Posted on 12/18/2005 1:01:43 AM PST by nickcarraway
The Chronicles of Narnia has done the unthinkable - it's put Christianity smack-bang in the middle of a pop-cultural debate. Stephanie Bunbury spoke with Tilda Swinton and the Kiwi director Andrew Adamson about the film's "hidden" meaning.
If anyone still requires proof of the gulf of difference between the US and everywhere else, look no further than the current storm-in-a-cappuccino about The Chronicles of Narnia.
For weeks, it seems, there have been spats in the papers about C.S. Lewis' classic children's fantasy series, the first instalment of which has just been adapted as a lush blockbuster by Andrew Adamson, who directed the Shrek films, for Disney. The storm is over religion. C.S. Lewis had it; the Americans have a lot of it; the rest of us don't, supposedly, or at least we don't like to put a hat on it and give it a ticker-tape parade.
In America, Disney has been pushing Lewis' story to Christian fundamentalists, offering churches free screenings and shops a choice of soundtracks, one with pop music and one with "Christian songs", whatever they might be.
Walden Media, co-producer of the film with Disney, is offering "a 17-week Narnia Bible study for children". Yes, Professor Lewis may have been a dusty don who thought Heaven looked exactly like Oxford, but he was on the right side.
Both Catholic and fundamentalist groups have been promoting the film, even employing coordinators to make sure their flocks see it. "We believe," said Lon Allison, director of the Billy Graham Centre at Wheaton College in Illinois, "That God will speak the gospel of Jesus Christ through this film".
For Disney - desperate for a hit franchise to rival Warner's Harry Potter series and Lord of the Rings, Sony's Spider-Man and Fox's Star Wars - it makes sense to sell the film to the one-third of the American population that is officially born again. Last month, the company posted a $US313 million ($A416 million) quarterly loss in its film division, the culmination of a three-year slide. Disney desperately needs a hit.
Since Mel Gibson showed it was possible to get this largely untapped audience into the cinemas for something sufficiently reverent, the marketing makes at least some sort of sense. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is even being described - entirely unfairly - as "The Passion for kids". And it is a strategy that seems to be working; in its first week, Adamson's film topped the charts in the 13 countries where it opened. By December 12, it had grossed $US112 million.
Outside America, however, even ordinary churchgoers are suspicious of a supposed children's adventure film that also serves as a Bible study aid; there is something horribly manipulative in that idea. Old Narnia fans, too, are inclined to reconsider a book that Governor Jeb Bush has decreed must be read by every child in Florida. It was not for this that we bashed around inside our parents' wardrobes, hoping that we too would find that the back panels gave way to Narnia - that, somewhere, we could fight and win battles against ogres, hags and the White Witch.
Like all the best children's stories, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and its sequels are jump started by a situation that means that children must fend for themselves without adult interference. In the case of the Pevensey children - Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy - that situation is World War II.
They are sent to the country to board in a vast mansion occupied only by a dotty professor and his harpy of a housekeeper. Playing hide and seek, they discover that a vast old wardrobe is a doorway to another world, Narnia, that is under the crushing sway of an evil White Witch who has ordained that there shall be endless winter without any Christmas. A prophecy has it, however, that Narnia's fortunes will turn when four human children come to lead a revolt and take their rightful places as kings and queens at the ancient seat of Cair Paravel.
For those who did not like the books, of course, all this Christian bandwagonry is a vindication; Lewis and his books were never anything other than thinly veiled missionary tracts.
The Pevensey children's arrival in Narnia coincides with the return of Aslan, a great lion of deliverance. After battling the Witch, Aslan negotiates with her and agrees to die in exchange for the children's lives, submitting himself to be executed by her henchcreatures. A night passes; the golden body disappears. And then, through the mystery of sacrifice and redemption, it comes back to life. Aslan rises again.
You could call it a parable; you could call it a borrowed legend. It is, indeed, a legend of undeniable power. One might just as well say that Lucy's afternoon tea with the faun Mr Tumnus, when she first finds herself in Narnia, reinforces the idea of Englishness as a universal marker of civilisation. Which, in fact, it does.
