Tony Watkins » Literature

Twilight – True Blood and True Love

Tony Watkins — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 22:40:25 +0000

This is a repost to coincide with the cinema release of The Twilight Sage: Breaking Dawn (Part 1)

This article was first published on Culturewatch.org. © Tony Watkins, 2010.

Vampires are currently one of the biggest phenomena in popular culture. They are central to hit television series like True Blood, Being Human and The Vampire Diaries, but leading the pack are Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books and their film adaptations. These are just the most obvious examples of a recent surge in interest after Buffy the Vampire Slayer a decade ago.

But of course the popularity of vampires in fiction goes back to John Polidori’s short story TheVampyre (1819) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Since then the folk-tale origins of vampires have been overlaid with all kinds of newer traditions, including fangs, sensitivity to sunlight and having no reflection.

Meyer gives them some new twists. Her vampires are not afraid of being in the sunlight, except when humans are present, because the light reveals their ‘true nature’ – not ugly monsters but possessing a beautiful glittering skin. A more important variation is that Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), the vampire hero of these stories, comes from a family that has learned to control its lust for human blood. They call themselves ‘vegetarians’, meaning that they feed off animals, not humans.

This takes us to the heart of the tension that pervades The Twilight Saga: deep-seated physical urges are at odds with an ethical sense that they should be kept in check. Edward and his family struggle with instincts that could reduce them to the monstrous behaviour of other vampires.

Bella (Kristen Stewart), the saga’s human heroine, experiences similar inner conflict, although she doesn’t have the same strength of will to resist her longings. She is completely infatuated with Edward and will risk anything to be with him, despite how obvious it is that a human-vampire romance will have bad consequences.

Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said we are driven to reproduce, so ‘ the lover shuts his eyes to all the qualities repugnant to him, overlooks everything, misjudges everything, and blinds himself for ever to the object of his passion.’ Bella certainly demonstrates exactly this in the first film, insisting that she doesn’t care that Edward is a monster who has killed people.

But although the films don’t make it very explicit, there must be more to their love than mere animal magnetism. If not, these movies would follow most others about teen love and make the relationship sexual (that’s coming, but not until the fourth film). Vampire stories have long been a metaphor for sexual desire and gratification, so the fact that Edward and Bella abstain from sex, and he from drinking her blood, is counter-cultural. It’s one of many ways in which Meyer’s Mormon background shapes her narrative.

Bella and Edward are each convinced that the other is their soul mate, that they could never love another person as truly and deeply. They want to be together forever, just like any young couple that has fallen madly in love. As far as Bella is concerned, the solution is easy: all Edward needs to do is bite her and make her like him. But he is reluctant to oblige, and with good cause: to do so would, he believes, destroy her soul and condemn her to hell. At the end of the second book, New Moon, he finally agrees to her request, but decides to wait for a few years.

The main attraction of The Twilight Saga may well be the brooding, unfulfilled longing for an idealised, apparently unobtainable lover. But why the wider preoccupation with vampires? Perhaps part of the answer is that when our instinctive longing to be connected with spiritual reality is obstructed by the prevailing secularism of our culture, it still comes creeping out of the shadows in some misshapen way. It seems that we can’t stop telling, or lapping up, stories about the supernatural or spiritual, and about humans becoming immortal, even if through terrible means.

The love that Edward and Bella yearn to share, once she sorts out the place of werewolf Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) in her affections, is what we all long for: exclusive, intimate and forever. It’s how we feel true love should be because it echoes precisely what we were made for: an exclusive, intimate, eternal relationship with God himself.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Tony Watkins — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:20:42 +0000

This is the article on the book of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows which I wrote for Culturewatch. Warning: contains major plot spoilers.

Daniel Radcliffe as Harry in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2”, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures Copyright: © 2011 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Harry Potter publishing rights © J.K.R. Harry Potter characters, names and related indicia are Trademarks of and © Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

Ten years after Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone blasted onto the best-seller lists, J.K. Rowling has finally brought the series to a spectacular and moving conclusion with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It is one of the most satisfying books in the series, though not without its problems. Rowling has resolved many of the earlier mysteries and tied up many loose ends. Yet at the same time she has wisely refrained from bringing everything to a neat and tidy resolution; there are still mysteries – even some new ones introduced in the seventh book.

Since the confirmation of the final volume’s title, fans have feverishly speculated as to what the ‘Deathly Hallows’ are. I’m not sure whether to feel relieved or disappointed that I didn’t spend long hours poring over the first six books and debating possible clues and theories with other fans online. Looking over some of their speculations now, I’ve seen many extremely well-thought out and accurate guesses about the nature of the horcruxes, but nothing that comes close to the identity of the Deathly Hallows. Given the sheer number of ideas on this in cyberspace, it would be surprising if someone somewhere hasn’t made a lucky guess about some aspect of the Hallows, but it’s largely a new piece of the puzzle that we haven’t been given much inkling of previously.

