First Look at The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Into The Wardrobe
A first look at the Narnia movie.
By John J. Miller
First impressions of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which reaches movie theaters this weekend:
Is it any good? Yes, the movie is very good—a solid piece of entertainment in its own right, and fans of C. S. Lewis will regard it as faithful to his book in every important respect. A few plot elements are dropped and several others are added, but each decision makes sense for a movie that’s trying to tell a story in two hours.
What’s new, pt. 1: In the book, Lewis says that the Pevensie kids “were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.” That’s why they wind up in a big house with a strange wardrobe. When Lewis wrote, the evacuations were fresh in many minds and he didn’t need to say much else. That’s not true today, and so the film adds some helpful historical context. The first image is of a German bomber as it flies over Britain.
What’s new, pt. 2: Edmund is the bad egg, of course, and in the book there are indications of this even before he becomes a Turkish Delight junkie. The movie relies far more on Edmund’s sibling rivalry with older brother Peter as a factor in his treachery, and far less on Turkish Delight.
What’s new, pt. 3: There’s a chase scene through a tunnel, an attempted crossing of an icy river, and an encounter with Father Christmas that initially reminded me of how the hobbits first came into contact with the ringwraiths in The Lord of the Rings—it’s a sleight of hand, of course, but an effective treatment and not in the book. Also, after Father Christmas gives presents to the Pevensies and sleds off, Lucy turns to Susan and says, “Told you he was real!” It’s a wonderful line—not in the book, but a clever addition that advances the book’s theme of faith. Another new line comes from Tumnus, imprisoned in the witch’s castle—he says something that recalls Braveheart.
What’s new, pt. 4: J. R. R. Tolkien famously didn’t like The Chronicles of Narnia. “It really won’t do, you know,” he told a friend. One of his main objections was the way in which Lewis mixed different mythological traditions into a Narnian stew. The moviemakers revel in this, fleshing out creatures described only briefly in the book and adding new ones entirely. This may have required their greatest feat of imagination. Think of it as multiculturalism, in the best sense of the word. Personally, I liked it. When I watch the movie again, one of my priorities will be to notice more of these details. Also, the climactic battle scene includes griffins that drop boulders on the witch’s army—they are the mirror image of those German bombers at the start of the film.
What’s new, pt. 5: We get our first glimpse of Aslan early on, in the fireplace of Tumnus’s lair. In the book, we don’t hear about Aslan until the Pevensies get to the beaver dam (and we don’t see him until after that). The passage introducing him is one of the most memorable in the whole Chronicles (“None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do…”). It really can’t be rendered on film and our moviemakers don’t even attempt it here. That’s a wise decision.
It’s funny: The movie has a lot of humor—much more than the book, in fact. “You’re a Daughter of Eve?” asks Tumnus when he meets Lucy. “My mom’s name is Helen!” she replies. (Also new: In the books, we don’t see the mother, as we do in the film, and Lewis never names her.) And I can’t tell you how pleasant it was to sit through a film aimed largely at kids and not hear a single burp or fart joke.
The acting: The four actors who play the Pevensie kids are excellent, especially the girls. (But will they grow up too fast for Narnia sequels?) Tilda Swinton is brilliant as the White Witch; James McAvoy is outstanding as Tumnus. Kiran Shah, as the witch’s dwarf sidekick, kept reminding me of Deep Roy as the Oompa Loompa in the recent Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake.
Cool tribute: In Professor Kirke’s house, we overhear a news report on the radio. The voice belongs to Douglas Gresham, who is Lewis’s stepson. It is a fitting family tribute to Lewis, who delivered radio addresses over the BBC during the Second World War. These were later collected as one of his most popular books, Mere Christianity.
The music: Not immediately memorable. And did they have to include a song by Alanis Morrisette? The last time I heard what she liked to do in movie theaters, I wanted to turn off the radio.
The credits: When the credits start to roll at the end of the movie, stay in your seats. There’s a final scene worth watching.
