Pullman rips on LOTR, others

[Mister Underhill]

Pullman again? It seems sometimes like he gets more press off of his jabs at Tolkien than he does for anything he's actually written himself.

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

I don't like the implication here. So only filmmakers are qualified to have opinions on films? The author has to just sit back, watch what they do, and (if he's lucky) offer a comment from time to time?

In this case, Pullman's right -- authors rarely have much creative input beyond token gestures. There are a few big dogs who attempt to negotiate more creative control, but even with a contract things don't always work out -- just look at the whole Clive Cussler debacle of recent years. On the other hand, I heard that J.K. Rowling was able to exercise considerable control over the later Potter films. Funny, if Tolkien had survived and held on to his rights, I'll bet he could have cut a very strong deal for the films. I wonder what that might have looked like.

Anyway, Hollywood has little respect for writers in general, screenwriters included. In fact we're about to see a strike that's motivated at least in part by that fact.

Of course, no one's holding a gun to any author's head to force him or her to sell their movie rights. But that filthy Hollywood lucre is soooo much more, well, lucrative than the comparatively puny payouts that most authors earn that many are happy to cash in and let the filmmakers do what they will.

[davem]

Originally Posted by Mister Underhill

In this case, Pullman's right -- authors rarely have much creative input beyond token gestures. There are a few big dogs who attempt to negotiate more creative control, but even with a contract things don't always work out -- just look at the whole Clive Cussler debacle of recent years. On the other hand, I heard that J.K. Rowling was able to exercise considerable control over the later Potter films. Funny, if Tolkien had survived and held on to his rights, I'll bet he could have cut a very strong deal for the films. I wonder what that might have looked like.
.

It seems many (most?) novelists write with a movie adaptation of the work in mind, & hope the film rights will be sold as a matter of course. Pullman himself in a recent interview about the movie for Empire magazine said he had always had Nicole Kidman in mind as Mrs Coulter. Pullman has had other novels of his adapted for TV - the BBC have done a couple - so I'm assuming that he has an adaptation in mind from the start, in which case he obviously wouldn't have a problem with his works being 'adapted' for the screen.

Tolkien, I assume, never wrote with any thought of a movie in mind - an author like Pullman can include the most fantastical elements/creatures/settings in his work & know that they can be put on screen. Tolkien was writing in a period when a work like LotR could not have made it to the screen (not as live action) in a convincing way. This alone says to me that Tolkien was writing LotR with no thought of a movie adaptation entering his head. Hence, Pullman is writing a book which he hopes to see adapted & which he knows cannot (particularly the religious/anti-religious elements) be turned into a movie without major changes.

What's interesting to me about Pullman's approach here is that in numerous interviews he's stated that he's 'using fantasy to undermine fantasy' that he 'wishes he could write contemporary novels', etc. & implies that the 'fantastical' elements are secondary to the underlying philosophy & the 'deep questions'. However, he seems in this interview to be perfectly happy for that 'underlying philosophy' & those 'deep questions' to be ignored & replaced by a two hour sfx fest. The death of God won't make it to the screen but the armoured polar bears will.

This last point is central to me. Pullman attacks Tolkien for not asking the 'deep questions' but he himself will happily see the 'deep questions' he asks, & the philosophy he espouses, cast away or turned into its opposite. Chris Weitz, in the same Empire feature has stated that the movie will still attack 'totalitarianism', etc, etc. But what we have, in the end, is a writer who claims the intellectual high ground but is happy to see the 'intellectual' dimension of his work twisted beyond recognition in order to have Nicole Kidman playing Mrs Coulter on screen.

[Hookbill the Goomba]

I read the first of His Dark Materials with no real knowledge of who the author was or what his agenda was. By the end of the first and the beginning of the second book I had a pretty good idea of where he was coming from. Perhaps it is naive of me to, but I slowly began to imagine the books not as a story but as a guy stood on a box shouting about how terrible the Church is. I think there is always a problem with writing a story with an ulterior motive which is where Narnia falters in my opinion. I still find the story enjoyable and will read them again and again. But it is a difficult thing to try and get across a message you feel passionately about without being a little overt in its delivery. You fear the risk of being too subtle with what you see as important.