Although each of the three Hallows plays a vital role within the plot development (one of which we are very familiar with since the first book), we never quite see them brought together to achieve their full power. And it’s a good thing too, because we learn that they would give their bearer immense power: they would make him or her the ‘Master of Death’ (p. 333). The temptation to gain this power had proved too much even for someone as great as Dumbledore. Although Harry spends a considerable proportion of this book feeling resentful that his old headmaster had kept secrets back from him, Dumbledore’s wisdom is proved right once again. Harry needs to know about the Hallows in order to achieve his ultimate goal of destroying Voldemort, but he must not be tempted to put all his effort into acquiring the two which he doesn’t possess. It’s questionable whether or not he would beat the Dark Lord in the race to find one of them – and to lose would make finding and destroying the remaining horcruxes immeasurably more difficult. Perhaps just as seriously, Harry would find the lure of such immense power impossible to resist. Not only has Dumbledore kept Harry ignorant of their full potential, he magically locks one of them away until such time as Harry must use it, once most of the horcruxes have been destroyed.

It is interesting to compare the three strongest wizards of the series with the tale of the three brothers who first received the gifts from Death. The first brother, ‘who was a combative man, asked for a wand more powerful than any in existence: a wand that must always win duels for its owner, a wand worthy of a wizard who had conquered Death’ (p. 331). Little surprise that this is the Hallow which the violent Voldemort desires so deeply: he is determined to possess a wand that Harry cannot resist. He plans to destroy his nemesis and live for ever. The second brother has interesting echoes of Dumbledore: ‘an arrogant man [who] . . . asked for the power to recall others from Death’ (p. 331). It is a surprise to discover that Dumbledore had been an extremely arrogant young wizard, though we know he has some dark secret from the Half Blood Prince. And it seems that a little of that arrogance had stayed with him. Dumbledore acknowledges how wrong he was to desire the Hallows, describing them as, ‘a desperate man’s dream! . . . Real and dangerous, and a lure for fools. . . . And I was such a fool. . . . Master of death, Harry, master of Death! Was I better, ultimately, than Voldemort? . . . I, too, sought a way to conquer death, Harry’ (p. 571). Harry rightly protests that Dumbledore had not wanted to conquer death in the same way as Voldemort. He had, after all, wanted to right the terrible wrong of his sister’s death by bringing her back from death. Nevertheless, he wanted the power for his own ends, not for the good of others. And he ought to have known that what he wanted was impossible, from the story of the second brother if for no other reason. Rowling insisted years ago that one of her rules for the books was, ‘Magic cannot bring dead people back to life. . . . there is no returning once you’re properly dead.’¹

‘The youngest brother was the humblest and also the wisest of the brothers, and he did not trust Death. So he asked for something that would enable him to go forth from that place without being followed by Death. And death, most unwillingly, handed over his own Cloak of Invisibility’ (p. 331). There is an obvious connection with Harry, the bearer of the Cloak. Harry does not consider himself to be wise – he has always looked to Dumbledore for wisdom – but, as Jesus said, ‘wisdom is proved right by all her children’ (Luke 7:35). Harry has learnt well from his mentor and now, with extremely limited information and an immense challenge, he chooses the right course of action – not the risky race for the Elder Wand but the annihilation of Voldemort’s soul fragments.

That these three central objects are related to mastery over death is not surprising, given the preoccupation with death throughout the series. Rowling acknowledges that, ‘My books are largely about death. They open with the death of Harry’s parents. There is Voldemort’s obsession with conquering death and his quest for immortality at any price, the goal of anyone with magic. I so understand why Voldemort wants to conquer death. We’re all frightened of it.’² Harry lives because of his mother’s self-sacrifice on his behalf – a magic that was beyond Voldemort’s comprehension – and he lives in the shadow of that event; the Dark Lord will stop at nothing to achieve immortality, including murdering people like Cedric in Goblet of Fire; and significant characters die because that’s what happens in war. Rowling’s treatment of death is not callous or morbid: she deals with it as a fact of life, the most unfortunate of all facts, sometimes coming with a growing sense of inevitability and other times coming quickly and unexpectedly. Death can come as a natural end to life or as a deeply unnatural end as a consequence of great evil. It is something that J.K. Rowling has had to come to terms to in her own life, but she still considers that the death of a loved one is her greatest fear.

The most significant death is, of course, Harry’s. Not that he quite dies, as Dumbledore makes clear in their touching meeting almost-but-not-quite beyond the grave:

‘But you’re dead,’ said Harry. ‘Oh, yes,’ said Dumbledore matter-of-factly. ‘Then . . . I’m dead too?’ ‘Ah,’ said Dumbledore, smiling still more broadly. ‘That is the question, isn’t it? On the whole, dear boy, I think not.’ They looked at each other, the old man still beaming. ‘Not?’ repeated Harry. ‘Not,’ said Dumbledore. ’But . . .’ Harry raised his hand instinctively towards the lightning scar. It did not seem to be there. ‘But I should have died – I didn’t defend myself! I meant to let him kill me!’ ’And that,’ said Dumbledore, ‘will, I think, have made all the difference.’

