The Golden Compass: From Provocative to Palatable

Expectations ran high for fans of Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials upon the release of The Golden Compass, adapted from the first novel in the series, into theatres. Pullman had achieved the ranks of J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling in the world of young adult literature with his popular trilogy that appealed to a wide range of audiences. The trilogy bends the rules of the genre to explore more metaphysical questions, precipitating great criticism for the nontraditional answers his narratives offer. Instead of presenting a clear cut world of good and evil, right and wrong, Pullman puts forth something far more complex and nuanced. In doing so, he willfully accepts the role of “myth maker for the children of a faithless age” (McCrum). Unfortunately, all this rich complexity fails to translate to the silver screen. In an effort to make the narrative more palatable to a wider audience, the producers fell into the predictable traps of adaptation by polishing off the dark edges that make the book so intriguing and compelling. The film’s many divergences from the novel ultimately undermine the core themes Pullman explores by preemptively removing all potentially controversial material in an effort to create a more socially acceptable narrative highlighting action and drama over depth and content.

The novel delves right into a world without setting its parameters. It begins with Lyra and her daemon, Pantalaimon, creeping through a forbidden room of Jordan College where they witness and prevent an attempted assassination on Lord Asriel. The author does not explain what exactly a “daemon” is, but rather draws the reader in with hints—“As Lyra held her breath, she saw the servant’s daemon (a dog, like all servants’ daemons)” (Pullman 5)—while maintaining some sense of mystery. The reader learns about the emotional connection between human and daemon, as the form of the latter can portray the inner world of the former. For children, a daemon’s shape might reveal a child’s emotional state. Pan could turn into a moth when she was nervous, a small dragon when she was defensive, or an ermine when she needed comfort. Adults daemon’s could not change form, but the form they settled in revealed much about a person. The reader learns that servants have dog daemons, Gyptians have birds, sailors often have dolphins or porpoises, and so forth. When Lyra expresses anxiety about Pan settling, a man tells her “there’s compensation for a settled form…Knowing what kind of person you are…There’s plenty of folk as’d like to have a lion as a daemon and they end up with a poodle” (Pullman 167). Thus a daemon’s form exposes the truth of a person’s inner world to the outside world.

The film takes a more heavy-handed approach, opening instead with a voiceover explaining virtually all of the tenets of the trilogy in a few stark sentences: “There are many universes…worlds like yours, where people’s souls live inside their bodies, and worlds like mine, where they walk beside us, as animal spirits we call daemons” (Weitz). So while Pullman allows the nature of daemons to slowly unfold, the film skips the mystery and explicitly tells the viewer rather than demonstrating through narrative. This has significant consequences for the rest of the film. The nature of daemons and their relationship to humans remains central to the plot, and the gravity of future discoveries hinges on an understanding of this relationship. By telling rather than showing, the events that play out from this point fall flat, as the viewer lacks the emotional investment that should be established through an understanding of the virtual sanctity of the bond between human and daemon.

Pullman elucidates this bond when Pan attempts to keep Lyra away from the perceived danger of the armored bear, Iorek Byrnison. A human and daemon must maintain close physical proximity, and testing this boundary causes great suffering for both. When Lyra does not heed Pan’s warnings, he tries to pull at their link to prevent her from getting closer to the bear. “It was such a strange tormenting feeling…part physical pain deep in the chest, part intense sadness and love…The pain in Lyra’s heart grew more and more unbearable, and a sob of longing rose in her throat” (Pullman 195). She gives in and rushes back to him, “and she knew she would rather die than let them be parted and face that sadness again; it would send her mad with grief and terror” (Pullman 196). This passage single handedly communicates the seriousness of the human-daemon bond, yet the film does not include it.

