Interlude

We interrupt this series on homiletics for a brief rant regarding the movie, “Prince Caspian.” I went to see it and my general impression was that a blind man on a bushhog had run backwards over a copy of the novel which was then pasted together by a drunken chimpanzee wearing two catcher’s mitts. You knew you were in trouble when the opening credits announced that it was “Based on” the novel by C. S. Lewis. Debased on it would have been more like it.

When I expressed these gentle sentiments to family and coworkers they all responded with those patronizing grins which say so clearly, “Purists are such a drag!” And I don’t say they’re wrong. The fact is that my angst was almost entirely inarticulate. I mean, I could cite chapter and verse as to where the film had taken liberties with the book but was less successful in explaining why this bothered me so much. About the best I could do was to realize that, as one trained to have deep respect for the written text of Scripture, I tend to extend that reverence to just about anything expressed in writing. (I’ve gone on similar jags regarding the liberties Hollywood has taken with various biblical stories: they mangle the theology and don’t improve the drama. It’s like simultaneously increasing the calorie count of a cake while making it taste like sodden toilet paper. And in case you’re wondering, yes, I do know what sodden toilet paper tastes like but it was a college prank and I don’t want to talk about it.)

ANYWAY . . . I decided it wasn’t just over-anal-ysis on my part, though a sort of literary fundamentalism might have come into play. For one thing, the screenplay has glaring flaws. (Warning: there’s a plot spoiler coming up, but the only plot it really spoils is the one in the movie, which is kinda like saying I’m going to spoil an egg that’s been sitting on concrete in the South Texas sun for six hours.) For instance, in the scene where Caspian flees his uncle’s assasins, he falls to the ground and blows his magic horn even as Trumpkin the dwarf rushes to defend him and is captured. Now, at this point, none of the Old Narnians knows who Caspian is or has any idea why he’s pretending to be Louie Armstrong when his life is in danger. Yet later on, when Trumpkin meets the Pevensie children, he expresses his disappointment that the magic hadn’t worked better, saying something like, “We expected a bit more.” Who, one wonders, is “we,” since he hasn’t a clue as to the Prince’s identity, and what reason did he have to expect anything? Then he decides to guide the Pevensie children to Aslan’s Howe, even though nobody was there when he left, there was no revolution underway and no battle taken place. And next (third time’s the charm), when Peter first meets the Prince, he calls him by name! Even though Trumpkin, the only Narnian he’s talked to on this particular trip, never knew the identity of the injured stranger whom, for some reason, he’d risked his life to defend. One clearly senses the mitt-muffled hand of the glue-sniffing chimp here.

But that was hardly enough. I mean, such evident gaucheries, irritating as they were, did not account for the level of anger I experienced.

I was wrestling with all of this when, in preparation for some lectures I’m supposed to deliver next week, I re-read Lewis’ essay “On Stories.” To my great delight I found Jack himself going on a tear about a movie made from one of his favorite books, H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. Unlike me, Lewis eloquently anatomizes his angst:

Of its many sins - not least the introduction of a totally irrelevant young woman in shorts who accompanied the three adventurers wherever they went - only one here concerns us. At the end of Haggard’s book, as everyone remembers, the heroes are awaiting death entombed in a rock chamber and surrounded by the mummified kings of that land. The maker of the film version, however, apparently thought this tame. He substituted a subterranean volcanic eruption, and then went one better by adding an earthquake.

Lewis goes on to explain that this double-barreled danger might increase the level of raw excitement but complains that “there must be a pleasure in such stories distinct from mere excitement or I should not feel that I had been cheated in being given the earthquake instead of Haggard’s actual scene. What I lose is the whole sense of the deathly (quite a different thing from simple danger of death) - the cold, the silence, and the surrounding faces of the ancient, the crowned and sceptered dead.”

What Lewis is getting at here is the idea of atmosphere, or what Lewis Scholar Michael Ward, in his new book on the Narnia series, Planet Narnia, calls donegality. This quality is, Ward explains, “the spiritual essence or quiddity of a work of art as intended by the artist and inhabited unconsciously by the reader. . . . its peculiar atmosphere or quality; its pervasive and purposed integral tone or flavour; its tutelary but tacit spirit, a spirit that the author consciously sought to conjure, but which was designed to remain implicit in the matter of the text . . . .”

So, for Lewis, the stories of Fenimore Cooper only work because of the “Redskinnery” of their danger, not the danger itself (For me, the stories of Fenimore Cooper don’t work at all, but that’s another topic.), stories about giants work not because the hero is in danger but because he is in danger from giants, and pirate stories work because they have pirates, not because they have storms and sea-fights and shivered timbers and the like.