Harry’s offering of himself as a sacrifice in order to save others is a profoundly moving moment in the book. It has a particular resonance for Christians because of its potent echo of Jesus Christ willingly giving himself over to forces of evil which wanted to destroy him. In fact, Voldemort only destroyed the horcrux in Harry, but it nevertheless took Harry into some kind of intermediate state (an echo of Neo at Mobil Av station in The Matrix Revolutions) where that he was able to choose whether to return to life or to embrace death. His return to life (having apparently suffered no ill effects of his near death experience) can, I think, be seen as some kind of resurrection, or at least a close analogy to it. Until Rowling speaks about this in interviews, it is difficult to be sure whether or not she was deliberately making this connection with Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection (after all, death and resurrection are not unique to Christian faith). Is it simply coincidental that death’s waiting room is King’s Cross? My guess is that Rowling has been more like J.R.R. Tolkien than C.S. Lewis. Tolkien did not set out to write any Christian allegories, yet his Christian worldview shaped much of what he wrote, whereas Lewis was very deliberate in his construction of the allegories in The Chronicles of Narnia. Rowling shares the same Christian worldview, saying that she believes in God and attends church for more than weddings and christenings, though she also says, ‘like Graham Greene, my faith is sometimes about if my faith will return. It’s important to me.’³

Whether deliberate or not, Rowling has created an allegory that powerfully illustrates the central truth of the Christian faith (arguably a better one than Lewis’s in some respects). ‘Greater love has no one than this,’ said Jesus, ‘to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’ (John 15:13, TNIV). This is what Harry knows he must do. He packs away his wand and the invisibility cloak (remember the third brother in the tale finally took off the cloak so that he could greet Death as a friend) and steps forward, surrendering himself to Voldemort’s malevolence. By then returning to life, he has broken Voldemort’s power, not only over himself but over those for whom he died. His ‘resurrection’ encourages and empowers his followers, and enables him to finally destroy the great enemy (in fact, the enemy destroys himself because his power is reflected back at himself). It is, of course, like all analogies and allegories, imperfect. Harry himself is a very real human character, with faults and failings. He dies to rescue his friends and all good people from a great evil, but he does not die to rescue them from their sin, their rebellion against God, since God is almost entirely absent from the fictional world of Rowling’s imagination. Dumbledore recognises that he was not worthy to bear the three Hallows: ‘I was fit to possess only the meanest of them, the least extraordinary’ (p. 576). Harry also recognises that he cannot become Master of Death, and drops the resurrection stone hoping that it will not be found. But Jesus, in the real, historical world, died and rose again to become Master over death, breaking its power over those who trust him and promising, not a vague, shadowy, temporary return to the world of the living as the resurrection stone brought, but a real, physical and eternal resurrection. Rowling quotes from 1 Corinthians 15:26: ‘The last enemy to be destroyed is death.’ Harry is no longer afraid of death, the Dark Lord and the Death eaters are defeated, but Jesus Christ alone destroys death itself.

Christopher Lydon, ‘J.K. Rowling interview transcript’, The Connection (WBUR Radio), 12 October 1999, quoted on www.accio-quote.com ↩
J.K. Rowling, interviewed by Geordie Greig, ‘There would be so much to tell her . . .’, Tatler,10 January 2006, p. 130; scanned copy at gallery.the-leaky-cauldron.org/picture/2464 ↩
Interview with Geordie Greig, ‘There would be so much to tell her . . .‘ ↩

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Seeing through other eyes – C.S. Lewis

Tony Watkins — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 21:50:21 +0000

I love this quote from C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism (1961), which is easily applicable to film as well as literature:

This, so far as I can see, is the specific value or good of literature as Logos; it admits us to experiences other than our own. They are not, any more than our personal experiences, all equally worth having. Some, as we say, ‘interest’ us more than others. The causes of this interest are naturally extremely various and differ from one man to another; it may be the typical (and we say ‘How true!’) or the abnormal (and we say ‘How strange!’); it may the beautiful, the terrible, the awe-inspiring, the pathetic, the comic, or the merely piquant. Literature gives the entrée to them all. Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through the eyes of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. (pp. 139-141)

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Jeffrey Overstreet on the how of storytelling

Tony Watkins — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 15:36:18 +0000

Encounter 10: Jeffrey Overstreet on the how of storytelling from International Arts Movement on Vimeo.

Jeffrey is a great, insightful Christian film critic whose perspectives I value highly. This lecture was given at the International Arts Movement Encounter 10.

