Better late than never, right?

Narnia runs deep in my blood. One of my most cherished childhood memories is having my father read the first few books of the Chronicles to my siblings and me, a chapter at a time before bed. By the time we were up to the last few I was old enough to read them by myself, which I did repeatedly through childhood. I revisited Narnia and became rather deeply steeped in the milieu in college, when I got involved with NarniaMUSH.[1]; Rereading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe recently reminded me of how ingrained these books are into my consciousness, and how hopeless any attempt would be to re-evaluate them objectively today.

Given all that, it’s understandable that I approached the new film version with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. But given the larger context, it was the latter that won out as I walked into the theater last night. Somewhere along the line, LWW the movie had been eclipsed by LWW the cultural event, certainly in terms of media coverage. Prior to its release, just about the only article you could find about the movie would be about how it was being heavily marketed to the evangelical community by Walden Media, the folks who gave us the Passion of the Christ marketing blitzkrieg. It took coming to the Midwest (I’m writing this in a coffee shop in Holland, Michigan²) to see it firsthand, though: the billboard advertisement for a church featuring the face of Aslan, or the fact that the Holland Christian school system sent all its students to see the movie.

This is weird, wacky stuff. First of all, whatever happened to the fundamentalists I used to come across who were down on the Chronicles, what with their magic, witchcraft, and unorthodox-theology-if-you-could-even-call-it-that, penned by a quirky universalist neo-Platonic Anglican? Are they quietly stewing right now, or have they morphed and embraced Lewis now that he’s a Pop Culture Event? And why is everyone behaving as if LWW is some sort of straightforward Christian allegory? C.S. Lewis, Christian apologist: check. Hodgepodge of Biblical references: check. Sacrifical atonement by a godlike figure: check. But what book did you read in high school that didn’t have Biblical references and a Christ figure?

Lewis gives away—strips away, actually—the metaphor at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when somebody (Aslan himself, I think) hints that Aslan goes by another name in our world. As a kid it wasn’t until that moment that I “got” that aspect of the story. And I was quickly disabused of the notion that they were Just Christian Stories when I first logged on to the aforementioned NarniaMUSH and mets scads of fans of the books, ranging from atheists to pagans to Christians, who appreciated them for what they are, primarily: excellent children’s fantasy literature.

So yeah, back to the trepidation. My hope going into the theater was that, whatever the marketing campaign, the film itself would simply do the book justice. (It was in the can before the marketing began, after all.) My worry was that the same people selling the film in churches had gotten their fingers into it while it was being made and turned it into . . . something else, something that was a neater allegory to contemporary evangelical Christianity in particular.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe the movie hews remarkably close to the book. There are the expected changes for a Hollywood film: additional action sequences, punched up dramatic sequencing, modernized dialogue and sensibilities. (“Battles are ugly when women fight in them” is changed to just “battles are ugly”—a better line all ‘round.) But none of it was in violation to the spirit of the book, and there are even a few dramatic choices that I’m sure Lewis would have wanted in his book if he had thought of them at the time.

A quarter of the way through I was worried that these young actors didn’t have the chops to pull off their roles. I don’t know if I was just sufficiently sucked in to ignore that stuff, or if they all get better, but that didn’t bother me again through the rest of it. Lucy in particular does a swell job. And all their characters age subtly but effectively, so that by the end you can actually buy Peter up there in front of the army, even though he was playing hide-and-seek just an hour and a half earlier.

J.R.R. Tolkien disapproved of Lewis’ Narnia to a certain exten;: it was sloppy world-building, after all. Lewis tosses in elements from English folklore, Greek mythology, Norse mythology, and throws in Santa Claus to boot. Ask too many questions about Narnia’s socioeconomics, or geography, and you’re bound to come up with some inconsistencies. But in the movie this messiness works, especially when surveying the delightful menagerie of the Narnian army, or the Irish stew of boggins and troglodytes that make up the jeering masses at the Stone Table. WETA Design, the folks who brought Middle Earth to life in all the wonderful ways documented in the extended LOTR DVDs, were also responsible for this Narnia, and you can tell they had a blast with it.

