The Lion, the Witch, and the Silver Screen
Like the portentous convergences of heavenly bodies witnessed by the stargazing centaurs Glenstorm and Roonwit or the half-dwarf Dr. Cornelius at various junctures in The Chronicles of Narnia, the big-screen advent of C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe represents a unique juxtaposition of several much-discussed trends in the sometimes uneasy relationship between Hollywood and religion.
As a big-budget adventure film based on the mid-twentieth century fantasies of an Oxford don and a Christian, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe begs comparison to Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films, which, like the books, have been eagerly embraced in large numbers by both Christians and non-Christians.
Yet The Chronicles of Narnia, though enjoyed by readers of all ages, are much more children's stories than The Lord of the Rings, and the heroes are principally twentieth-century English children, suggesting a parallel to another British series of seven (projected) books and films: the Harry Potter phenomenon, which has met with hotly mixed responses from Christian audiences.
At the same time, where Tolkien's Middle Earth was fraught with deliberately muted echoes of religious significance, Lewis's Narnia is so overtly and enthusiastically Christian that it has elicited a small but determined stream of criticism from non-Christian critics. In this, the new film dimly echoes, on a far smaller scale, the controversy surrounding another iconic film that, in a very different way, tells essentially the same story as LWW, i.e., The Passion of the Christ.
On one level, the first Narnian adaptation suggests an ideal best-of-all-worlds blending of precedent. It's The Lord of the Rings without the obligatory massive edits or PG-13 battlefield gore; it's Harry Potter without the moral ambiguity regarding witchcraft and rule-breaking and the like; it's The Passion of the Christ without the troubling questions about anti-Semitism or the almost unbearable brutality.
A Different Sort of Film for a Different Sort of Book
It doesn't follow that LWW will necessarily achieve anything like the box-office success of any of those precedents — though it certainly might. As popular and beloved as the Chronicles have remained for decades, even the most ardent Narnia fans tend to be less consumed with these stories than the most ardent devotees of Tolkien or Rowling. If nothing else, Lewis's stories are simply too short to take over your life. Rowling fans already have the better part of 3,000 pages to wade through, and as for the history of Middle Earth, for the very few who actually get to the end of it all (including the appendices, The Silmarillion, the Unfinished Tales and the twelve-volume History of Middle Earth), there are still the languages to be learned. With Narnia, on the other hand, you can easily learn all there is to know in under a week.
Yet for precisely that reason, every detail of the Narnian stories looms larger and is more precious to fans. Change one line in LWW, and you might be changing more than if you excised pages and pages from Tolkien or Rowling. Then, too, the more overt Christian meaning of the story makes some things in the story more sacrosanct. Get Aragorn wrong, and you've only botched a character who is at most a dim Christ figure. Get Aslan wrong, and you've actually botched Christ himself, since Aslan is no mere type or allegory of Christ, but is literally meant to be God the Son, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity as a Lion rather than a man.
Perhaps the most auspicious sign regarding the film, then, was that it was in the hands of education-oriented Walden Media, whose track record of scrupulously faithful adaptations of acclaimed children's books includes the charming Because of Winn-Dixie and the excellent Holes, which, like LWW, was distributed by Disney. Beyond that, Douglas Gresham, C.S. Lewis's stepson and a devout Christian, signed on as executive producer and has been championing the film in church-based promotional events across the country.
However, there have also been scares over the project's gestation period. One short-lived early proposal suggested relocating the Pevensie children from WWII-era England to modern Los Angeles in the wake of an earthquake and replacing Turkish Delight with cheeseburgers and hot dogs. Then came the report that the digital creature effects for the lion Aslan and other characters, originally slated for WETA's Lord of the Rings veterans, might be entrusted to a company called Rhythm & Hues, best known for the unremarkable digital work on Daredevil, Scooby-Doo, The Cat in the Hat, and Garfield.
During pre-production, director Andrew Adamson (Shrek, Shrek 2) raised eyebrows with remarks about not wanting "to make the book as much as my memory of the book," and descriptions of the story as the tale of "a family which is disenfranchised and disempowered in World War II, that on entering Narnia, through their unity as a family become empowered at the end of the story." Most recently, a small furor erupted on the Internet when an early test screening of the film reportedly included a line in which the coronation of the four Kings and Queens of Narnia included an invocation of "the four winds and their powers."