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Interview with Corey Olsen, the Tolkien Professor

Tony Watkins — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 09:04:54 +0000

Colin Duriez, the most knowledgeable person on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien I know, interviews ‘the Tolkien Professor’, Corey Olsen, for Festival in the Shire Journal. Here’s one question which particularly interests me. You can read the rest here, but you’ll need to go to the Festival in the Shire home page to access anything else in this splendid resource for Tolkien fans.

2. Why does the medieval world have such an appeal today? How much is the appeal of Tolkien part of this wider medieval appeal?

On the one hand, I would certainly say, as I just said above, that Tolkien does tend to inspire or nourish an interest in medieval things in his readers. There are also indirect effects, as well: Tolkien’s role in helping to bring “fantastic literature” back into the mainstream in modern culture has paved the way not only for the fantasy genre in literature but for the fantastic (and the archaic) in modern films.

But the question of the appeal of medieval stories and figures in modern pop culture is a rather more complicated one. The popular enjoyment of movies involving a medieval story or a medieval setting is very different from the sympathy with medieval literature that reading Tolkien can help to build. I spoke above of the big gap between the medieval and the modern worldviews; almost all medieval films are firmly entrenched in a modern way of looking at the world. Modern audiences aren’t really encountering the medieval world in any substantive way in most of these productions; they are encountering the modern world in fancy dress (or, as is more common in recent films, covered in mud).

And yet, there is clearly something that makes these stories (especially those of King Arthur and Robin Hood) compelling, or they would not be so continually retold. One factor I would point to is the emphasis on heroism. Medieval stories are attractive because the heroes have fewer resources at their disposal. The greatest warrior is the one who is strongest, most skilled, most resourceful, and most clever, rather than just the one with the biggest gun or the most bombs. Personal achievement looms larger when you remove the technology. But Aragorn defying the armies of Saruman from the walls of the Hornburg or unfurling his royal banner at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields has a lot more in common with medieval heroes than does any film character I’ve ever seen.

via festivalintheshire.com

Posted via email from Tony Watkins

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A Hunger for Truth and Justice

Tony Watkins — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 14:19:13 +0000

Stieg Larsson’s Crime novels

Interview with Tony Watkins by Christian Bensel, 23 March 2010

The bestselling Millennium Trilogy features cases of mass murderers, human trafficking and government conspiracies. 27 million copies have been sold in over 40 countries according to theEconomist (March 22, 2010), making the late Stieg Larsson the second most sold author worldwide in 2008 (after Khaled Hosseini).Today, his books still rank in the top selling lists of Europe.

Christian Bensel asked writer and cultural commentator Tony Watkins on the significance of crime novels and the message behind Stieg Larsson’s trilogy.

Tony, you seem to spend a lot of time in cinemas or reading great book – and then thinking about them.

Not enough!

What to you hope to achieve?

Part of the work of Damaris is to equip the church to understand the culture that we are in. Culturewatch itself and much of my work is more focussed on helping people who are not Christians to begin to think more deeply about the books, the films and the television that they are already watching. And to realise that they actually raise very fundamental issues such as morality, happiness, freedom, love, spirituality, identity, religion, politics. These issues are at the very centre of any narrative. And the Bible and Christians have a lot to say about them.

Do crime novels also raise those big life questions?

Yes, absolutely, I think there is an argument for saying that crime novels are the fictional form which takes the hardest look at where society is at the moment and raises the biggest questions over the dark side of human nature.

What makes crime novels so appealing to European readers?

Crime fiction nearly always has a strong narrative drive and it engenders feelings of mystery and intrigue, but also of fear, because of the possibility of what’s out there. Crime fiction presents us with the dark underbelly of our society, with the fear of what can happen with us. It helps us to face those fears in the same way as fairy tales did.

Does the success of crime novels also show a fundamental hunger for justice, for truth?

Absolutely, yes. Those are the two big drives of crime fiction, that we want justice to be achieved at the end. There is a longing for justice. And crime fiction is all about the pursuit of truth and the investigation of truth and the marshalling of evidence.

Is that a sign that society isn’t as postmodern or relativist as we sometimes think?

I think that’s true. A lot of postmodernism happens at a fairly intellectual level and deep down most people still keep that longing for truth and justice. Cracks are appearing in the relativist paradigm.

Stieg Larsson must have had a passion for justice – his friend described him as a sort of Don Quixote, trying to save the world. How can we incite Christians not to give up on society?

I don’t know really because I think that Christians ought to know enough already to know what to do. The problem of how do you move somebody’s will is very difficult. Make them all read Stieg Larsson perhaps.

In your article “Moral Climate” you ask questions about the foundations of ethics: “How are we to say that Nils Bjurman’s sexual treatment of Lisbeth Salander is wrong, and that Blomkvist’s sexual behaviour is right?” But the character of Blomkvist never uses force in relationships and thinks about satisfying other’s desires. He sees himself as a tool. Bjurman uses the other person as a tool. There’s a clear difference between the two. Isn’t that enough of a distinction?

