Positive Liberty

I saw the new movie this weekend. Although I thought it was an artistic failure, it brought three thoughts to mind.

First, I thought it was a failure because I quickly became tired of the idiom of Lord of The Rings, as well as that of Harry Potter, and this movie is a thick combination of both. Massive, spectacular battle scenes simply cannot make up for a failure to make your audience care about the characters—and we never care about any of the characters. Edmund is overplayed so badly that he’s just an unredeemable brat. The others are totally cardboard characters, even Tumnus, who in the book is probably the most sympathetic character of all. The movie spends absolutely no time investing us in these characters so that the result is more like “scenes from The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe” than the story itself. I’m sick to death of movies that consist of a two hour collection of fifteen-second scenes, each of which is made up of some very mild tension which is quickly resolved by a not-very-snappy line, a smarmy smile and a musical crescendo—only to start the next fifteen-second scene with mild tension quickly resolved by a not-very-snappy…et cetera. Wardobe, if I recall correctly, is the least interesting of the books, so perhaps the sequels will be better, but so far I am unimpressed. Tron should have taught Disney that special effects don’t make a movie.

But more deeply, it struck me that Wardrobe is a brilliant, prototypical twentieth-century tale. I’ve lately been reading some ancient history, and it’s interesting how historians consider mythologies years later to see what it was that concerned people of that time. Future historians will regard Wardrobe as a fascinating insight into what made up the 20th century mindset: dark, totalitarian tyranny; secret police; a conflict of the manifold and various against the singular and monotonous; law against lawlessness; the sacred against the profane. Wardrobe isn’t really a Christian story; or, it’s not merely a Christian story. Lewis—whom I’ve always much preferred as a theologian to the dull third-rate bumperstickery of G.K. Chesterton and the rest—believed in what he called the Tao: the unifying themes of great faiths and civilizations, which reflected a timeless human nature, and on which a good society must rest. Twentieth century fascism and communism represented the greatest attacks on these themes that humanity ever encountered, and it’s really interesting to see how Lewis wraps this conflict in a story that draws on so much of Western Culture’s mythological vocabulary (as did Tolkein, of course). Aslan is Christ, in some ways. But he’s also Dionysus, and Prometheus, and dozens of other gods and heroes, all of whom Lewis saw as the spirit protecting civilization from the forces of evil—be they Nazi, or Communist or whathaveyou—a peculiarly twentieth century evil brilliantly symbolized by the White Witch and her sanitary darkness of Timeless Winter. Tacitus famously said of the Romans that “they make a desolation and call it peace.” This was something that the twentieth century was especially attuned to understand: the silent “peace” of the Poland, 1939, or of Czechoslovakia, 1968, or of North Korea that still goes on; a winter with no Christmas. Recognizing and calling attention to the special evil of the twentieth century (man’s evilest century)—special because it was so calm: that was Lewis’ particular strength. His famous lines:

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

—showed a sensitivity to the horrors of twentieth century life that even today many people lack. That Ronald Reagan was ridiculed so loudly for the speech in which he quoted these words—ridiculed for stating the obvious and vital truth that Soviet communism was the greatest evil in man’s history—shows how genuine Lewis’ contribution really was.

Is it relevant in the twenty-first century? That’s my third observation. The best line in the movie occurs when Peter and his two sisters are crossing the river and are confronted by Maugrim the wolf captain of the secret police. “This is not your war,” says Maugrim.

This is not your war. In Lewis’ day, there were so many people who thought that Poland, September, 1939, was not their war. They thought that France was not their war, that the Sudetenland had not been their war, and that the Iron Curtain that descended from Stetin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic was not their war. Now there are people who believe that the Middle East is not our war. But today, from Algiers on the Mediterranean, to Karachi on the Indian, an Iron Veil now divides the world—and, as was true of the last century, too many well-meaning people, and their not-well-meaning leaders, believe that it, too, is not our war. What Peter understands at that moment is that, at some point in any war, you can tell yourself, with some plausibility, “this is not my war.” But that does not get the job done; it does nothing to fight back the endless Winter. In an age in which even calling evil by its name is regarded as superstitious and empty, it’s enough to recognize that a war against lawfulness and freedom anywhere is our war. And it’s better still to recognize that our war must be the war against the moral equivalency, the moral timidity—the moral shipwreck as it were—which stops so many people from recognizing and denouncing evil for what it is. The “Deep Magic” is really nothing more than the law of right and wrong, and it cannot be overthrown so long as people are willing to stand up for it. Peter stands up for it because a war against the Deep Magic is his war, just as it was Ronald Reagan’s war, and C.S. Lewis’ war, and Peter’s father’s war, and our war today.

Update: As I was saying….

Trackback URI |