Narnia Films "Subvert Lewis's World"

Speaking of the Narnia films, Steven Boyer has an excellent piece at Touchstone analyzing a key difference between the Narnia books and films:

So hierarchy [for Lewis], by its nature, is fundamentally good. And Lewis follows the overwhelming majority of the Christian tradition by going further, by believing that the goodness of hierarchically ordered relationships extends all through the world that God has made. Relationships of all kinds are ordered, Lewis thinks, with an appropriate kind of giving and an appropriate kind of receiving. When that order is respected, real joy and freedom are the result….

Indeed, for Lewis, the whole notion that kings must live in competition and suspicion of one another reflects the outlook not of Peter or Caspian or the noble Narnians, but of Miraz. It makes all the sense in the world that Miraz should be threatened by any authority other than his own, for his own authority is only that of a tyrannical usurper. Miraz doubts the very existence of such a thing as legitimate authority; for him, there is only power. And power is always threatened by any other power.

In fact, when we first meet Miraz in Lewis’s story, we find him disbelieving the ancient tales of Peter and Susan and Edmund and Lucy on precisely these grounds. He cries out in a rage, “How could there be two Kings at the same time?”

How could there, indeed! Such a harmonious, supportive, virtuous understanding of hierarchical rule is foundational to Lewis’s deeply Christian worldview, but it is utterly incomprehensible to Miraz—and also to the unwitting disciples of Miraz who wrote this Hollywood screenplay. In Miraz’s view, kingship is all about who calls the shots, who gets his way, who is top dog. Those who adopt this view cannot but find the notion of courteous, cooperative kings to be impossibly unrealistic.

And this, of course, is exactly my complaint. Everywhere you look in the first two Narnia films, you find incontrovertible evidence that the creators of those films take exactly this view.

Read the full article for specific examples that illustrate this problem with the films. It's fascinating to me how easily our culture was able to infiltrate this story through the filmmakers and change something so fundamental--and probably without their realizing what they were doing. They simply did not fully understand the story they were attempting to portray. It's a reminder to all of us of the power of cultural blinders and the careful work we need to put into understanding the text of the Bible.

(HT: Tim Challies)

Comments

[Douglas Gresham]

Great food for thought as to how modern sensibilities may have poisoned the Christian message in the Narnia films.