Lions, witches and wardrobes--oh my!

Disney's take on the classic C.S. Lewis work The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe isn't bad, actually. It's not that good--but the special effects, cinematography, and above all Lucy's character as played by newcomer Georgie Henley will keep your interest.

The problems with the film have less to do with Disney, and more to do with two factors beyond its immediate control: the books themselves, and our society today.

First and foremost, the Narnia series consists of seven uneven books. The LWW, although the first written (in 1950) actually comes second in Narnia time, The Magician's Nephew (1955) being a prequel that explains how Narnia and the wardrobe came to be created.

I probably liked MN the best, and LWW second, but all the books suffer from the unfortunate fact the Lewis was a clunky writer and often winds up 'cheating' by just inserting or asserting things.

Rereading them last year, I was struck at how limited Lewis seemed. The writing was often flat, sentences didn't flow, tart asides seemed the work of a cranky old man, and the story just didn't seem all that compelling.

It's tricky writing fantasy, even trickier when you take on the constraint of writing it for children. You need to create a believable, rich world populated with interesting characters tied together by an imaginative plot wrapped up with interior logic. So when John Doe does thing Z or says statement Y, it flows and seems inevitable, so that you don't see the strings dangling at the behest of the author's wand.

The master of this was Tolkien; anyone who's read the Hobbit/Fellowship books can't wait to reread them and yet is always wistful about not being able to rediscover them for the first time each time. Lewis is no Tolkien; Narnia is to Middle Earth as Aesop is to the Bible.

In my opinion Lewis is not even a Philip Pullman, whose His Dark Materials trilogy (the first book of which is the only children's book to ever win the prestigious British Whitbread Prize, placing Pullman in the company of Ted Hughes and Kazuo Ishiguro) is referred to by some as the anti-Narnia.

Maybe I'm expecting too much out of Lewis--after all, I remember being delighted with Narnia the first time I read through the series as a kid. It could be the books just aren't for adults.

Certainly the racism and sexism aren't for (most) adults. Don't get me wrong--I like Lewis as an author; Out of the Silent Planet is quite interesting, Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity are thought-provoking, and I'm definitely giving my kids Narnia.

But the racism is in the books like the N-word is in Huck Finn. Read the series and you'll find yourself cringing time and again. Lewis, after all, is a product of his times (and religion). I'd typify his as quietly seeping racism and sexism. It doesn't rush out at you and Lewis probably wasn't conscious of it, but it's always there, like the old man on the porch who good-naturedly tries to pat the head of his "Oriental" neighbor's kids while praising their work ethic.

The Horse and His Boy in particular really plays up the white people are the natural leaders over the swarthy masses aspect, but it's a foundational theme of every book.

The racism leaps out at you in a visual manner in the Disney film--four white children fall into a world and instantly are accepted as the natural leaders (think for a moment--if four black kids took over running a war with no previous training, don't you think the audience would've groaned a little at such PC-filmmaking?!), battling a White Queen (read race traitor) with her general (big black bull) leading an army of mostly swarthy and non-white foes (there's even a fleeting scene in the movie with evil Chinese-looking archers).

It'd be odd, actually, if Lewis were anything but racist and imperial--everything in Narnia is discernably from his post-WWII British perspective, when having been devastated and reeling from the loss of their sun-never-sets empire English authors churned out fantasy like never before, all emphasizing plucky yet cool white characters coming into their natural due after trials and tribulations against the forces of darkness. Ah, the poor British, rarely in the course of human events have so many lost so much so quickly!

But bad as the racism is, the sexism is what really rankles. Few people, after all, are holding up Narnia as a paragon for relations between whites and non-whites; but people are pushing it onto little girls everywhere hoping they'll model Lucy and Susan (wonder what they'd think of Polly or Aravis or Jill....)

Yet rereading the series as an adult, I thought Lewis definitely sexist, if not misogynistic. Philip Pullman wrote a much-celebrated (but short) essay that mentions this.

Most obvious is the White Queen as the serpent cum Eve cum women, a trope that appears literally in the Magician's Nephew but is always there elsewhere. Part of her sin is she dares usurp the natural order of things, trying to take over in a world where she does not belong after having literally destroyed her own world.

