Boycotters set their sights on holiday movie 'Golden Compass'
BY CHRISTOPHER BURBACH AND BOB FISCHBACH
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITERS
Catholic League's "The Golden Compass: Agenda unmasked"
content.omaha.com
• Catholic League's "The Golden Compass: Agenda unmasked"
Flying polar bears in armor. Ghosts. Angels. Souls that take animal form outside people's bodies. An epic clash between good and evil across heaven, earth and several parallel worlds. A little girl's quest to save the universe.
The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights is urging families to boycott the movie and its source books, a trilogy of novels called "His Dark Materials" by British author Philip Pullman, who is a self-professed atheist.
Catholic League leaders predict the movie will lead children to what the organization sees as poisonously anti-Catholic propaganda in the books. The league, a lay group, published a booklet attacking the film and Pullman as campaigning to turn children away from God.
"The movie will serve to tempt children into reading the books," Catholic League spokeswoman Kiera McCaffrey said from the group's New York headquarters. "It's sugarcoated atheism - just in time for Christmas."
The league has distributed 11,000 copies of the booklet to home-schoolers, bishops and Catholic school superintendents.
In Omaha, the Rev. Joseph Taphorn said there's no centralized effort in the Catholic Church to boycott the film, which opens Dec. 7 nationwide.
"But obviously there are concerns," said Taphorn, chancellor of the Omaha Archdiocese. "We would certainly urge parents to be cautious. It's not just an innocent little children's movie."
Defenders say the film and the books are just good stories, not meant to turn young minds against religion.
Plot synopsis
A girl named Lyra lives among scholars at the Oxford University of an alternate world. There, each person's soul takes the shape of an animal. Hers is called Pantalaimon.
Lyra overhears Lord Asriel - her uncle - talking of a magical dust, found in the Arctic, with powers to unite whole universes. Others fear the dust and want to destroy it. The college's master gives Lyra a golden compass that will answer any question if one is skilled enough to read it.
Lyra decides to live with the beautiful Mrs. Coulter. As children around Oxford begin to disappear, Lyra learns Mrs. Coulter is associated with the Gobblers, who are linked to the disappearances. Lyra flees, calling on clans, Gyptians, witches and armored bears in a dimension-crossing adventure.
At the heart of it is an effort to rescue the captured children."The film is neither anti-Christian nor anti-religion," a spokesman for New Line Cinema said in a prepared statement.
In Omaha, fans of the books see the flap as baseless, manufactured or both, and many are eager to see the movie.
"When I heard there was a controversy, I thought 'This is amazing,'" said Mai Tran, 21, a fan of the books since eighth grade. "I'm a Catholic, too. . . . There was the 'Harry Potter' controversy, and then another one over 'The Da Vinci Code.' I just thought 'What is it this time?'"
"The Golden Compass" is just the latest cinematic flash point in a long culture war.
"Churches have been struggling with this for as long as cinema has been produced," said Paul Williams, editor of the Journal of Religion and Film, headquartered at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. "They've always used film for their own purposes, while also being concerned about messages they don't agree with."
Movies in the Roaring '20s contained promiscuity, drug use, profanity and gangsters. The result was the Hays Code, written by a Jesuit priest in 1930. Afraid of losing Depression-era audiences, movie studios eventually bowed to the code.
Motion Picture Association of America ratings (now G, PG, PG-13, R) replaced the code in 1967.
But calls for boycotts continued over violence ("Bonnie and Clyde"), sex ("The Graduate") and religious themes ("The Last Temptation of Christ").
To Omaha filmmaker Mark Hoeger of Oberon Entertainment, it's all business - and not just the movie business.
"All kinds of groups make and raise money by exploiting everybody's favorite emotion: righteous indignation," he said. "Both the right and the left are guilty of it. The systems feed on each other."
Hoeger said the resulting polarization keeps legitimate, thoughtful discussion of religion out of film - and keeps Hollywood making movies that offend as few as possible.
Rather than Christianity vs. pop culture, Williams sees an intra-Christian debate about cinema and faith.
"There are differences within Catholic or evangelical circles about whether these films represent a threat to morality or faith," he said.
Exhibit A of that point: Donna Freitas, an assistant professor of religious studies at Boston University. She discovered Pullman's books while a doctoral candidate at Catholic University. She found them to be breathlessly written adventures, rich in Christian ideals and theological probing.
Omaha theaters: Q-Cinema 9, 20 Grand, Village Pointe Cinema, Great Escape 16, Cinema Center, Oak View 24, Star Cinema, Twin Creek CinemaFreitas even co-authored a book, "Killing the Imposter God," recently published, about what she sees as the spiritual and theological dimensions of "His Dark Materials." She hopes to start a class at Boston University on the trilogy.
Younger students probably would just enjoy the adventure stories without catching the religious references - just as they do with "The Chronicles of Narnia," Freitas said in a telephone interview.
"You have a small group of conservative Catholics who are trying to control what kind of theology people can consider," Freitas said. "Not to be melodramatic, but it would be a tragedy if this discouraged children from reading these books."
Rowan Williams, the Church of England's archbishop of Canterbury, has said students 15 and older should study Pullman's trilogy.
And Daniel P. Moloney, associate editor of the conservative First Things, an ecumenical journal on religion and public life, wrote in a review of "His Dark Materials" that "Pullman challenges the most fantastic and yet most persuasive parts of the Christian myth - Creation, the Fall, Sin, Death, Heaven, Hell - and one credits him for gumption. If his alternative were more compelling, I would recommend parents keep their children away."
Instead, Moloney wrote, Pullman "has unintentionally created a marvelous depiction of many of the human ideals Christians hold dear."
Pullman has said in interviews that he sees organized religion as the source of much evil in the world. He once said his books "are about killing God."
Pullman's novels have been wildly popular in Britain since the first of the trilogy came out in the mid-1990s. They've been slower to catch on in the United States, but still have sold more than 6 million copies here, according to New Line.
In Omaha, they've been popular mainly with sophisticated readers of fantasy fiction, many of them sixth- through ninth-graders, said Ellen Scott, manager of the children's department at the Bookworm bookstore.
"The Golden Compass" and subsequent books are steeped in literary and theological references. The trilogy re-imagines the biblical fall of Adam and Eve as a good thing. In Pullman's version, they obtained human consciousness, not original sin, by eating the forbidden apple - and religious authority has been trying to stifle all that is good and natural ever since.
The religious people are villains, with the single exception of a former nun. Their collective name is the Magisterium, which is the word the Roman Catholic Church uses to describe the pope and bishops, its official teachers.
In recent interviews, Pullman has toned down his attacks on religion. He told the Atlantic Monthly magazine that he didn't want to say anything that would jeopardize the making of the next two movies.
Hoeger, the Omaha filmmaker, said the bottom line will always be profit.
"People often say Hollywood has an agenda," he said. "Its only agenda is making money, delivering whatever product sells. If that's fuzzy 'VeggieTales,' great. If it's hard-core porn, great. All you have to do is get people to stop going, and Hollywood will stop making them."
A better approach than boycotts, Hoeger said, might be for parents to simply acknowledge what's in Pullman's books.
"Just sit down and talk to your kids about it rather than whipping people into a frenzy."
omaha.com |
