FOR NARNIA!!!!! *leads band of sword-wielding creatures in charge across grassy field*
It was suggested in the Toronto Star’s review that to recreate the new Walden Media version of C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian, one need only repeat the title of this entry several times. While this is perhaps not entirely fair, as my friend Juliana pointed out after we saw the noon screening this afternoon, there was a lot of fighting. Anyway.
The thing about Narnia and me is, it was my absolute favourite book series when I was a kid. I could quote you the texts in chunks. I rented the BBC version over and over from the library and watched it while waving a dollar-store plastic sword. I never went anywhere without at least three or four of the books in my physical possession, just in case I wanted to read them again*. Then, when I hit high-school age, all the blatant Christian, colonialist allegory hit me in the face, and I felt personally betrayed. Like, “I thought this was an anyone-can-play game, but all this time you’ve been trying to convert me, attack my system of belief, and tell me what’s ‘natural’ for people of my gender?” So, while I still enjoy the stories and what they meant to me when I was younger, I can’t help but have this “ICKY!” feeling as I do.**
This is necessary to help you understand how I felt about the Prince Caspian movie.
+ First off, as with the Walden adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I liked how the moviemakers kept within C. S. Lewis’s original plot and still expanded the story in ways that made it more intriguing rather than disappointing. For instance, in the original book, there’s no attack on Miraz’s castle. Peter and Caspian don’t battle for dominance, Susan has almost no part to play in the proceedings, and the plot is basically driven and resolved by everyone’s favourite leonine deus ex machina. But I liked how I could finally believe that Miraz, Peter, Caspian, and the Old Narnians were making understandable, adult political decisions. I liked seeing Peter and Caspian overcome their deep flaws to win in the end. And I liked the fact that Susan could kick butt and show initiative without drastically changing the flow of the story.
– BUT the colonialist and racist overtones were DISGUSTING, plain and simple. You know what oppressed people need to overcome their oppression? A Righteous Liberator from their oppressors. Because, while they deserve freedom, it just wouldn’t be right for them to govern themselves! Things are only right when a Son of Adam has the throne! Made even grosser by the fact that the only non-white people in the entire movie are the centaurs whose role is to pledge undying allegiance to the aristocratic white guy they just met and then die for him. YUCK, YUCK, YUCK.
+ It’s kind of difficult to think of a plus after that. Well, okay, the writers clearly tried to eradicate some of the colonialism. Movie!Trumpkin never accepts the Pevensies as superior, speshul, and wonderful the same way Book!Trumpkin does, and their teeth-grinding habit of calling him “the DLF [= Dear Little Friend]” is pointed out as being patronizing***. I guess I’d rather have a movie that tries not to be colonialist and racist but fails than one that doesn’t make the attempt at all (*cough*IndianaJones*cough*), but I’d still rather have one that, you know, ISN’T COLONIALIST AND RACIST.
+ However, as individuals outside the context of their story, I like the main characters a lot. In the books, Peter is Captain Perfect who never makes mistakes. In the movie, the first time we see him, he’s a frustrated and immature young man getting into fistfights on the subway because he’s sick of being treated as a kid. In Narnia, he refuses to admit he was wrong even when he’s leading his party into a dead end. He’s a dick – and I love him for that, especially because he eventually comes ’round to doing the right thing.
Likewise, Book!Susan is weak and doubting and always crying when she has to shoot something to save someone’s life. Movie!Susan is assertive, rational, and determined to fight for the right. I even didn’t mind Lucy so much – in both book and movie, she represents faith, but, whereas, in the book, faith always leads her in the right direction, in the movie, we understand that, though Lucy’s faith is a good guide for larger, moral questions, it can sometimes put her in harm’s way. Book!Caspian is wide-eyed, innocent naive whose fitness to rule stems from the divine right of kings; Movie!Caspian is a hotheaded Laertes who learns to take responsibility for putting things right and to be a better person than the people who’ve wronged him.
And finally – SO MUCH LOVE FOR EDMUND IN THIS MOVIE! SO MUCH! He does the right thing without being asked and without making a big deal of it. When the others’ flaws blow up in their faces, he rescues them calmly and intelligently. He always offers good advice, is never patronizing, and works tirelessly to make things happen. Not because he’s innately good, but because he learned the evils of selfishness after his run-in with the White Witch in the last movie. Word. See, it’s stuff like that raises my hopes for the next movie and really, really, really makes me want to see how Walden will handle Eustace. (Er… and his “evil” ways of non-drinking and non-violence. Oh dear.)