The fact that Blomkvist has sexual relationships with three people in the first volume alone means that he is not ultimately concerned about the needs of any one of them, because that would require a commitment that he doesn’t go off having sex with other partners. He’s not really meeting somebody’s needs.

What basis does Stieg Larsson have for his morality? A lot of his morality is good morality. But I don’t think that he has a solid basis for it. He is an inheritor of the Christian tradition within Western Europe that has given us this strong moral framework and there are many people like Larsson, humanists, people like Richard Dawkins who live in the benefits of that Christian tradition and yet want to deny the basis of it. They don’t realise that they’ve actually taken the foundations out from under their feet and are left with no secure place to stand

Even if people have good morals – no matter what they base them on – where can they find the strength to not exploit and violate others?

What does drive Blomkvist and what does drive Larsson is their intuitive sense of right and wrong. It is deep, deep within us. For a Christian, the strength to do good also comes from the work of the Holy Spirit within us who clarifies that intuitive moral sense and brings it to the surface, and provides an inner dynamic to make acting on it possible.

Tony Watkins is a speaker, writer and editor, working mainly with Damaris. His main responsibility is as Managing Editor ofCulturewatch.org. Tony is the author of Focus: The Art and Soul of Cinema (2007) and Dark Matter: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Philip Pullman (2004), co-author of Back in Time: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Doctor Who (2005) and a contributor to a number of other books including Matrix Revelations: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to the Matrix Trilogy (2003) and the Talking About books, of which he is the series editor. He also teaches “Prophets” on the Bible&Culture course.

Download the full version of the interview .

Posted via email from Tony Watkins

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The failure of His Dark Materials film trilogy

Tony Watkins — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 07:51:22 +0000

I stumbled across this yesterday, having missed it when it was published in The Guardian last year:

The actor Sam Elliott, who starred in the 2007 adaptation of the first novel, Northern Lights (the film was called The Golden Compass), said earlier this week that books two and three were not being filmed due to a successful campaign by America’s religious right. The Golden Compass grossed more than £230m around the world, but was less successful in America, where the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights called for a boycott on the grounds that Pullman’s books introduced children to atheism.

Pullman, 63, told the Western Mail: “If Sam is right then I am very disappointed because it obviously would have been very good to have seen the other two films made.”

Catholic League leader Bill Donahue has said he is “delighted” by the effectiveness of his religious boycott – “I knew if we could hurt the box office receipts here, it might put the brakes on the next movie.”

Pullman said of Donahue’s triumphalism: “It’s disgusting, but only the sort of behaviour I expect of these people. It’s rubbish [that the Golden Compass introduces children to atheism].”

He added that he was particularly disappointed because the film adaptation of Northern Lights finished about three quarters of the way into the book. “So there were a number of very important scenes that were shot and were very good, but we didn’t see them in the film.

“Their justification was that they were going to use the scenes they’d shot, but at the start of the second film. It sort of made sense, but if what Sam Elliott says is true we won’t see those scenes.”

via guardian.co.uk

This is not why the His Dark Materials film franchise has stalled. It’s because Chris Weitz – the man who almost begged for the chance to helm it – made a lousy film. It is visually stunning with excellent effects and a stirring (if over the top) score, and some of the performances are great (Nicole Kidman and Sam Elliott are spot on). But Weitz mangled the story, alienating many fans and confusing people watching it without having read the book. He shouldn’t have binned Tom Stoppard’s original screenplay, which I’ve seen and was rather good.

The single biggest problem was reversing the order of two major incidents from the second half of the book: the battle at Bolvangar and Lyra’s encounter with the bears on Svalbard. Weitz evidently wanted an exciting fight finale, but in doing so he made the scenes on Bolvangar utterly irrelevant, with no motivation and no consequences to speak of. I understand his reasoning for holding the key climactic scenes at the end of the book for the beginning of the second film, but I still think it was absolutely the wrong move. Keeping them in would give the film the darker edge which makes the end of the book so compelling.

However much Bill Donahue congratulates himself for an effective boycott, I seriously doubt whether it hit the US box office hard – boycotts often generate quite a buzz and prompt people to watch a film they would otherwise have overlooked. And that certainly wouldn’t have hit the international box office. No, it was a damp squib because people just didn’t like it. And nor did the critics – it scraped just 42% on Rotten Tomatoes. The bottom line is that its bottom line was just not good enough – in a recession-constrained film industry it would have needed to make much more money for New Line to run the risk of letting Weitz loose on The Subtle Knife.

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Reinventing Jesus

Tony Watkins — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 20:37:39 +0000

This article was first published on Culturewatch. © Tony Watkins.