Will your kids like it? The movie is rated PG, appropriately. A few scenes are meant to startle. There is combat and violence, much of it fast and loud. The film is by no means gory—we don’t see the witch actually kill Aslan, for instance, though we do know exactly what she did with her knife. I took my entire brood to a screening last weekend. My eight-year-old boy, who has had the book read to him three times, said the other day, “it was so good, I can’t stop thinking about it.” My six-year-old daughter, who has had the book read to her twice, called it “perfect” as we were walking out of the theater, although later she added that she didn’t like it when Aslan was killed. Of course, she’s not supposed to like that part. It may be worth noting that the scene is like a Star Wars cantina set in the netherworld—full of scary monsters and vicious animals up to no good. A susceptible kid might suffer nightmares. My four-year-old son, who is a budding monster-movie aficionado, squirmed a lot during the film and said he wanted to go home. Later, he said he liked it, especially “when the lion roared really, really loud.” In truth, he was probably too young for the movie, but only because he’s kind of young for movies generally. The biggest problem was keeping him quiet, as it was during last summer’s March of the Penguins.
The best part: We can hope, realistically, that the movie will inspire a whole new generation of children to devour The Chronicles of Narnia.
Want more? I’ve written previously about Narnia for NRO here and here.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGU1NDQ4ZWJmZDNjZmE3Mzk4MGNjODA5OTZkYjdkZTA=
Aslan as Christ
Xmas in Narnia
Have Yourself a Merry Little Aslanmas?
By John J. Miller
There is no Christ in Narnia—there is only Aslan, the lion who dies for the sins of others and returns in glorious triumph. So instead of Christmas, shouldn’t the Narnians celebrate Aslanmas? And shouldn’t Lewis have left Father Christmas out of his books entirely?
This is more than just a rose-by-any-other-name semantic dispute, because it goes to the heart of a fundamental criticism that many people level at The Chronicles of Narnia: The books are full of maddening inconsistencies.
When we first encounter Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, for example, we learn that a permanent winter has descended upon the land. This creates a problem later in the story, as Leland Ryken and Marjorie Lamp Mead describe in their new book, A Reader’s Guide Through the Wardrobe:
Another friend [of Lewis's], poet Ruth Pitter, recalled with pleasure her good-natured “win” over Lewis, when she caught him in a textual error in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: where did the beavers obtain certain foodstuffs (e.g., potatoes, flour, sugar, oranges, milk) for the dinner they provided for the Pevensie children, given that it was winter and (by Lewis’s own setup of the story) no foreign trade was allowed? According to Pitter’s memory of the conversation, Lewis had no answer and was “stumped.”
Maybe the food was smuggled into Narnia from Calormen, a country to the south. But that’s pure speculation. And even if this were the case, it is a flaw on the part of Lewis: A good story doesn’t create puzzles for readers; it answers questions before they’re even asked. Lewis is perhaps under a special obligation to explain the food, given that the feast with the beavers is one of the most sensual passages in the book. Where did those big rodents get their chow?
The beavers create other problems as well. “There’s never been any of your race here before,” says Mr. Beaver to the Pevensie kids. As we learn later in the series, however, this isn’t true. Perhaps this can be chalked up to Mr. Beaver not knowing any better. Yet his statement is actually the result of Lewis not knowing any better. When he started writing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he did not plan to compose six sequels. Later books suffer from some near-sightedness that found its way into the first one.
Gee, Toto, I Don’t Think We’re in Middle Earth
Narnia simply wasn’t prepared with the meticulous attention to detail that J. R. R. Tolkien lavished upon to Middle Earth. And Tolkien famously criticized Narnia as an awkward mishmash of a world. It must have pained him to do so: He and Lewis were not only colleagues at Oxford, but also personal friends. Tolkien played a key role in Lewis’s decision to become a Christian, in what is probably one of the most significant conversions of the 20th century. The author of The Lord of the Rings might not have finished his own masterpiece but for Lewis’s unflagging enthusiasm and encouragement. So he probably would have liked to return the favor and cheer on Lewis in the writing of Narnia. Yet Tolkien was a relentlessly honest man and he could not hide his antipathy for the Narnian project: “I hear you’ve been reading Jack’s children’s story,” he told a mutual friend. “It really won’t do, you know!” (To his buddies, Lewis was known as “Jack.”)
Perhaps Tolkien was jealous that Lewis could whip out seven books in seven years—the man wrote at a delirious speed, and Tolkien couldn’t have kept pace even if he had tried. Yet his critique of Narnia contains both substance and merit. Tolkien believed that Lewis veered too close to Christian allegory. Lewis denied this, calling his tales suppositions: “Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would have happened.”