But who notices that stuff? For most juvenile readers and, I should think, for the largely secular Australian audiences who go to see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe this Christmas, the sacred story of resurrection slides by in the wash of centaurs, minotaurs and fauns and the essentially Homeric story of the children's attainment of heroic status.
Right now, however, the Christian allegory stands out in high relief. Any discussion of the Narnia stories, as journalist Zoe Williams has noted, is now compulsorily prefixed with some disclaimer that will reset the discussion to the neutral agnostic. "Besides the dodgy Christian subtext ..." the article will begin. We don't want to be tarred with the same brush as Disney.
Tilda Swinton, who plays the White Witch with an evil iciness that could snap freeze whole congregations, had not read the books when Adamson first approached her. A long-time collaborator with the now-deceased queer filmmaker Derek Jarman, she is probably the least likely actress in the world to join forces with Bible bashers. "The Christians are welcome," she says, with composed irony. "As everyone is welcome. Honestly, the connection had to be explained to me. And the more I got to know about Lewis ... I know he was a very devout Christian and that he was capable of writing, as he did his entire life, very obviously Christian tracts. This is not one of them."
Narnia is undoubtedly spiritual, she says, but its world derives from myths and legends that prefigure the religion of tracts. "In fact, if anything - and I cannot believe I am going to say this - I think it is almost anti-religious," she says.
"What I mean by that is that it's about children learning to draw not on any kind of dogma or doctrine but on their own resources, outside of the box. Outside their family, outside parental guidance, outside anything. The thing about Narnia is that it takes you to the heart of yourself, your own conscience and your own experience, and so I think it is so much wider than any religion could be, actually."
If there is evil in the world, she thinks it lies in the lack of doubt. "The incapacity to be compassionate, to be humane and changeable. I am very intrigued by the idea of the righteous. I am suspicious of it, being human. I think that human nature is so much more interesting than that; doubtlessness is not helpful to human beings. So to start the year as the Angel Gabriel in Constantine - and that is the film for the Christians, by the way, not this one - and finish it with the White Witch is a sort of little meditation for me on that idea."
Some Narnia naysayers, most notably the author Philip Pullman, have complained of the conservatism, racism and sexism inscribed in Lewis' stories. "It's not the presence of Christian doctrine I object to so much as the absence of Christian virtue," he said recently.
The Narnia books contained "a peevish blend of racist, misogynistic and reactionary prejudice, but of love, of Christian charity, there is not a trace". In subsequent books, Narnia is at war with a country of swarthy men who carry scimitars, a clear reference to the Crusades. From the first, boys have adventures and take bossy command, he says, while girls are bonny and blithe and pure of heart. God is a lion, a representative of muscular Christianity, while evil, inevitably, is a woman.
Swinton, however, never saw her character as human at all. "She is not a person; she does look like a human but she isn't one," she says. "The Witch is a force of evil and Aslan is a force of good and they are absolutely in balance one with the other. I am Narnia, in a way ... One of the things I enjoyed developing was the costume, because I was determined that her costume should not look as if it had been made. That it should look like Narnia, that her dress be the side of a hill or her crown should be made of ice."
Andrew Adamson simply shrugs off the Christian marketing push as a press beat-up. "Largely, I think it is because people haven't seen the movie," he says. "The truth of the matter is that Disney is promoting this movie to everyone they can get to go and see it, because they want to make their money back. And C.S. Lewis was a Christian writer and there is, I think, a sense of ownership of this film from fans worldwide, some of whom are religious."
Nobody at Disney told him how to make the film. "It wasn't like anyone forced me to make it more or less Disney," he says. "And I think they are going to do a great job of getting this film out into the world, so I'm happy with that."
A down-to-earth New Zealander who graduated from reading Narnia as a child to managing special effects on films before he took on Shrek, Adamson is clearly much more invigorated by describing how they used green screen to turn James McAvoy into Mr Tumnus the faun, how he staged the battle, or how he worked with the children to get them used to the filmmaking process without losing the sense of surprise they needed to feel as they discovered the elements of Narnia.
