What? “The Golden Compass” Came Out Last Year? I Can’t Hear You! LALAALALALALALA

I’ve been meaning to re-read His Dark Materials ever since I attended a lecture by Philip Pullman in November. Because I’m an awful procrastinator, I haven’t yet done so. BUT – I did see The Golden Compass this month when it was one of the movies available on that cool touchscreen thingie on my overseas flights!

(Spoilers for both book and movie ahead, but all are clearly marked in advance.)

As much as I enjoy Philip Pullman’s books, I don’t find any of his series characters particularly appealing. I’m happy to sympathize with Lyra Belacqua and Sally Lockhart, and I find them well-drawn and compelling, but they don’t stick with me the way others do. What does stick with me is the way Pullman isn’t afraid to make things devastatingly difficult for his protagonists: he’s not afraid to hit them where it hurts. Even when I find myself drifting away from Lyra or Sally, I can’t put the book down because Pullman’s stuck them in such an awful predicament that I’ve just got to see what happens.

For example, Pullman’s rather good at separating his heroines from their allies, and he’s certainly the king of seemingly-trustworthy parental figures who turn out to be backstabbing, selfish scoundrels. He’s great at malevolent, powerful, almost omniscient entities like the Magisterium or the Tzaddik, from whom one can hide only by exercising constant vigilance. And he’s not afraid to unexpectedly kill off characters the reader has come to love.

(Interestingly, at the lecture I attended, Mr. Pullman suggested that one of the recurring motifs of His Dark Materials that he finds most compelling is the enforced separation of objects or beings that were once intimately close, his examples being the children cut away from their daemons and the relationship of Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter. So not only is he good at causing unbearable tension for his characters, but he seems to recognize the techniques he uses to create it. Incidentally, Mr. Pullman also mentioned, when asked, that he was satisfied with The Golden Compass movie, and, when asked if the sequels would also be filmed, suggested we go see it and vote with our feet.)

I don’t remember much of the plot of The Golden Compass (aka Northern Lights) novel, even though it was far and away my favourite of the series. I remember enough to know that Hollywood significantly “toned down” Lord Asriel’s coldness, which I suppose makes sense: in a fantasy-adventure film that runs just under two hours, where, as a storyteller, you wish the audience to like Lord Asriel and feel that Lyra should trust him, you don’t have time to subvert the typical signals for “BAD MAN! VILLAIN!”. As usual with Pullman, there were plenty of complaints both from conservative religious groups who claimed the movie was trying to make godless heathens of us all and from staunch atheists who (factually accurately) objected to the watering-down of the book’s clearer anti-organized-Judeo-Christian-religion subtext. True, everything I didn’t like about the movie could be summed up as “watering-down”, but I could have happily dealt with that

(I’ll take watering-down over complete elimination any day *cough*TheSeeker*cough*, especially since it happens to novels from all sides of the political and theological spectrum. I doubt C. S. Lewis would recognize his “mere Christianity” in Walden’s films, and something tells me plenty of the Jesus-undertones of the seventh Harry Potter book will disappear somewhere between page and screen. Although it does disturb me deeply that Hollywood film-makers seem to think the average spectator’s intelligence is somewhere below ‘sponge’. Actually, I was reading about the theatre of Victorian London, and there’s a strong case to be made that most of today’s popular film is Victorian melodrama transposed to a medium more suited to its aims. Must. Stop. Talking. About. Grad. School. Sorry, slipped off for a moment there.)

ANY-how, my point is, the thing about The Golden Compass film that shocked and surprised me was It. Didn’t. End. I mean, it ended ended – the plot stopped, the credits rolled, the theme music played. But it didn’t end where the book ended. It ended a couple chapters before, which is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in a book-to-movie adaptation. Because the ending of The Golden Compass was really the only part I remembered quite vividly from the book. Because Pullman does another of those how-bad-can-I-make-it-for-this-protagonist things, and reminds the reader that you can’t always trust people just because you have a common enemy or because your allies like them.

Now, the plot of The Golden Compass, both book and movie, runs something like this: Lyra is a girl living in an alternate Oxford under the absentee care of the explorer and scientist she knows as her uncle, Lord Asriel, who is a thorn in the side of the powerful religious group known as the Magisterium. When Lyra’s best friend, Roger, is kidnapped by the “Gobblers”, she sets out to rescue him. In doing so, she finds herself entangled in a vicious conspiracy involving the Magisterium, their agent Mrs. Coulter, and Lord Asriel himself. Also, everyone has an animal-companion-spirit thing called a daemon that IS METAPHORICALLY THEIR SOUL.

SPOILERS FOR The Golden Compass AHEAD!