So what is the “donegality” of Prince Caspian? I suggest that it is chivalry: codes of honor and elaborate courtesy and carefully defined social roles. When Miraz stumbles on a tree root during his mano-a-mano for the Narnian throne, Peter steps back to let his foe rise. “‘O bother, bother, bother,’ said Edmund to himself. ‘Need he be as gentlemanly as that? I suppose he must. Comes of being a Knight and a High King.” It is the same with the baroque language in the challenge Peter sends to Miraz in the first place. Peter describes Miraz’ regicide as “abhominable,” then insists that his amanuensis “spell it with an H.” That spelling is based on an incorrect etymology which believed the word derived from ab-, “apart from,” and homo, “human,” and thus meant “outside the boundaries of humanity.” The fact that this is a medieval spelling is significant in itself; Peter insists on harking back to the age of Chivalry. More important, perhaps, is his very medieval idea that murdering one’s king and brother is more than “illegal.” It is, instead, an act which casts one out of the fellowship of humanity.

Now, you can like or dislike chivalry. Most feminists, I understand, hate it. I was raised to love it. My grandmother taught me to say “sir” and “ma’am” and my mother insisted that I stand aside as she or any other woman entered a doorway. I’ve always liked the story about how G. K. Chesterton, a man of brobdingnagian girth, once spoke of the chivalric privilege of offering his seat to two ladies on a bus. But the point isn’t whether one likes chivalrly or not; the point is that Lewis made it the “spiritual essence or quiddity” of his book and that changing it is akin, not to changing the color of a baloon, but to deflating the helium and replacing it with oxygen.

It is hard to imagine anything less chivalrous than the movie “Prince Caspian.” A few examples will have to suffice, though skipping any of them makes me feel like a ravenous hyena leaving slabs of juicy flesh on the carcass of a freshly downed wildebeest. Off the top of my head, then:

In the opening scene of the movie, we find Edward, oldest of the Pevensie children and High King back in their Narnian days, brawling in a punch-up down the tube station because someone has pricked his swollen pride and he can’t stand being treated as just another kid when he is, in fact, royalty. But the whole idea of Narnia is that those who visit become better people, and this happens precisely because they imbibe an “atmosphere” (the children have hardly been a day back in Narnia when we read that Edmund can hold his own in a fencing match because “the air of Narnia had been working upon him ever since they arrived on the island, and all his old battles came back to him, and his arms and fingers remembered their old skill.” Before his fight with Mirza, Peter, we read, would be unrecognizable to his schoolmates because “Aslan had breathed on him at their meeting and a kind of greatness hung about him.”). This atmosphere of Chivalry, or Medievality or whatever one wants to call it, is the donegality of Prince Caspian. To attribute pugnacity to a character precisely because he has been to Narnia violates it.

To take another example, the movie depicts a sense of rivalry between Peter, the High King of old, and Caspian, the prince who would be king. No doubt the producers thought the story needed this kind of tension to keep up the interest. But rivalry and jealousy are foreign to the donegality of chivalry. In the novel, Caspian’s first words to Peter are, “Your Majesty is very welcome,” a greeting to which Peter replies, “And so is your Majesty. I haven’t come to take your place, you know, but to put you in it.” It isn’t that power struggles don’t happen, but they don’t happen in a chivalric story. In Chivalry, such relationships are governed by codes that are clear and clearly understood. To drag in the sort of bickering that a modern audience would expect among, say, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, may heighten the tension or the drama, but it destroys the very atmosphere Lewis so carefully crafted.

A third example and I’ll stop. No, I won’t: I have a fourth to add. And a fifth. My third is the fact that the Susan of the movie is a gimlet-eyed killer. She slices down foe after foe with her bow and arrow, all with a haughty look of triumph that would be more fitting for Dirty Harry or Rambo. Yet in the novel neither of the girls takes part in the battle. Indeed, they never actually enter the Narnian Alamo of Aslan’s Howe. The Lion has already stated in the first book of the series that “battles are ugly when women fight.” Now, that kind of talk might make Gloria Steinham chew up a chair but it is Chivalric talk. The pleasure we get from it is the pleasure of entering a world where those who are strong have the privilege of defending those who are weaker. Nor is this a matter of women weakly receiving service. “A desire to have all the fun,” quips Dorothy Sayers’ sleuth-and-English-gentleman Peter Wimsey, “is nine-tenths of the law of chivalry.” By agreeing to forego the glory of battle the female characters act to keep a part of the society free from bloodstains.

For a fourth instance, consider the entirely apocryphal raid on Miraz’ castle. Nothing in the novel anticipates this; it is pure invention on the part of the producers. Or perhaps I would be more accurate to say “impure” invention. True, the scene treats us to some nifty special effects and some exciting swordplay but, once again, no Chivalry. Stage the same scene with camo-clad commandos, replace swords with M-16’s, and the scene loses nothing. One recalls here Lewis’ complaint about the “King Solomon” movie where two dangers replaced one as if danger were the whole point. The producers of “Caspian” seem to have subscribed to a similar inflationary econcomics of drama: excitement counts and two battles have twice the excitement of one. The fact is just the reverse: Peter’s cage match with Miraz has the specific excitement of a deadly combat waged according to strict codes of conduct - the full intent to kill an opponent combined with the determination to let him recover from a stumble because it was an accident irrelevant to the test of skill.