Big kudos to the filmmakers for starting the film with the London air raids. It’s a throwaway line in the book but it works wonderfully as a way to contextualize the story, introduce the Pevensies, and provide a counterpoint to the fantasy battles inside the wardrobe.

LWW is a good movie, but not a great one, and one of the big reasons is that Andrew Adamson has taken way too many pages from the Peter Jackson Book of Fantasy Film Direction. This is true throughout, especially in the climatic battle scenes, which are done rather well except for a fact that they steal rapaciously from The Lord of the Rings, sometimes shot-for-shot. It all would have been a lot more thrilling if we hadn’t seen it before. This is going to be a problem for anyone who wants to do a fantasy movie or a big army battle scene for a long time—Jackson found a near-perfect visual language for it, so how are you going to live up to that but still be original? A tall order, and one that doesn’t get filled here.

A lot of it still works, though. Like the centaur dude dual-wielding broadswords—Lewis never would have written that in, but he totally kicks ass.

I couldn’t help myself—as I watched the movie, I was keeping a mental inventory of any changes from the book that might be construed as an attempt to Christianize the story more than it is. I came up with three, all of them tenuous:

1. Aslan walking away at the end on the beach. Subtle reference to the maudlin Footprints in the Sand meme? It’s a stretch.

2. After the battle, Aslan says “it is finished,” which doesn’t happen in the books. But if this is a conscious allusion to the Biblical words it is just plain bizarre, seeing as they are Christ’s words moments before his death on the cross. It works as a nod but not as any sort of allegorical reinforcement. Maybe a coincidence.

3. The fact that the trees carry the news of Aslan’s death to everyone back at the army camp. In the book, only Susan and Lucy (and the reader, of course) are ever aware that Aslan dies and comes back. I always liked the fact that Aslan’s death and resurrection were so limited—for the sake of one person alone, and done essentially in secret. It meant there were associations with the Christ story but no point-for-point connectivity. Making everyone aware of Aslan’s death moves it a step closer to being a collective, religious experience, which it’s not in the book. But you could also make a good case that doing so simply increases the dramatic tension, so, as with the previous two points, this really isn’t enough to get worked up about.

So where are they going to go from here? The IMDB doesn’t have anything else on the horizon, Narnia-movie-wise. I’ve heard it said that if this one does well, they have six more that they can make, but that isn’t necessarily so—not all of these Chronicles are necessarily going to translate well to film. Prince Caspian, the next one in order³, is a middling contender. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader would be a much better bet for a next movie—it would work well on film, and is the best of the books to boot. I would love to see The Horse and His Boy and The Silver Chair, my other two favorites, but neither The Magician’s Nephew nor The Last Battle seem like the big screen is going to embrace them without some heavy tweakage.

Whatever happens, though, I no longer have trepidation about the film future of these beloved books. If Adamson & Co. stay on this course, it’ll be good—good enough, at least, to withstand whatever manner of marketing silliness, for those who are willing and able to see past it.

UPDATE:

Some links:

• Not surprisingly, Fred Clark’s words on Narnia and the culture wars are memorable and apt.
• Here’s Joshua Bell’s review.
• David Edelstein gets it.

1. Joshua Bell, a fellow Narnian from those days, has an excellent page describing what the heck a MUSH is for those who don’t know, and describing NarniaMUSH in particular. Those readers who also took part in NarniaMUSH will also appreciate his archive of assorted files and maps from those days as well. Quite a trip down memory lane.

