I mentioned I was going to do a C.S. Lewis post at some point...

[sabotabby]

So here it is. I abducted a four-year-old and went to see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe yesterday because I always feel a bit creepy seeing kids' movies without having a kid in tow. I had serious reservations about seeing it, not because it's blatant conservative Christian propaganda, but because I didn't like the thought of Disney watering it down or veering too far away from the source material. Propaganda or not, I adored the Narnia books as a kid, and re-read them every few years years or so until I moved out of my mum's house.

The past few years have seen movie adaptations of a few other books that I was fanatical about when I was a kid: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. My main hope for the LWW movie was that it would be more like the latter (which did change elements of the books but never left me feeling that I wasn't in Tolkien's Middle Earth) than the former, which, while it was a good movie, failed at some level to capture the sense of wonder that I felt when I first read Adams' books. Fortunately (and pending reassessment based on more viewings), I did think that they did a good job with LWW overall.

Let's get the primary political stuff out of the way first: One cannot watch this movie in the hopes that it will present a progressive worldview. It doesn't, and it shouldn't, because the book doesn't. But it doesn't need to be reactionary either. Slacktivist is worried that by going he is contributing to the wrong side of the Culture Wars. Someone pointed out in the comments to that post that if he avoids seeing it because religious fundies have decided it's Their Movie, then the Culture Warriors win. This is true. Lewis, though very much a religious and political conservative, was a radically different creature from today's fundies. I suspect he would see in them the same sort of joyless literalism that he liked to mock when he wrote about atheists and heathens.

Also, let's talk about my biases when it comes to the books: LWW isn't my favourite of the Narnia books (that's changed over the course of my life and many re-reads; right now, I think Prince Caspian and Voyage of the Dawn Treader are about tied), and I'm a diehard "publicationist" (I'm so glad that there's a word for it!) because I think Chronicles should be read as stories first and allegories second. I'm also of the opinion (and I don't know enough about Lewis-as-author to know if this is true, but I think I did hear it somewhere), that the Narnia books began with a single (and non-religious) image -- Lucy discovering the lamp post in the snow -- and the rest followed from there. This is my favourite moment in the book and my favourite moment in the movie.

Spoilers follow. ZOMG the lion dies and comes back to life because he's Jesus!!eleventy-one!!!



What they did right

• Beginning with the German air raids and evacuation was such a very, very good idea. I don't recall, when the book was first read to me, whether I knew what the hell Lewis was talking about and why the Pevensies went off to the Professor's to begin with. But I'm fairly sure that if I didn't know, I could have stopped and ask my mum what an air raid was. Children watching a movie don't have that option. It also set up a later plot point that wasn't in the book and worked really well, which was...

• ...the aerial bombardment by the birds during the final battle. Nice touch, because one of the silliest things in the book (and in children's fantasy in general) is that the human kids, with absolutely no fighting experience, stroll into Narnia and instantly become skilled fighters and are accepted as leaders. The later books deconstruct this a bit with explanations like "the Narnian air turns kids into adults," but this managed to show how they could conceivably bring a different strategic outlook that gave them an advantage.

• The Pevensies seemed much more reluctant and skeptical than they are in the books. In a sense, I thought it was too quick a transformation, but I also appreciated that they weren't uniformly "OMG Aslan now let's go risk our lives!"

• Some people seemed to be worried by what Santa was going to say when he armed the girls. The original (and problematic) line, "battles are ugly when women fight" got changed to "battles are ugly affairs." It doesn't smack of condescension or sexism; he says it specifically to Lucy, who is significantly younger than the others, and pointedly not to Susan. The implication is that seven-year-olds shouldn't fight in wars but 12-year-old girls can kick serious ass. I don't mind ageism given the context.

• Speaking of Lucy, the wee actress was perfect. The casting was great overall, but as far as I'm concerned she stepped directly out of Pauline Baynes' illustrations.