Filmmaking is always experienced by those involved as a series of practical problems, but a film with hundreds of extras dressed as minotaurs presents more practical problems than most. The make-up artists worked 18-hour days; the effects make-up crew alone consisted of 42 people.
His other concern was telling the story in such a way that both the university-age fantasy buffs and the children hooked on the books could enjoy it.
"But ultimately, I made the film for myself. I know that sounds selfish, but you can only really appeal to your own instincts and make a film you like. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't too scary or gory or gratuitously bloody for young kids."
Clearly, nobody involved in the film was especially concerned with C.S. Lewis' allusion to the central story of Christianity. And why should they be? Isn't it a good story - one of the greatest, most primal of stories, in fact, along with the Greco-Roman and Norse myths on which Lewis also drew? Of course, it is true that Lewis did see the books as preparatory texts in Christian spirituality, easing the way for the juvenile reader's encounter with the real thing in later years.
However, given that the Narnia books are, in Andrew Adamson's estimation, generally read by children between eight and 13, this seems a fairly benign version of indoctrination; Lewis seems to be assuming his readers will be innocent of hard-core religion at least until their teens. There is none of that scary stuff about getting a child at seven and making him God's for life.
All Lewis is suggesting is a spirited romp with centaurs, beavers and a rather unpredictable lion: make of it what you will. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is hardly likely to deprave and corrupt nature's young atheists; most children don't even get the metaphor and, if they do, it is probably because the God-botherers already have them in iron thrall.
Now that Lewis has been signed into service by the American evangelists, however, all this is cast in the light of that disquietingly foreign religion, with its cheesy excess of good cheer, glib materialism and suspect political connections.
Any "Christian subtext" thus becomes "dodgy", as Zoe Williams has noted. The implication of that "dodgy", she wrote, is that Christianity is "inherently unsound, as if it had, without our noticing, ascended to the ranks of anachronistic wrong-headedness, like Nazism or hissing at single mothers".
It seems unfair to everyone, including - but perhaps not especially - C.S. Lewis himself. Forget those awful evangelists for a moment. Really, there is no good reason why a fantasy story should not be based on Christian narratives and iconography. Our entire culture, after all - most notably the laws of the land - derives from a Judeo-Christian understanding of the world. There is no good reason why he should not recount the Resurrection, albeit using furry animals instead of humans as dramatis personae.
There has to be a good case for knowing any of these stories, emblematic as they are. Does anyone, especially a thinking atheist, actually want to argue that children should be told less about anything? Surely not.
So bring on the lion, bring on the minotaurs, bring on the dancing horses. Apart from anything else, the pious don certainly knew how to spin a yarn.
I took my 14 year old grandson, who does not read (except for Harry Potter books). We both loved it. The theatre was jam packed with every age group and was, once the movie began, dead silent and enthralled.
I read British childrens literature from that period and the Narnia books follow a pattern that you won't find in The Sweet Valley High books or any of the current "teen" books that focus on the tawdry, the sexual and the spiritual violence of satanic beings -- a lot of the secular whining is product of people who do not read and are focused on form rather than substance. The books are a product of their time, and I was most relieved to find that the producer and director had resisted the urge to 'update' them by moving the venue to California and changing Narnia into a reprise of 17 Magazine and the girls into Xena, Warrior Princess. (I have to confess that the tiresome "Susan" character, the whining older girl who always wails in favour of running away and going home, is the one character in all books of the period that I would like to drown -- but she existed and exists -- she's the prototype of Cindy Sheehan and only the presence of brothers and friends with backbone keeps her on the right path.)
After the movie Paul and I talked about a few of the things we had seen -- but not much, just enough to give him something to think about, and to indicate to me that he'd picked up a few of the messages. We have been discussing gambling (he knows I gamble and we talk about it honestly) and an occasion when I had to choose between a friendship and a $40 slot machine win. He said "Money is always important" and you ought to choose it over your friends; and I pointed out that he'd seen Edmund betray his brother and sisters for a box of candy, and what that caused to happen. For a 14 year old, things are very black and white -- and a few more words revealed that he'd grasped the idea. That movie gave him plenty to think about. I bought him the book and I hope he'll read it.
You can do this thing here. Join the Republican party and fight against Hillary Clinton and liberalism.