Fears Dispelled
The good news is that these fears are largely unfounded. The finished film preserves the plot of Lewis's story, with the WWII setting, London blitzes, and Turkish Delight all in place. The digital creature effects, by Industrial Light & Magic and Sony Pictures Imageworks, are impeccable, with Aslan in particular a stunning visual achievement. As for the comment about his "memory of the book," Adamson seems to have meant something less subjectively idiosyncratic than it sounded. Reiterating the comment at a recent New York press event, Adamson told CWR, "I realized that reading the book as an adult, it was kind of like the house that you grew up in — it was much smaller than I remembered, and I wanted to capture the more epic story that I remembered."
Moreover, compared to previous Walden films, LWW doesn't hew as closely to the text of the source material. Instead, Adamson and company have taken a freer approach closer in spirit to the Lord of the Rings films, with incidents changed, deleted, or added, and characters reinterpreted. And, as with Lord of the Rings, some of these liberties serve the story well, while others don't. (Note: Those who haven't read the books should be aware that story spoilers follow.)
One well-conceived change involves providing an additional motive for Edmund's lie to Peter and Susan about his visit to Narnia; the addition makes narrative and emotional sense, and nuances Edmund's character and moral dilemma without diminishing the meanness of the act. On the other hand, the character of Peter is not well served by changes that diminish his role as the natural leader, such as depicting him throughout the film wanting to get his siblings out of Narnia and back into England, while Lucy, and later even Edmund, insist that they must stay and help battle the Witch.
The film preserves the story's basic themes of guilt and consequences, sacrifice and redemption, forgiveness and victory over evil. However, one of Lewis's key themes — the primacy of good over evil — has been compromised by numerous changes that have the net effect of making the evil White Witch and the all-powerful, all-knowing Aslan seem throughout the story more like equal adversaries than Lewis intended.
For example, during the parley scene, instead of first sending an emissary and obtaining a promise of safe conduct, the Witch simply enters Aslan's camp unannounced. In fact, she arrives on a litter, announced by a herald crying for all to kneel to the Queen of Narnia, which is much bolder than she appears in the book. At the end of the parley, where Lewis has the Witch fleeing in terror at Aslan's roar, the film has her merely look a bit shaken as she sits down in her litter to be carried out.
Ultimately, of course, Aslan is revealed to be superior to the Witch both in understanding and in power, as he cheats the death she thought had claimed him forever and puts an end to her evil. Thus, Lewis's point isn't completely lost, but it's less clear throughout the story than he intended it to be.
There is a happy sense in which, whatever liberties the film takes for good or ill, it can't fail to bring Lewis's story to a wider audience with all its themes fully intact. The reason, of course, is that films always send audiences in droves to the source material. Sales of the Narnia books have been climbing since the trailer for the film debuted last spring, and for weeks The Chronicles of Narnia has occupied the top spot on The New York Times bestseller list for children's paperbacks, with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe currently in second place to the series as a whole.
Is it a Christian Film?
This added attention is likely to promote Lewis's other writings as well, in addition to secondary sources about Lewis and Narnia by other writers. Naturally, it also means increasing attacks from Lewis's ideological critics.
Novelist Philip Pullman, author of the anti-God fantasy series His Dark Materials and a frequent Lewis critic, recently blasted the books again as "a peevish blend of racist, misogynistic, and reactionary prejudice" with "not a trace" of charity. "If the Disney corporation wants to market this film as a great Christian story, they'll just have to tell lies about it," Pullman added.
Pullman will perhaps be relieved to know that the Disney Company is not in fact marketing the film as any such thing. Although Walden has been holding grass-roots faith-based campaigns in churches and community centers across the country, the unofficial Disney talking point on the subject seems to be that the story in the books as well as the film is only religious if you want to see it that way.
"I didn't really think a lot about the religious aspect," Adamson said when the subject was brought up. "I know people have interpreted this book in many different ways . . . I know C.S. Lewis never really intended it to be allegory, but he definitely wrote from a place of his own belief, and a lot of people get that from the book . . . People can interpret the movie the same way, they can apply their personal belief and interpret the movie the same way they interpret the book." White Witch actress Tilda Swinton, producer Mark Johnson, and others offered strikingly similar noncommittal comments.