When I interviewed Philip Pullman, I found him genial, generous and engaging. He has a sharp mind, a clever wit, and he’s a brilliant writer. He has justifiably been acclaimed as one of Britain’s finest writers, having won several awards including the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the internationally prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial award, as well as receiving a CBE. Some years back, The Independent declared that Pullman is ‘capable of lighting up the dullest day or greyest spirit with the incandescence of his imagination’.

He’s also capable of making Christians incandescent with indignation at some of the things he says. His best-selling His Dark Materials trilogy was very negative about the church, which irked some. It also contained an incident in which a being claiming to be God is killed, which really raised some hackles. Pullman also made some particularly outspoken remarks in a couple of interviews. One of the most quoted is ‘I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief,’ though he admits he was out to wind up the reporter. He told Bryan Appleyard in The Times recently that ‘I’d be a complete idiot if I tried to undermine Christianity. It would mean undermining what I am as well.’

It would undermine what Pullman is in the sense that he has always insisted that he is a ‘Christian atheist and even more particularly, a Church of England atheist. And very specifically, a 1662 Book of Common Prayer atheist. I can’t escape these influences on my background, and I would not wish to.’

So, as Rowan Williams pointed out in an event at the National Theatre, Pullman was surprisingly quiet about Jesus in His Dark Materials. Pullman promised him that he would make this the subject of his next book. Then Canongate invited Pullman to contribute this volume to their Myths series. He went back to the Gospels and read them in three different versions (the Authorised Version, the New English Bible and the New Revised Standard Version). He also re-read Acts and Paul’s letters, and was struck by how often Paul refers to ‘Christ’ rather than to ‘Jesus’:

Christ is an addition; he comes later. I reread Paul, and I counted 30 occasions when he refers to Jesus but 150-plus when he refers to Christ. Paul wasn’t interested in Jesus, he was interested in Christ — in the God part, not the man part. Paul was an incomparable genius, literary and administrative, whose view of this entity he called Jesus Christ, strongly skewed towards the Christ part, is what the church has been founded on ever since.

So he decided to rework the story of Jesus to focus on this perceived tension by making them separate characters. In his version, Mary gives birth to twins: Jesus and a much weaker boy, who becomes known as Christ. Their lives remain intertwined, yet go on very different courses.

Once again, it appears that Pullman is out to shock. Even the title seems calculated to inflame Christians, and it’s surely no accident that it’s being published in Easter week – though that is Canongate’s decision, not his. The back cover of the book perhaps tries to defuse some of the attacks by declaring in big, bold letters, ‘This is a story.’ But perhaps even that is slightly double-edged, suggesting that the source material is also a story and not necessarily a true one. It also points to one of Pullman’s recurring themes: the process of telling stories.

Philip Pullman is, of course, a consummate storyteller. He frequently insists that all he’s doing is telling stories, not trying to preach a message – though I think he introduces a false antithesis, because he clearly does both. This story, though, is a curious thing. To my mind it’s far from Pullman at his best. Sometimes it is a respectful retelling of incidents from the Gospels, and since Pullman has written in a spare, biblical tone, it feels very much like reading a somewhat old-fashioned translation of the Bible, with some extra details. At some other times, the stories are changed considerably, and at times are a complete distortion of what the original texts say.

It is clear that Pullman has done his homework. He cleverly fills in some of the background of the stories, explaining some of the details and suggesting motivations for why people acted in particular ways. It’s also clear that he’s also been reading at least some bits of the Old Testament. But of course, he’s not a Bible scholar, so, unsurprisingly, there are things he gets wrong or doesn’t understand how they fit into the wider context of the Bible or of the culture of the day. He also occasionally draws on non-canonical gospels, particularly the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, despite the fact that this dates from around two centuries after the biblical Gospels.

From the outset, Pullman creates a great deal of ambiguity about the miraculous aspects of the story. Mary is visited by someone claiming to be an angel and told that she will conceive. She clearly believes him and Pullman never says otherwise, but the implication is that Mary is gullible and has been tricked. Nevertheless, when she gives birth in a Bethlehem stable, shepherds come to see the long-awaited Messiah in response to seeing a glowing angel telling them of his birth. Pullman makes no attempt to explain this angel away. Neither does he offer any rationalisation for astrologers arriving from the east in search of one who has been born to be king of the Jews.

As a child, Jesus is a normal, somewhat mischievous boy, while the weakly Christ is irreproachable. Interestingly, Christ performs miracles to rescue Jesus when he is in trouble. When Jesus gets lost in Jerusalem after the Passover, again Christ gets him out of trouble with the priests by giving clever answers.

Pullman has set up certain expectations in the reader about how Christ’s story is going to develop. But he begins to subvert this at Jesus’s baptism, when Jesus is inspired to focus his life on God as John had done. He goes into the wilderness to pray, where he is tempted, not by the devil, but by his brother. Christ wants Jesus to be a messiah figure, doing miracles to win disciples and building a powerful church which could spread throughout the world being a force for good. Jesus flatly rejects Christ’s pragmatism; he is an idealist who preaches the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God.