– Why the “swarthy” people = evil? WHY???? Couldn’t they at least have been, maybe, not evil but ideologically opposed to Caspian and the Old Narnians for some other reason than xenophobia? Maybe Caspian the Ninth was a bad king. Maybe the Telmarines had their own religion that made them believe the Old Narnians were the ones behaving in an evil manner. You stuffed all those political connivings into the mix – surely you could sneak something like that in, too!
– Why is Susan the only woman who seems to be allowed to fight? Why are she and Lucy always getting rescued by men? What the heck is the point of that shy, nebbish boy whose advances Susan seems to reject at the beginning and the end****? Why do all the “worthy” men have to prove themselves through violence? How come Aslan’s solution is to bring in new magical troops to kill the Telmarine infantry instead of holding a ceasefire or something?
– Final, minor note: one thing that Lewis had over Rowling and the rest of contemporary fantasy authors who like to include wars and swordplay in their work is that he was a medievalist at Oxford. He actually knew what one can and can’t do with a broadsword, and he knew how battles worked. While Walden’s Narnia films make use of clever battle plans (hey, we’ve got gryphons that can fly – let’s get them to carry some stuff over enemy lines!), and some of the details do seem accurate (Miraz’s army has mounted cavalry, heavy artillery in the form of catapults, and Switzer-style ground troops with pikes and shields), sometimes we get weapons being used in the most ineffective way possible. Uh, Susan? A bow is a distance weapon. Maybe you should bring a sword or something for hand-to-hand combat. And, Miraz’s troops? Those long pikes you got, they’re for keeping cavalry away. If you just hold them up and keep formation, the less well-armed Narnian troops shouldn’t be a problem.
So, in conclusion, I like Peter. I like Susan. I LOVE Edmund. And I like Lucy. And, yeah, whether I like it intellectually or not, I can feel myself thrilling to epic battle scenes with lots of shouting and desperate charges. BUT… I can’t get over the awful implicit morals that the good ones (“Learn when you have to share the leadership role”, “Everyone needs humility”) don’t even begin to wash away. I know that a lot of these ideological problems are Lewis’s, but, at the same time, the choice to re-tell a story is just that: a choice. Just because Rudyard Kipling embodied the morals of his time doesn’t mean you’re not at fault if you choose to teach your grade three class “The White Man’s Burden”.
I’m enough of a coward taking refuge in her own privilege that I will probably end up re-watching bits of this movie or even owning it, tricking myself into ignoring its worse conclusions the same way I’ll trick myself into ignoring the fact that all the bad guys look like me, or that the movie is subtly pressuring me to accept Christian values in place of my Judaism and atheism, or that the plot seems to indicate that science and technology are only for evil people who can’t believe in magic. After all, I still like The Merchant of Venice and The Taming of the Shrew despite being completely ideologically opposed to their morals-of-the-story. Maybe familiar stories are a little like relatives with opposite politics from one’s own: I wouldn’t seek to make friends with someone whose attitude struck me as racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, anti-Semitic etc., and I wouldn’t go see a new movie or read a new book that seemed to embody those values. But… I couldn’t abandon a relative or an old friend no matter how much part of their outlook disgusted me. I’d argue with them and try to show them why their opinions offended me, but, whether I like it or not, I know and love them as a whole, not as them-minus-their-racist/sexist/etc. parts. They’re already a part of me.
And as much as Narnia makes me cringe now, somewhere, in my subconscious, there will always be blond guys in armor decked with rampant red lions.
Something to think about, and something to work on.
* Sadly, this is literally true. Whether we were on a rare week-long vacation in the US or visiting Grandma at the cottage, you can bet there would be a stack of parchment-coloured paperback novels listing on the seat beside me.
** As a sidenote, I’d like to mention that, this aside, I find Lewis a lot less “ICKY!” than the Harry Potter series. I think it’s because Lewis was meticulous about his philosophy. If you read his other writings, it becomes clear that, disturbing as some of his beliefs are, he has examined them very carefully, and he has been equally careful to ensure that the Chronicles of Narnia say exactly what he believes and no more or less. If you said to him, “Your books say women should be submissive to men!”, he’d say, “Yes, I know, and here’s why I believe that.” Rowling, on the other hand, seems to have given little in-depth thought to the morality of her world, and, if she is to be judged by her interviews, it seems that some conclusions she didn’t intend to convey are implicit in her writing and others she did intend to convey are absent. When people say things to her like, “Your books don’t convey a positive portrayal of overweight people”, her reply is basically, “Well, you’re wrong, because that’s what I was trying to get across. Just ask Mugglenet.”
*** I guess you could argue that, in the book, it’s Trumpkin who uses the phrase first. So the Pevensies aren’t being patronizing out of nowhere, but they’re still being patronizing.
**** Well, I did kind of like that she rejected him – like, just because a guy is nice and sweet doesn’t automatically oblige you to be in a relationship with him if you don’t like him.