Prince
Caspian begins being remarkable in its very first image, which
is a sudden, intense zoom-in onto a woman screaming in the throes of
childbirth. This is striking because the female, procreative aspect of Nature
is one which Lewis always instinctively resisted. Certainly there was
nothing like this in his original book, which glossed over the whole
development with the phrase “there came a time when the Queen seemed to be ill
and there was a great deal of bustle and pother about her in the castle and
doctors came and courtiers whispered.” Anything more than this would have led
Lewis places he wasn’t willing to go. The phrase “Mother Nature” is not a mere
accident of idiom, but contains the inherent truth that it is woman, with her
procreative function, who really embodies Nature and its fecundity and
continuity. In the most blunt biological terms, we men are little more than
sperm donors, with the potential additional uses of bodyguards and/or errand
boys. As Camille Paglia once wrote, the invention of a patriarch creator-God
was the male of the species’ “declaration of independence” from this state of
irrelevance before Mother Nature. In other words, men had to invent a He who, in
turn, had created the She of Mother Nature and all her workings. Paglia viewed
this as a useful fiction because it has, over the course of human history, emboldened
men to invent and organize a great deal of useful things that are surplus to
the basic requirements of Mother Nature. Lewis, however, would have been repelled
by this characterization of Christian monotheism as “a useful fiction,” because
he genuinely believed in it. Thus, dwelling on the biological workings of
Nature, in all its feminine procreative aspect, is verboten in his work. That Prince
Caspian the film so blatantly contradicts this in its first sixty seconds
gives one an initial sense that all bets are off, and that this film could go
in any direction...
And so it proves. After this initial childbirth
scene, we see a Telmarene soldier enter a throne room and tell Lord Miraz that
he has a son, after which we introduced to our titular hero and his tutor, and
a few shots later the film’s first action sequence – a big chase on horseback –
has begun. What with all this, we’re almost ten minutes into the film before we
cut to 1940s England and meet Susan, Lucy, Peter, and Edmund, and by this point
it comes as something of a shock. In Hollywood cinema especially, the first few
minutes are always the most crucial in establishing the terms of a film’s world
and worldview, and Prince Caspian has
here knowingly and deliberated violated the basic narrative structure of
Lewis’s first four Narnia books:
namely that we begin with the Penvensies/Eustache/Jill in the “real world” of
wartime and post-war England, are then magically transported to Narnia for the
book’s adventures, and are finally returned to the “real world” of England at
the end. Prince Caspian’s refusing of
this logic ties in with its emphasizing of female fertility.
Even though Lewis’s Narnia books never actually invoke the “it was all a dream”
approach of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland or the film version of The
Wizard of Oz, there is nonetheless a sense of hierarchy of reality at work,
whereby Narnia is a sort of figuration of the realm of Faerie – accessible only
to prelapsarian children for purposes of socialization, who must of necessity
be banished from it as they mature. This theme would eventually be brought to a
hideous culmination which I’ll discuss later on, but for now it’s sufficient to
say that the unspoken-but-obvious corollary is that “mature” here means sexual
maturation – or beginning to exist on the terms of the Mother Nature who Lewis
cannot admit of. This gives the game away, insofar as Lewis isn’t wanting to
depict Narnia as a literal “other
world” in comic-book terms of “another dimension,” or Philip Pullman-style “another
string in the multiverse,” or even Tolkien’s planet “Arda,” but as a sort of
ur-reality that shows how the world should
be, if only it didn’t have this damned fact of female-sexuality-cum-Nature in
it. “Since the fairy-story deals with ‘marvels,’” Lewis’s friend and colleague
J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote, “it cannot tolerate any frame or machinery
suggesting that the whole framework in which they occur is a figment or
illusion.” What with all the ideological baggage described above, Lewis’s Narnia stories still clear this
requirement, but only just. By literalizing Narnia’s existence in such blunt
“other dimension” terms, Prince Caspian
the film simply obviates and dismisses all this tortuous logic. It’s another
beautiful example of the film’s steak of creative vandalism.
