Booklist: How do you think readers will feel about the fact Lyra and Will make love?
Pullman: Well, let's be clear about this. They go to sleep in each other's arms. The only thing I describe them doing is kissing. I deliberately withheld my imagination from anything else.
In the first article in this series, I touched on the bait-and-switch nature of the release of the film adaptation of The Golden Compass, the first in author Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series — how the release of the watered-down version of the book was going to lure unsuspecting parents to unwittingly purchase these books for their children, ironically, for Christmas. As the above quotation from an October 1, 2000 interview with Booklist reveals, this is not where the duplicity will stop.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
For those who wonder what The Golden Compass foreshadows for the remaining two films in the trilogy, director Chris Weitz has answered that for us. In an interview posted on MTV Movies Blog, Weitz explains: "If I wanted to popularize this series of extraordinary books and open them to a wider reading public than ever before, I was going to have to make some compromises." After admitting that he watered down the more controversial elements of the book to try to gain that wider audience, and a solid financial footing for the next two films, Weitz proclaims: "I will not be involved with any 'watering down' of books two and three, since what I have been working towards the whole time in the first film is to be able to deliver on the second and third films."
But exaggerated history and bad theology is not all that Pullman serves up in the last two books in the His Dark Materials series. He also introduces sexual themes that are inappropriate for the tweener and early teen audience that make up the main audience for the movies and the books. Moreover, despite his protestations to the contrary, he does in fact depict a scene of intimate fondling between his twelve-year-old protagonists: Will and Lyra in the third book, The Amber Spyglass. You don't even have to be Sigmund Freud to figure it out, since Pullman prefigures their sex act with a similar scene between adults in The Subtle Knife.
Sexuality by Example
There are few married couples in His Dark Materials, and there is little talk of sexual relations between them. The closest we get is hearing that Will's father was never unfaithful to his mother, even though he was the object of a witch's sexual advances. Active sexuality is reserved for those who are free from the "shackles" of the marital bond. Examples abound. In The Golden Compass, we learn that Lyra's life was begun in adultery. Mrs. Coulter was married to a rising politician while having an affair with Lord Asriel. Lyra admires him. Pullman reveals Lyra's thoughts about Lord Asriel, "Her father was lying back in his chair, lazy and powerful, his eyes as fierce as his daemon's. She didn't love him, she couldn't trust him, but she had to admire him, and the extravagant luxury he'd assembled in this desolate wasteland, and the power of his ambition" (GC 376). But it isn't only humans that ignore traditional sexual mores.
The witches are a race of beings that have developed their own morality. Serafina Pekkala, the queen of a witch clan, knows she cannot marry the human Gyptian, Farder Corum. But her love for him caused her to stay "with him long enough to bear him a child." The child dies young, and Pekkala describes the experience in interesting terms: "And it tore out pieces of my heart, as it always does" (GC 315). Pekkala is over 300 years old. One wonders how many times, and with how many men, has she done something like this?
The most attractive, sensitive human character in the His Dark Materials universe is Mary, a scientist and ex-nun. Toward the end of The Amber Spyglass, she gives the children a tutorial on rejecting God and falling in love. Mary describes her attendance at a scientific conference after which some friends invite her out for dinner. She says, "I thought I'd loosen up a bit" (AS 442). She describes the evening as a delight to her senses, saying that she was "discovering another side to myself," a physical side whose repression was a result of Church life. She sits across from a man and is surprised to find herself flirting. When she gets a taste of marzipan, it transports her back to a party in her youth — of course, in the flashback, she is the same age as Will and Lyra are now: twelve. Mary tells how, at the party, a boy placed a piece of marzipan in her mouth. Then she describes her first kiss with the boy. It must have been some kiss. Mary recounts the experience, "all my body was aching for him, and I could tell he felt the same." Mary says "it was paradise" (AS 444).
As Mary tells the story, it evokes an awakening in Lyra. We understand that Lyra "felt other doors opening, deep in the darkness, and lights coming on. She sat trembling as Mary went on" (AS 444). And Mary does.
By the end of Mary's story she has completely abandoned her faith, determined that nothing or no one will ever sit in judgment over her: "no one to bless me for being a good girl, no one to punish me for being wicked. Heaven was empty" (AS 445).
When Lyra asks if Mary ever got married, Mary answers, "No, I didn't marry anyone. I lived with someone, not Alfredo, someone else. I lived with him for four years, nearly. My family was scandalized. But then we decided we'd be happier not living together. So I'm on my own" (AS 446). Blithely, Mary tells the story — from nun, to ex-nun, to romance, kissing, co-habitation, and consequence-less separation — in a few short pages. In no time, Lyra demonstrates that she is Mary's apt pupil.
Sexuality by Analogy
Pullman's books, being written for children, have no explicit sex in them beyond kissing. So if we are going to be literal, Pullman is telling the truth — he only describes the children kissing. But problems arise because, while Pullman may want to be literal in his interviews, he happily employs analogies in his writing that give lie to his protestations.