• Speaking of Pauline Baynes, the entire movie pretty much looked like her illustrations, which is the highest compliment I can manage in terms of the cinematography. It was damned near perfect and I felt watching it that I had gone through the wardrobe and into another world. Also, our seats were ridiculously close to the screen, as the theater was packed, so I practically was in Narnia. Yikes!

What they did wrong

Not much can be done about the silliness that comes from the book itself. There's only two ways for Aslan's resurrection to work: Either you have to know, reading it, that it's a Christian story and Aslan is literally Christ (in this sense it's not an allegory; in Dawn Treader he basically says "Hi, I'm Christ in a distinctly Narnian form"), or you have to be, as I was, a very young child who is so invested in the character that you don't really care how he's brought back to life as long as he comes back. The problem is that you don't get to know him as well by that point in the movie to be invested (unless, I suppose, you're a young child who really likes lions), so the only option that works is the first.*

The "man must rule over beasts, men must rule over women, and yay monarchy" motif is also flat-out stupid, but again, it's from the book and changing it would be even worse. So while watching it, I can't help but wonder why they wouldn't just leave the centaur in charge in Aslan's stead, since he seemed to know what he was doing, I have to accept the element of wish-fulfillment on the target audience's part and hierarchical notions on the part of Lewis.

But let's just leave that alone, as we should let that slide. I have actual movie-specific critiques.

• We are at an awkward point in the history of cinema. CGI is advanced enough that not using it would look dated, but not so great that you can't tell it's CGI. I found it jarring. Strangely, it didn't annoy me much in LOTR, and I was completely sold on Gollum, but I think that's because Jackson was using old-fashioned models and makeup as well as digital effects. In LWW, the talking animals, Aslan included, didn't convince me.

• It wasn't bloody enough. Shhh, you back there! I hear what you're saying: "sabotabby, this is a kids' movie, it's a Disney movie, it can't have any blood."

Then Disney shouldn't have made it.

Sorry, Lewis' book is violent and bloody, and it's for a good reason. The battle with the wolf is supposed to be terrifying -- something about a "nightmare of blood and hair." You're supposed to fear for the characters' lives. Sanitizing it does a disservice to the books, which offset a certain belief in the "just war" by being honest about what wars entail. The four-year-old wasn't even fazed by the movie violence.

If I could handle gory, scary books when I was four, filmmakers shouldn't be wimpy about scaring today's children. I'm sure they've seen a lot worse, anyway. Also, "rise, Sir Peter, and don't forget to clean your sword" isn't nearly as funny if there's not blood all over the sword in the first place.

• Aslan saying, "It is finished" after killing the White Witch is bad, bad theology. I shouldn't need to tell you why.

• Let's talk about the fox for a moment, who as far as I can tell, was the only new character created for the movie. First off: Why? There's no need for a new character, and he was the least convincing CGI of the lot. But that's not the worst thing about him. We've got the beavers mistaking him for an enemy.

Why is that, you ask? He seems like a nice enough guy. They mistake him for an enemy because he looks like a wolf, which he chalks up to "an unfortunate family resemblance." The, um, real-life implications of this are not very nice.

Lewis, despite his racism, did not believe that race or species determined one's destiny. Yes, he made the villains in the later books dark-skinned and Muslim, and on a more metaphorical note, the followers of the White Witch tended to be typically "evil" creatures -- minotaurs as opposed to centaurs, satyrs as opposed to fauns, wolves as opposed to dogs and foxes, etc. But he wasn't exclusive or essentialist about it -- in the book, wolves are among the creatures that Aslan frees from the palace, dwarves and trees fight on both sides, and if you think about it, Mr. Tumnus is initially working for the Witch until Lucy and his conscience get the better of him.

At the risk of reading way too much into this, it reminds me of The Siege and how they tried to dodge allegations of racism by including the "good" Arab character (who I think was even Christian and Lebanese) to counter the hordes of bad Palestinian Muslims.