Without this sense of the emotional weight of the bond, the primary plot line loses its significance. In both the film and novel, a central narrative develops around the disappearance of young children, snatched up by “gobblers” according to urban folklore. Lyra discovers the real perpetrators, the General Oblation Board, and their motive for kidnapping so many children: intercision. The film reveals this when Lyra finds a list of kidnapped children on official General Oblation Board paper, and puts two and two together on the spot as to the origin of the term “gobblers” and the meaning of intercision. In the novel, Lyra comes to this knowledge through a far more heart-wrenching and revealing situation. She discovers a boy in a cabin, barely a shadow of his former self, desperately clutching a piece of dried fish instead of his daemon, because his daemon had been cut and taken from him. Lyra had to fight the impulse “to turn and run, or to be sick. A human being with no daemon was like someone without a face…something natural and uncanny that belonged to the world of nightghasts, not the waking world of sense (Pullman 213-214). This skeleton form of this scene does occur in the film, but fails to convey the sense of loss and revulsion demonstrated in the novel. Instead, it rushes to the next scene of action, and fails to even mention the boy again. In the novel, the boy does not survive, and his loss becomes more tangible when Lyra insists he have his dried fish to cling to in death (Pullman 219-220).

Alterations like this to the plot abound, seemingly in service of drama and action, yet gutting the narrative of its intended impact. Throughout the novel, Lyra battles against forces not yet fully understood. However, the film defines the antagonist quickly, constructing a one dimensional enemy in the Magisterium. This entity hardly receives mention in the novel, and its role does not become clear until the following books in the trilogy. Yet the film repeatedly cuts to scenes of powerful men in black robes jabbering on about gaining control of the world in no uncertain terms. In an early scene that does not occur in the book, Lyra asks Mrs. Coulter about the purpose of the Magisterium. She patronizingly tells her that it “keeps things working by telling people what to do…[but not] in a mean way, they tell people what to do in a kindly way to keep them out of danger” (Weitz). This quickly sets up the Magisterium as an evil totalitarian force bent on lording over people’s minds and actions, as an end in itself.

While the Magisterium does come to represent corrupt and oppressive forces and human tendencies later in the trilogy, the politics at play are more complicated than creating “a generation that will never question its authority again” (Weitz). For example, the Master of Jordan makes an attempt on Lord Asriel’s life in the novel, for reasons that do not come to light for some time. The Master of Jordan does not represent an evil character, he clearly cares for Lyra (Asriel’s daughter), and has no overarching villainous plan. His attempted assassination demonstrates in the very first chapter that the forces at play are neither simple nor apparent. As he tells Lyra with earnest, “Men and women are moved by tides much fiercer than you can imagine, and they sweep us all up into the current” (Pullman 73). The film upends this by having a member of the Magisterium attempt to assassinate Asriel. This eliminates all mystery as to the motive, for he was simply acting out of “evil”.

In creating a definitive enemy with explicitly one dimensional nefarious goals, the film betrays one of the core purposes of Pullman’s work—to create a nuanced world that more closely resembles our own. In many interviews, Pullman has made his disdain for oversimplified literary worlds clear. He outright dismisses Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as “trivial” for creating such black and white characters—“Life is bigger and more interesting than The Lord of the Rings thinks it is” (The Guardian). And while he finds C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia more compelling in that it seriously deals with broader metaphysical questions specific to humankind, he finds its predefined set of (Christian) answers less than interesting (Butler). Instead of fantasy for fantasy’s sake, Pullman makes his goal clear: “what I wanted to do was to use the apparatus of fantasy in order to do what writers of realism are more typically interested in doing, namely, to explore this business about being a human being” (Gale Biographies). He uses fantasy to illuminate reality, and reality does not easily fit into simple opposing categories of good and evil.

The film undoubtedly made these alterations in an attempt to heighten the sense of drama and appeal to a wider audience accustomed to oversimplified narratives. The film alters numerous details in the pursuit of drama that appear insignificant at first glance, but ultimately conflict with the intent of the author. In the novel, Lyra receives an alethiometer, a golden compass, from the Master of Jordan before she leaves the college. He tells her, “It’s one of only six that were ever made…It tells you the truth. As for how to read it, you’ll have to learn by yourself” (Pullman 73). As the narrative progresses, Lyra shows a certain aptitude for understanding the alethiometer, and eventually becomes quite adept at reading it. However it consistently remains more a matter of interpretation rather than a clear cut method of ask and tell.