2. Lemonjello’s Coffee. Good place.

3. This seems as good a place as any to shoehorn in my Chronicles of Narnia Book Order Rant. The published order of the books—LWW-PC-VDT-SC-HHB-MN-LB—has stood for a while, but more recent editions have been coming out in chronological order—MN-LWW-HHB-PC-VDT-SC-LB—presumably with the consent of the Lewis estate. This is all poppycock and nonsense. Lewis wrote an oft-quoted letter to a kid one time where he suggested reading the books in chronological order, but if you read that whole letter it’s clear that what he was saying was “it’s not a big deal, and if you’ve already read them the published way why not read them this way this time,” not “This Is The Way I Wish My Books To Be Read.” When it comes down to it there’s really only one point of contention. LWW-PC-VDT-SC-LB should obviously be read in that order. The Horse and His Boy is unrelated to that chronology, and can be inserted pretty much anywhere. The issue is whether to read The Magician’s Nephew, the “prequel” book, right away or at some later point. And as far as that goes, MN as it is written is clearly the sort of prequel that you read after having read the other stuff. It gives plenty of “aha!” answers as to how various things came to be in Narnia. Answering the questions at the outset takes away a little of the mystique of LWW especially, and besides, MN is a quirky, somewhat uneven work—not the strong opener you’d want for a series of books. Chronological order is a fun way to read the Chronicles on a subsequent reading, but sucks as a way to tackle them at the outset, and super-sucks as a way to publish them.

. . . in which we answer reader mail! This one comes from a particularly esteemed reader:

Dear Nate,

I write because your 83 year old grandfather needs some help.

My high school teacher of English (and president of the Wisconsin English Teachers Assocation WETA) was a harsh taskmaster. She insisted that no one would get a passing grade in her class until they could distinguish the correct use of “I” and “me”, “we” and “us”, and similar pronouns. She claimed that any intelligent person, which she hoped we would become, would know the difference between a subject, an object, or what followed a preposition, and would thus use the proper pronoun.

So I have almost a visceral reaction when I hear what I believed correct for 81 years (I learned the above at home even before I went to high school) to be misspoken. I cringe when I hear a preacher proclaim that “you and me need God’s forgiveness.” Why should I believe the truth of someone who speaks in error? Hearing a successful CEO observe that “it’s been a good year for my partner and I” I say to myself “He’s rich, but he’s dumb” or “he must not have taken an evening English course when he immigrated to the States.” To be honest, this is one part of my life where I am extremely intolerant.

Imagine then my consternation when occasionally I read in your blog expressions like “it was preferable to Suanna and I”. This is my grandson Nate who writes this?! Nate: college English instructor, blogger who incisively critiques movies and novels, perceptively records the growth of his daughter, and politically echoes the New York Times slant on national affairs.

Help me. Is this the “new English” like the “new Morality”? Must I abandon my deeply held conviction about what is right and wrong? Shall I, at age 83, change my whole outlook on my mother tongue? Me needs some guidance. Me thinks you can help I. That doesn’t sound right. I need some guidance. I think you can help me.

Still searching for wisdom . . . grandpa Pekelder

Have no fear! While it is true that there _is_ a New English, different in many respects from the one taught in your grade school days, that is only because, like all living languages, English is in a constant state of evolution and change. Some of the changes are welcome, others (curse you, “Great Vowel Shift”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift!) less so, but nearly all of them inevitable. However, to the best of my knowledge, confusing pronouns in the way you describe is still an _error_, pure and simple.

The fault is mine, and mine alone. But I think it’s important that we identify the nature of the fault: sloppy editing, pure and simple. When it comes to writing, ‘sloppy editing’ is a sin pretty far down on the heinousness spectrum — certainly not so heinous as ‘a clunky, artlessly constructed sentence’ and a very far cry from ‘a poor or even deliberately misleading idea’. Your critique is incisive except insofar as it associates a grammatical error with a character flaw.

One other quibble: the editors of the New York Times chose to cave to political pressure and sit for years on a tremendously important story highlighting the abuse of executive power. I have precious little interest in echoing their “slant,” whatever that might be.

It’s kind of late and I really ought to be getting to bed, but the thing is, I’ve been invited to Madonna’s wedding. It’s happening in town, after all, so why not go? But instead I end up just hanging around and watching the wedding on the E! entertainment network. As it’s wrapping up on TV I realize that I could still go to the reception — it is _Madonna’s_ wedding, after all, so it’s bound to be swank, with lots of famous people and great food. But isn’t it a little weasely to crash the reception when you’ve skipped the wedding? Nevertheless, I go. I’m delighted to run into a friend outside the building who’s doing the exact same thing, so we slip in together.