Maybe you have to be an English major to care about the difference between an allegory and a supposition. Tolkien’s primary objection to Narnia, however, raised another issue entirely. He thought that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was an irritating blend of different cultural traditions: centaurs and fauns from the Greeks, dwarves from the Norse, and so on. And that’s even before we get to this strange business about Jesus, Aslan, and Father Christmas.
Lewis was a great borrower, and it drove Tolkien bonkers. In Perelandra, a science-fiction book published in 1943, Lewis makes a reference to “Numinor.” This was meant as a kind of tribute to Tolkien, who wrote of the “Numenor,” which was a kingdom of Middle Earth. Note the slightly different spelling, which may be the result of Lewis being sloppy or thinking the word’s root was “numinous.” Whatever the case, it was not in keeping with Tolkien the philologist’s carefully crafted linguistics. It was a dabbler’s error, the sort of dumb blunder that Tolkien strove to banish from Middle Earth.
The Numenor-Numinor controversy is of course an exceedingly small thing for casual readers of Tolkien and Lewis. The introduction of Father Christmas into The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, on the other hand, is obvious and jarring, even if you don’t compose elaborate letters from Father Christmas every year (as Tolkien did). Shouldn’t St. Nick just stay on our side of the wardrobe?
Kids!
Perhaps. But he does play an important role in Narnia. Lewis has a wonderful line early in the book about how the White Witch has made it “always winter but never Christmas.” If we cross out the Christmas half of it, the line doesn’t carry nearly half the punch: the witch doesn’t seem nearly so terrible, nor does the plight of the Narnians seem quite so grave. That’s especially true for children, for whom Christmas is a time of magical importance. And the arrival of Father Christmas presents the first clear evidence that the tables have turned against the witch. “I’ve come at last,” he says to the Pevensie kids. “She has kept me out for a long time, but I have got in at last. Aslan is on the move. The witch’s magic is weakening.” With that, the spell over Narnia begins to break.
It is of course possible that Lewis might have accomplished the same trick, from a narrative standpoint, without importing Father Christmas. It is also perfectly legitimate to stand with Tolkien and declare that Father Christmas has absolutely no business sledding around a fantasy world in which there is an Aslan but not a Christ. But perhaps this misses the point. The Chronicles of Narnia, after all, are written for children. My own kids love the Father Christmas scene, and I suspect that on some level they grasp its real meaning. To say that it doesn’t belong in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is to argue against the actual experience of countless readers who also have enjoyed it and grasped it. In the end, it may in fact be a very grown-up kind of critique—sober and logical, but blind to the imaginative sensibilities of kids. Can you picture an 8-year-old who would care about the spelling of Numenor/Numinor? That’s a discussion for adults—and even then, only for adults of a very certain type. Narnia, by contrast, is a great big fantasy playground—and as Lewis makes clear throughout the Chronicles, grown ups can’t go there. So maybe Father Christmas is a kid thing, and you just wouldn’t understand.
So is it Christmas or Aslanmas in Narnia? Maybe we should just leave it a mystery, like the beaver’s food. Or we could call it Xmas, using “X” in the algebraic sense of “solve for X.” But let’s remember that most kids don’t like algebra either.
If you’ve made it this far, it probably means that you haven’t yet suffered from Narnia fatigue. Here are three other pieces I’ve written for NRO on C.S. Lewis and Narnia: a general appreciation, an argument on the order in which the Narnian books ought to be read, and first impressions of the new movie.
—John J. Miller is national political reporter for National Review and the author, most recently, of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America..
Aslan: The Lion King
The Lion King
by John J Miller
When Lucy Pevensie says that she has walked through a wardrobe and discovered a new world called Narnia, her older brothers and sister don’t believe her. But little Lucy insists. By the fifth chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the classic book by C. S. Lewis, two of her siblings begin to worry that the poor girl has lost her head. So they approach Professor Kirke, who is looking after them during World War II. “There are only three possibilities,” he says. “Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”
, the classic book by C. S. Lewis, two of her siblings begin to worry that the poor girl has lost her head. So they approach Professor Kirke, who is looking after them during World War II. “There are only three possibilities,” he says. “Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”It turns out, of course, that Lucy really is telling the truth, and it isn’t long before all the Pevensie kids have traveled to Narnia. Untold numbers of readers have followed them there — more than 85 million copies of the seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia series are in print — and millions more will join them when a film version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe reaches theaters. The movie’s commercial potential is huge. If Narnia weren’t by now one of the great brand names in 20th-century children’s literature, its backers might have pitched The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Hollywood as a cross between The Lord of the Rings and The Passion of the Christ. That’s because it is both a fantastic adventure story and a profound expression of Christian belief. Because of this, Lewis’s famous tale not only stands on the threshold of blockbuster success, but also holds the potential to become the next great battleground in the culture wars.