Christ is a more complex character. On the one hand, he continues to love his brother deeply, though he stays in the background and has no contact with Jesus during his ministry. But on the other hand, he is calculating and manipulative, hungry perhaps to be the power behind the throne when Jesus, as he hopes, establishes an earthly system of churches and structures.

Then he is approached by a mysterious stranger, the identity of whom we never discover. Christ eventually concludes that the stranger is an angel, and he certainly seems to know an awful lot, but Pullman never quite says enough for us to know for sure. The stranger encourages Christ to watch Jesus very carefully and to write everything down for the future. He also urges him to see the spiritual ‘truth’ beyond the sometimes inconvenient historical events.

Pullman’s point is that what we read in the Gospels is not what actually happened. The real historical Jesus – a good, inspiring man, but nothing more – has been smothered by inventions of the early church – in particular the incarnation and the resurrection. This is a well-worn attack on the Gospels – the Jesus of history versus the Christ of faith – though Pullman gives it a provocative new coat of paint. He says, ‘I think my version is much closer to what Jesus would have said. The version in the Gospels is so different from what he said usually.’ It’s a great shame that he evidently has no idea of the very impressive evidence for the reliability of the gospels.

Jesus eventually reaches Gethsemane realising that things are coming to a head and that public opinion is turning against him. And by that point he has lost his faith. He compares himself to the fool who says in his heart, ‘There is no God,’ and says, ‘When the fool prays to you and gets no answer, he decides that God’s great absence means he’s not bloody well there.’ He wonders whether Christ’s dream of a church was right, but revolts against the idea, perceiving that it will lead to abuse of power, cruelty and conquest.

Pullman told Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian,

He is really speaking for me in that section. Of course I don’t condemn speculative thinking, or organising people to help them do good, or setting up hospitals or giving hospitality to travelling strangers or educating people. But we have seen very recently how some aspects of all this can go wrong. People can abuse power.

The greatest excuse in the world is that ‘God told me to do it’: hence the Crusades. Once you are appealing to an authority that can’t be checked, you are doing something dangerous.

This is a familiar theme in Pullman’s work: there is no God; this world is all there is and it’s wonderful; organised religion is a terrible thing which leads inexorably to abuse of power. At least, in The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ he is not as simplistic as he was in His Dark Materials, in that here he does acknowledge the good which the church has done, as well as pointing to its failures.

It’s easy for Christians to get defensive about such attacks on the church, but although Pullman overstates the case, it is true that there have been, and are, abuses of power and authority within church structures. It is a disgrace on the church and it brings the gospel of Jesus Christ into disrepute. But we shouldn’t be surprised, because the church is made up of fallen human beings, who are not always very good at working through the implications of their faith. On the iPhone app of the book, which has both text and audio book as well as extra features, Pullman says, ‘My beliefs are those of Jesus as I have him expressing them in the Garden of Gethsemane. If there is to be a church, it should be a poor church. It should own no property and make no laws.’ He has a point.

Eventually, the stranger seduces Christ into betraying Jesus (Judas is not mentioned), believing that like Abraham, he has to be willing sacrifice the one he loves. He is distraught when he realises what he has done, but for the sake of the bigger story, he agrees to deceiving the disciples into thinking that Jesus has risen from the dead. Once again, Pullman is suggesting that the miraculous is an invention, a deliberate deception combined with gullibility, or at least suggestibility, but not something that could possibly be true.

Much of this is inevitable, given Pullman’s atheism. He comes to the stories already convinced that miracles cannot happen and believing, like the philosopher David Hume, that there cannot ever be enough evidence to establish their truth. However, it is curious that Pullman seems unable to tell the story without occasionally bringing in some very mysterious goings-on, which do appear to be miraculous or angelic, even though he tries to deny or redefine such things. The angel appearing to the shepherds, for instance. He dismisses these elements as aspects of a fairy-tale, but he wasn’t able to do without them altogether.

He sometimes portrays the miracles as simply a matter of someone’s mental state, as with the paralysed man who ‘was so strengthened and inspired by the atmosphere Jesus had created that he found himself able to move.’ But there are other times when a healing is much more ambiguous, allowing for the possibility of something mysterious having taken place.

Pullman is clearly fascinated with the person of Jesus. He recognises that the Gospels don’t read like novels or fairytales, though – because of his scepticism about the miraculous – he doesn’t think they’re history either. Pullman’s Jesus is an extraordinary man, but he’s nothing more than that. He does no miracles, makes no claims to divinity and remains irrevocably dead after his crucifixion. Yet in much of the book, he remains a profoundly compelling character.