But the reception is a terrible disappointment. Madonna has married an Ubuntu tribesman[1] and they are sitting on thrones at the head of the hall. On a whim at the last second Madonna has decided that she wants every single guest to be presented to her and introduced. The line is _incredibly_ long, and the presentations are taking forever. My friend and I can see the open bar and the table stacked high with the most glorious hors d’ouevres imaginable, but with a sinking feeling I realize that it will be dawn before I get through the line and am finally able to partake. And anyway, I have breakfast plans. What a bummer.

fn1. In waking life I realize full well that Ubuntu is a word, not a tribe. But this was a dream. This is the only part of the dream that I know where it comes from — I read “this”:http://www.goesping.org/archives/2005/12/26/bring-it-goes-linux/ just before going to bed.

Big props to “Ed”:http://www.goesping.org/ for starting a webcomic, appearing informally (so far) as entries on his blog. He’s done seven so far and I’m already hooked. Right out of the gate he seems to have found his voice for it; the subject matter is autobiographical in that perfect way that lends authenticity but isn’t at all self-absorbed. The drawing is rough around the edges, but the more I look at it the more I find that expression or gesture or bit of composition that is just exactly what it should be. Encourage him in this endeavor, and you can say that you were there when it all started.

I’ve got the blog back to looking like it ought to, though many many tweaks remain. I’m aware of all the funny-looking stuff, and will get to it eventually.

It’s just not fair. You know the type of guy. He’s big and he’s strong, he’s blustery—he’s actually kind of a jerk. He’s the prototypical alpha male and is always engaging in chest-pounding types of behavior. Going through life, he leaves a destructive swath all around him. He takes a downright possessive attitude towards the woman he’s interested in, and treats her pretty badly for the most part. But what does he have to do to keep her hooked? Once in a while, just show a sense of humor, or a touch of sadness, some hint of Hidden Depths. Never mind that most of them time he’s totally shallow. He always seems to get the girl.

Damn ape.

King Kong is a big, big movie. It’s long. It has really big monsters, and big action, big shots, big emotion. We’re accustomed these days to action/adventure movies with a certain measure of ironic detachment. Not here. Peter Jackson wants to have you at the edge of your seat, or sitting back with your mouth gaping. Sometimes he wants you to laugh, or to cry. But he never ever wants you to snigger.

I saw the original King Kong for the first time only a couple of years ago, actually, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that the lion’s share of the movie tells the story of the rescuers’ danger-defying venture into the heart of dinosaur-ridden Skull Island. So too with this version—dinosaurs, more dinosaurs, giant crocs, and an insect pit that had me writhing in my seat the whole time. Here we can see Jackson’s roots as a low-budget director of quirky horror films. It’s one long thrill ride, with sequences that just keep going and going and going—most of the time this is a very good thing. Kong versus not one, not two, but three Tyrannosaurs is the highlight of the film, though the Brontosaur stampede did go on a little long.

Kong himself is Gollum II—a digital construction overlaying an actual actor’s face, with a result that is way more convincing than you’d think. Only after the movie was over did it occur to me that at no point during the movie did the CGI-ed-ness of Kong bother me. Like Gollum, he blended into the scenes almost perfectly. Plus, here, he’s the best actor in the film, closely followed by Naomi Watts, neither of whom have a whole lot of actual dialogue with each other. It would have been such an easy, obvious mistake to have Ann Hathaway speaking to Kong, if only to let the audience know what she was thinking. But, as with the big ape, Watts has to do everything, absolutely everything, with facial expressions. And she pulls it off.

