Rudy Garns's Library tagged movie →  View Popular, Search in Google

The fading of memory in Memento is about the loss of pure information, like an erased hard drive. In Eternal Sunshine, the richness of memory is as much about emotion as raw data.

Theoretically, if you could block protein synthesis in a human brain while triggering a memory, you could make a targeted erasure.

I suspect that many reviews of this movie are going to begin with some variant of the sentiment, "I was disappointed." This one is no exception. It's just not a very good movie; it's one that packed in lots of miscellaneous detail from the book it is based on, but thereby threw away the core of the story … and it shows. It's a movie that races along inventively, but futilely, leaving you wondering at the end what the point of all the rushing about of armies of strange characters was all about.

Newsweek said The Catholic League is encouraging families to boycott "The Golden Compass," the upcoming film adaptation of one of Pullman's "His Dark Materials" fantasy books.

The magazine quotes Bill Donohue, the group's president, as saying the movie is "bait" to lure youths to Pullman's novels where they will be influenced by the author's "pernicious atheist agenda."

But Pullman told Newsweek he is a story-teller whose only agenda is "to get you to turn the page."

"To regard it as this Donohue man has said -- that I'm a militant atheist, and my intention is to convert people -- how the hell does he know that? Why don't we trust readers? Why don't we trust filmgoers?" Pullman said. "Oh, it causes me to shake my head with sorrow that such nitwits could be loose in the world."

Culture: A star-studded, big-budget fantasy film released for Christmastime features religion as the villain. Hollywood is collaborating with a militant atheist British children's book author to indoctrinate children.

The adaptation of the story was clunky and simply concertinaed the plot into verbal asides. There was none of the cleverness in shortcuts or substitutions you sometimes see when a scriptwriter finds a novel way to explain background or the lore of the book. (There’s a lot of lore to explain, especially about daemons and missing children.) Friends who hadn’t read the books found the quick explanations and plot surges utterly baffling. Everyone agreed that the actress playing Lyra was superb, and Nicole Kidman pulled off the sexy, driven, ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ chutzpah of Mrs. Coulter. But the magic of Gyptians, bears and witches was completely lost in the rush of events. When the battle in the arctic kicked off no non-readers could tell why anyone was fighting the far-from-home Tatars.

And public atheist Pullman says he isn’t perturbed at all by the complete excision of theocratic corruption in the film because all forms of totalitarianism are the same.

  

Except they’re not. Life in a theocracy means everyone – not just members of the Communist party or the military junta – must live out the philosophy of the rulers every day of their lives. There is a peculiarity to a complete absence of the separation of church and state that doesn’t prevail in a communist or a fascist state. When there is no distinction between religious and secular power, it’s not enough to obey the rules, you have to believe in them, too. Theocracies are obsessed with sexuality in a way that common or garden totalitarianism is not. Women get a spectacularly raw deal in a theocratic state, which is what makes Mrs. Coulter such a notable character; she plays the religious hierarchy at their own game and wins, albeit at a terrible cost.

  

Cutting out the special viciousness of theocratic totalitarianism from His Dark Materials is its own form of intercision, the books’ term for an operation that separates children from their daemons and cleanses them of original sin. The evil at the heart of the Magisterium is its abuse of religious power, its need to ‘free’ children of their sexuality by surgically removing their souls.

When pressed, Pullman grants that he’s not really trying to kill God, but rather the outdated idea of God as an old guy with a beard in the sky. In his novels, he replaces the idea of God with “Dust,” made up of invisible particles that begin to cluster around people when they hit puberty. The Church believes Dust to be the physical evidence of original sin and hopes to eradicate it. But over the course of the series, Pullman reveals it to be the opposite: evidence of human consciousness, a kind of godlike energy that surrounds everyone. People accumulate Dust by “thinking and feeling and reflecting, by gaining wisdom and passing it on.” It starts to build up around puberty because, for Pullman, sexual awakening triggers the beginning of self-knowledge and intellectual curiosity. To him, the loss of sexual innocence is not a tragedy; it’s the springboard to a productive and virtuous adulthood.

