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"You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body."
— C. S. Lewis
Since The Chronicles were published, there have been several attempts to bring the works to screen, but none that even approach the grand scale of Disney Studios and its co-producer Walden Media. As noted by many, the ability to create a visually realistic and aesthetically satisfying film version that did not rely on a cartoon format or Claymation figures had to wait until the technology was in place. That The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe will be a believable and mind-boggling eyeful is not in doubt. Just a look at the trailer of the opening scene, where one of the young protagonists, Lucy, enters the dark wardrobe and emerges into a fully realized, compellingly credible and dazzlingly beautiful fantasy world, is enough to give you goose bumps.
The decision by Disney to bring this classic to life at this particular point in time is a shrewd and cleverly calculated one. There are an estimated 90 million readers of the books, and that translates out into really big business, both from ticket and DVD sales and concomitant franchise markets. Moreover, in recent years, Disney has not had a "signature" movie with a predictable ongoing stream of profits to keep their coffers full. It has met with stiff competition in the family flick arena from rivals such as Time Warner and Sony Pictures with the Harry Potter and Spider-Man movies, and indies like Peter Jackson with his magnificent production of The Lord of the Rings.
With so much at stake, Disney and Walden have spared no effort to make sure this endeavor succeeds. They brought in a longtime Narnia fan, Andrew Adamson (of Shrek fame) as the film's director, C. S. Lewis's stepson Douglas Gresham as a co-producer and hired Motive Marketing (that helped turn Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ into a blockbuster) to work its magic on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, too. More than 50 licensees are manufacturing Narnia-themed board games, dolls, trading cards and photo albums. HarperCollins is publishing over 140 editions of Narnia, including 31 audio versions and a video game. Among the companies with tie-ins are McDonald's, General Mills, Oral-B, Kodak, and others.
Though previews of the film have been generally well received, as Michael Flaherty, president of Walden Media admitted, "This is a risky project. Box office-wise, we'd love to be The Passion -- though we could do without the controversy." The reality is that if the books are being so ruthlessly scoured for hints of heresy by conservative Christian factions, one can only imagine how much more so will be the movie. And the inherent problem still remains of how to do the proverbial impossible and please all of the people all of the time. While it's probably safe to say that the film will be an artistic success, it may end up being a box office flop because of the very nature of the subject matter. Too direct a treatment of the spiritual aspects of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and they lose the secular audience; too oblique an approach to it, and they lose the church crowd they're specifically trying to draw in. Either way, it will amount to a significant loss of revenue, and profit margin is what it's all about with a movie that has cost upwards of $200 million to make.
In an article last month in Time, writer David Van Biema laid down a guideline for religious purists to determine if The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is really a Christian film. According to him, it apparently all boils down to four sentences from the book that put this mytho-spiritual tale into its correct Biblical New Testament context and clearly deliver the message of the Gospel:
The White Witch (the archetype of Satan) says, "That human creature is mine. His life is forfeit to me. His blood is my property."
Later, Aslan (the archetype of Christ) explains, "The Witch knew the Deep Magic. But if she could have looked a little further back... she would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table [upon which the sacrifice was made] would crack and Death itself would start working backwards."
If he's right about those lines being the dead giveaway, every conservative Christian is going to be waiting to hear them uttered loud and clear. Whether they made it into the final cut, we'll have to wait to see. When asked about it, a Disney spokesperson rather evasively replied that the movie was going to "be as faithful to the book as possible" -- not very reassuring to the defenders of orthodoxy, to say the least.
"Pictures are for entertainment; messages should be delivered by Western Union."
— Samuel Goldwyn
Obviously, mainstream Christians will have no problem whichever way it goes with those supposedly all-important lines. But the really interesting question is: will the secular audience be listening just as closely to make sure those lines safely ended up on the cutting room floor? One can only hope (dare I say pray?) that all those the non-churchgoing, non-Bible believing, liberal thinking, tobacco-smoking and alcohol-drinking and left wing-voting "lost souls" out there are more tolerant and less nit-picking than their more sanctified movie-going counterparts.
I have a feeling, though, that Jack the boy who never grew up wouldn't be surprised or take the uproar over himself and The Chronicles very seriously, and he'd probably agree with Sam Goldwyn because they shared a certain understanding. Jack once wrote somewhere, "Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again." Observing the current hullabaloo, he'd probably just shake his head, puff on his pipe, lift his pint and say with a wry smile, "You aren't old enough yet."
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