I am sure I will see The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the recent movie made adaption of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series. I have read the seven-book series to my kids multiple times and, despite depressing reviews like this one, I am sure I will soon be devoting one of the 1 or 2 movies I see a year to this feature.
With this in mind, I found Laura Miller’s piece in today’s Wall Street Journal to be insightful. Miller points out that one of the major themes in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader–the idea of child adventurers detached from their families–works decidedly against the evangelical Christian audience that the Walden Media hopes to reach with the film. She writes:
Without a doubt, the “Chronicles” are infused with Christian ideas, but are they the same sort of ideas that define Christianity to America’s “faith-based community”? Not exactly, and in one crucial department, not at all.
The watchword of America’s socially conservative Christians is “family,” as in “family values” as well as “family entertainment.” It’s an ethos that places the nuclear family, headed by a married heterosexual couple, at its moral center. Marshaled against that stronghold, and aimed particularly at luring children away from their parents’ rightful authority, are the forces of a hostile secular world, full of venal temptations dangled by agenda-pursuing sexual deviants, political radicals and nonbelievers. To defend the family is to defend Christianity and vice-versa.
The rest of the “Chronicles” (with one exception) are very much the same: the child characters, while devoted to each other, never spare a thought for their parents or long to be reunited with them. To the contrary, they can imagine nothing better than staying in Narnia for ages. There are no Dorothy Gales in this bunch.
I was a bit turned off when a reviewer mentioned that the filmmakers had added a quest for six swords with which to prevent the gassing of Narnia or some such blather. I'll still watch it of course.
Have you seen this Touchstone article about the Narnia films?
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=23-06-030-f
Frankly, I don't think she's really right, much at all. Eustace understands in “Voyage” how his behavior has affected his parents.
The boys in “The Horse and His Boy” are fiercely dedicated to their father, the king. And the example of the main character's father is meant to provide a terrible foil.
Most prominently, the entire quest in “The Magician's Nephew” centers around Diggory searching for a way to save his dying mother, who he misses his entire time in Narnia.
I have an interesting theory. It could be totally outlandish, but here it goes. Is it completely out of the question to compare the Narnia story with the idea of the Kingdom of God. There are many passages in the Gospels about how Christ (Aslan) would call people away from their families, brother against brother, father against son. Jesus told somebody if he wanted to follow him, that he couldn't even go back and bury his mother. I wonder if this was the goal that C.S. Lewis was aiming at. It wasn't a rejection of the authority of parents or a rejection of the centrality of the family, but about sacrifice for the work of Jesus.
Like I said, this could be completely off shoot, but I'd be interested to hear what others thought.
Jamie, you might be interested in Michael Ward's book “Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis.” He argues that Lewis modeled the books off of medieval cosmology (in which there were seven planets). Each book represents a different planet and the corresponding divine virtues associated with it. Lewis is still using the books to talk about God, but he's using a classical form to do so.
I highly recommend it, though it is a scholarly monograph and so it can get a bit thick. Ward also has a more compact edition targeted at lay audiences entitled “The Narnia Code.”
Here's the links to the two books' websites if you're interested. http://narniacode.com/
http://www.planetnarnia.com/
Thanks for the links! I'll look into them.