Bizarro Narnia!

The current issue of National Review features a cover story by John J. Miller about the upcoming first movie in the Narnia series, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. It's a good article, and a shocking one. Shocking because it details plans once hatched by Paramount to produce a LW&W movie that would have outraged fans of the book:

During the 1990s... Paramount owned the film rights to The Chronicles of Narnia and began to develop a script for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Moving the book’s setting from wartime Britain to modern Los Angeles (and replacing air raids with earthquakes) was the least of its flaws: The Pevensie children apparently entered Narnia not through a wardrobe but through a swimming pool, and the White Witch tempted Edmund not with Turkish delight but with cheeseburgers and hot dogs. Worst of all, Hollywood proposed that perhaps Aslan shouldn’t be killed.

(Emphasis added.)

Thank God... literally... that this planned "adaptation" fell through.

Miller, by the way, hits the nail on the head with his summation of what the Narnia stories are for, and why Lewis wrote them:

Lewis worried that the right imaginative stories were in short supply. (Another subtle theme of the Narnia books is the inadequacy of British schooling.) “There is too little of what we really like in stories,” Lewis once told Tolkien. “I am afraid we shall have to try to write some ourselves.” In offering Narnia, one of his main goals was to save children from his own fate of falling into the snare of disbelief. Lewis believed that a powerful sense of compulsion spoiled his religious upbringing. “Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ?” he once asked (in what was for him an uncommonly stilted passage). “I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings.” Then he continued: “But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency.” If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then Narnia is the continuation of Sunday school by different devices...

“I am aiming at a sort of pre-baptism of the child’s imagination,” (Lewis) once said.

It's an excellent article. National Review is always well worth the cover price, and this article is the icing on the cake of the current issue.

  ¶ 10:01 AM