for narnia and the north
Jan. 21st, 2006 01:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseI love the Narnia movie beyond all reason. The actors all make me completely and unreasonably happy, the set and prop work is impeccable. I hate hate hate hate the White Witch's costuming, but the one thing about the film that bothered me more than any other was the heavy emphasis on the battle. For one thing, my god could it be any more cliche? With the sound-suck and the heartbeat and the shining sword and the "to the death." Gack. Seen that just a thousand times before.
But the lack of focus on battles is also one of the things that I most appreciate about Lewis' writing. Sure, they're there, but they never really seem to matter that much. The climax is always personal, not martial. LWW's main battle is merely summarized, within the space of a page. "Prince Caspian" has a single combat, undertaken to prevent open combat, and a nonviolent rout. "Dawn Treader," my favorite, has no battles at all. Even in "Horse and His Boy," where Rabadash's invading army is key, the climax is Shasta's attempt to warn Archenland and personal journey towards self-knowledge and maturity and courage. The fight itself is of no real textual importance, just "this happened".
We've gotten to a point where the only way a fantasy saga can end is by poking evil with sharp sticks until it gives up. Not only is this silly, it's out of touch with reality in ways that are becoming dangerous. The rhetoric surround the Iraq war could have been lifted verbatim from a typical work of high fantasy: there are Bad Guys over there and we need to save the world. You can tell that they're Bad Guys because they don't look like us.
The problem with the fantasy war is that war isn't like that. Not even fully justified war. It can never be like Peter, the Boy-King of Narnia, galloping towards Evil--with his blond hair and innocent face and shiny Sword of Goodness--on a Unicorn. Ack. No. To go to war is to kill other people. Sometimes it may be the right thing to do, but I don't think that it could ever be glorious. Not that I've ever fought in a war, but I can't help but believe that taking life is taking life, and that there is some very dubious morality appended to it. I'm not saying that war is always Evil, nor that it is never the right thing to be a soldier. But: "He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace" (Tolkien, Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit).
It bothers me that fantasy has become so, well, escapist. The word has a very legitimate good meaning--see Tolkien on the escape of the prisoner. But the glorification of war is merely cowardice. It's hiding in the sand pretending. No enemy will ever be the Axis of Evil. We're all people. We can't Other those that we fight into Platonic representations of all that is dark. Fantasy should not be usable by dictators or deceivers. It's about higher truths clad in extended metaphor, things that cannot be said in ordinary words or images. Yes, it's about the conflict between Good and Evil. But that conflict doesn't have to be a cavalry charge. It can't be reductive and survive with any meaning intact.
LeGuin has no battles, nor T.H. White to speak of. Tolkien can pull it off, because he lived and understood it. Lewis knew better than to try, to his credit. I wish that Adamson could have done the same, because it does cheapen his work. It's like the ending of a sports movie: it feels good, looks good, but is completely empty of anything real. I enojyed it, I got sucked in, but I felt sort of dirty about it later on.
Come on, guys. Can't we show conflict in any other way?
Also, gacked from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chaos_pockets,
Gmail Account: from.dawn.of.time
Password: deepermagic
Contains all seven Chronicles of Narnia as well a Gaiman's short story "The Problem of Susan".
But the lack of focus on battles is also one of the things that I most appreciate about Lewis' writing. Sure, they're there, but they never really seem to matter that much. The climax is always personal, not martial. LWW's main battle is merely summarized, within the space of a page. "Prince Caspian" has a single combat, undertaken to prevent open combat, and a nonviolent rout. "Dawn Treader," my favorite, has no battles at all. Even in "Horse and His Boy," where Rabadash's invading army is key, the climax is Shasta's attempt to warn Archenland and personal journey towards self-knowledge and maturity and courage. The fight itself is of no real textual importance, just "this happened".
We've gotten to a point where the only way a fantasy saga can end is by poking evil with sharp sticks until it gives up. Not only is this silly, it's out of touch with reality in ways that are becoming dangerous. The rhetoric surround the Iraq war could have been lifted verbatim from a typical work of high fantasy: there are Bad Guys over there and we need to save the world. You can tell that they're Bad Guys because they don't look like us.
The problem with the fantasy war is that war isn't like that. Not even fully justified war. It can never be like Peter, the Boy-King of Narnia, galloping towards Evil--with his blond hair and innocent face and shiny Sword of Goodness--on a Unicorn. Ack. No. To go to war is to kill other people. Sometimes it may be the right thing to do, but I don't think that it could ever be glorious. Not that I've ever fought in a war, but I can't help but believe that taking life is taking life, and that there is some very dubious morality appended to it. I'm not saying that war is always Evil, nor that it is never the right thing to be a soldier. But: "He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace" (Tolkien, Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit).
It bothers me that fantasy has become so, well, escapist. The word has a very legitimate good meaning--see Tolkien on the escape of the prisoner. But the glorification of war is merely cowardice. It's hiding in the sand pretending. No enemy will ever be the Axis of Evil. We're all people. We can't Other those that we fight into Platonic representations of all that is dark. Fantasy should not be usable by dictators or deceivers. It's about higher truths clad in extended metaphor, things that cannot be said in ordinary words or images. Yes, it's about the conflict between Good and Evil. But that conflict doesn't have to be a cavalry charge. It can't be reductive and survive with any meaning intact.
LeGuin has no battles, nor T.H. White to speak of. Tolkien can pull it off, because he lived and understood it. Lewis knew better than to try, to his credit. I wish that Adamson could have done the same, because it does cheapen his work. It's like the ending of a sports movie: it feels good, looks good, but is completely empty of anything real. I enojyed it, I got sucked in, but I felt sort of dirty about it later on.
Come on, guys. Can't we show conflict in any other way?
Also, gacked from
chaos_pockets,Gmail Account: from.dawn.of.time
Password: deepermagic
Contains all seven Chronicles of Narnia as well a Gaiman's short story "The Problem of Susan".
no subject
Date: 2006-01-21 01:27 am (UTC)Great post. And THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for the gmail link, Loti -- I didn't have etexts of the books, and these are great. ♥ ♥ ♥
no subject
Date: 2006-01-21 06:12 am (UTC)Have you read any of the stuff that he wrote after his marriage? It's quite a lot better in terms of gender, esp. "Till We Have Faces," which is wonderful in every way.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-21 08:04 pm (UTC)Silly me for not thinking that everything can be found online, some way or another.
In other words: yay, thank you!
no subject
Date: 2006-01-21 09:00 pm (UTC)