of Christianity - sacrifice of the chosen one (i.e. Aslan/Christ) and his rebirth leads to redemption for all who follow him. In the Middle Earth of The Lord of the Rings, there is a similar good vs. evil, with temptations (especially in terms of power) along the way even for the good at heart, but fellowship and faith will win through and allow the restoration of the correct hierarchy, i.e. the return of the King and there is analogies for the time that it was written in with Mordor representing the Nazis/Soviet Communism, the hobbits as the brave British and the elves as the Americans sailing to a new world. [



In 'The Golden Compass' things are intentionally not so clear. There is a young girl, Lyra (played very capably by Dakota Blue Richards who despite the name seems to be British or certainly can do an excellent British accent. Interestingly Christopher Lee (aged 85) continues his dominance of evil nobles in recent blockbusters, appearing as First High Councillor of the Magisterium (he was Saruman in The Lord of the Rings movies; Count Dooku in Star Wars II and III)), getting involved in adventures just like Lucy in 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' and similarly learning new strengths and skills. There is Lord of the Rings/Narnia style redemption for the deposed polar bear king, brought back from alcoholism to overthrow the usurper. However, there is more ambiguity even in the simpler form shown in the movie. Lyra finds out who her parents are and one clearly is devious if not outright evil. Unlike in traditional stories, including Harry Potter which in many ways is not of contemporary Britain but of an earlier age remembered, where being an orphan is seen as legitimate, Lyra turns out to be illegitimate and also the result of what turned into a bitter encounter between her parents; possibly more relevant to many children in the audience today than being orphaned, but again far more challenging and ambiguous than the other routes these epics offer. Above all there is the sense that authority should not tell us all the answers; as one of the witches says (and again this may upset some viewers that witches are heroines, very reminiscent of wartime resistance fighters - Eva Green an actress I admire plays the lead one so I accept I am biased) it is about free will, the ability to choose the wrong as well as the right path, in fact the opportunity to choose at all. 'The Golden Compass' has many of the trappings of other fantasy epics such as full-scale battles and a child heroine but it and its sequels (if they are ever made given the poor reception in the USA) will always challenge the audience's assumptions far more than these others and thus I doubt it will ever do well in the USA where the audience wants easy stories and demands a happy ending not a complex one and consequently without the US box office dollars it will not thrive in the way the more Christian-orientated fantasy epics will. In some ways, in our world, the battle Lyra is fighting in hers, is already lost.

The Black Riders of the Internet II

I was not able to get all the maps in one posting, so this is the sequel, so if you have not had your fill of Middle Earth maps quite yet:

So if for some reason you find yourself transported there, then you have no excuse for getting lost. Now this is a list of some of the websites and parts of websites which have been closed down by these lawyers (information courtesy of The One Ring fansite):

Annals of Arda: Maps- Star map still available, others had to be dropped. Licensing attempted.
Map of the Shire -Removed due to lawyers.
Map of Arda - Removed due to lawyers.
Fangorn Area- Removed due to lawyers.
LotR Maps - Removed due to lawyers, whole site.
Jeroen Map of Rohan, Gondor up to Mordor - Removed due to lawyers.
Rolozo's Tolkien Map Collection - Removed due to lawyers.
r3t's LotR Maps -Removed entire site due to lawyers. Forum also removed.

These sites were not ones making money, they were fan sites. Many of the maps were drawn by fans, so this was not a copyright issue. In addition, the law is being applied inequitably as it appears only English-language sites are targeted, not for example, French-language ones. In addition, removing forums is clearly suppressing freedom of speech, there are no grounds on which to claim that a discussion infringes copyright. I also thought that challenges to anything I posted would come from the government not from a group of profiteering lawyers pretending somehow to defend the legacy of an author who died in 1973 (we have to wait until 2044 until the copyright is clear, it having been extended from 50 to 70 years in the UK). I am sure Tolkien himself would have loathed such an attitude especially when it suppresses enthusiasm about his work. I always thought 'The Lord of the Rings' was about geeks have anorak fun, but clearly it is now about free speech in the face of attacks by faceless minions something both Tolkien and his fans could appreciate. Read this before it gets (il)legally suppressed!