Thematically and literally, in the end Lewis' women are all subordinate to his male characters. The ultimate authority is always male, and there are many scenes in his series where the male character--Aslan, Peter, and others--is paid homage to in a way that emphasizes their manliness.

In the movie, for example, Peter forces Edmund to wear a girl's coat at one point, during the period in which Peter's asserting who's in charge. (Incidentally, how odd is it that the children spend much of their time in Narnia wearing fur coats while talking to beavers and other animals)

Lucy is the pluckiest of Lewis' females, but it's important to realize she's a young girl and hence not for real. She doesn't count ultimately, and indeed it's been suggested Lewis liked his women to stay child-like.

While Susan, who is womanly and could be on an equal footing with Peter, is consistently portrayed as shrewish and at the end of the series is singled out for punishment.

Like the Christian church, ultimately Lewis's women are all under the male's rule like children/parents, and submit to the natural authority of the male. Again, he was merely a product of his times--I'm not condemning him or saying not to read him. Let's just not close our eyes (or misread) and hold him up as some visionary.

Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker touches on some of these points about the underlying power dynamics of Narnia; he brings up another interesting point that gets at how Narnia isn't really a shill for Christianity, unless you're Christian the way Jerry Falwell is:

Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side.

If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory.

A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.

Whatever happened to the meekness and not lording it over others that seems so much a part of Jesus's teachings?!

Like the lion vs. the donkey, given the priviledged position white Christian males occupy in our society it's difficult to buy into the right's view of a religion under siege. And it's even harder to believe Jesus, were he to reappear, would gather Christians as his bretheren. Christ was always for the powerless--camel/needle's eye is the heart of his teachings; he'd be apalled by Falwell and his ilk, no matter how many times they whisper his name at night.

Gopnick's article also discusses how Lewis came to Christianity as simply the culmination of his lifetime interest in myth. It's an important point, because evangelicals are trying to reinvent Narnia as Christian allegory, much as they've tried to recast the Constitution as a Christian document (somewhere the founding fathers are rolling their eyes in their graves).

And indeed it seems to me the poor misreading of literature that Marxist scholars pushed in the 70s has given way to the poverty of evangelicals trying to suck the marrow out of every act of creation by anyone who happens to be a Christian.

Did C.S. Lewis Create Narnia as an Allegory? has an interesting take on this; I would add that to see Narnia, or Tolkien's works, as Christian allegory is to demean and sadly miss the entire point of what they believed and created.

Drafting it as allegory means you're saying the true heart of the work is in what it says about Christianity. But both authors strongly believed creating a world for its own sake was their highest purpose, and would be horrified and saddened by those who parsed their works, sifting out 'mere story elements' while looking for the Christian bits.

In Lewis' case especially, he wrote Narnia as children's stories--they were informed by his experience as a Christian, but in a way perhaps unimaginable to evangelical Christians today, the relationship of an Anglican and his faith was comparable to the relationship of a veteran to the war in which he fought.

It's a major, perhaps the major, experience in shaping who you are and what you believe and will permeate what you write. But it is still an experience mediated by you the person. It is not all-pervading, it is not your soul--otherwise, you suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome... or pre-rapture stress syndrome.

For both Lewis and Tolkien WWI and WWII, their love of mythology, and the effects of academia were as important in shaping their writing as their Christian background. You may as well read Narnia as a WWII allegory (well, the White Queen is a Nazi, Aslan the Americans...), which would likewise sap some of its life away and serve as blinkers on your understanding of the work.

It's not surprising to me that evangelical Christians are trying to claim Narnia for their own. It's just another dying gasp of this most-fearful segment of society, along with the putting the Christ back in Christmas hoopla, the puffing of Mel Gibson's wretched and anti-Semitic Passion, claiming credit for Bush's re-election, and pretending that Christianity is under siege.

It's not surprising that Lewis's mild racism and sexism feels familiar to the religious right, acquainted as it is with much uglier manifestations of two sins that apparently were left off their God's tablets.

But you know, Narnia is no Earth, and England circa WWII is not America today. Those days are over.

Frame grab from Disney's Narnia from unidentified website.