In the film, the narration dramatically declares that the alethiometer she receives is the very last one in existence, and Lyra is the very last person on the planet capable of reading it. When she consults the alethiometer, it shows her glittering visions, faces and places passing across the screen. This not only becomes visually tiresome throughout the movie, but contradicts the intent of the novel. Pullman did not want Lyra to figure as some extraordinary or special human: “Lyra is a very ordinary girl. The world is full of Lyras. I can’t work up much interest in stories where the hero or heroine is ‘special’ in some way…She has no special gifts or talents or magic” (“Philip Pullman”). Pullman takes offense to the absence or denigration of female characters in other young adult literature, such as Tolkien who “doesn’t allow girls or women any important part in the story at all” (“Philip Pullman”). So it seems he wanted to maintain Lyra’s ordinariness, in order to demonstrate that everyday girls can accomplish extraordinary things. They need not have some inherent special gift, just a little courage and perseverance. Therefore when the film insists on Lyra’s uniqueness, it unravels Pullman’s message to young girls.

The final and most glaring discrepancy between the novel and film comes at the very end. Lyra has learned Lord Asriel is her father, and has less than pure intentions. He has taken her dear friend Roger, so she sets out to save him. But Asriel kills Roger, sacrificing him through intercision to open up a door to another world. Tragically, Lyra could not prevent it. “His body, suddenly limp in hers; and high above, the greatest wonder” (Pullman 393). After witnessing so much horror, it dawns on her and Pan that Dust, what the Magisterium and her parents sought to destroy through intercision, might not be so evil after all. So they set out on their next adventure into an unknown world, to discover the meaning of Dust, and prevent the all the forces collapsing in on it from destroying it (Pullman 397-399).

The film omits this ending in its entirety. Instead, it leaves Lyra and her allies on a deceptively positive note as they sail off in Lee Scoresby’s balloon. The uplifting and optimistic dialogue does not even hint at the tragedy to come. It remains unclear whether the director intended to begin the sequel with the scene of Roger’s death, or eliminate it all together due to its dark content. Regardless, this decision results in a very misleading conclusion that fails to tie together the various threads of the narrative. In opting for a feel good ending, the viewer has very little reason to care what happens next.

It seems no one did care what happened next, as a sequel never came out. The film received mostly unfavorable reviews, as critics found it bland and disappointing. While some theorized that the failure to film a sequel stemmed from the vehement opposition of religious groups, it seems more likely that “the film’s long, impenetrable voiceovers about dust” bored viewers into apathy (Heritage). Of the subjects interviewed for this paper, most rated the film between two and three stars, and those who had read the book rated the film significantly lower than those who had not. Unfortunately, the film did not do justice to Pullman’s rich and weighty narrative. The film chose to highlight drama and action at the expense of all else. Where Pullman shows his readers the significance of daemons and Dust through narrative, the film simply told viewers with flat narration, and expected them to care. Where Pullman creates a complex and mysterious world, the film sets up a predictable good versus evil scenario, without giving the viewer a reason to have an emotional stake in the outcome. The Golden Compass could have met the success of the Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings series on film, but instead it was reduced to mediocrity.

Works Cited

Bobby, Susan R. “What Makes a Classic? Daemons and Dual Audience in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.” The Looking Glass: New Perspectives on Children’s Literature 8.1 (2004): n. page. Web. 19 March 2014.

Butler, Robert. “Philip Pullman’s Dark Arts.” Intelligent Life, December 2007. Web. 19 March 2014.

“Gale Biographies of Children’s Authors: Philip Pullman.” Answers, n.d. Web. 19 March 2014.

The Golden Compass. Dir. Chris Weitz. New Line Cinema, 2007. DVD.

Heritage, Stuart. “Who Killed off The Golden Compass?” The Guardian. Film Blog, 15 December 2009. Web. 19 March 2014.

McCrum, Robert. “Daemon Geezer.” The Observer, 26 January 2002. Web. 19 March 2014.

“Philip Pullman: a Life in Writing.” The Guardian, 3 March 2011. Web. 19 March 2014.

Pullman, Philip The Golden Compass. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.