Narnia certainly has its enemies. One of them is the White Witch, the fiendish creature who brings perpetual winter to the land. Another foe, in our own realm, is best-selling children’s author Philip Pullman, who has described the Narnia series as “one of the most ugly and poisonous things I’ve ever read.” (Pullman has explained his own motives for writing books for kids this way: “I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.”) The Narnia movie may not deserve to generate controversy, but there can be no doubt that it will, especially from the quarters that objected to Mel Gibson’s interpreting the story of the crucifixion. Watch for Pullman to go on a new round of opportunistic Lewis-bashing, the New York Times to print hand-wringing articles about Narnian theocracy, and the ACLU to threaten litigation against public-school teachers who read the book to their students or encourage them to see the movie. When Florida governor Jeb Bush chose The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as the centerpiece of a statewide reading program, a columnist for the Palm Beach Post pounced. Frank Cerabino complained about “this cabal of Christian commerce” and added, “We’re opening up the public schools to some backdoor catechism lessons.” As this manufactured controversy unfolds, there will be crude references to the author’s odd personal life, which included a lengthy relationship with the mother of a close friend — the source of endless gossip and speculation and controversy. Others will reproach Lewis for letting the word “darkies” appear in the Chronicles (he was a racist!), accuse him of preferring his male characters to his female ones (he was a sexist!), and theorize about why he spent most of his life as a bachelor and enjoyed the company of men (he was a closeted homosexual!). The attacks will begin from the moment movie reviewers — not an especially conservative group of people — file their first dispatches. The entire assault may prove relentless.
That’s because the Narnia stories are much more than meaningless entertainment for children. Some readers have said that the stories are Christian allegories — i.e., literary representations of Biblical events. Lewis denied this, but he did call them suppositions: “Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would have happened.” And so Aslan comes into Narnia as a talking lion, suffers and dies for the sins of a child, and rises again. Most grown-ups understand what’s going on here, even if many of the kids who listen to this as a bedtime story don’t have a clue.
Clive Staples Lewis, of course, was the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th century. He was born near Belfast in 1898; he died at the age of 64, on the same day JFK was shot. None of his contemporaries could compete with his wit, intelligence, or influence, and arguably none has matched him since. He spent most of his adult life as a professor at Oxford and Cambridge, and by the 1930s he had established his reputation well enough that he was handed the prestigious assignment of writing the third volume in the Oxford History of English Literature. It covered the 16th century and took years to finish — frustrating Lewis so much that he wondered whether the pronunciation of its acronym, “Oh Hell,” was more than a coincidence. Yet many Lewis aficionados consider it his finest work. Today Lewis is revered as a popularizer of the Christian faith who also produced some literary criticism; in truth, Lewis viewed himself as an academic who wrote about religion on the side.
He certainly possessed a remarkable vocation for it, in part because as a young man he had succumbed to atheism. Just as some of the most penetrating critics of Communism have been ex-Communists, Lewis’s own period of irreligiousness equipped him with a disarming ability to explain and defend the principles of Christian life and thought. His conversion did not spring from a sudden epiphany, but was more like what his brother Warren called “a slow steady convalescence from a deep-seated spiritual illness of long standing.” It was, above all, a carefully considered decision. His friend J. R. R. Tolkien, a fellow Oxford professor and an orthodox Catholic, was instrumental in coaxing him along. (Lewis returned the favor: Tolkien once said that he never would have finished The Lord of the Rings without his friend’s unflagging encouragement.)
The writings of G. K. Chesterton also helped sway Lewis, especially Chesterton’s observation that when Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, he was revealing himself to be either a crazy or a phony — or, in fact, the flesh-and-blood Son of God. This insight would have a profound effect on The Chronicles of Narnia and their depiction of Lucy’s initial comings and goings through the wardrobe. Before that, however, it would help Lewis craft one of the most famous passages he ever wrote about his faith.