Besides the, er, speciest overtones of the fox vs. wolf thing, it makes the Witch's totalitarian rule far less frightening if you can tell who the bad guys are from looking at them. At least they kept the "even some of the trees are on her side," mind you.

• Someone else (I forget who) pointed out the family-centric spin that Disney insists on putting on everything. The example that they mentioned was at the end, when Lucy heals Edmund. In the book, she sits around waiting for him to recover and Aslan gives her hell because there are other dying people that need her attention. In the movie, we've got a battlefield curiously barren of both corpses and wounded, and they get around to group hugs before she decides, all on her own, to go help out. It's a subtle shift, but an important one, because the story becomes that of an estranged family that grows closer together rather than on characters whose experiences draw them closer to Christ.

It's funny that it bothers me, the curmudgeonly atheist, but the barometer for me liking the movie was how close they stuck to Lewis' vision, right or wrong.

• Finally, Aslan wasn't scary enough.

A cookie to whoever initially pointed out (probably to Lewis himself) that the Lion-as-Christ isn't the greatest theological metaphor. But Lewis redeems himself by, in a way, making Aslan less Christlike by virtue of the world he has to save; he is wild and dangerous to reflect a world that's more wild and dangerous than ours. He's not a tame lion. This doesn't get brought up until the end, which I think is probably the biggest problem with the movie and entirely Disney's fault. It's why everyone keeps insisting that the Witch is the most interesting character. They're both supposed to be beautiful and terrifying. She is, he isn't.

Best Narnia-related joke I've heard so far
Q. Why isn't Aslan being used on marketing merchandise at McDonald's?
A. Because he's not a lame tie-in.

* Actually, I don't think it even worked for me when my mum first read me the book when I was around four or so. I was guaranteed to go into hysterics at the thought of any animal dying, so she occasionally, as I recall, changed the endings of books so as not to upset me. Of course I saw right through that, and since I couldn't read that well at the time, thought that this was one of her attempts to soften the ending.


So...anyone else seen it yet? Also, open season on discussing Lewis, Narnia, and Pullman vs. Lewis because no one can ever get enough of that.

Comments

[apperception.livejournal.com]

It also set up a later plot point that wasn't in the book and worked really well, which was...the aerial bombardment by the birds during the final battle.

Yeah, I noticed that parallel, too, and you're right, it does help to fill that gap.

It wasn't bloody enough.

It was not bloody enough, and that sucked.

And also, why are battles always so simplistic? One army runs into another army. There's almost no tactics and strategy. Before we could just push buttons and blow places up, people actually had to out-manuever their opponents. That's how battles were won. Now people just scream a lot, have a lot of feeling, or they're "good" and so they're guaranteed to win. Bleh.

Anyway, I don't have anything else to add. I read your whole review and thought it was good.

[sabotabby]

Oh, I also want a moratorium on people observing the battle from afar and then shouting "YESSSS!" when it looks like their side is winning. Never having been in any battles myself, I have no idea if this ever actually happens, but it drives me insane when I see it in a movie. Why don't you just go and fight it yourself?

The one thing I loved about Last Battle was that the good guys lost. Heh.

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

Actually, those forces that are "watching" have a purpose - they are the reserves, being saved for later. They aren't actually spectators.

Though during the American Civil War, there really were spectators who brought picnic lunches and watched as battles were fought.

[sabotabby]

Oh, I got that (the reserves, that is). It's the cheering that bothered me. It's not a football game; do people actually cheer?

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

Well, sooner or later, the battles really do turn into the two sides crashing into each other. It can be hard to visually show tactics and strategy, and most people don't want to sit through scenes where the general and his underlings have a war council and talk about the logistics of the battle. Audiences just want to see the part where they crash together and the butt-kicking starts.

[fannishnonsense]

Actually, I think the first image Lewis started with was a faun with an armload of parcels under a lamp post.

[sabotabby]

I knew the lamp post had something to do with it, anyway.