This cagey approach differs significantly from the more forthright line taken by the makers of The Lord of the Rings, who proved to be more open about and willing to discuss the story's religious dimensions and how they approached them in making the film. For example, Rings screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens talked about the significance of the ideas of Providence, immortality, and a moral universe in the books and the films. Ironically, though Lewis's stories are much more overtly religious than Tolkien's, the Narnia filmmakers seem less willing to acknowledge them.
Taking Aim at Lewis
Lewis's ideological critics, on the other hand, have no such compunctions. Twin pieces in The New York Times and New Yorker last month, relying heavily on A. N. Wilson's controversial, highly psychoanalytical biography, took aim at Lewis's allegorical methods as well as his narrow-minded religious dogmatism.
Adam Gopnik, writing in New Yorker, accused Lewis of "always trying to stuff the marvellous back into the allegorical," of considering it his "Christian duty" to "inoculate metaphor with allegory, or, at least, drug it, so that it walks around hollow-eyed, saying just what it's supposed to say" ("Prisoner of Narnia," November 11). What the allegorical meaning of Lewis' magical wardrobe might be, or what evidence he finds of Bacchus being "drugged" in Prince Caspian, Gopnik doesn't say.
The Times piece, by Charles McGrath, states among other things that the "allegorical element in the Narnia books drove Tolkien crazy" ("The Narnia Skirmishes," November 15). This may be an overstatement, though it is true that Tolkien was totally unsympathetic to Lewis's Narnia stories. So much has been written, and perhaps too much has been made, of Tolkien's famous antipathy for allegory that it is easy to assume that this was the reason the Narnia stories, being far more transparently religious than Tolkien's stories, rubbed Tolkien the wrong way.
But this may a red herring. The difference between Narnia and Middle Earth on this point is one of degree, not kind; both Narnia and Middle Earth contain elements of allegory, but neither is an allegory in the strict sense of Pilgrim's Progress, in which each element symbolically represents something else. Edmund is not exactly Judas, and neither Susan nor Lucy can be neatly identified with any Gospel figure. The Stone Table variously suggests the cross, the tablets of the Law of Moses, the sepulchre and its stone, and the Temple altar and veil, but can't be identified with any of them. And even Aslan, as noted above, is not an allegory for Christ, but Christ himself in another form.
Tolkien's root problem with the Narnia stories was otherwise. Quite simply, he didn't like their grab bag assemblage of differing mythologies and influences. If the LWW movie is like a convergence of Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and The Passion of the Christ, the books are an out-and-out hodgepodge of source materials and influences: Greco-Roman and Nordic mythology, Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame, Genesis and Revelation and the Gospels, Hans Christian Anderson, Arthurian legend, and much more. In these seven slender volumes Bacchus and Silenus, talking beasts and walking trees, lamp-posts and sewing machines, rumors of Atlantis and Morgan le Fay, and even Father Time and Father Christmas all jostle hugger-mugger, without apology.
For Tolkien, this was artistic sloppiness. He felt strongly, on aesthetic grounds, that a lamp-post in fairy-land is an affront, and that nymphs and dryads do not belong in the same world, let alone the same story, as Father Christmas or sewing beavers. To this objection Lewis had an answer: He argued that all these diverse creatures do happily coexist, in our minds. Tolkien's retort: "Not in mine, or at least not at the same time."
As it happens, Lewis was not the first British fantasist to write about a composite fairyland made up of, and indeed corresponding to, all the bits and pieces of other stories and other worlds milling about in one's mind. Nor, in fact, was Lewis the first to imagine such a world as a magical realm accessible only by children, from which those who have grown beyond a certain point are barred.
Here is how J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, described the Neverland, a magical realm with tiny fairies (just the sort Tolkien detested), Caribbean pirates, American Indians, mermaids, crocodiles, flying "lost" boys, flying pirate ships, detachable shadows, talking Never Birds, and a boy named Pan:
I don't know whether you have ever seen a map of a person's mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child's mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine, three-pence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still.
The quote is significant because it illustrates precisely what Lewis was doing in The Chronicles of Narnia. Narnia is in a way Lewis's Neverland, not just in the sense that it is his created fairy-land, but also in the sense that it is — as his own rebuttal to Tolkien's objection indicates — a "map" (if a partial one) of his mind, or his imagination.
