The Golden "Complass"

You can always tell if younger daughter is excited about something if she writes it up herself on the large calendar in her bedroom. We use the calendar to ease her in to the events of the week, and in the case of a movie, we play the clips posted at Yahoo Movies, which takes the edge of the unfamiliarity of a new experience. Yesterday, we took her to see The Golden Compass and a particularly enticing aspect of this was that we were going with a friend from school and her mum.

I was a little anxious myself because of the scary possibilities of the movie. I found parts of the book enormously upsetting, particularly the bits when children are excised from their "daemons", animal spirits which in this parallel world are the souls that live outside the body. So I watched younger daughter from the corner of my eye as the movie rolled on. She seemed entranced, but her left hand reached up as if to shield her left eye, her forefinger resting on her temple. On her right hand was Jasmine the Mouse, one of her beloved hand puppets who often accompanies her to school and church. It occurred to me that younger daughter has her "daemons" too, and that after the movie she would process and act out what had stayed with her with Jasmine and her other "friends".

When we got out of the cinema, younger daughter was anxious to go home, despite the attentive ministrations of her "guardian angel", a flesh-and-blood friend who has been the subject of a previous post. Once back, she disappeared upstairs, and after a bit of play alone in her bedroom, emerged to "watch something" (her very favourite thing). Her choice? Godspell, which is, in a number of ways, the antithesis of the movie we'd just seen. (Although I hasten to add that all the fuss about atheism and anti-Catholicism that some people have detected in The Golden Compass is a bit overblown. The Resident Fan Boy, giving a quick review to my mum in her weekly phone call from Victoria, said: "The only Catholics I can see being upset by this movie are those with guilty consciences." He's a devout Anglican, for the record and the son of an Anglo-Catholic himself.)

That evening, younger daughter nodded off in the tub like Ophelia (without the drowning bit), clearly exhausted.