The mouse, the witch, and the wardrobe
My daughter, at eight, has proven a great disappointment to me: She has become a voracious reader. Which means that a ritual I shared with her older brothers — namely, reading to them before bedtime — is a thing of my parenting past. Which also means not only that I am getting old but that I’ve lost my excuse to read kid lit — old favorites, new releases, and the classics I somehow missed in my own voracious-reading youth.
That’s how I came to the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S.
Lewis’ seven-book saga about the Pevensie children: with a child tucked under each arm and a copy of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe propped on my knees. The books are astounding in their sweep and their detail, as the Blitz on London sends the Pevensies to their uncle’s country home, through a portal into the alternate universe of Narnia, and ultimately to an epic, literally time-ending battle between good and evil.
Or Good and Evil — the words earn their capital letters by dint of Lewis’ quite open attempt to recast the epic of Christianity in the form of a children’s fantasy tale. The Christ figure — or stand-in, more accurately — is Aslan, a benevolent flying lion who alternately inspires, chides, and suffers for the children as they face down his satanic nemesis, the White Witch. The books’ legions of fans include librarians and teachers at public schools — you know, those godless, prayer-free zones — and Evangelical Christians, many of whom consider the book among the best examples of Christian fiction ever written.
That’s giving headaches to the folks at Disney, who plan to bring out a film version of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe next December. The New York Times recently described their dilemma as “whether to acknowledge the Christian symbolism and risk alienating a large part of the potential audience, or to play it down and possibly offend the many Christians who count among the books’ fan base.”
Clearly in the minds of the filmmakers and marketers at Disney is the controversy that erupted in 2001 when the books’ American publisher chose to play down the allegorical aspects of the stories in its marketing and educational material. Indeed, in HarperCollins’ recently published single-volume edition, marketed specifically to adults, there are no references to Lewis’ scheme for the books or his role as one of the best-known public Christian intellectuals. It is a little like publishing Animal Farm without mentioning Orwell’s anti-communist agenda.
Part of being a mature reader is appreciating works of art on multiple levels. Knowing Lewis’ intentions deepened my experience of reading the Narnia books. I took a graduate school pleasure in figuring out how his fantasy maps onto the New Testament. And I had a more emotional thrill: The spiritual core of the book made me realize how Christianity became, in Rabbi Irving Greenberg’s tongue-in-cheek phrase, “one of Judaism’s more popular by-products.” I wasn’t about to convert, but as a Jew I earned an appreciation for Christian belief that had escaped me in my comparative religion classes, let alone watching The Passion of the Christ.
This was lost on my children, I suspect, who thought the Narnia saga was a ripping good yarn with a number of beautiful relationships and occasionally disturbing comeuppances. The Christian imagery in Narnia is obvious if you know the sources, but irrelevant if you don’t. As Disney’s Martin Kaplan, who also directs the Norman Lear Center of the University of Southern California, told the Times: “There’s enough story and traditional emotion in the ‘Narnia’ books that they can let the Christian mysticism in it either be a subtext or not a part of it at all.” In other words, there’s resurrection and there’s The Resurrection — one is a constant in pop culture (think E.T. or The Matrix), the other a cornerstone of Christian faith.
The debate over Disney’s Narnia, like many of the battles in the culture wars, seems divorced from the ways most children experience entertainment; that is, as the thing itself, separate from the agendas of its creators. From the brouhaha over the “two mommies” episode of the PBS series Postcards from Buster, you’d have thought that the show was filmed at a gay rights rally, when, in fact, the mommies in question were very much in the background. Critics also underestimate children. Some Christian groups have sought a ban on the Harry Potter books because they promote magic and “Satanism,” although I suspect that kids in many an Evangelical home are able to distinguish between the mystical world of Hogwarts and the spiritual teachings of their churches.
In fact, kids with strong religious groundings are probably better equipped to both understand and “resist” those differences. That’s why I felt comfortable discussing the Christian themes of Narnia with my oldest son: For a kid attending a Jewish day school, it was a rare opportunity to discuss Christianity and how it differs from Judaism.
One of the ironies of the culture wars is that those with the strongest convictions — especially the religious — probably have the least to fear, and the most to gain, from the cultural phenomena they decry. If they are confident in their beliefs, then they can treat uncomfortable portrayals of worldliness as cultural whetstones on which to sharpen those beliefs. The alternative is censoring the kinds of messages others can hear and raising their own kids in a world divorced from reality.
The Narnia film poses a similar challenge, but to secularists and non-Christians. Those who defend free expression place the integrity of the artist’s vision at the center of their catechism. Are they willing to defend the artist who is a devout Christian, and who places Christianity at the center of his work of art?