Steven D. Boyer has an excellent analysis of how the Narnia films subvert C.S. Lewis’s hierarchical world:
Then follow some remarkable lines. Says Peter, “Don’t you ever get tired of being treated like a kid?” “We are kids,” Edmund wryly observes. “Well, I wasn’t always,” Peter retorts. He is obviously remembering that he used to be a king in Narnia—and he wants the kingship back.
Director Andrew Adamson helps us understand just what is going on in this scene in a commentary that is one of the bonus features on the Prince Caspian DVD. Adamson explains,
I always felt . . . how hard it must have been, particularly for Peter, to have gone from being high king to going back to high school, and what that would do to him, do to his ego. . . . I always thought that would be a really hard thing for a kid to go through.
Adamson acknowledges that this emotional turmoil was “not something that C. S. Lewis really got into,” but as director he wanted “to create more depth for the characters, more reality to the situation.” He wanted “to deal with what all the kids would go through having left behind that incredible experience and wanting to relive it.”
This emotional realism was Adamson’s explicit aim, and as a result, the screenwriters who put this scene together were actively encouraged to think about what it would be like to go from “king” to “schoolboy”—not a pleasant prospect, of course, and one to which any of us might react with bitterness and resentment, just as Peter does.
Right, any of us might react that way—but that is because we have not breathed the air of Narnia. We are thinking like ordinary persons (and worse, like self-sufficient, twenty-first-century, Western intellectuals) instead of like knights or kings. In Lewis’s telling of all of the Narnia tales, the children’s experiences as kings and queens in Narnia consistently transform them into nobler, more virtuous people in their own world. They are not spoiled children wanting to be kings again; they are noble kings who carry that very nobility back into their non-royal roles as schoolchildren.
But not so in Hollywood. To be a king at all is to hunger for power forevermore, like a tiger that has tasted human blood and ever afterwards is a “man-eater.” To lose imperial power by being transported back to England is to become a bitter, sullen, acrimonious brat. That is just what Peter has become, and his folly is the driving force behind most of the action in the movie.
(Via: Volokh Conspiracy)
October 28th, 2010 | 9:31 am
The irony is rather delicious, isn’t it? Lewis writes about a schoolboy becoming a king, because that elevation is a symbol of what will happen to us all in the resurrection. Hollywood, prefering to tear down, focuses on a king becoming a schoolboy, supposedly so that modern audiences can identify. If he wanted to tell the story of King Peter in Highschool he should write that book himself, not drain another’s work of its meaning. The story Adamson wants to tell is in fact a bit intriguing – but it is not this story.
I am reminded of the proposed animation of LOTR in the 50′s, where the screenwriter suggested a change: When Meriadoc and Peregrine are found outside Orthanc by their friends, instead of pipes and pipeweed they were to be holding “ridiculously long sandwiches.” Sandwiches, John-Ron, can’t ya just picture it? Funny, eh? Sandwiches!
October 28th, 2010 | 11:31 am
I have to take issue with the interpretation being offered. I don’t believe the portrayal in the film painted Peter in a negative fashion. One need also remember that Peter was modeled after the Apostle Peter–a man himself who frequently made mistakes, and whose errors are important lessons in encouragement, perseverance, and humility for us.
So it also is with Narnia’s Peter and in our own lives. Should we live past our physical prime, there is the great task of learning to surrender our power, our sense of self, progressively over to Christ, and learn to value ourselves for the love God bears us rather than out of a sense of accomplishment. As Lewis wrote elsewhere, we’re called in this life to experience thousands of little deaths before we can enter into Christ’s new life.
Narnia’s Peter does learn the lesson, and in doing so (like the saints) serves as a model for us in our own walk.
October 28th, 2010 | 11:50 am
Not sure the analysis is correct. The children were enobled by their Narnia experience but not perfected by it as the Lewis stories show.
October 28th, 2010 | 12:03 pm
I thought there was a real problem in the movie version ot the TLTW&TW. The “back story” provided excuses for poor Edmund so that we would feel sorry for him and understand his estrangement from his sibs. The whole point that Lewis was making that Edmund was, in the words of Lewis’ brother Warnie, a “**** of the first water.” And yet for a total creep like that, Aslan would lay down his life. By pulling the punches on Edmund as a creep, we lose the fullness of Aslan’s sacrifice, and by extension, Christ’s.
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