The story of Jesus as told in the Gospels is extraordinary. Its impact on human history has been incalculable, and people keep coming back to it even when they disbelieve its message. As Richard Baukham argued in his Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, the Gospel accounts bear all the marks of having been written by, or at least closely based on the accounts of, people who were there at the time. These records, with their mind-boggling claims about Jesus being both God and man, and rising from death to prove it, cannot easily be dismissed as merely faith-based accretions on top of the story of a good man. There is good evidence for their reliability; the claims of Jesus are astonishingly far-reaching – they deserve to be listened to on their own terms, with an open mind. Charlotte Higgins’s response is the right one: on her Guardian blog she writes that the book has ‘sent me rushing back to the Gospels. I read Matthew over my lunchtime soup, ready to see with new eyes these fascinating and often startling documents.’

Posted via web from Tony Watkins

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Charlotte Higgins’s response to The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Tony Watkins — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 12:17:21 +0000

Charlotte Higgins wrote this in her blog on the Guardian website yesterday. What a great response to Philip Pullman’s new book:

The Good Man Jesus is a fascinating story, told in the same kind of spare, lapidary prose as the Gospels themselves or a Grimm brothers fairytale. Pullman’s gift for storytelling is in evidence on every page. For what it’s worth, in case any Christians are out there pulsating with rage already, in the same way that His Dark Materials made me pick up Blake and Milton (two of his poetic sources), The Good Man Christ has sent me rushing back to the Gospels. I read Matthew over my lunchtime soup, ready to see with new eyes these fascinating and often startling documents.

via guardian.co.uk

Posted via web from Tony Watkins

Philip Pullman’s next book is a reworking of the story of Jesus. And a denial of the truth of Jesus. Children’s author Philip Pullman says Jesus wasn’t the Son...
Another article on Pullman’s next book Canongate to publish Pullman on God 07.09.09 Catherine Neilan...
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The God-Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Philip Pullman

Tony Watkins — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 19:41:04 +0000

Philip Pullman seems to enjoy stirring up controversy. He annoyed many Christians with his best-selling anti-church, anti-God trilogy His Dark Materials. And it’s evident that he was out to provoke when he made comments like, ‘my books are about killing God,’ and, ‘I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.’ He’s admitted that the latter comment, at least, was intended to wind up the reporter. Often he insists that he’s simply telling stories, not preaching an atheist message.

Still, it’s hard to think that Pullman’s new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, is merely telling a story. Even the title seems calculated to inflame Christians, and it’s surely no accident that it’s being published in Easter week. The story itself is a curious mixture of respectfully retelling some parts of the Gospel accounts while mangling others.

Pullman says he decided to write about Jesus after Rowan Williams asked why he’s never done so. He went back to the Gospels and read them in different versions, and then re-read Paul where he was struck by many more references to ‘Christ’ than to ‘Jesus’. Pullman claims that Paul wasn’t interested in Jesus the man, only the divine Christ.

So he decided to rework the story of Jesus to focus on this perceived tension. In his version, Mary gives birth to twins: Jesus and Christ. In the wilderness Jesus is tempted not by the devil, but by his brother. Christ wants Jesus to build a powerful church which could spread throughout the world being a force for good. Jesus flatly rejects Christ’s pragmatism; he is an idealist who preaches the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God.

Christ, however, is approached by a mysterious stranger who encourages him to see the spiritual ‘truth’ beyond the sometimes inconvenient historical events. Eventually, the stranger seduces Christ into betraying Jesus (who loses his faith) and then deceiving the disciples into thinking that Jesus has risen from the dead.

Pullman’s point is that what we read in the Gospels is not what actually happened. The real historical Jesus has been smothered by inventions of the early church – in particular the incarnation and the resurrection. Pullman’s Jesus is an extraordinary man, but he’s nothing more than that. He does no miracles, makes no claims to divinity and remains irrevocably dead after his crucifixion.

This is a well-worn attack on the Gospels, though Pullman gives it a provocative new coat of paint. It’s a great shame that he evidently has no idea of the very impressive evidence for the reliability of the gospels.

It’s interesting to see how, despite Pullman’s tinkering with the Gospel accounts, Jesus remains a profoundly compelling character. When he prays in Gethsemane and concludes that God is not there to hear him, it feels like a grating contrast with what we’ve seen of him earlier in the book.

It’s also fascinating that Pullman seems unable to tell the story without occasionally bringing in some very mysterious goings on, which do appear to be miraculous or angelic, even though he tries to deny or redefine such things. It feels like there are times when he’s had to struggle hard to come up with a different interpretation of the events.

Pullman’s gospel fairy-tale is hardly a threat to a Christian’s faith, but it could well be a stimulus which starts many people thinking. The fact that an atheist like Pullman is trying so hard to explain away the divinity of Jesus should drive people back to the Gospels, to see for themselves what the truth really is.

via damaris.org

Posted via web from Tony Watkins

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Another article on Pullman’s next book Canongate to publish Pullman on God 07.09.09 Catherine Neilan...
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