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So, at the end of the movie, Lyra has just discovered Roger and the other kidnapped children have been taken by the Magisterium to a secret laboratory in the Arctic Circle, managed by Mrs. Coulter, where they’re being cut away from their daemons. She rescues Roger and the others and then sets off with him and some other friends to find Lord Asriel, whom they have reason to believe is being held hostage by the Magisterium somewhere in the North. Which allows us a lovely final shot of them heading off toward the Northern Lights in a hot air balloon. The end.

Er, except, in the book, they then find Lord Asriel, who, despite being held captive, has gathered up enough equipment to continue his all-important experiment: attempting to create a pathway to the parallel universes he knows exist. Unfortunately, creating this pathway requires a large amount of energy – an amount that can only be released by separating a child from its daemon. Lord Asriel sacrifices Roger for the sake of his experiment, killing him in the process, and Lyra finds out only when it is too late to stop him. Unsure what to do next, she follows Lord Asriel into the parallel universe.

So, yeah, a little thematic difference there between book and movie, don’t ya think?

I can see why film-makers might want their story to end with Lyra’s success rather than her failure, but isn’t Lord Asriel’s crime one of the main points of the story? Like, you’ve got to question the motives of anyone in authority, because once they put something else above human life, even if that thing is “good”, there’s gonna be trouble. You know me, I love the “whoops, maybe while we were so busy running after those dastardly villains, we forgot to keep an eye on our own actions” plots. And I hate, hate, hate it when evil is something “over there”, something we can point to and identify by the uniform it wears or the badge on its sleeve or the person signing its paycheck. In part, Lord Asriel’s “betrayal” (although one can hardly say he lied to Lyra, not having promised anything different) is so shocking because it implicates a whole bunch of other people Lyra has trusted all along, including the faculty of Jordan College.

It’s difficult to wonder why the filmmakers decided to make this change without cynically suspecting that a happy, hopeful, moral-confirming ending has better market appeal than a dark, jarring, introspective one, especially as The Golden Compass is/was marketed as a family film. And I suppose that’s fair enough: if I were a parent who’d already had to deal with the deaths of Bambi’s mother and Mufasa, both close to the beginning of their respective films, the surprise-ending death of the protagonist’s best friend, another CHILD, might not exactly thrill me, no. But, on the other hand, anyone who thinks kids can’t deal with death or tragedy onscreen (or between covers) is kidding themselves. Sure, at any given moment, there will be some children who can’t understand or emotionally deal with it, and that’s fine: there are some adults who can’t deal with it, either. But, when I was a member of the target audience for The Golden Compass (about twelve years old?), I remember reading and “enjoying” (that sounds sort of trite and silly when you apply it to stories about serious issues, doesn’t it?) books like Lois Lowry’s The Giver and James M. Deem’s The 3 NBs of Julian Drew and of course His Dark Materials – and L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series, where people are continually dying of disease, accident, or old age at the most dramatically compelling moments. True, I doubt I’d have liked some of the darker stories I do like now, like Watchmen or The Pillowman, but my tastes haven’t changed significantly: I still can’t take things-jumping-out-at-you flicks, but I still don’t mind ones where protagonists die like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan*.

And, you know? Sometimes, when people see movies they aren’t ready for, it just goes over their head. Mom let us rent The Rocky Horror Picture Show when I was about fourteen, and I didn’t understand a word of it (well, except the Time Warp). I saw Scream when I was thirteen-ish, and, while it terrified me for a night or two (especially because I was sleeping over at a friend’s house at the time), I didn’t pick up at all on the meta-horror way it picked up on cliches and turned them on their heads. Heck, I didn’t understand most of Mary Poppins until I was a lot older than I was when I first watched it.

What’s the point of this? (Other than proving that I was, and remain, a bit thick?) To tell you the truth, I’ve sort of forgotten. I guess what I’m mainly trying to say is, I don’t believe the endings of stories should be changed to happy ones IF the only reason to do so is to avoid upsetting the audience. I’d be happy to see a new ending to The Golden Compass if it served the story; after all, I like most of the changes Walden has made to the Narnia series.

Is the only “good” reason to change a story for the sake of the story itself? On one hand, if you write a story nobody will enjoy, then it’s not going to get read – and, if you don’t take your audience into account, you won’t know the extent to which you have to explain certain things (eg, if your audience lives in the tropics and your story is set in Northern Ontario, you might have to explain the day-to-day details living with a couple feet of snow for six months). On the other, if you cater to the audience at the expense of the story – give them what you believe they want or, worse, what you believe they should want – you risk winding up with a story nobody wants. What do you guys think?

* Watching the Star Trek movies was (is) mandatory in my family, although my sister and I had a very skewed sense of the plot, since Mom decided the proper order for us to watch them in was “least scary” to “most scary”, rather than first to last. We went from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (according to Mom, the “scary part” was the ear-creatures, not Spock’s death), which meant that, yes, we watched Spock be reborn before he actually died and could not for the life of us understand what Kirk & co. were being tried for when we’d never seen them commit their crime.