So I took my oldest daughter to see the Narnia movie yesterday. I read the book as a kid and didn’t much get into it. I read it again as an adult, out loud to a 4th grade classroom. Again, it didn’t do much for me. I was aware of the Christian allegory and all that but I mostly just read it as a children’s story and found it kind of so-so. The characters weren’t very compelling, the lion wasn’t very interesting or inspiring and the witch wasn’t dark or scary enough to create any tension.Watching the movie yesterday, I took the opportunity to really consider the allegory and try to find something deeper but I found it even more lacking. I think the failure of the allegory is actually why the story has never resonated with me, and here are my problems with it.
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A lion is the wrong animal for “Jesus.” Jesus is not supposed to be a badass. He’s not a king and he’s not a military leader. He’s supposed to be passive and unassuming. He’s a peasant, a servant, a nobody, a wuss. A Jesus animal shouldn’t be intimidating or powerful. He should be gentle and meek and vulnerable. I might suggest a lamb, but that would be to obvious and too cheesy. A better choice might be something like a pack mule. Humble, loyal, self-sacrificing in a REAL way (more on that later) and subserviant. Making him a lion immediately removes any vulnerability, makes him violent, makes him a political authority and disallows the audience from feeling any real sympathy or pity. He’s just a big protective daddy figure and that’s the wrong conception for Jesus.
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Aslan’s sacrifice is no sacrifice at all. If he knows he’s going to come right back to life then there isn’t any particular virtue n it and he isn’t really sacrificing anything. He’s basically playing a trick on the White Witch and cheating her out of what is rightfully hers. Giving one’s life is only meaningful if one is really giving it with no expectation of a big resurrection scene. My pack mule would have stayed dead. The sacrifice would have meant something.
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The sacrifice doesn’t work as Christian allegory because Lewis misplaced the blame for it on his “Satan” figure rather than on God. In Christian doctrine, Jesus did not die to satisfy Satan but to satisfy God. By shifting the blame away from God (who I guess would be Aslan himself in this scenario?) Lewis blows his own analogy. He makes the demand for a sacrifice come from an entity of evil rather than God and thus makes it appear as though the demand itself is evil or unjust in some way.
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Lewis steps all over his allegory by making Narnians into Christians (or at least, they celebrate Christmas). It’s very clumsy symbolism to say that Jesus is like a lion who worships Jesus. By bringing Father Christmas into Narnia, the story also implies that Father Christmas exists in the “real” world too, which is just silly.
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Where the hell does Aslan keep disappearing to? He just vanishes for long stretches and everybody is supposed to accept it without asking questions, no matter how badly the place goes to shit while he’s gone. I can’t feel sympathy or loyalty or have any faith in an absentee king (or God) and I think the denizens of Narnia are idiots for going along with it and making excuses the way they do.
I also had some aesthetic complaints about the movie (the children’s acting ability ranges from saccharine to wooden and the sacrifice scene goes on forever without evoking a shred of emotion, just to name a couple) but the issues I raised above (issues which have to be blamed on C.S. Lewis, not the movie itself) are the reasons I think that the story fails to be great.
In fairness, I must disclose that my daughter loved the movie, sat entranced, literally at the edge of her seat for most of the movie and imediately asked if we could get it on DVD whenever it comes out.