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Alison Piepmeier

My life is all about bringing down the patriarchy. I write books and articles about feminism, and I also teach and direct the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston....

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The Golden Compass

Alison Piepmeier

One of the great things about the Christmas holiday is that I have time to consume some of the pop culture stuff that I often miss during the school year.  Last week I saw the film version of The Golden Compass, and I have some thoughts.

The Golden Compass is the first book of the His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman.  I love these books.  Love them, love them.  If you haven’t read them, walk away from your computer and go read them right now.  Only after reading the books should you go to the film.

I doubt that your life will be much the worse if you miss the Golden Compass film, but I found it entirely entertaining.  I admit that it’s not good, but it was visually beautiful, and there were parts of it that I found to be really fine adaptations of the book.  Nicole Kidman is perfect as the beautiful, evil, complex Mrs. Coulter.  I also really liked Dakota Blue Fanning as Lyra Belacqua--she did her very much as I imagined her, although she was perhaps a bit meaner and dirtier in my mind.  I loved the bear battle and watching the witches fly in with their cloud pine branches and their scrappy black clothing.  And I have a somewhat irrational attachment to Hester, the rabbit daemon of Texan aeronaut Lee Scoresby, who is often described in the books with her ears flattened against her back, her face appropriately inscrutable.  She had a very small part to play in this movie, but I thought Kathy Bates voiced her beautifully.

There’s something very emotional about seeing a book I love made into a movie.  I can either feel betrayed--as some of my friends have felt by this movie--or deeply satisfied.  I felt satisfied by this one--not, I’ll stress again, because it’s an outstanding movie on its own terms, but because it felt like I was enjoying other people’s homage to the book and the characters.