Please don't ruin Narnia
Hooray! Puddleglum is returning. And about time. In case you’ve been too busy tracking public- policy disasters, I’m referring to news that the Chronicles of Narnia franchise will produce a fourth film in the series that already includes The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian and Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
I greet this news with the same ecstatic trepidation I felt when the franchise began. I fell in love with the Narnia Chronicles as a child, and with Aslan, and the feeling has never passed. But as with The Lord of the Rings ( ditto as a teen) the excitement at seeing a favourite tale and beloved characters in a new medium is tempered by fear they will mangle the story.
Peter Jackson did. The Fellowship of the Ring is good, but then things went terribly wrong. Not just the plot distortions, t hough having a Nazgul spot Frodo in Osgiliath would clearly have doomed t he entire quest. Having the Ents decide to duck the struggle, then being tricked into a rage- fuelled march on Isengard is just one example of wantonly overlooking an obvious, profound moral lesson. Why, I wonder, did they want to make the films if they didn’t understand the books?
A movie can also f ail through inadequate resources, including an old BBC adaptation of the first four Narnia books that brilliantly cast Tom Baker as Puddleglum then spent about £ 8 10s and sixpence making the film. But the Chronicles of Narnia films have largely avoided both traps. They are lavishly produced and the stories are mostly intact other than the spurious castle raid in Prince Caspian … so far.
There are some warni ng signs regarding The Silver Chair. The writer is the guy who did the screen adaptation of Life of Pi, and Mashable says the new producer wants a director who “will help him bring a fresh approach to the series, which aims to capture a broad global audience.” But Narnia already has a broad global audience because of the original approach.
I am not blind to Lewis’s shortcomings as a novelist. But millions of people, like me, love the original and will pay good money to see it done faithfully in both senses. If it is not, we will stay away. I know Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham is involved and keeping an eye on any shenanigans. But he may have his work cut out for him because the obtuseness on this point can be staggering. For instance Wikipedia’s article on the movie franchise never ment i ons Christ, unless you count a footnote to something in Christianity Today. But Narnia is a Christian allegory or it is nothing.
When I fantasize about doing film adaptations of cherished books, I imagine starting with the dozen or so scenes crucial to the plot, character development and moral of the story, which must be done right even if it requires a fair bit of narrated backstory elsewhere. ( Like the Barrow Downs in The Fellowship of the Ring, BTW.) And i n The Silver Chair the pivotal scene is when Puddleglum foils the witch’s effort to seduce the characters into abandoning Aslan for materialism.
Superficially an appalling pessimist and loudly snoring wet blanket modelled on Lewis’s own gardener, comically gifted at finding a dark cloud in any silver lining, Puddleglum imagines floods and dragons when things are going well. But when a real flood t hreatens t o drown t he characters underground he cheerfully observes that being thus trapped would save funeral expenses.
He is the person, or bei ng, you’d most want at your side in a crisis temperamentally, despite lacking Gandalf ’s capacity to summon magic fire or hew Balrogs.
And Puddleglum breaks the witch’s hedonistic spell and shatters the rebellious romance of materialism, at the cost of some physical pain, by saying “Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one … four babies playing a game can make a play- world which licks your real world hollow.” And so “I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”
If this scene moved you to tears as a child, you don’t just need to see it in the movie to consider it a good adaptation, or indeed an adaptation at all rather than a mockery. You need to see it as a lens through which to approach everything, including public affairs.
Politics is downstream from culture because culture shapes our understanding of the world. Including whether there is a sun and a free Narnia on which it shines, or merely an artificial lamp, endless dead rock and slavery.
Puddleglum got it right. I hope the producers do too.
WHY, I WONDER, DID PETER JACKSON WANT TO MAKE THE LORD OF THE RINGS FILMS IF HE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND THE BOOKS?