[finding-rowan.livejournal.com]

Eh, the only reason why I saw it was because I wanted to see what the fuss was about. Oh, and James McAvoy, who played Mr. Tumnus, was hot. Disturbingly hot... for a faun.

[sabotabby]

I know it's in the original illustrations and everything, but he really shouldn't have been running around in the snow with no shirt on. I was bizarrely fascinated by his nipples the whole time. And yes he was hot.

[groovitude.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you already saw this. Not about Narnia per se, but it's still funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=zLElfJ9YCh0

My knowledge of CS Lewis' books is very elementary, but from what I've read about his story in the press I understand that they contain a potpourri of cultural elements that you didn't remark on, and these borrowings in my view put Lewis in a tradition of British writers who plundered the cultural artefacts of exotic Orient for plot elements in their stories.

Everybody has said that a bite of Turkish delight persuades one of the kids to turn his back on his human heritage and join the epic battle against the forces of evil, but no one stops to wonder what this borrowed element might mean. In a postcolonial reading, the supernatural powers of persuasion exerted by a bite of Turkish delight is similar to the extraordinary hold Orient had on the imagination of upper class Brits in the heyday of the British Empire--it was a ticket for adventure, glory and conquest that could be as dangerous as fulfilling.

The other borrowed element is the name of the Christ figure lion, whose name is a Turkish word that means lion. Whereas the inclusion of Turkish Delight clearly owes to the imperial baggage of Lewis' imagination, this allegorical motif hints at an identification of Orient with the quintessential Christian hero. Aslan is also a figure from an exotic culture's mythology. In Turey, "aslan" is the code name given to nationalist warriors that fought to overthrow the mandate imposed on the Turkish mainland by the Allies in the aftermath of WWI. Lewis' fantasy imagery complicates his imperial baggage and even I would assert partially anticipates the liberation theology in its homage to oppressed cultures in the figure of Aslan.

As a Turk, I'm divided about the value of Lewis' books. I can't say from what I've seen and read that they always have the right attitude toward Oriental cultures. But they are not as blatantly one sided as they appear at first.

Re:

[sabotabby]

For some reason, I can't hear anything on that video. I may be going deaf. :(

He's definitely got Orientalist issues (to say the least); it comes out more in the later books. I'd never thought of the Turkish Delight thing as particularly problematic or even significant -- for all I know, Lewis just thought it was yummy and moderately hard to find. I'm much more bothered by the Calormenes, who wear curly-toed shoes, turbans, and smell like onions and garlic. The fact that this sort of thing is balanced by a measure of respect and even fascination doesn't make it better. Or at least Said wouldn't think so.

I didn't know that Aslan was a Turkish word. Now I'm really hoping it was intentional.

[jordansc.livejournal.com]

I was readin' The New Yorker the other day and they said a film version of His Dark Materials is going to be made. I've only read the first two books, but I'm not so sure that's a good idea.

[sabotabby]

I'm not sure that they'll do a good job. The first director wanted to take the religious bits out.

*headdesk*

[aaronfreed.livejournal.com]

yes, which basically amounts to taking the story out.

I have bad feelings about the HDM movie, but I'll probably go see it anyway.

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

My sister just gave me the trilogy for christmas. I was blown away. There is no way that can be made into a good movie or movie series. There are far too many themes that are too complex to portray visually.

If they do make a movie, I hope it doesn't suck.

[sabotabby]

I think they could make a good movie out of it. But I don't think they will make a good movie out of it.

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

I don't think they could make a good movie out of it.

[seanmonster.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen it yet, but I did see a comic about it.

[sabotabby]

Your icon is even better.

[ex-melimeli728.livejournal.com]

i havent finished reading the post yet....

but i wanted to say, i got such a fun nerd kick out of looking up the word publicationist. and i got an even bigger nerd kick out hte article explaining it (referencing 'devout Chronologists and sincere Publicationists). I think I'm a publicationist, though i wonder if it's just cause i tend to dislike the prequels that get written later... or at least i hold them in less fond memory than the book number one's proper.