During World War II, Lewis delivered a series of radio broadcasts over the BBC. These were eventually collected in a book, Mere Christianity, which remains one of his most popular titles. In one of its short essays, Lewis noted that many skeptics are willing to call Jesus “a great moral teacher” but unwilling to accept his divinity. Lewis held a dim view of this position:
It is a jarring passage — by no means an iron trap of logic (it is conceivable that a madman might utter wise words), but surely a line of reasoning that forces clear thinking. Protestant evangelist Josh McDowell has called this set of choices — Jesus as liar, lunatic, or Lord — the “trilemma.” In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Professor Kirke presents the Pevensie kids with their own trilemma as they consider Lucy’s talk of Narnia. Call it “liar, lunatic, or logic.” Before long, the children enter Narnia together and the older ones apologize to their sister for disbelieving her story.
As it becomes clear to them that Lucy is neither a liar nor a lunatic, Lewis’s grand purpose begins to emerge. After asking Lucy’s forgiveness, the Pevensies wonder where they should go. A robin flies into sight and offers itself as a guide. One of the kids questions whether they should follow it. Could it be leading them into a trap? “That’s a nasty idea,” says Peter, the oldest. “They’re good birds in all the stories I’ve ever read.” As Jonathan Rogers points out in The World According to Narnia, “This is the first instance of a theme that recurs throughout the Chronicles: The children know what to do because they have read the right imaginative stories.”
Yet Lewis worried that the right imaginative stories were in short supply. (Another subtle theme of the Narnia books is the inadequacy of British schooling.) “There is too little of what we really like in stories,” Lewis once told Tolkien. “I am afraid we shall have to try to write some ourselves.” In offering Narnia, one of his main goals was to save children from his own fate of falling into the snare of disbelief. Lewis believed that a powerful sense of compulsion spoiled his religious upbringing. “Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ?” he once asked (in what was for him an uncommonly stilted passage). “I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings.” Then he continued: “But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency.” If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then Narnia is the continuation of Sunday school by different devices.
And so each of the books in the series contains elements of Christian instruction: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe confronts the challenge of belief and introduces the concepts of sacrificial death and resurrected life; Prince Caspian describes a period of corruption and restoration; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader includes a baptism scene; The Silver Chair recounts a descent into hell; The Horse and His Boy takes on the problem of unbelievers; The Magician’s Nephew offers a creation story and reveals the origin of evil; and The Last Battle depicts the end of the world. Many children who encounter these stories miss the analogues completely. That was all right by Lewis. “I am aiming at a sort of pre-baptism of the child’s imagination,” he once said. So when Professor Kirke explains why Lucy’s reports of Narnia might be true, Lewis isn’t hoping that kids will think of Chesterton. But he does hope to create the conditions for them to gain a sophisticated understanding of their faith, when they’re ready to grasp it.
The miracle of the forthcoming movie may be that its producers didn’t try to distort Narnia beyond recognition. There have been attempts to do this in the past. During the 1990s, for instance, Paramount owned the film rights to The Chronicles of Narnia and began to develop a script for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Moving the book’s setting from wartime Britain to modern Los Angeles (and replacing air raids with earthquakes) was the least of its flaws: The Pevensie children apparently entered Narnia not through a wardrobe but through a swimming pool, and the White Witch tempted Edmund not with Turkish delight but with cheeseburgers and hot dogs. Worst of all, Hollywood proposed that perhaps Aslan shouldn’t be killed. That would have represented a literary sacrilege, like rewriting The Passion of the Christ so that Jesus doesn’t die. “Some of these ideas really shocked me,” says Douglas Gresham, a stepson of Lewis and an executor of his estate. “Ultimately these scripts were never made into movies because nobody really wanted to make them.” One of the key factors must have been the concern that an unbowdlerized version would be seen as little more than Christian propaganda. Indeed, even HarperCollins, the publisher of Lewis’s work, has felt the urge to neuter Narnia. Four years ago, it announced plans to release a new series of books based on Lewis’s characters. “We’ll need to be able to give emphatic reassurances that no attempt will be made to correlate the stories to Christian imagery/theology,” said a memo that was leaked to the media. Lewis fans gnashed their teeth, and HarperCollins had the good sense to shelve this rotten idea.