The Black Riders of the Internet

It is interesting how I have been on quite an internet journey in the last couple of days. First I am interested in 'what if?' history and then become interested in book art and its possibilities of visually expressing counter-factuals. Then working up some of those I begin looking for counter-factual maps across the internet and in turn this leads to maps of fantasy and imaginary places and in turn that leads to me finding out about how a group of lawyers are seeking to rein in the internet in a serious way.

Growing up, unlike the bulk of teenage boys that could read that I knew, I was never a fan of 'The Hobbit' or 'The Lord of the Rings'. I enjoyed writing fiction myself and seeing so many people rip off ideas from those books I thought that if I read them I would contaminate my own writing and other things I did at the time, such as playing role playing games (this was the 1980s when the most sophisticated computer games were rather blocky and teenage boys would spend hours in stuffy rooms describing gloomy castles and rolling to see if they were killed by orcs). The work of J.R.R. Tolkien has sort of been subsumed into mainstream fantasy culture anyway. Of course, he did not invent it all himself anyway. His elves and dwarfs (or dwarves as he called them) and dragons all come from traditional Western mythology; the rings in his books borrow from Wagner's Ring Cycle of operas and much of the politics of his books are analogies for Europe's battle with Nazi Germany's and then the Soviet Union's expanding influence in the world when he was writing ('The Lord of the Rings' was written between 1937-49 published 1954-5), with the reluctant help of the USA (i.e. the elves). He did invent the Orcs, but even their name comes from Orcus who was one of the Roman gods of the underworld, stemming from Etruscan myths and subsumed by Pluto. A lot comes from Norse and German myths, though tempered with Christianity though less overtly than by his fellow Oxford witer, C.S. Lewis, in his Narnia series.

Anyway, so 'The Lord of the Rings' has become globally successful. A movie in 1978 was a flop, but with technology having advanced a great deal to allow the fantastical scenes to be portrayed convincingly, the trilogy of films 2001-2003 made it globally successful and as with all movie franchises it sparked off loads of merchandising. The internet is littered with websites by fans, companies and other groups all with something to say about the stories and the films and the products. What I found out very quickly, though is that the lawyers of Tolkien's estate have been rampaging across the internet (very like the ghoulish Black Riders who remorselessly hunt down Frodo in 'The Lord of the Rings') threatening a score of internet sites with legal action unless they remove images of Middle Earth (Tolkien's setting for the stories, itself derived from Midgard in Norse myths). You can find a long list of websites closed down by these lawyers. They even threaten people who have drawn their own maps of Middle Earth and only permit them to restore them once they have paid for a licence.

I can accept copyright, though it seems silly when people are not deriving any income from the images, simply just putting them on a website for decoration or to discuss. However, this attempt to intellectually control what appears on the internet and to seek to close down websites which seek to express visual views of a topic is very sinister. Does the Chinese government try to remove Andy Warhol's image of Chairman Mao, does that of Cuba seek to licence the image of Che Guevara (I know he was not Cuban, but that is the authority with the strongest cultural claim over the image)? How close does my map have to be for the Tolkien lawyers to intervene? Can the outline be the same and the names changed or the names be the same on a different map. If I did an underground railway map of Mordor would I be sued and by whom, London Underground? I doubt it.

There are numerous websites and blogs out there that I would love to see removed because of their views or what they depict, but I accept that in a world of free speech they will be there. It is alarming that a group of lawyers, so assiduously, are policing what is produced, especially when only intellectual and not financial gain is being derived. Do they really believe that someone who wants a map of Middle Earth on their wall is going to settle for a fuzzy jpeg rather than buying one? Clearly they do. I think this is an attitude is self-perpetuating, they have no desire to benefit the estate of Tolkien just to line their own pockets combating the 'threat' that twenty websites have a picture of Middle Earth on them. Of course, fortunately, there are many they have not yet stopped and if you, unlike me, are interested in Middle Earth here is a range of maps: