One wonders how Disney is going to handle any future dramatizations of The Chronicles of Narnia. How much twisting of the plots and making-over will they have to do to avoid offending contemporary sensibilities, paradigms and audiences?
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was an easy adaptation. There was a bit of jiggering with the complementarity of faith and logic. In the story as written, the old professor uses logic to convince Lucy's siblings that her report of an impossible world accessible through the wardrobe may be true. In the movie, the old professor pooh-poohs Susan's "logic." It is discarded as useless according to the present-day axiom that faith and reason only get in the way of each other. Faith is too crazy an aberration from normal thought for reason to have any function in it. [5/27/08: The above appears to have been corrected. The edited-for-TV version I saw a while ago had different dialogue that more closely matches the book.]
But what would Disney do with the Calormenes of The Horse and His Boy? These folks from the hot desert-land south of Narnia dress, talk and plot treachery and domination like the muslims of stereotype. We in this Enlightened Age of course, know that our Calormenes are gentle peace-loving folk who would never riot like Christians and who ask only that no one bring stuffed animals into their countries.
The Calormenes are ruled by a Tisroc--May he live forever!--who laments, "Every morning the sun is darkened in my eyes, and every night my sleep is the less refreshing, because I remember that Narnia is still free." Sounds like something broadcast by Al Jezeera. Oh, the Calormenes also worship the god Tash and in The Last Battle, it is insisted that Tash and Aslan are the same.
And what about the dufflepuds in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader who need to be led by a "chief" and who plant boiled potatoes in the lazy hope that they won't have to cook them? These could be called "The Narnian's Burden."
Then, in The Silver Chair, there's Experiment House, a school run by people who "had the idea that boys and girls should be allowed to do what they liked." At Experiment House what "ten or fifteen of the biggest girls and boys liked best was bullying the others." The only consequences of doing "horrid things" is that instead of expelling the bullies, the Head declares them to be interesting psychological cases and talks to them for hours and hours. Isn't this a near description of contemporary public schools/zoos with their values-neutrality and due process? Aren't public schools all Experiment Houses where one educational theology after another is taken up and dropped? I was reading The Silver Chair when a news story about public-school bullying came out, reporting that the school administrators had "reached out" (their expression) to all the parties involved. I had to laugh.
I don't think we need worry about Disney handling the idea of ab-homination. Lewis, without elaboration, slips this concept into Prince Caspian ("and don't forget to spell [abhominable] with an H, Doctor"). The original meaning of this term is lost in its modern spelling, "abomination." Webster's dictionary doesn't even get the derivation right. What now means a hateful thing originally meant "departure from humanity," from the virtues that accompany human dignity. In other words, dignity is tied to behavior and can be lost. There are creatures in Narnia who have degraded from the dignity (ability to talk) bestowed on them by Aslan.
While ab-homination is too subtle an idea for movie scripts, it is not too subtle for the Catholic Church wherein the late pope wrote heaps and heaps about human dignity without--and I may be wrong--ever touching on the idea that it may be surrendered. Of course, John Paul II's main and quite valid concern was protecting human dignity from the assault of others than the self.
Finally, there's all this armed conflict in Narnia and a god-like figure whose supposed to be a lovable lion, but who gets angry and even joins in on the killing. Once in a while, the peace and good will of Lewis's monarchy-ruled realm (another strange idea) has to be preserved through warfare. How will folks with the fight bred out of them, who meet their enemies with appeasement, understanding and hatred of their own people handle that?
Copyright © 2006 by Neal J. Conway. All rights reserved.