Tolkien approaches the 'deep questions' in the right way, I think. As Davem pointed out, what people assume to be the 'deep questions' (Is there a God? Which one should we worship? and the rest) were not, in his opinion, the best questions to ask. Like the Zen Monk who thought he had found the ultimate question when he asked 'Who am I?' only to be surprised by the reply from within, 'Who's asking?'
By not directly answering the questions of morality or of an afterlife, Tolkien does something brilliant, he leaves it open to more questions. This makes Tolkien's questions much deeper. They are not simply the acquisition of facts, but a search that the reader, if he or she has a mind to, must wrestle with and think about. It is not simply the authors opinion (although that will come into it) but you are open to disagree. To explain; from a point of morality you cannot say that each character always makes the right decision. Sam's prejudice against Gollum could be seen as either a defect or as an insight given later events. You could also see Frodo's trust of Gollum as blindness or kindness born out of the hope to change him. Tolkien seems to question both stances in the story as it plays out.

One must always remember that Tolkien's world is an imaginary one. Although there may be similarities in behaviour or actions to historical, mythical or Biblical events, it is not simply a re-telling of them. It is Tolkien's story and he no doubt wanted his own imagination to play a large roll in the creation of Middle Earth. This doesn't mean there won't be simelarities, but these can only go so far. The fact that the elves always look back on their ancient heroes and the men on their fatherly figures, we cannot automatically assume that such people are Beowulf, or Abraham or someone, they are not. They are their own characters. It may be that the later characters regard these figures in the same light as one may regard Abraham or Beowulf if you happen to believe in them. The same goes for Eru, in my opinion. The point is not if he is God, but how the characters react to him and his work. As George MacDonald said "Attitudes are more important than facts."

In Pullman's work the focus is on disrupting a system he doesn't like. I have no problem with that, people do it all the time. But he criticizes Lewis for doing pretty much the same thing from a different angle. Two armies may critizies one another, I suppose, and be annoyed when they both use similar tactics, but they cannot criticize the tactics because they themselves are using them. This is where Pullman's argument falters, I think. He dislikes Lewis trying to get a message across through his story, yet this is precisely what he is doing.

[davem]

Originally Posted by Hookbill the Goomba

I read the first of His Dark Materials with no real knowledge of who the author was or what his agenda was. By the end of the first and the beginning of the second book I had a pretty good idea of where he was coming from. Perhaps it is naive of me to, but I slowly began to imagine the books not as a story but as a guy stood on a box shouting about how terrible the Church is. I think there is always a problem with writing a story with an ulterior motive which is where Narnia falters in my opinion. I still find the story enjoyable and will read them again and again. But it is a difficult thing to try and get across a message you feel passionately about without being a little overt in its delivery. You fear the risk of being too subtle with what you see as important.

And yet, when it comes to the changes which Pullman is 'happy to accept' in a movie adaptation its this very message he's prepared to see downplayed, or thrown out. In the book he shouts it too loudly, but for the movie he's prepared to see it silenced. And let's face it the only reason that message will not make it to the screen is because New Line fear a backlash from the Bible belt. I'm pretty sure that Tolkien would have made the opposite choice - if it was a choice between keeping the message & losing (for example) the Fell Beasts, or keeping the Fell Beasts & sacrificing the message he would have gone for the former - or raised a big stink. He certainly wouldn't have just smiled & said 'Well, movies are different.' If Pullman's target is God - & it is, because, for all he now claims he's attacking 'organised religion'/totalitarianism in the book, his 'final solution' is to kill God off & build the 'Republic of Heaven' - then he should stand his ground & demand that theme remains central to the movie adaptation. If he is so willing to have that message thrown out then it says to me that actually he doesn't care that much about it - for all his shouting of it in the book.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Pullman has been doing this for years, although in earlier comments he's called Narnia both more 'serious' but also much worse- I believe he used the word 'fascist.' All because, of course, Tollers and Jack don't share Pullman's nasty little world-view.

What struck me about HDM was how fundamentally *adolescent* its thesis was- that all good would derive from sexual liberation and casting off authority. Nietzche for bratty teenagers.