Chris Weitz and Co. have not, in fact, eradicated all of the religious references from The Golden Compass.  What they've eradicated are all specific references to God.  The "Magisterium" or "Authority" seeks out and destroys what is explicitly identified as "heresy"; the Magisterium's headquarters have a vaguely Vaticanish look; the nasty guy with the beetle daemon is Fra (Brother) Pavel; and Mrs. Coulter's explanation of Dust is a transparent allegory for the Fall.  Fra Pavel, in particular, has ambled straight out of several centuries' worth of both anti-Catholic and anti-clerical literature: he is legalist, authoritarian, underhanded (e.g., the poison), and slimy.  (Quite literally: his hair could use some washing.)   

  

The irony, though, is that because the film never attacks religion eo ipso, its supposedly atheistic critique of the Magisterium is indistinguishable from a very traditional (also several centuries' worth) Protestant critique of Catholicism. 

His story is a rival to the narratives put forward by two earlier Oxford writers, J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and C.S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia". Pullman loathes the way the children in Narnia are killed in a car-crash. "I dislike his Narnia books because of the solution he offers to the great questions of human life: is there a God, what is the purpose, all that stuff, which he really does engage with pretty deeply, unlike Tolkien who doesn't touch it at all. ‘The Lord of the Rings' is essentially trivial. Narnia is essentially serious, though I don't like the answer Lewis comes up with. If I was doing it at all, I was arguing with Narnia. Tolkien is not worth arguing with."

A moviegoer could come away thinking Pullman is for witches and demons and multipe universes, talking polar bears and mysterious dust. The movie’s real theme, though, is truth. Good in the movie is lined up with free inquiry and the unimpeded search for the truth. Evil is the monstrous institution of the magisterium, which battles against the truth- seekers.

 

But wait, if the movie is pro-truth, why shouldn’t it be construed as pro-God, or even pro-Jesus. (Wasn’t it Jesus who said “I am the way and the truth”?) It will take any moviegoer a moment of honest reflection to admit the power of the movie’s message. All religions claim contact with truth, but they don’t empower members of the religion to be truth-seekers themselves.

 

I’m not just talking about the obvious cases, like the Roman Catholic church. I think the same is true even in the most liberal religious communities. The movie brilliantly makes children the target of the magisterium–it’s brilliant because children really are the crux of the matter. They don’t yet believe, and will ask challenging questions, if permitted.

 

This whole business of teaching children “truths” before they’re mature enough to make up their own minds is tricky. We do it all the time. We teach them all sorts of facts before they can verify them as facts. We teach them moral values before they can discuss morality. We teach them political attitudes before they are in any position to understand the pro’s and con’s.

 

Religion is a special case. For one reason, that’s because children are allowed to ask questions about all the other topics, but discouraged from asking questions about religion. In the middle of a religion class, even at the most liberal church or synagogue, a child cannot raise his or her hand and say “is there really a god”?

 

Another problem is that many religious ideas, as they are presented to young children, are not even wholly believed by the teachers…at least in a liberal religious setting. The child is taught, as if it were a plain truth, that God created the world in six days, and Noah put the animals on the ark, and Abraham married Sarah, and Moses walked up the mountain, when the grownups are not so literal in their beliefs.

 

Well, but young children can’t understand the subtleties of a liberal theology. But then why not hold off on teaching them about religion until they’re older? The intention is obviously to “get em while they’re young.” But why is that important? The truth is, I think, that children are taught young in the hopes that the ideas will take firm root. But then doesn’t religious education simply exploit the credulousness of children?

 

I don’t think any religion can claim to encourage people in the open-minded pursuit of truth. This is an especially uncomfortable fact for those of us who like some things about religion, or even participate in one (as I do).

Throughout the film, Allen has used old movie clips to toggle   from Judah’s story into Clifford’s. These clips, including   Professor Levy’s, act as a Greek chorus, providing an omniscient,   knowing commentary upon the little people of the film.