In keeping with this idea of Narnia as a realm of
moral socialization, moreover, one of the things I’ve always found most
distasteful things about The Lion, the
Witch, and the Wardrobe, both book and film, is the way that while Lewis
pays lip service to the idea that there’s always room in Heaven for a repentant
sinner – what with Edmund being redeemed and forgiven after being inveigled by
the White Witch – there’s always seemed to be a deep undercurrent of smugness
to the whole business. Lewis loads all of the sinful fallibility onto Edmund’s
character, while keeping Peter and Susan’s consciences spotlessly clear, and
making Lucy the cherubic angel of the bunch. This one-dimensionality is too
much even for a children’s story, or perhaps especially for one. Of course
you’re forgiven, the story seems to say, but the rest of us children have never
been bad – never done anything we need to be forgiven for, have we? Excuse us
while we smirk and snigger superiorly at you behind your back… Prince Caspian the film is brilliant
because it seems to sense this same logic, and takes drastic steps to
neutralize it. The film moves aggressively to knock Peter off his high horse.
Our first sight of him in England has him brawling with some other schoolboys
in the tube. After meeting Caspian, the film turns into a fiesta of clashing
egos between the two kings. And then, at the climax of the second act, the film
offers perhaps its most mind-boggling scene. We see, through a magic
mirror/screen, the avatar of Tilda Swinton’s White Witch, just a single touch
away from reviving and living again. She begins seducing Peter with promises
that he can recapture his former glory. Peter is obviously amenable. She
reaches out… He’s almost about to seal the deal with his touch… When suddenly
the screen shatters and collapses, taking her out again. We see that Edmund has
stabbed it from behind. “Yeah I know, you had it sorted,” he quips, fixing
Peter with a very knowing look. It’s one of the most brilliant moments I’ve
ever had the pleasure of seeing, in how it fluently reverses Lewis’s moral
logic.
The points of outrageousness continue. In Lewis’s
books, Father Christmas gives Susan a bow and a quiver of arrows, but also
declares that “I do not mean for you to fight in the battle,” and “battles are ugly
when women fight,” and we accordingly never see the weapon really used. Not so
in this film. After first seeing it in the theatre, it was one of my bigger
points of joyous incredulity that “you’d need a huge scorecard to keep track of
how many people Susan kills.” Indeed, keep a sharp eye out at the 1:16:08 mark
of the film, and you’ll actually see her dispatch one Telmarene soldier at
close range by stabbing him in the groin with an arrow! Likewise, Edmund gets to
be a great deal more kick-ass as well. In Lewis’s book, the fact that he is the
one to fight an initial sword duel with the dwarf Trumpkin – by way of proving
that although they seem to be children, they’re still warrior-king material –
is tortuously legitimized with “No, let me do it. If will be more of a sucks
for him if I win, and less of a let-down for all of us if I fail.” In the film,
Peter simply declares “Not me. Him,” and Edmund then duly hands Trumpkin his
ass on a platter. We’re left with the suggestion that Edmund is actually the
more skillful swordsman, an impression strengthened during the later sequence
of the abortive storming of Miraz’s castle. Among other bits of business, we
see Edmund almost casually kill three Telmarene soldiers in quick succession,
barely breaking stride as he dashes across a castle turret. Even Lucy’s
character is made slightly sharper and harsher for the film. In the books, the
dirk that Father Christmas gives her is never used. Here, keep an eye out for
the 1:29:56 mark, and you’ll see her with it out and genuinely poised to slit
Nikabrik’s throat. Moreover, when they finally meet, Aslan says to Lucy that
“if you were any braver you would be a lioness” – a deliciously subversive
line, in that it abruptly imaginatively cues us to wonder about Aslan’s sex
life, something emphatically not gestured towards in Lewis’s books.
