New York Diary

Chronicles

Despite myself I saw the Chronicles of Narnia yesterday night. Without commenting particularly on the movie per se (which I confess I found surprisingly good, if a bit heavy with the Christian allegory), I have a few thoughts:

1. The frame of the movie seemed unneccessary. Why doesn't it seem so in the book?
You might recall that the children in the Chronicles of Narnia are sent out to live in the English countryside during World War Two. It is while there that they stumble into Narnia and have all of their adventures. I was struck by the fact that you could have just had Narnia, in the movie at least, without needing an explanation of how the kids got there or where they came from. Perhaps the book is stronger on the idea that they are strangers in Narnia (which is importantly true for the flow of the story) and so their backstory is also more important. Or perhaps the frame in the book works because it seems to take a story of "real" kids, whereas in the movie they are already fictional characters merely by virtue of being onscreen. But that seems unlikely and inconsistent, since they are as much characters from the opening pages of the book as they are from the opening shots onscreen.

2. There's a problem with treating ever-older "children" as kids.
If you can send your 8-year-old off to live with relatives she's never met in World War Two, and she can buck up and take it and even feel that there's some purpose in doing so; if you can marry your daughter off when she's 15 if you live in 15th-century Verona, and she can run a household and have a family (albeit probably not that happily); if you let your 11-year-old run away in the 1920s and he can support himself by sweeping shops; then how come 25-year-old Americans today live at home, don't have jobs, and are quick to feel discouraged, unhappy, and incapable? Were we never given any responsibility growing up? Or was there no responsibility to give, since everybody was going to be okay anyway? Or do our actions (or lack thereof) just never seem to matter (either for ourselves or for anybody else)? Or what?

3. Our wars often allow us to abstract far from actual killing.
In historical terms, it's a strange, strange thing that we can destroy our enemies without ever seeing them. In the Chronicles of Narnia, two wars take place, and they are represented very differently on film: one features hand-to-hand combat, the other is epitomized by the Luftewaffe bombers conducting air raids over Britain. Bows and arrows abstract away from actual physical contact; guns abstract away once more; bombs do so yet again. ICBM's represent the farthest we can do this and still be on earth, I take it. None of this is a new thought, but the relative newness of this ability still strikes me. It's a rare thing to be able to destroy from such a distance.

posted by Skay @ 2:10 PM