Barbelith Underground > Film, TV & Theatre > Northern Lights/ The Golden Compass

You know, when I read Flyboy’s comment the Authority and church's (generally agreed) ability to stand in for any repressive authoritarian hierarchy I wonder whether I was reading the same books as him. So much so that I’ll quote my post from the Books forum thread in almost its entirety:

Pullman’s on record in interview that his thoughts extend to all authoritarian systems, but the text doesn’t reflect this: it singles out one specific religion and strips it of love, sensuality, art, wisdom and (most tellingly) Christ. All disconfirming examples, all breadth and levels and types and denominations of Christianity are ignored. The church is depicted as dull, ignorant, fanatical, murderous, and bland: an abomination, ruled by a senile and aged demiurge. Pullman sets up some good and currently very popular concepts within a broadly Gnostic story, and then sledgehammers it into a mess of demonising the enemy. Piss poor.

Hmmmm… the way out of the prison camp afterlife is to recount the story of your life to the harpies, and we’re warned in the latter half of the book that it’d better be a full and interesting tale. When you reconcile that with Pullman’s painstakingly established notion that within working rules of his universe Christianity is always a barrier to living a whole and happy life, it’s not a step too far to imagine exactly who will come to populate his vision of hell.

I’m flabbergasted that the excellent critique that’s usually offered on Barbelith on matters of oversimplification and generalisation isn’t extended to this text. In the context of the distortion and defacing of Christianity in the novels leading up to the end it’s easy to see Mary’s voice as the authors: “I saw that there wasn’t any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.” The dismissive tone is the most offensive element and encapsulates the Pullman’s approach: throughout the trilogy he’s astonishingly single-minded in his quest to strip Christianity of every redeeming feature until he’s left with something that - in the end - vanishes like a puff of smoke.

And it’s not only the lack of counter-examples, it’s the absence of inclusivity in the Authority. Where are the representatives of other humanity crushing and repressive organisations in its structure? Where are the other religions, the corporations, the military… it is depicted solely as the Christian church with no acceptable analogues to anything else. There seems to be a confusion between HDM and what Pullman says about HDM, and in that respect even he’s been open enough to refer to his portrayal of the church as a mistake, even if it was one sentence in an otherwise huge interview. Redefining the work to change its emphasis from what Pullman actually wrote to what he bizarrely believes he wrote can only strengthen the message.

How would criticisms differ if the Authority wore the tropes of Islam?

Northern Lights/ The Golden Compass - The Film