The Golden Compass

Last night Dean and I saw The Golden Compass. As fantasy movies go, it was pretty entertaining, although a bit confusing. Neither Dean nor I have read any of the books, so it took quite some time to catch up with the story and figure out what was going on.

The basic plot of the movie is that an all-powerful "Magisterium," a small group of people who are in complete control of civic [and religious?] life, in order to consolidate their power, have hatched a secret plan to sever every child from his or her soul, which in the movie, do not live within people, but are external animals. Psychically attached, neither can live properly without the other. A little girl goes on a quest to rescue the children that have "disappeared" to be used as experiments in their plan. Along the way there are arcane references to "Dust," parallel universes, and so on that don't yet make much sense. The title of the movie, refers to a mystical device given to the child that tells her the truth about any situation she thinks about. Although every fantasy movie has to have the "magic item," the compass plays a rather small role in the movie.

This movie is being boycotted by many conservative religious types (especially Catholics) because the books apparently have the aim of "killing God," and based on some book reviews I read that may not be too far from the book's aim. But that notion has not made it into the movie (at least not yet).

Rather the movie is a lot about external vs. internal authority, about whether it is okay to think for one's self, or whether it is better for others (particularly government and religious authorities) to tell you what to do and to think because it is "for your own good." It is ironic then, that religious groups are trying to tell people what to think when they tell them not to see this movie. As if adults (and children) will be so unduly influenced that they will stop listening to the Church and lose their faith. Hrrmph.

The author himself says this in an interview, "What I was mainly doing, I hope, was telling a story, but not a story like Tolkien’s. (To be honest I don’t much care for “The Lord of the Rings.”) As for the atheism, it doesn’t matter to me whether people believe in God or not, so I’m not promoting anything of that sort. What I do care about is whether people are cruel or whether they’re kind, whether they act for democracy or for tyranny, whether they believe in open-minded enquiry or in shutting the freedom of thought and expression. Good things have been done in the name of religion, and so have bad things; and both good things and bad things have been done with no religion at all. What I care about is the good, wherever it comes from."

Philosophically it seems to me that authority must be both internal and external, it is not an "either/or". Internal because we must come to our own understanding and convictions of the truth of things, and not believe them just because somebody told us so--not least because that somebody might either be evil or just wrong. External because we have an infinite variety of ways of fooling ourselves, and we need an external "checks and balance" to our own thinking. Our thinking must be communal -- we must take time to think and experience for ourselves, and then come together as local communities (and I include God/Scripture/history in that) and think and experience together. When the Church is at its best, it works this way. It is precisely the kind of "top-down" authoritarianism of the Golden Compass that we *ought* to repudiate as not being the best because, no matter what we might prefer to have, church authorities reflect the same human frailties that we all do, and sooner we admit that, the better off we will be.

Interestingly, I frequently meet people who are uncomfortable with the ambiguity and greyness of life that comes with realizing that both internal and external authorities can be wrong. They would rather that it be black and white. They would rather commit themselves fully to being firmly and completely wrong, than to live in that ambiguity. I wonder if that is where GWB is at.