Taming Aslan

I like the Lord of the Rings movies. Sure, there is plenty at which devoted Tolkien fans may legitimately chafe and grumble, but overall, a very respectable piece of work, and - for a major motion pictute based on a book - very faithful to the source material. Thumbs up, and all that.

The Narnia movies, though, I have found personally underwhelming. I was just not whelmed, at all. The first movie started strongly enough, but I lost interest by the middle. The White Witch is defeated and Narnia is set free in the end, but somehow... Meh. What bothered me seemed to be more than just the watery Disney-fication of the story, but involved something off key.

I could not at the time put my finger on any one reason for my ambivalence, but have just found a dandy article by Steven D. Boyer at Touchstone that I think sums it up, or begins to. In short, the modern world (and so the movie) rejects the very idea of hierarchy;

 

We can see Lewis’s strategy at work if we just think for a moment about what his original stories are like. Narnia is a great repository of hierarchical images and relations—of good kings and noble knights, of laborers who are not disgruntled and servants who are not demeaned, of Aslan the great Lion who rules over all, who is never safe, but always good.

One can hardly turn a page of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or of Prince Caspian without encountering compelling images of royal authority and knightly virtue—and we see now that both of these themes are intimately connected with Lewis’s positive construal of hierarchy, which in turn is foundational to his distinctively Christian vision of reality.

A Strange Sign of Maturity

...the movie as a whole consists in Peter learning to think and act independently... By (the end of the movie), he has grown enough to realize that receiving orders and following them is a sign of immaturity and weakness, whereas independent action, especially when it involves not doing as you’re told, is the sign of strength, maturity, and success.

Note well: disobedience is the sign of real maturity. This quiet, unobtrusive devaluation of humble submission to rightful authority is a significant omen of things to come in the later film.

...One could look at Caspian himself, who is transformed from a noble and honorable young king in Lewis’s telling, into a tortured warrior whose unchecked desire for personal revenge against his father’s murderer leads to the deaths of scores of his Narnian subjects. Or again, one could look at the virtuous Red Dwarf Trumpkin, whose cheerful, good-humored embrace of obedience in Lewis’s story is quietly dropped from the film, replaced by the more modern virtues of sarcasm, irony, and cynicism.

(emphasis and italics mine)

In addition to the problem with hierarchy, there is a general chipping away, or erosion, of the story at a myriad of points. For one, the Narnia in which the children find themselves is just... smaller than the one in the books. Not geographically, but less grand, less noble. Lewis' Narnia was suffused with spiritual and moral energy and significance. Something in the Narnian air made the importance of every action (or inaction) somehow closer to the surface. Courage grew more courageous, friendship more dear, sacrifice more costly, there. The Narnia of the films is... an admirably worked-up fantasy world, but where the most important thing is the children - that they have a Big Adventure and come out safe by the end of the movie. Whew! Now, wasn't that fun?

In the books, rather than being the Center of Everything, the Pevensie children play an important part in what they know is a story much bigger and more magnificent than themselves.

In the movies, Aslan's voice is not, as one might expect, the rumbling basso of a Giant Lion, but the velvety, soporific baritone of a kindly uncle. He seems not so much to have supernatural significance, but simply to have Super Powers. And he is very importantly, not known or referred to as the Son of the Great Emperor over the Sea - who as far as the films are concerned, apparently doesn't exist. The importance of that ommission is really difficult to overstate. Without God, there is no Son of God. Jesus becomes not the Maker of All Things and Savior of Mankind, but a great teacher... a kindly uncle. Without the Great Emperor Over Sea, Aslan becomes a kindly talking lion with super powers. He is shrunk.

In other words, the makers of the first two Narnia films, at least, just do not GET Lewis' story. They have never fallen in love with Narnia, though they may have read it fifty times. Like the wicked Uncle Andrew in The Magician's Nephew, they have only a surface understanding of Narnian events, and so they feel the need to juice the story up with invented rivalries, contrived teen romance, tone deaf melodrama and sturm und drang that not only gets in the way, but at times positively cuts against the grain of Lewis's story.

As Boyer observes;

 

In Lewis’s telling of all of the Narnia tales, the children’s experiences as kings and queens in Narnia consistently transform them into nobler, more virtuous people in their own world. They are not spoiled children wanting to be kings again; they are noble kings who carry that very nobility back into their non-royal roles as schoolchildren.

In the Narnia films, the children do not carry the spirit of Narnia with them into our world, but instead carry their childish pettiness into Narnia.

But, I mean, after all... you can't expect modern audiences to believe all that Pollyanna rubbish that Lewis put in there. So, we can dream of a place where the very land, the animals, the sky and the sea are better-than-real, but we must not do the same for people. People must always be portrayed with dull and cynical realism.

Comments

[Bill912]

"...disobedience is the sign of real maturity." Kinda sounds like what the serpent said to Eve, doesn't it?

[Robert_H]

"...disobedience is the sign of real maturity." Kinda sounds like what the serpent said to Eve, doesn't it?

Posted by: Bill912 | 01/13/2011 at 11:26 AM

Also echoes what Weston tried to persuade the Green Lady in "Perelandra."

[John Kasaian]

I never looked at the Narnia movies that way---I guess was too caught up in the special effects to notice the wobbling off course from the original stories.
It's all very distressing now!

[Tim J.]

Oh, nothing to be distressed about, John! The movies are still probably worth viewing, but they just lack the resonance they might have had.

Whereas they could have been great films of artistic depth, they are pretty standard Hollywood fantasy fare.

Which is too bad.

[Athos]

Narnia by focus group ... sigh. BTW, high marks for David Downing's fictional placing of his protagonist in war-time England where he meets Chas Williams, CSL, Tollers and the other Inklings in an orthodox thriller:

http://www.amazon.com/Looking-King-Inklings-David-Downing/dp/1586175149

[The Pachyderminator]

I'm late commenting here, but this article is one of the most insightful I've seen in pinpointing the problems with the Narnia movies.

Although when I see the name Steven D., it's always a shock not to have it followed by "Greydanus"!