One Utah

It’s rare, but it happens.  I watched The Golden Compass last night and I have to say I think it was a better movie than book.  Interestingly, all the kerfuffle from conservative christians about the film was a mistake - the film’s supposedly anti-Christian content is all but missing.  To be honest, I expected more.

But that connects with my thoughts on something else - I see there is another Narnia movie coming out, Prince Caspian.  To be honest, I disliked The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe precisely because it was an accurate representation of Lewis’ theology.  In that movie (and the book) Aslan is supposed to be some sort of Christ character who sacrifices himself to save the world, but his sacrifice is portrayed as random and meaningless - it is because it has to be.  There’s no aspect of choice for Aslan nor is there any real sense of sacrifice since Aslan knows he will be resurrected.  In Narnia, what matters is going through the steps and then everything is fine.  There’s no need for meaning or thought or reflection - just follow the steps and all will be well:

Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to? Poor child Edmund, to blame for everything, must bear the full weight of a guilt only Christians know how to inflict, with a twisted knife to the heart. Every one of those thorns, the nuns used to tell my mother, is hammered into Jesus’s holy head every day that you don’t eat your greens or say your prayers when you are told. So the resurrected Aslan gives Edmund a long, life-changing talking-to high up on the rocks out of our earshot. When the poor boy comes back down with the sacred lion’s breath upon him he is transformed unrecognisably into a Stepford brother, well and truly purged.

. . . Over the years, others have had uneasy doubts about the Narnian brand of Christianity. Christ should surely be no lion (let alone with the orotund voice of Liam Neeson). He was the lamb, representing the meek of the earth, weak, poor and refusing to fight. Philip Pullman - he of the marvellously secular trilogy His Dark Materials - has called Narnia “one of the most ugly, poisonous things I have ever read”.

Why? Because here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America - that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right. I once heard the famous preacher Norman Vincent Peale in New York expound a sermon that reassured his wealthy congregation that they were made rich by God because they deserved it. The godly will reap earthly reward because God is on the side of the strong. This appears to be CS Lewis’s view, too. In the battle at the end of the film, visually a great epic treat, the child crusaders are crowned kings and queens for no particular reason. Intellectually, the poor do not inherit Lewis’s earth.

. . . Children are supposed to fall in love with the hypnotic Aslan, though he is not a character: he is pure, raw, awesome power. He is an emblem for everything an atheist objects to in religion. His divine presence is a way to avoid humans taking responsibility for everything here and now on earth, where no one is watching, no one is guiding, no one is judging and there is no other place yet to come. Without an Aslan, there is no one here but ourselves to suffer for our sins, no one to redeem us but ourselves: we are obliged to settle our own disputes and do what we can. We need no holy guide books, only a very human moral compass. Everyone needs ghosts, spirits, marvels and poetic imaginings, but we can do well without an Aslan.

Lewis’ theology strikes me as at best dessicated and inhuman.  There is no room in his world for the spontaneous, the loving.  The girls weep all night for Aslan because . . . well because they’re supposed to.   Their weeping tells us his death matters.  The plot, Aslan’s lack of character, the flatness of the other characters motivations, don’t lead us to our conclusions.

The Narnia books aren’t all that compelling.  Philip Pullman, who wrote The Golden Compass, said of Lewis:

In a superficial and bustling way, Lewis could tell a story, and when he cheats, as he frequently does, the momentum carries you over the bumps and the potholes. But there have always been adults who suspected what he was up to. His friend Tolkien took a dim view of The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, particularly disliking Lewis’s slapdash way with mythology: ‘It really won’t do, you know!’ And the American critic John Goldthwaite, in his powerful and original study of children’s literature The Natural History Of Make-Believe (OUP, 1996), lays bare the misogyny, the racism, the sado-masochistic relish for violence that permeates the whole cycle. 

Pullman also notes Lewis’ mysogyny:

And in The Last Battle, notoriously, there’s the turning away of Susan from the Stable (which stands for salvation) because “She’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.” In other words, Susan, like Cinderella, is undergoing a transition from one phase of her life to another. Lewis didn’t approve of that. He didn’t like women in general, or sexuality at all, at least at the stage in his life when he wrote the Narnia books. He was frightened and appalled at the notion of wanting to grow up. Susan, who did want to grow up, and who might have been the most interesting character in the whole cycle if she’d been allowed to, is a Cinderella in a story where the Ugly Sisters win.

Lewis’ mythology is slapdash, cobbled together.  Unlike his friend and peer Tolkien, Lewis seems strangely uninterested in a really deep mythology.  Tolkien criticized Lewis’ Narnia for its lack of depth; fwiw, I’ve heard the Lewis felt Middle Earth was far too complex a world.

 In the end, the link between the two series and two writers is an odd one.  Lewis, the conservative Christian hero, with his creaky allegory and bustling proselytizing stories and Philip Pullman, a staunch secularist and rationalist whose trilogy is intentionally, in some sense, the anti-Narnia.  Pullman’s book made for a bit of a slog in terms of reading, it dragged in places but it turned into a highly entertaining movie.  Pullman’s world is far more richly imagined than Narnia, his Oxford is a bustling, real place, his Gyptians are ultimately real people.

Conservative Christians jumped up and down and complained about The Golden Compass and its supposedly flawed perspective.  But they managed to miss that the film version of Narnia is an accurate recording of Lewis’ theology - one that seems to turn nonblievers away rather than attract them.

This entry was posted Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 2:58 pm and is filed under 4th Estate (Media), Religious Fundamentalism, This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.