By 2001, Paramount’s rights to Narnia had lapsed. Walden Media, a Boston-based company headed by Michael Flaherty (who briefly worked for National Review in the early 1990s), bought them from Gresham. One of Walden’s strategic aims is to take outstanding children’s books and turn them into films. In the last two years, it has produced Holes and Because of Winn-Dixie; next year will see the release of a live-action Charlotte’s Web. (For The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and its budget of more than $150 million, Disney ultimately became a co-financier.) Refreshingly, Walden has embraced Narnia’s Christian themes. The movie is true to the book in almost every way. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a short book, so it’s easy to get everything in,” says Flaherty. The film actually contains several helpful flourishes. It provides extra historical context for the German bombing of London and the evacuation of city children into the English countryside. (At one point, a news broadcast plays over a radio in the background, and the voice belongs to Gresham — a thoughtful tribute to his stepfather’s own wartime commentaries.) In the book, Father Christmas makes a joyful appearance in Narnia; in the movie, the scene closes with Lucy gently scolding her older sister Susan, “I told you he was real.” Lucy is blessed with an extraordinary gift of faith, a quality that allows her to accept the reality of Narnia when her older and supposedly wiser siblings won’t. Her new line, which she doesn’t speak in the book, actually enhances the story in an understated but compelling way.
Unlike the works of other literary giants, which are often more admired than read, C. S. Lewis’s writings have had an increased readership owing to the widespread acclaim. Yet Lewis is not great because he is popular; he is popular because he is great. His greatness has been ignored by some, especially in English departments. Others have scorned it. Such assessments won’t change this winter, as Narnia achieves its highest level of public exposure. Instead, opinions of Lewis are bound to intensify. But the larger effect will be positive. Lewis enthusiasts massively outnumber Narnia’s naysayers. Their ranks will swell, as moviegoers become book readers and book readers dust off an old favorite. And a new franchise may be born, as Hollywood becomes excited at the prospect of six moneymaking sequels. It seems hard to believe, but the importance of C. S. Lewis will increase rather than diminish. As Professor Kirke tells Lucy’s brother and sister, when they come to grips with the possibility of worlds beyond our own: “Nothing is more probable.”
http://www.holyspiritinteractive.net/columns/guests/johnjmiller/thelionking.asp
Crowning Prince Caspian
Crowning Prince Caspian
Behind the movie.
By Rebecca Cusey
Douglas Gresham, co-producer of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, is the stepson of the author of the Narnia series, C. S. Lewis. A child when Lewis married his mother, Joy Davidman, Gresham and his brother grew up in Lewis’s household and inherited Lewis’s estate. Much of Gresham’s life has been spent safeguarding his stepfather’s legacy, and pursuing the dream of properly adapting the series into film. In a phone conversation, I asked him about life on the set and behind the scenes of the movie, which hits theaters this weekend.
What is the essential thing that they absolutely have to get right in this movie?
The underlying messages of the story are so important, and so vital in fact, to the story; [they] are the return to faith, truth, justice, honesty, honor, glory, personal commitment, personal responsibility. All those things come out so strongly in the movie and were very important to me. Also the message is of vital importance, No matter how far away we stray, there’s always just one way back.
Do you think they got Aslan right?
Oh, yes. Far better than last time even. Aslan, in this movie, has all those characteristics which were so difficult to attempt last time. We’ve taken the technology that we’ve pioneered in some respects, but we’ve pushed out again. So, [with] this huge Aslan, you get this great character who is not only a great lion and beautiful to look at, but he’s warm and he’s welcoming, and just a tad bit forbidding, all at the same time. He’s not a tame lion. It’s all there now.
This film, even more than the other, seems to embody the idea of Muscular Christianity — fighting for what is right against desperate odds — that is apparent in C. S. Lewis’s writings. Would you agree that it is there in this film?
I think it is certainly there in this film to a certain degree. What you have to bear in mind is that the Narnian side tried everything they could, even to the extent of single combat with Peter, to avoid a bloodbath; it was the evil side in the end that brought it about. And that is of course, exactly what happens in our world. At the time that they were being written, Chamberlain [made an] effort to make peace with Hitler, right up until Hitler had betrayed everything they had agreed on. And of course we see it in our world today, where we are trying, Western society is trying — desperately almost — to the mistake of rolling over and playing dead, to pander to everyone else who is attacking it, one way or another. Eventually, of course, what will happen is people will dig their heels in, just as in Narnia, and the thing will be forced upon them. I think there are causes which are important to fight for, and I think that comes out in Prince Caspian.