For anyone that hasn't seen the dreadful, and I mean dreadful, mishmash called Constantine you will not understand how utterly clueless this womyn is.
Atheist apparently are trying to convince themselves that Christianity is an irrelevant anachronism as they rush headlong into the void.
I'm really beginning to enjoy watching liberals writhe as people get more and more sick of them....they don't represent middle America, and their doctrines are being rejected by more and more people.
Some (not all) people who claim to be atheists or agnostics are really anti-Christian bigots. An honest agnostic would be indifferent or mildly negative about all depictions of religion in popular culture. Our dishonest "agnostics" claim to have outgrown religion, but they are generally favorably disposed toward Islam or the New Age corruptions of Eastern religions. Christianity, on the other hand, always gets their ire.
News flash: She likes the movie, and the CS Lweis stories. She just doesn'r buy that it's only good because it'ss Chriatian. That seema to be an American attitude: that culture is to be avoided anless it supports the Chriatian message (Actually William Jennings Byran said pretty much that - I guess it's inherent in Americans)
...that, somewhere, we could fight and win battles against ogres, hags and the White Witch.
You can do this thing here. Join the Republican party and fight against Hillary Clinton and liberalism.
_____________________________
LOL
Right on. The great and epic battles are always waiting to be fought. It only requires people of courage and moral conviction to take up the gauntlet.
I especially liked:
"The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is hardly likely to deprave and corrupt nature's young atheists...."
Had the writer any spiritual wisdom he would know that stories with great Christian themes will always deprave and corrupt nature's young atheists. Let this writer and his merry band of fops wallow in their ignorance. Heroism is not dead.
Gee, A film about death, pedophilia and religious submission by force.
Obviously, a blockbuster by Hollywood standards
Dan
So true.
"Outside America, however, even ordinary church goers are suspicious"
Please note that the "ordinary church goers outside of America" religions are not identified. Secularists consider their beliefs to be a religion. The ever constant trickery of word manipulation.
" of a supposed children's adventure film that also serves as a Bible study aid; there is something horribly manipulative in that idea "
Leave it to (secular) liberals to rewrite history and definitions to confuse and deflect from reality. They switch out metaphors or similes used in a fun, positive "story" for the word manipulation.
"I'm really beginning to enjoy watching liberals writhe as people get more and more sick of them....they don't represent middle America, and their doctrines are being rejected by more and more people."
...
That's because you and the rest of sane America are not like these rabid sick dogs who keep returning to their own vomit.
Steph, the real-life Screwtape and Professor Lewis are both chuckling right now. Screwtape's chuckling because he could have written that line, probably has, and perhaps even believes it's true. Lewis is chuckling because he could have written that line for Screwtape, probably would have if he'd had the occasion to, and because as a former atheist who was "depraved and corrupted" (heh) by Christian friends and literature, he knows better.
"Swinton as the villainous White Witch, so that she seems less a malefic force of nature than a frosty schoolmarm"
...
It isn't Swintons fault that her only role model for the part was rerun clips of Hillary.
"The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is hardly likely to deprave and corrupt nature's young atheists...."
___________
Nature knows no atheists. It is only the unnaturalists (sic) who can not tolerate nature or God.
Tilda Swinson "I know he was a very devout Christian and that he was capable of writing, as he did his entire life, very obviously Christian tracts. This is not one of them."
Eyes but can not see.
I was looking at the "NArnia" table in the bookstore at Church yesterday, covered with C.s. Lewis' work, and realized it isn't so much the religious "message" in the film as it is that it may get people interested in Lewis' writing again. The secular humaniss should worry about that because he presents Christianity in a way that makes it very difficult to resist.
Funny the violent words we use around the bible. Bible belt is geographical. Maybe "Bible Thumpers" is a better term, though your Aussie term sounds like it refers to one who beats others over the head with the bible. Funny how all this "bashing" came from a gay word -- gay bashing. Now everything is bashing this and bashing that. Like the verb "to out".
Susan turns to the dark side later, doesn't she?
Susan becomes a Flapper, so you might say so -- and pretends she never heard of Narnia.
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