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The Once And Future Flyboy is correct about the movies following the order of the rlease of the books, rather than the chronology of Narnia. The books were renumbered fairly recently—after I’d read them, anyway, so some time after the late 1970s—in accordance with someone-or-other’s deathbed wish. And like lots of deathbed wishes, it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.
We talked a lot about that and other things in this thread on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which I urge you to read if you have not done so; not only does it answer a lot o questions that may arise here, it’s also one of the best movie threads we’ve ever done on Barbelith, IMHO, and not just because I run my mouth a lot in it.
I can see the point of wanting to get Caspian out of the way, too, in the sense that not a lot actually happens, compared to the travelogue of wonders that is Dawn Treader and the fevered atmospheres of Chair; but it’s the one book in the series that lingers most in my mind. It’s got some of the loveliest and most vivid descriptive writing in the series (which of course won’t survive the translation to the screen), but it’s also the clearest example of how idiosyncratic and strange Lewis’s religiosity is.
The theology of the Narnia books is downright weird, and never moreso than in Caspian. There’s a lot more going on here than the simplistic Aslan = Jesus equivalency. This is no Jesus we’ve ever known; he’s a direct-interventionist god who nonetheless absents himself from human affairs for long periods, often to disastrous effect. He’s the true ruler of Narnia, or so we hear, but he’s rather m ore like an absentee landlord—never staying long, more a figure of rumor than an object of worship, always being forgotten and rediscovered. More of an Old Testament God, really, with kings and princes as his prophets.
But what does it mean, allegorically, for Lewis to begin with a conflation of the Christmas and Easter stories and then vault backwards to what is essentially a retelling of the Babylonian Captivity?
And Lewis’s theology has room in it for pagan gods and pagan sensuality: in Caspian we find river spirits (the sundering of the bridge at Beruna shows up briefly in the trailer), naiads and dryads, Silenus, and Bacchus—Bacchus, for cry-eye—as part of Aslan’s entourage. The bad guys are Puritans, basically, consumed with a loathing for superstition, frivolity, and the body. When Aslan returns (again), all that is swept aside; the wine flows freely, and people throw off their “scratchy, uncomfortable clothes” and dance with wild abandon. Safe to say that the allegedly-huge Christian Conservative audience that ate up Lion is going to have rougher sledding with the rest of the series.
Perhaps most importantly, Caspian foreshadows and deepens what is probably the most troubling and controversial aspect of the series, The Problem Of Susan—and makes a strong case that what keeps her out of Heaven at the eschaton is not sexual sin, after all.
Based on the first movie, and impression gleaned from the trailer, I imagine that the adaptation will be faithful, workmanlike—neither striving for nor attaining genius as a piece of filmmaking—and I guess that’s okay. Andrew Adam’s Son seems to think his job as director is to not get in the way of the material, and to let Lewis speak for himself. And Lewis speaking for himself should generate plenty of discussion.
Tiny quibble; I’d always imagined Caspian as younger. He’s only a year or two older than Peter, isn’t he? |
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Chronicles of Narnia - Prince Caspian movie poster.
Prince Caspian