All of this is mere prelude, however, to the film’s
greatest coup, and most invaluable vandalism of its source material. The most
unacceptable part of C.S. Lewis’s book series, for me, comes at the end of the
twelfth chapter of The Last Battle,
where we learn that Susan “is no longer a friend of Narnia.” She is “interested
in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was
a jolly sight too keen on growing up.” In other words, she’s grown from a sweet
little girl, tractable to the Christian harness, into an actual grown woman,
with all the amoral trappings of sex that Christianity has never been able to
control or accept. She’s no longer a “daughter of Eve,” to use Lewis’s
terminology, but a daughter of Mother Nature, showing up Christianity’s
fictiveness and inadequacy. Lewis’s only answer to this is “banish the bitch,”
so as to keep his imaginative Christian playground-utopia intact.
I’ve never been the hugest fan of films such as The Notebook, Mamma Mia, The Vow, or Eat, Pray, Love, or TV shows such Sex and the City, Girls, or Desperate
Housewives, but I consider that more a failing in my own education than a
reflection on the worth of these things. I find their very existence
reassuring, as well as the fact that their fans take them very seriously
indeed, because these facts in and of themselves constitute a stinging rebuke
to Lewis’s hysterical attempt to deny the reality and legitimacy of adult
womanhood. Thus, it was with enormous glee that I saw a great part of Prince Caspian seeming to have been
made in exactly this spirit.
Near the ten minute mark, when we finally cut
back to England, the first Pevensie
that we see is Susan, and our immediate impression is that actress Anna
Popplewell – now pushing twenty in real life – is looking very grown-up indeed,
with pillowy, lipstick-covered lips almost evoking Angelina Jolie. And
occupying the frame thus, she is standing at a kiosk, reading a magazine – no
doubt some gloriously frivolous teen thing which is feeding her love of nylons
and invitations – before having to beguilingly and toyingly fob off some
gormlessly awkward boy who’s trying to hit on her. Soon enough, she finds herself
back in Narnia – evidently still a friend of it after all, in spite of everything
– but nonetheless confesses to a certain ambivalence about the fact, having
spent the last year of her life getting used to being back in England. In other
words, Adamson & Co. have accepted and inverted Lewis’s moralism, the
better to deflect The Last Battle’s monstrosity, an astonishing five books in advance! It’s almost a
shame The Last Battle will never get
made, just so we can see what would ultimately have been done with it when the time came…
In the event, Susan’s new, more grown-up
characterization is soon used to generate a romantic subplot with Caspian,
played by the swoon-inducingly swarthy Ben Barnes. They don’t conclusively end
up together, because, as Susan says after their (very striking) good-bye kiss,
“we would never have worked anyway … I’m 1300 years older than you.” To say
that all this was not in Lewis’s novel would be an understatement of the century. Any
cyclones in the vicinity of Headington Quarry’s Holy Trinity Church can
henceforth be explained by the intensity with which Lewis is spinning in his
grave. And yet, even beyond its specific application in this case, this is
exactly the kind of literary adaptation that I most appreciate – the kind that
is unafraid of making big, shameless bowdlerisations to its subject matter
simply in the interests of cinema. As well-done as a film like Atonement was, that kind of filmmaking’s
abject servility to its source material always exasperates me. How much more fascinating would it have been to simply – in an impishly contrarian spirit of mischief –
rewrite Ian McEwan totally? For instance, having Briony be deployed across the channel as a
nurse and redeem herself by finding and rescuing Robbie? Or having the
library-tryst scene result in Cecilia becoming pregnant, and her daughter then
vengefully stalking Briony in later life?
One of my favourite examples of this kind of
adaptation – one of the few that approaches what Adamson does with Prince Caspian – is the 1994 version of The Jungle Book, which rewrites Kipling
to make Shere Khan into a benign and noble guardian-figure. Listening to the
DVD commentary for the film, one hears director Stephen Sommers blithely
declaring, with a total lack of self-consciousness, that the tigers they hired
to play Shere Khan just looked so majestic that demonizing them as villains
just didn’t seem cool, so they rewrote the story accordingly. One can readily
image Kipling purists’ reaction to this approximating Calvin’s at left, but I
always sympathize more with Hobbes’s look of jubilation at his own chutzpah.
It’s my firm belief that, fundamentally, this is how art really
advances, rather than though the dignified refraining from “taking liberties.”
And as such, I’d rate Prince Caspian a
very great piece of film art indeed.
