Jesus loves 'His Dark Materials'
Shrill Bible-thumpers boycott 'The Golden Compass'; world's children grin devilishly
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, November 30, 2007
It has become some sort of rule, some sort of perfectly delicious law of the popular culture upon which any open-minded and attuned and humor-licked and spiritually aware and intellectually curious and sexually alive human worth her moist, wine-massaged soul can now rely with utter and perfect clarity.
It goes like this: If there is some sort of creation, a piece of art, a TV show, a column or a book or a movie or a statue or a blog or a movement, a wine bottle or sexual position or Jesus-shaped dildo that somehow deeply threatens the various ultraconservative sects of Christian-blasted America to the point where their pale, dour representatives demand boycotts and distribute angry pamphlets and try to stop people from experiencing said hunk of culture because of how negatively it portrays their seething, condemnatory God, well, you know it's time to break out the Champagne. Or buy that book. Or get very, very naked. Or all of the above. Depending.
So it is with the first movie made from Philip Pullman's astonishing "His Dark Materials" trilogy, "The Golden Compass," a complex, mystically gorgeous, spiritually dense, big-budget fantasy epic so far removed from the cute wizardry of Harry Potter and the thin, simpleminded Christian morality of say, "The Chronicles of Narnia," it might as well be a Coen brothers movie. On acid.
Oh my God yes, they are protesting. They are pamphleting. The Catholic League and Focus on the Family and evangelical/fundamentalist Christian blogs from here to Colorado Springs, they are calling on their trembling armies to boycott the film because they believe that Pullman's brilliant books — which, by the way, if I had the power, I would place in the eager and lovely hands of every youngish human on the planet right now, but especially the girls — are not only aggressively anti-Christian, they ultimately describe, as their grand finale, nothing less than the death of God. This is what they say.
And here is the terrific thing: They are absolutely right.
But let's be a bit more specific, shall we? Because as any fan of HDM knows, it ain't really about God, per se. Pullman's luminous novels have nothing to do with rejecting faith or destroying the spirit or inhibiting the exploration of what it means to be divine. They are, in fact, the exact opposite. They relish spirit and the magic of belief and love, are soaked through with divine inspiration of a kind any intelligent Christian (or honest spiritual seeker of any stripe, for that matter) should crave the way Lindsay Lohan craves cocaine. This is what makes them so incredible.
No, 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 (perhaps the books' most beautiful, inspiring theme), 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.
Indeed, if humanity is to flourish, to get over its addiction to war and guilt and fear, this is the false God that should — that must — die.
But let us get more specific still. Because while the books have as their evil antagonist a sinister cabal called the Magisterium (obvious parallel: Catholic Church), they also have a slew of dark characters in service of the Magisterium, various assassins and double-agents and robot drones running around trying to annihilate the children's spirit and destroy magic and lock down faith forever. Let us call these robotic drones, oh, say, the Catholic League. Or Focus on the Family. Gosh, no wonder they're a little peeved.
Ah, but it's almost too easy, is it not? Even a child can see that these people, these groups are so far from true spirit, so far from open consciousness it's a bit like comparing a lint ball to a cloud bank, a dung beetle to a flower bed. They are spiritual caricatures, the creepy clowns in organized religion's gloomy circus, all scrunched brows and gnarled hands and so much repressed sexuality it would make a porn star wince. Really, why give their silly protests any attention at all?
Well, for one thing, because these groups have proven they can be highly dangerous, utterly toxic to the culture as a whole. You already know the list: FCC crackdowns, stem cell research, ultraconservative judges, abstinence education, anti-choice laws, vicious homophobia, intelligent design, the rejection of science, all aiming toward nothing less than the creation of a fascist theocracy in America.
The rest...
