Journal

The Lion, the Witch, and the Worldview

Posted on December 16th, 2005, in the small hours

There seems to be a coming-around-again of all kinds of things. One of my early posts was on Firefox, and now there's Firefox 1.5. Another was spotting that Disney had got the domain narnia.com for a film of 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe', and a year-and-a-bit later I've just been to see it. (I am being a good consumer this week: not only did I buy a CD, but I went to the cinema too, and I'm going to a concert tomorrow later today!)

The following is not so much a review as an observation...

The film is more faithful to the book than I dared to hope. There are a few bizarre Disneyfications and the emphases are a bit skewy, but the narrative itself comes out almost unscathed ...with one small, interesting alteration.

Aslan still honours the Deep Magic underlying Narnia: a traitor belongs to the Witch and blood must be paid. But the film deviates from the book as Aslan explains to Susan and Lucy why, when he paid that price for Edmond, death could not hold him.

In the passage I quoted a year ago, CS Lewis has Aslan explain that there is "a magic deeper still which she [the Witch] did not know." It isn't the Deep Magic that causes death to work backwards when "a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead," it's a Deeper Magic. But, if I heard correctly, the Disney Aslan talks about the Witch having wrongly interpreted the Deep Magic.

This may seem a small nit to pick - and the deviation certainly didn't spoil my enjoyment of the film - but I think it's ideologically revealing.

Talk of 'interpretation' is far weaker than talk of a Deeper Magic. We, as a culture, are nervous about calling something "deeper." It is far less threatening to imagine that everyone is ignorantly splashing about in the same shallows. In our day, Aslan and the Witch simply have differing interpretations (albeit hers a demonstrably impoverished one) of the Deep Magic. But that is not the account CS Lewis gave. For Lewis there is a deeper order of reality at work in Aslan's resurrection.

This is not a conspiracy theory against Disney. They may not have even noticed the change. It's more an observation of our culture, which hesitates to the point of inertia rather than commenting on the relative depth of worldviews. We're more than okay with the relative bit, but the depth bit seems a bit ...well, judgemental. So we have constructed a cultural logic that turns depth on its side and calls it equivalence.

If there truly was a Deeper Magic at work in the universe, one that issued a call, would we even have ears to hear?