[sabotabby]

Oooh, linkage to the article? My theory is that people who appreciate Lewis as a fantasy writer tend to be publicationists and overly literal religious types are chronologists, but I may be speaking from my own biases.

[ironed_orchid]

Great write up. I feel pretty much the same about the books, in that while I can't read them without wincing these days, I loved them and read them many times as a kid.

I thought it was very pretty, and the kids were really well cast. Agree about the CGI, I didn't mind Aslan, but the beavers were very annoying.

I also thought they drew very clear analogy between Mogrim and the gestapo. Which makes the white witch the evil nazis etc.

I'm wondering how I'll react to the adaption of His Dark Materials, Narnia and LotR are both books that I loved and then grew out of, but I haven't grown out of HDM yet, so I suspect I will care a lot more about the lack of significant themes.

[sabotabby]

I found the beavers annoying in the books, too, and it made me a bit happy that (SPOILER!) talking beavers are extinct by Prince Caspian. Because beavers should just shut up.

HDM isn't as good on a second reading, IMO; at least not the third book, which gets way too preachy even if I mostly agree with what Pullman is preaching.

[ironed_orchid]

I agree about the over preachy, but I sort of love the resolution of Will and Lyra enough not to care so much by the time I'm finished. I think I've read the series 4 or 5 times.

And beavers are bloody annoying, you're right. But they could have been better rendered annoying animals.

[aaronfreed.livejournal.com]

I approve of this write-up. I'm also of the "HDM > Narnia" camp, just because I still share most of the values of HDM. (I never got around to reading it until about a year ago, either).

[sabotabby]

It = Narnia, or HDM? I don't think I'd have quite the same thing about Narnia if I'd read the books as an adult.

[smhwpf.livejournal.com]

Finally seen the film! Excellent write-up, and I'd go along with most of it. Especially about the inadequacy of Aslan as a character in the film. Not scary enough, and not enough time to really care about him, so it does come across pretty much as just shoe-horning a Christian allegory into a fantasy story. Which doesn't really come across any better from the fact that I'm a believer in the original. Overall, reasonably pleased with the film, but that was perhaps the biggest weakness.

Lewis's politics (to digress somewhat, but a lot of the ideas do feed though into the books) were a mixture, and possibly not always consistent. (Of course it's also possible that they changed, does happen.) I think it's partly that he doesn't see politics as all that important. I mean, he's not a pietist by any means, but he did regard it as secondary. He'd believe that relieving poverty and preventing war were good things for example, but that in the end whether you are at peace or war or in wealth or poverty is not the most important thing, but whether your response to that situation brings you closer to or further from God.

Anyway, I think it would be probably fair to describe him as a Conservative - though I've never seen him express a party political alleigance, and I've read an awful lot of his stuff. But that was far from consistent. At one point he said that an 'ideal' Christian society would probably be economically quite Socialist, but socially conservative. In terms of race, he clearly had heavy imperialist baggage, but again there were elements of his thinking that went in the other direction. In his sci-fi trilogy, Earth is 'quarantined' from other planets because of the Fall, and he comments elsewhere on this that, while a lot of sci-fi up to then had concentrated on what aliens might do to us, he was more worried about what we would do to them - and that the Native Americans could bear witness to what would likely happen if we were to encounter a more 'primitive' alien race. He wondered if one day humans would not be able to look up at the stars without a deep sense of shame.

He was very much a supporter of democracy, not because the people are wise, but because the Fall means that no group of people can be given power over any other, however wise or holy or intelligent or naturally suited to rule. So he believed that in an Unfallen state, absolute monarchy might be the only legitimate form of government, but that in a Fallen world, this would result in tyranny. Likewise he believed that, in the natural state, husbands should rule over wives, but that in the fallen state, there must be absolute equality. I think he's talking bollocks about the 'natural' state here of course, but you do get this combination of a theoretical reactionary, obscurantist, virtual facism, with a practical progressive egalitarianism.