Christian Imagination
More broadly, Narnia may be seen as a kind of "map" or allegory of Christian imagination, with the Paschal mystery and Trinitarian faith coexisting with myth and fairy tale recognized and appreciated for what it is. The Chronicles of Narnia is fantasy, not allegory or apologetic, but it has allegorical and apologetical dimensions, and as an apologetical fantasy it cuts more than one way. Narnia is partly a fairy-tale defense of Christianity, but it's also a Christian defense of myth and fairy tale.
At one point in his life, Lewis felt obliged despite himself to reject the myths he loved as "lies, though lies breathed through silver." It was Tolkien who helped Lewis to get past this view, to recognize Christianity as the "true myth," the myth that God himself creates, and human myths as efforts to express and apprehend truths partially and imperfectly known. Lewis later expressed the point by writing, "Into an allegory a man can put only what he already knows: in a myth he puts what he does not yet know and [could] not come to know any other way."
If myths are lies, then Bacchus is the enemy of Christ, as a lie is the enemy of the truth. And certainly to believe in Bacchus rather than in Christ is a profound misfortune. But why did the ancients conceive of such a being as Bacchus (or Dionysus) in the first place? What led the Greeks and the Romans imbibing over their tables to ascribe this drink, along with its constitutional and social effects, to some divine being? Can it not be seen as an attempt to express, in the absence of divine revelation, some inchoate awareness of the truth attested by the psalmist, that God brings forth wine to gladden the hearts of men?
Obviously this is only a partial truth, and potentially a dangerous, destructive one — particularly in the absence of other complementary precepts (the apostle's warnings against drunkenness and carousing come to mind). Debased and dreadful things have been done in the name of Bacchus. Yet once the dangers of bacchanalian excess have been safely cordoned off in the light of the Gospel, may we not safely recognize in Bacchus an evocative image of something true?
Doubtless in the absence of the fullness of truth revealed in Christ, Bacchus would be a dangerous companion; as Susan observes, "I wouldn't have felt very safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls if we'd met them without Aslan," and Lucy agrees, "I should think not." Yet in Aslan's presence Bacchus — far from being "drugged" — is himself at his best, with no license to human wantonness. In his book The Four Loves, Lewis expressed this in a Chestertonian twist on Emerson's maxim that "When half-gods go, the gods arrive": To this Lewis replied, "When God arrives (and only then) the half-gods can remain."
Not Overtly Mythological Either
Christians focused on the Christian elements of the story may not notice at first, but the film is not quite as overtly Christian as the book and it's not quite as overtly mythological either. Certainly, there are fauns, centaurs, witches, and so forth. On the other hand, the film dispenses with Tumnus's tales of the dryads and nymphs, the spirits of wood and well, dancing with the fauns, and of the visits of Bacchus and Silenus, when the rivers would run with wine for weeks of revelry. Nor is there mention of the White Witch's half-giant, half-Jinn ancestry or her descent from Lilith, Adam's mythical first wife.
Orthodox critic Peter T. Chattaway has argued that the mythological elements of the Narnia stories are more than window dressing for Lewis. For Lewis, paganism was vastly preferable to the desacrilized modernist view of the world, and perhaps he delighted in pagan imagery partly as a corrective to reductionistic materialism, or even as a potential stepping stone toward Christianity. As Lewis wrote in God in the Dock:
When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, 'Would that she were.' For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads.If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is essentially the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our day differs from him as much as a divorcee differs from a virgin.
If Lewis's book combined Christianity and mythology, Adamson's film includes elements of both, though not untouched by the very modernism Lewis sought to combat. Still, the Narnia stories, like the Lord of the Rings books, are strong drink, and the taste, even watered down, remains potent: the goodness of Aslan and the evil of the White Witch, the innocence of Lucy and the troubled complexity of Edmund, the wonder of the wardrobe and the horror of the Stone Table retain the odor of the books.
Adamson's film brings Lewis to life imperfectly, but in a way that adds new dimensions to the experience of this story of wonder, good and evil, sin and redemption, repentance and forgiveness. For those who have never read the book, the film mediates the heart of Lewis's story and themes, and in many cases will send viewers to the book for the first time. Those who know the book will find themselves returning to it after seeing the film, grateful to the film for what it does, and to the book for what the film doesn't do.
Stephen Greydanus frequently reviews films for CWR and more of his film reviews may be found at decentfilms.com.
© Ignatius Press
This item 6854 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