And now to my fifth example. Lewis complained of the “totally irrelevant young woman in shorts” in the movie version of King Solomon’s Mines. He quickly says that this flaw does not concern his main point. Given the boys’-club nature of Haggard’s books I’m not so sure he’s right, but let it go. My point is that “Prince Caspian,” the movie, contains, not a totally irrelevant young woman but a totally irrelevant quasi-romance between a young woman and a young man. We find early on that Susan and Caspian sense an attraction to one another, a feeling which ends in a passionate kiss just before they part for good. I think that the hot-pants-hottie in “King Solomon” and the love-interest in “Caspian” are there for the same reason: the producers thought the whole thing needed jazzing up with some romance - or at least sex. Again, this seemingly innocent innovation violates the donegality of Chivalry. Under the code of Chivalry the two young people might indeed have fallen in love, but any contact between them would have taken place through a Byzantine labyrinth of negotiations, bows, curtsies, letters and other protocols. However they functioned in historical fact, the ideal purpose of these dance steps would have been to protect the virtue and honor of both parties, as well as their families and, in the case of nobility, their entire community or nation. To have the young folks fling themselves at one another like two American teenagers after a school dance introduces the sound of an electric guitar into a Beethoven symphony.

All of this, of course, leaves the larger question: so what? What does it really matter if the story being shown is not the story Lewis told? As several people have said to me, it isn’t the same, but if you hadn’t read the book, or if you just forgot about the book, it was enjoyable to watch.

In one sense, this argument has a certain validity. If Hollywood does not like chivalry, or does not think it will sell, or is simply too mentally clumsy to see it (I still have not made up my mind how much of the mulching of the novel was due to sinister intention and how much to simple incompetence), then let them make whatever story they wish to tell. I could wish that they had not linked it to the name of an author who would not have approved of their treatment of his story, but merry old middle earth has seen far worse injustices.

In another sense, one can enjoy the movie by forgetting the book, and that is just the problem. As Ward points out in his excellent study of the Chronicles, Lewis had a view of symbolism which amounted to the sacramental. If a symbol worked well, the reader took in the numinous thing signified without really knowing it. Just as the children become “Narnian” by breathing the air of Narnia or the breath of Aslan - without realizing it and with no effort to analyze the process - so Lewis intended that those who read his stories would be changed by the very atmosphere - the donegality - of what they conveyed. “The head rules the belly through the chest” Lewis states in The Abolition of Man. In other words, when one is encouraged to imagine a noble and chivalrous world, one gains the capability of chivalry. A similar idea lies behind his comment to Malcolm that “if the imagination were obedient, the appetites would give us very little trouble,” and Screwtape’s cynical but accurate observation that “All mortals turn into the thing they are pretending to be.” Lewis took great delight in the reviewers’ failure to notice the theological implications of his space trilogy and his children’s books, not because he did not want to come out of the Christian closet, but because he thought the stories could do better work under cover. But if the atmosphere is polluted, viewers will breathe in something different from what the author intended.

Lewis intended to encourage children to imagine themselves to be chivalrous - knights and ladies. This movie encourages viewers to imagine themselves to be conquerors pure and simple. The movie may - as some have hoped - motivate more people to read the books, but I see two problems with this. First of all, I do not think it is true. I rather think that most people, children and adults alike, in this image-addicted, book-shunning society, will forego the solitary and demanding task of reading and instead content themselves with the movie. But secondly, even if they do go on to read the book, their expectations will already have been shaped by the movie.

A couple more thoughts and I will have ranted myself out. In explaining the decision to turn Peter into a petulant brawler, co-writers Andrew Adamson and Stephen McFeely explain that “itʼs an area Lewis left mostly untouched. Lewis memorably examined what it would be like for a 1940s school kid to become King of Narnia. However, he didnʼt much consider what it would be like for a King of Narnia to return to being a 1940s school kid. Their year back in London must have been awkward at best. Given their different personalities, each Pevensie handles the situation with varying levels of success.” The tin ear displayed by such a comment stuns the reader. Lewis sharply distinguished “stories,” tales written “for the story” from the “novel of manners where the story is there for the sake of the characters, or the criticism of social conditions.” Lewis isn’t concerned about how their Narnian adventures affect his characters because his characters serve his story. Again, his aim is an atmosphere, a donegality, not an exploration of adolescent social development or psychology. And, as I pointed out earlier, to the extent that the stories do allow us to ponder their effect on the characters’ psychology, the movie writers have gotten it exactly wrong.

Finally, it is important to remember that Lewis described himself as “absolutely opposed” to any movie version of his Narnia stories. “A human, pantomime, Aslan,” he wrote, “wld. be to me blasphemy.” And though one can argue that Lewis could never have envisioned 21st century special effects, I still believe his instincts were right. The Aslan of the Narnia movies is a failure. He lacks the “hugeness” associated with the lion, and fails to convey the combination of ferocity and playfulness, of majesty and humility, Lewis so exquisitely crafted into with words.

Alistair MacIntyre considered the visual media irredeemable for Christian purposes, famously speculating that Jesus’ fourth temptation would have been an hour on prime time television. After two Narnia movies, my own verdict is that now as in the beginning (so John the Evangelist tells us) it not the image but the Word.

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