 Starring: Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell, Tilda Swinton, James McAvoy, Jim Broadbent
Director: Andrew Adamson
Year Of Release: 2005
Plot: The four Penvensie children are sent to the country to escape the Blitz. After the youngest, Lucy discovers an old wardrobe leads to a land called Narnia, she returns and encourages her siblings to go back with her. However Narnia is held in grip of the evil White Witch, who it ensures it’s always winter. The fantastical creatures that live there believe in a prophecy that says that when four humans arrive, the magical lion Aslan will return and free Narnia from the witch’s evil power. |
While some people doubted it would succeed, The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was an unqualified success, racking up worldwide box office of over $580 million. While most major blockbusters deliberately try to avoid controversy, Narnia pitched headlong into it, with atheists arguing it was religious propaganda, while many Christians led campaigns to get as many people to see it as possible. So why do some people argue the Narnia stories are racist and misogynistic tracts that promote religious indoctrination, while others applaud the book and film for helping change the way Hollywood looks at the movies it makes? To answer that, we need to look at why the movie was made.
In 2001 a man called Phillip Anschutz decided that movies had become too generic and dumb. There was nothing to stimulate young people’s minds, so he decided to do something about it and set up his own production company. Although movie history is littered with people with laudable aims planning to produce movies with a particular vision, they normally fail because of a lack of cash. What sets Anschutz apart is the fact he has a personal fortune valued at $6 billion and is ranked by Forbes Magazine as the 37th richest person in American and 98th in the world. He can basically make whatever films he likes with his own pocket money.
Anschutz teamed up with former Dimension Films President Cary Granat, who had overseen the likes of Spy Kids, Scream and Scary Movie, to set up a company called Walden Media. The company’s stated aim was to make family friendly movies with educational value, and to do it with budgets that could compete with Hollywood’s more usual fare.
While the conservative Christian Denver billionaire definitely had a vision when he set up the company, it should be noted that he wasn’t going into this blind. While he initially made his money drilling for and striking oil, like the 19th Century magnates he moved into railroads, telecommunications and the entertainment industry. Among his company’s entertainment interests are stakes in the LA Lakers basketball team, the Swedish soccer team Hammarby IF, the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood (where the Oscars are held), the London Arena, the Manchester Evening News Arena and even the Millennium Dome. After Michael Jackson’s death, when they were talking about the fact his London concert series was organised by AEG – that stands for Anschutz Entertainment Group.
He also holds the majority stake in Regal Entertainment Groups, America’s largest cinema chain with over 6,200 screens, which certainly helps matters if you’re planning to make your own films.
Walden produced its first films in 2003, with James Cameron’s IMAX underwater odyssey Ghost Of The Abyss, the wonderful Holes and the unsuccessful holocaust drama I Am David. It was 2004 where things stepped up a gear, with the company making a $110,000,000 version of Around The World In 80 Days with Steve Coogan and Jackie Chan. Although the movie flopped, the thing that set Walden’s films apart from the majority was their commitment to turning only the best children’s literature into films and that the movies themselves should be morally and educationally uplifting.
At the beginning of March 2004, Walden and Disney announced that they were jointly planning to bring C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe to the big screen for the first time. It’s believed that Walden and Disney split production costs in half, with each stumping up around $90 million.
It’s at this point in the story that another man should get his kudos. Douglas Gresham had been working tirelessly for years to get a big screen adaptation of the Narnia stories made, but only found someone willing to do it after the success of Lord Of The Rings. Gresham is C.S. Lewis’ stepson (the relationship between the author and Douglas’ mother, Joy, was chronicled in the film Shadowlands). He had dreamed of a Narnia movie from an early age (although Lewis himself is said to have disliked the idea of a live action film because he thought Aslan and the other creatures would have to be men in suits. He’d probably have been happier with CGI), and actively petitioned to get one made. Eventually Walden Media stepped up and Gresham became a co-producer, representing Lewis and his estate on the set.
With Anschutz and Gresham both committed Christians (Gresham even runs a mission in Ireland), and the novel itself well known for being an allegory of the life of Jesus, even at this early stage sceptics started to grumble, worried that the film would be a two-hour advert for Christianity. Likewise religious people who were aware of the moviemaker’s pedigree rejoiced, feeling that these were people who would stay true to the spiritual aspects of the book. However arguments over the religious side of Narnia aren’t new, as people have been having problems with Lewis’ work ever since the books were published.
There are a lot of people out there who really don’t like C.S. Lewis. Most of the arguments against him stem from the religious allegory aspects of his books. It has long been seen that the idea of Aslan dying in order to save Edmund is a direct recasting of Jesus’ crucifixion. The correlations follow all the way through the books, with ‘The Magician’s Nephew’ mimicking The Bible’s creation stories, while ‘The Last Battle’ heavily references the Book Of Revelation and its prophecies of the end of the world.
Others have argued against this strictly Christian interpretation, with people like Douglas Gresham saying that you can seen the idea of a dying god in Hindu, Norse and many other cultures. While Lewis regarded the Bible as ‘the true myth’, it’s argued that he was actually writing about things that concerned mythology as a whole, rather like Tolkien did in ‘The Lord Of the Rings’. Lewis himself slightly scuppered this idea by saying that as God was in charge of everything, in another world there would presumably be an equivalent figure to Jesus, and that this is what he was writing about.
Some have said the religious aspects don’t even matter, as when a child is reading the books, incredibly few will see the parallels. For them it’s just a great story. A few shrill voices really don’t like that idea, seeing it as indoctrination by making children susceptible to the ideas of Christianity without even telling them that’s what it’s about.