It resonates throughout the whole of our society. We have to become more and more conscious of that fact, by the way. Most of us go about our little lives hoping that these things will go away and just leave us alone. Well, they won’t. The forces of evil are always going to be there. We’re always going to have to fight them. As Tolkien himself said, “All wars are lost. THE war goes on.”
Did you meet Tolkien?
Yes I did. Fine man, I liked him enormously.
Can we talk a little bit about Susan and Lucy’s more active role in the movie? How do you think Lewis would have responded to that?
Well, I’ve been persuaded by Andrew Adamson, that Lewis’s attitude toward women changed to some extent after he married my mother. Now there was a wonderful occasion that epitomized this to some extent. We’d had a problem in the wood with trespassers coming into the wood, local youths breaking down the trees, carving their initials into the trees, throwing rubbish into the lake, including each other and so forth. Mother said, “Jack we’ll just build a barbed wire fence to keep them out.” Jack said, “It’s no good my dear, they’ll just cut the wire and steal it.”
So, my mother, being from the Bronx, said, “If they do that, I’ll buy a shotgun.” They did steal the wire. Well, she bought one. Small gun. Threw a few pellets, never hurt anybody. She used to blast into the leaves of the trees whenever she saw a trespassers and they all chickened out and went somewhere else.
One day, Jack and my mother were walking up the hill ahead of me. Suddenly, out from the shrubbery, leapt a young man with a longbow and a quiver of arrows, casting himself in the part of a latter day Robin Hood, perhaps. Jack said, “Excuse me, but this is private land and you really shouldn’t be here. Would you mind leaving?” The man’s answer was to put an arrow to the string and draw the bow and point it at them. Immediately, Jack stepped in front of my mother to shield her from the arrow. He stood there for a moment, a very chivalrous thing to do, until he heard my mother in tones of chilled steel behind him saying “Goddamn it, Jack, get out of my line of fire.” He stepped sideways very smartly. That whole kind of experience of my mother’s determination and personality, I think changed Jack’s ideas toward women. In the first book he said “battles are ugly when women fight,” and he was right. But in the second, he did from there on, give them an active role for fighting for truth and justice and what was real.
I’m not entirely comfortable with it, because I do believe battles are ugly when women fight. I think they’re pretty ugly to start with, more so when women get involved. I believe what George MacDonald said was very true, which is that it’s every man’s responsibility to protect every woman, first of all from himself.
So what is the role of chivalry in a world where women take part in battles?
That becomes a very difficult thing to define. I don’t really think women should be involved in active combat. I don’t think it’s fair for the men who are fighting beside them, or the men who are fighting against them. And it’s not fair for the women themselves. I think the idea that women have to become men in our current society is a very bad one.
How do you think passionate fans of C. S. Lewis will receive this movie?
I think passionate purist fans of Jack’s works are going to have some interesting surprises when they see this movie. There is no more purist, more passionate fan of Narnia than myself. After all, I grew up there. I think the people who think about changing the book to a movie will see it was absolutely essential to do what we’ve done.
How involved were you?
Well above my neck, you might say. They call me a co-producer, but so much is under my umbrella of responsibility, there isn’t really a credit for what I do. I’m involved in the development of the screenplay, involved in just about every facet of the film and everything related to it. Video games, merchandise. And of course, we’re working on the next one as well.
How often were you on set?
I spent a lot of time on set. We had some interesting experiences. We were in a valley, way in the mountains, deep in the bush of New Zealand. It rained so savagely. There was a ford to get across the little stream to get into the place. Of course the river rose. No body could get in. It was just myself and about four others were the only people left in the whole base camp. For four days nobody could get in or out. I was on set as much as my other responsibilities to the movie would allow.
What do you do when you’re not making movies?
That depends. A lot of my life is spent overseeing everything that is being done in the publishing department of Lewis’s work. My spare time is largely filled, at the moment, with chopping down a forest of prickly pears in a field I’ve just bought. My life is pretty full.
You have children and grandchildren?
We have five children and we have nine, about to be ten, grandchildren. The keenest thing about having kids is grandkids, believe me. It’s wonderful when they hand you grandbabies and you spoil them rotten and when they turn an interesting green color, you hand them back.
— Rebecca Cusey writes from Washington, D.C.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2VjZTY2YzcwZDVjODdiMDBhZjZiYmEzMDA1MTQ1OGY=