Indeed there's something of the bratty teenager in Pullman's habit of slagging off the giants of his profession.

[gorthaur_cruel]

Yes, well...this is the guy who said that "'The Lord of the Rings' is fundamentally an infantile work"

Apparently from some article in the New Yorker some years ago:

Pullman loves Oxford, but he’s far from donnish. His books have been likened to those of J. R. R. Tolkien, another alumnus, but he scoffs at the notion of any resemblance. “ ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is fundamentally an infantile work,” he said. “Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He’s interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.” When it comes to “The Chronicles of Narnia,” by C. S. Lewis, Pullman’s antipathy is even more pronounced. Although he likes Lewis’s criticism and quotes it surprisingly often, he considers the fantasy series “morally loathsome.” In a 1998 essay for the Guardian, entitled “The Dark Side of Narnia,” he condemned “the misogyny, the racism, the sado-masochistic relish for violence that permeates the whole cycle.” He reviled Lewis for depicting the character Susan Pevensie’s sexual coming of age—suggested by her interest in “nylons and lipstick and invitations”—as grounds for exclusion from paradise. In Pullman’s view, the “Chronicles,” which end with the rest of the family’s ascension to a neo-Platonic version of Narnia after they die in a railway accident, teach that “death is better than life; boys are better than girls . . . and so on. There is no shortage of such nauseating drivel in Narnia, if you can face it.”

At one point, Pullman and I stopped by the Eagle and Child, an Oxford pub where Lewis and Tolkien used to meet regularly with a group of literary friends. (They called themselves the Inklings.) A framed photograph of Lewis’s jowly face smiled down on us as we talked. In person, Pullman isn’t quite as choleric as he sometimes comes across in his newspaper essays. When challenged, he listens carefully and considerately, and occasionally tempers his ire. “The ‘Narnia’ books are a real wrestle with real things,” he conceded. As much as he dislikes the answers Lewis arrives at, he said that he respects “the struggle that he’s undergoing as he searches for the answers. There’s hope for Lewis. Lewis could be redeemed.” Not Tolkien, however: the “Rings” series, he declared, is “just fancy spun candy. There’s no substance to it.”

Seems to me he's saying "My writings are good, and for real adults. Anybody who likes Tolkien is immature." Seems really snobbish to me, as if he knows he's right, and how close other authors' opinions are to his is his measurement of "quality"

I understand he isn't too fond of Tolkien or Lewis, but it seems to me plain rude to call their works "nauseating drivel", "infantile", or "fancy spun candy".

[Sir Kohran]

Pullman is the Noel Gallagher of literature, constantly criticising pretty much everyone else in the business.

As to the 'Republic Of Heaven'...it's his dream; Pullman's idea of a perfect world - an atheist republic without a single ruler - a world without God. Personally I find the idea and his portrayal of Christianity revolting but then free speech must be maintained.

As for the movie versions of HDM...I don't expect much. It'll be like the Potter or Narnia movies, with plenty of special effects and 'drama' with no real reason to watch again after the initial view. I might be dragged along by my family at Christmas or something but I think that's as far as it'll go.


Tolkien's view on 'God' is interesting in that it is not what you'd expect of a Christian writer. He was a devout Catholic and indeed, the characters in his book show very Christian outlooks and themes (temptation, pity, etc.). However I've always found it interesting that Eru, regardless of his boundless power and influence, is, to the people in the story, almost non-existent. None of the characters ever pray to him; in fact he is not even mentioned once in all of LOTR. As it is the only 'faith in a higher power' is in the Valar (angels, not God). Eru does little or nothing to stop the spread of evil in his perfect world, stepping in only once to remove Morgoth from Arda - and only once much of the world has been ruined and corrupted (also note that Eru does nothing to help the world after this). Some might argue that he caused Gollum to slip - but this is never confirmed by the text (there is in fact the slightly chilling possibility that it was literally just a random slip - that Middle-Earth was saved by accident). Tolkien's portrayal of God is surprising - Eru is not loving, or even present. Eru doesn't seem to care for his world.