While these arguments have been running for decades, less well known are allegations of misogyny and racism. The charge that Lewis was sexist mainly comes from what happens to the character of Susan in the later books, particularly ‘The Last Battle’. There she is described as no longer being a friend of Narnia, and that she’s interested “in nothing nowadays except lipstick, nylons and invitations". Many other authors have weighed into this argument, with Neil Gaiman having written a short story, ‘The Problem With Susan’, about it and even ‘Harry Potter’ author J.K. Rowling stating that, “There comes a point where Susan…is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She's become irreligious basically because she found sex. I have a big problem with that.”
Again many have rushed to the books’ defence, saying that sex wasn’t Susan’s problem, it was the fact that she no longer believed in Narnia. It’s also true that there are several positive depictions of women in the books, such as Susan’s younger sister Lucy (although it is her innocence that keeps her a positive character).
Phillip Pullman, whose ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy of novels have been seen as an atheist’s response to Narnia, not only thinks the attitude towards Susan is sexist, he also charges Lewis with racism. “Death is better than life; boys are better than girls; light-coloured people are better than dark-coloured people; and so on. There is no shortage of such nauseating drivel in Narnia, if you can face it,” he says. This racism allegation mainly concerns a race called the Calormenes who feature in later books and live to the south of Narnia. These dark-skinned people are portrayed as having turbans, pointy shoes and being armed with scimitars. They are basically old-fashioned, stereotypical Muslims. Lewis describes them as worshipping a false god called Tash, who’s portrayed as more or less being Satan.
Again many don’t see it this way, stating that Lewis lived in a world before political correctness and wasn’t doing anything that hadn’t been done by many others before and after him, and he certainly wasn’t trying to be offensive. There are undoubtedly positive Calormenes characters, but it’s difficult not to see the race as a whole as Lewis portraying a bunch of heathen barbarians. It is believed that this problem was one of the main reasons the BBC decided not to make a TV version of ‘A Horse and his Boy’ when they adapted four other Narnia novels in the late 80s.
Nevertheless, long after Lewis wrote the books (they were published in the early to mid 1950s), Britain was still tuning into the ‘Black and White Minstrel Show’ and buying gollywogs for their kids to play with. This doesn’t mean that we should necessarily accept these things today even if they do come from another era, but it does show that at the time Lewis wasn’t doing anything culturally unusual.
The racism issue is undoubtedly going to become more important as the film series goes on (Voyage Of The Dawn Treader recently finished shooting, after a switch from Disney to Fox, but Walden ideally wants to make all seven Narnia book into films), with many already wondering how they will manage to make ‘A Horse And His Boy’ both faithful to the book and not offensive to Muslims.
While race and sex are important to arguments about Narnia as a whole, it is mainly the religious debate that effected the release of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. While major studios normally shy away from anything that actively promotes religion, because they see it as contentious, Disney actually employed the same company who’d handled the grass roots promotion of The Passion of the Christ, Motive Marketing, to create, “an extensive Faith and Family Outreach marketing and publicity campaign" for Narnia. An album of songs ‘Inspired By’ the story was released featuring 11 different Christian artists and special preview screenings were held across the US for 1,400 religious leaders in the hope they would promote the movie to their congregations.
Alongside this religious promotion a more traditional marketing campaign was going on. Here religion was barely mentioned, and the film was sold as magical, fantasy adventure, based on some classic books, that would have the whole family enraptured. The mainstream marketing was no more religious than that of Lord Of The Rings, and if you weren’t paying attention and didn’t go to church it would have been easy to miss the fact that there was any spiritual dimension to The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe at all.
Not everything went the filmmaker’s way though. In October 2005 there was a ruckus in Florida when it was announced that as part of Governor Jeb Bush’s (the president’s brother) ‘Just Read, Florida!’ program, copies of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe would distributed to schools that December – the same month the film opened. While some were dubious about the timing, others didn’t like the religious implications, especially as church and state are supposed to be separate in the US. Palm Beach Post journalist Frank Cerabino stated that, “We're opening up the public schools to some backdoor catechism lessons in the guise of getting kids to read." Things didn’t get better when it was discovered that Phillip Anschutz’s family and foundation had donated nearly $100,000 to the Republican Party, with some suggesting that this may have helped sway Jeb’s decision towards promoting the Narnia book, and by association the film.
This sort of grass roots religious marketing is incredibly rare for a blockbuster, and hasn’t really been seen since the like of Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandment, The Robe and The Greatest Story Ever Told lined up to see who could be the most pious in the 1950s. It undoubtedly raised the hackles of those who were already dubious of the allegorical elements of the Narnia stories. Polly Toynbee felt compelled to write that, “Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion” in the Guardian when the film was first released, and she wasn’t the only one.
Equally those on the other side of the religious divide vociferously defended the film and its themes. The American magazine, Today’s Christian Woman, offered a guide on ‘Talking Narnia To Your Neighbours’, which maintained that lives had already been changed for the better by the Narnia stories. The article used the case study of a woman called Lindy who had rediscovered her faith partly through the novels, and argued that the movie could be used as a tool to do the same for thousands of others through faith-based discussion of the film.
However, whether the film’s religious side really matters is another matter. You could easily watch the film and miss the allusions to Jesus crucifixion (even kids brought up in religious families probably wouldn’t put two and two together unless it was pointed out to them). As a result you’re left with a movie that does achieve Phillip Anschutz stated aims. It’s a film that’s family friendly and promotes universal values, such as loyalty, bravery and fighting for what you believe in. Are an entire generation of children going to become committed Christians after watching The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe? Probably not, they’ll just be entertained and perhaps given some positive role models.
TIM ISAAC
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