One great failing: there’s a moment when Kong is up at the top of the Empire State, dying, and Ann is there staring into his eyes, and the soaring music of the score falls off and we’re left with a single female voice, high and keening. It’s a moment of high emotion, but it falls flat because we have heard that voice before. It was used to tremendous effect a number of times throughout the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Those moments had a lot going for them: the beautiful voice, occuring in the context of the choral work throughout the score, was meant as a reflection of the sad, ethereal voices of the Elves. There’s no such obvious connection here, and besides, it’s a rehash.

There’s lots else that’s reminiscent of LOTR, in terms of score and sound but especially the visual stuff—the swooping cameras and timely slo-mos and long close-ups. Is all of this Jackson’s unique voice, variations of which we’ll continue to see in future films? Or is he recycling all his idioms from his Tolkien work here when he should have been trying for something new—especially seeing as this is pulp and not high fantasy? Hard to say—the LOTR movies cast a long shadow and make it tricky to evaluate other stuff independently.

If the un-crowdedness of the theater I was in on a Friday night is any indication, King Kong isn’t going to do particularly well at the box office, especially considering its budget. This is too bad insofar as it might reduce Jackson’s cachet in Hollywood and thus the likelihood that he’ll get to do The Hobbit someday. On the other hand, it may be time for him to take a step back and do another indy feature, something more along the lines of the superb Heavenly Creatures. And—having just googled around a bit—he appears to be poised to do just that (scroll down to the ‘film version’ section).

We need a word for the feeling of frustration, impatience, and impotence that sets in when everyone else has seen the movie / read the book / experienced the experience, but you haven’t yet, and so you’re forced to put off reading and/or engaging in the discussion until you have also seen the movie / read the book / experienced the experience. It’s a feeling that’s accentuated when you’re determined to avoid spoilers prior to engaging with the whatever-it-is yourself.

So, yeah, Narnia. I’ll get there eventually.

UPDATE: Many suggestions in the comments. I cannot choose among them.

Is “The Tin Man”:http://feeds.feedburner.com/tinman a podcast? I guess so. You can subscribe to it like a podcast, and it’s released in serialized form. But you could just as easily download the mp3s off of Matt Sahr’s “website”:http://www.pferdzwackur.com/tinman/. If you think of a podcast as being analogous to a typical blog, where the entries are spontaneous and rough around the edges, then _The Tin Man_ is nothing at all like a podcast. It’s a polished audio drama. It has more in common with the radio dramas of the 30s and 40s than anything else — though I doubt any of those Golden Age serials featured a debate between the Tin Man and the Scarecrow that slid abruptly into a satirical commercial for Monsanto.

Yes, this is a “Matt Sahr”:http://www.pferdzwackur.com/ production, and like “his play”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/2003/12/pferdzwackr_buy.html from a couple years ago, _The Tin Man_ is a surrealist, absurdist romp full of philosophical flim-flammery, riffing this time on themes of consumerism and intellectual property. The story, such as it is, follows the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, Dorothy et al on their familiar path, though here it is rife with diversions, and the diversions are what it’s really all about. The extended bar joke that comprises Episode 7 is not to be missed. In fact I’ve found the whole thing rather a treat. Three aspects stand out:

* The stellar production values. It’s just Matt and his computer with a good microphone and some decent sound-editing software. But of course that’s enough. When I say it’s an “audio drama” I mean that it isn’t just a guy talking into a microphone, but a fully polished affair with background music, sound cues, and effects. It is largely a one-man show but the voice-masking used to allow Matt to play different roles is not gimmicky in the slightest. And of course there’s . . .

* . . . the music of Steve Putt, including an entire song in one episode but all manner of guitar licks and other tidbits spicing things up throughout. Very good stuff.

* The Tin Man and the Scarecrow dialogues. If you didn’t know you would never guess that that’s one person doing those two voices, sounding for all the world like a naturally performed scene. Two Guys Talkin’ is Matt’s specialty, dramatically speaking. There’s a long parade of duos engaging in philosophical repartee throughout his work. But it’s not a rut — there’s something fresh each time. It’s just his thing.

Catching up on all the existing episodes will take you about an hour, and then you can be notified as new ones arrive — whether through your podcasting software of choice, or just through email. What are you waiting for?