Early in the books, as readers learn about "daemon etiquette," we discover that the great taboo of Lyra's culture is touching someone else's daemon. They are a private part of a person. Throughout the book, bad people, or the daemons of bad people, control others by grabbing and hurting their daemons. But there is more here than simple one-to-one correspondence between the daemon and the person — there is also something sexual about the daemons.
This fact is demonstrated in a seduction scene between Mrs. Coulter and Lord Boreal at the end of The Subtle Knife. Mrs. Coulter is trying to get information out of Lord Boreal. She tells him that she can "please him." When he responds that the pleasure of her company is enough, she replies, "No it isn't, Carlo. You know it isn't. You know I can please you more than this" (SK 310). What follows is like something out of a Fellini film. True, Coulter and Boreal never touch, but their daemons do, in ways that implicitly mimic sexual contact. Boreal's eyes are closed, he shudders, he "sighs with pleasure" as a result of this contact (SK 312). This establishes for the reader the sexual role that daemons play.
At the end of The Amber Spyglass, two exchanges take place like those of Mary and Mrs. Coulter — not between adults, but between the twelve-year-old protagonists. It begins with Lyra feeding Will a berry in imitation of Mary's marzipan moment. Pullman describes the experience: "All his body thrilled with it, and he answered her in the same words, kissing her hot face over and over again, drinking in with adoration the scent of her body and her warm, honey-fragrant hair and her sweet, moist mouth that tasted of the little red fruit" (AS 466). What begins as a kiss, ends in much more. The two of them go off together and Will initiates what can only be described as sexual contact with her by petting her daemon. Her response is telling: "Lyra gasped. But her surprise was mixed with pleasure…she was breathless. With a racing heart she responded in the same way…" (AS 498). The final paragraph describes them as lovers who "had made this blissful discovery" (AS 499).
With no God around to provide these young people with a transcendent idea regarding sexual morality, it all starts to make sense. This is Pullman's New Fall. With no true God from whom to be separated, this Fall is a celebration. The question is, do we really want to join it?
Does Our Culture Want to Abandon Childhood?
One of the most disturbing aspects of the way Pullman's novels for children play out, is that real children do not appear in them — at least not children in the way most of us apprehend the word. No one protects them. They are beaten, tortured, made subjects of medical experimentation, and killed. Culture and media critic Neil Postman, noted in his book, The Disappearance of Childhood:
It is only half an explanation to say that children are beaten up because they are small. The other half is that they are beaten up because they are not perceived as children. To the extent that children are viewed as unrealized, vulnerable, not in possession of a full measure of intellectual and emotional control, normal adults do not beat them as a response to conflict…many adults now have a different conception of what sort of a person a child is, a conception not unlike that which prevailed in the fourteenth century: they are miniature adults (136).
Pullman's children — both readers and characters — are introduced to sexuality by adults in a way that few parents would tolerate if the voice were emanating from an adult in the room rather than from a page in a book. Keep in mind that I haven't even mentioned Pullman's take on homosexual angels.
Postman argues that the separation of child and adult worlds is based on the shame that comes when knowledge is revealed prematurely: "One might say that one of the main differences between an adult and a child is that the adult knows about certain facets of life — its mysteries, its contradictions, its violence, its tragedies — that are not considered suitable for children to know: that are indeed shameful to reveal to them indiscriminately" (15). Pullman is guilty of crossing the line. He sets up a world with no legitimate transcendent moral authority, and then leaves the children to figure it out for themselves. All we have to do is look around to see where that line of thinking has taken us as a culture.
If Chris Weitz is telling the truth; if he really intends to take the gloves off in his adaptations of the second and third books of Pullman's trilogy, to make a faithful retelling, then what you've read is what you'll get. The box office response to this first film will tell the tale. If we can continue to get the word out to people about the contents of this film and these books (through rationale argument and not hysterical protest) — the bait and switch of the film, the books' animosity toward Christianity, and the inappropriate sexuality — perhaps they will think twice about taking their children to a film that will whet their appetite for reading books where the material is best left to when they are much older. Adults are the ones who need to be having these discussions, not barely pubescent children.
Watch for the next article:
The Golden Compass: Conflicting Notions of Eternity in His Dark Materials (For quick reference, you can find the previous two articles at www.movieministry.com in the articles archive.)
Works Cited
Cooper, Ilene. "Darkness Visible — Philip Pullman's Amber Spyglass Review." Booklist 97:3 (October 1, 2000):354.
Jacks, Brian. "Golden Compass Director Chris Weitz Answers Your Questions: Part I." MTV Movies Blog. Accessed December 3,2007. Online: http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2007/11/14/
golden-compass-director-chris-weitz-answers-your-questions-part-i/
Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood. New York, NY: Dell Publishing, 1982.
Pullman, Philip. The Golden Compass. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1995.
—. The Subtle Knife. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1997.
—. The Amber Spyglass. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2000.
