Forgive me if I'm beating a dead god - er, horse - but I occasionally run into comments and statements about "The Golden Compass" that I just feel a need to comment on. However, given that the movie comes out in a few days and thus I'll soon cease to speculate as to how it performs at the box office, I still recall Philip Pullman's very public tirades against "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe" preceding that film's premiere. So, as I see it, I'm just returning the favor.

Besides, it's a special-effects-laden fantasy movie, so I feel like it falls into my purview.

The director of the film adaptation, Chris Weitz, has been answering questions about the movie on MTV's Movies Blog. From the Nov. 14th installment, some of my favorite excerpts:

QUESTION #1 (from Simon):
Some changes were made in the adapting process — taking out talk of religion, original sin, beating death, etc. — to avoid controversy. And yet, some religious groups are still upset. If you can’t please everybody either way, if it’s not possible to avoid controversy by taking religion out, do you feel more or less emboldened to put it back in the rest of the films?

ANSWER:
It’s very important that people understand that nobody just hands you a couple hundred million dollars and says “Go ahead, knock yourself out!” What you have is a dynamic — you could call it a debate — between me, the filmmaker, and them, the studio — that, one hopes, results in a good film. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. It is my job to fight, by hook or by crook, for the best adaptation of the book possible... [snip]

So, how does one go about adapting a book that has controversial elements into a film that a very wide variety of people can enjoy, without betraying the original? One tries to be clever about it. I realized that the overt stating of some of the themes in “The Northern Lights”/”The Golden Compass” would never — this is important to make clear — never EVER get across the goal line. There isn’t a wide enough audience for that — yet. If I wanted to popularize this series of extraordinary books and open them to a wider reading public than ever before, I was going to have to make some compromises... [snip]

It’s true, though, that “The Subtle Knife” and “The Amber Spyglass” tread in territory that is much more controversial than the first book. This is also addressed by a bunch of questions that I will lasso under the heading “what next?” Well, though I saw it as my duty to build the franchise of “His Dark Materials” on as solid a grounding as I could, it would all be in vain if the second and third films did not have the intellectual depth and the iconoclasm of the second and third books. 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. [empasis mine] This is important: whereas “The Golden Compass” had to be introduced to the public carefully, the religious themes in the second and third books can’t be minimized without destroying the spirit of these books. There is simply no way to adapt them without dealing with Lyra’s destined role, her secret name, and the war in the heavens. I will not be involved with any “watering down” of books two and three, since what I have been working towards the whole time in the first film is to be able to deliver on the second and third films. If I sense that this is not possible, there’s no point my continuing to work on them.

So, in the director's own words, what there is of an anti-God message in the first movie is more concealed in order to get less-aware butts into seats and finance the more honest-to-the-source-material second and third adaptations. I'm not yelling "hypocrite!" or "sell-out!" or anything - I can see how this would be a good idea, if you didn't have a Higher Authority to answer to. Not everyone was aware that the Narnia stories were inherently Christ-oriented stories, and while I would complain loudly if Walden Media had watered down the Christian themes in "Lion", I can understand not wanting to advertise for the movie based solely on the merit that it concerns what Jesus did for us. What I am doing is calling a spade a spade.

But even at this degree of admission, suddenly Weitz starts backpedalling:

Let me also kind of round up some of the other questions in the same vein that I have received - let’s call them the “Religion” questions. First off, I would like to state what I think about Philip Pullman’s books and their view of religion. A lot of people — mostly those who haven’t read the books but are only repeating what they have read in some biased chain e-mails — are saying that Philip is “against religion” or “against Christianity.” These people don’t really want to engage with the very subtle philosophical and theological ideas in “His Dark Materials.” There are many grand ideas and themes in “His Dark Materials,” and Pullman asks us to question a lot of cherished and engrained beliefs; but if I had to boil it down, I would say that Pullman is against the abuse of religion for political power. He is against forcing people to believe what you believe, and against accepting something you are told without thinking about it. Which makes it ironic that none of the people who have attacked the film from a religious angle have seen the film!

He makes a point: I haven't read the books (or seen the film, but then, I didn't need to see the film "The Da Vinci Code" to know what it was going to say). Normally, I would grant that this does hurt my position of argument to some degree. Yet there's still plenty of damning evidence (Snopes.com, back me up on this). And if there's fresh dog crap on the carpet, I don't need to see it to know that it's there - "Always follow your nose," as Gandalf said.

I might be more willing to accept the claim that His Dark Materials is not about condemning Christianity, per se, but abuse of religion, were it not for its author's outspokenness on the issue. It's not like Pullman has made any pretense of hiding his intentions:

Just a short walk away from the Pullmans' house is the grave of another Oxford master of fantasy: J.R.R. Tolkien. Comparisons, notes Pullman with a heavy sigh, are inevitable. There's the Oxford connection, and the invented worlds, and both Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" and "His Dark Materials" consist of one (very) long story in three volumes. But Pullman insists the similarities stop there. "What I'm doing is utterly different," he says. "Tolkien would have deplored it."

So, too, would have another famous Oxford fantasy writer, C.S. Lewis, a devout Christian whose children's series "The Chronicles of Narnia" exemplified his religious convictions. "I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief," says Pullman. "Mr. Lewis would think I was doing the Devil's work."

(Emphasis mine; From an interview in The Washington Post, 2001)

Now, to be clear, I'll allow that that last statement may have been said with tongue in cheek. Judging from the overall tone of the interview, Pullman may have been saying Tolkien would have hated his work because he considers the real world to be far more wonderful and interesting than a completely invented world or the notion of a spiritual world that is an improvement upon this one. But one must take into account all of Pullman's conceptions of Christianity that he mentions in the interview - it's worth reading to get his mindset.

(By the by, there's a well-composed refutation of Pullman's charges against Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia from the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 2005. Again, it's well worth reading, but be warned, there are some spoilers regarding both book series.)

Yet, in Weitz's words (later in the same earlier-quoted Q&A), I'm an "extremist" who doesn't "really want to engage with the very subtle philosophical and theological ideas in His Dark Materials" and just doesn't get what the trilogy is really about. He also thinks that people who cheer His Dark Materials on for being anti-religion "have misapprehended the meaning of Pullman’s books as much as the 'other side.'" At least a few other sources have ridiculed Christians for being up in arms about this movie, again using the charge that we're ignorant as to what the story's really about.

So it's entirely possible that the media, Christian organizations, and the author himself have duped me as well as some of Pullman's fans. But it doesn't seem plausible.

Besides, Mr. Slusser read them, so I have an inside source. As he mentioned in the comments box two posts ago ("In Which I Talk About Movies", Nov. 24), in isolation from Pullman's comments it's quite possible to venture into this story without getting the sense that an anti-Christian screed is on its way. But we live in the Information Age, where the internet has a long memory, and Pullman's words are preserved for all to reference. It's tough to un-see the signs of an author's heart-content in his artwork once one has been made aware of them.