With a lot of media publicity on the upcoming holiday release of Disney's new film adaptation of C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, I sat down and re-read the book last night (I had previously read the book back in fifth grade as assigned reading).I was surprised at how short the book was (I read most of it within about 90 minutes), and at the same time, how well Lewis had crafted his story, especially for a younger audience.
According to news articles, Disney is worrying if the film is "Christian enough" for Christian audiences, and if it is "too Christian" for general audiences. I must admit that when I read the book in fifth grade, I read it as a story about a heroic lion, four British children, and their efforts to liberate a kingdom from oppression. It wasn't until our teacher (the school was affiliated with a Protestant church) started talking about how Aslan represented Christ that I saw the analogy.
But on re-reading the book some twenty years later, after many literature courses, the allegory of Aslan's self-sacrifice and resurrection from the death was obvious. But for small children? It probably would depend on how much exposure they had to Christian beliefs.
While I was reading, I started thinking, why are movies with such obvious divisions between good and evil so popular? I was thinking about the Star Wars films and Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. If one is to believe these films, we can all choose between good and evil, and, of course, we all WANT to choose the good, but when we don't, terrible things can happen (we turn to the Dark Side of the Force, we are corrupted by the power of the Ring, we become an agent of the White Witch).
And it made me feel nostalgic for the fiction of Ursula Le Guin, which deals with more complex themes based on Taoist philosophy. I think the basic difference in LeGuin's stories is that the good and evil that occurs is a result of human choices. There is no threat to the world from ultimate evil. The characters are threatened by choices they have made themselves.
Last December, the SciFi Channel showed a miniseries that took the basic themes of the Le Guin's Earthsea books and subordinated them into a story about good vs. evil. Someday, Hollywood will make an adaptation worthy of Ms. Le Guin's complex themes.
