Narnia director Andrew Adamson has said that he really, really wanted his film to be “empowering” to girls in a way that C.S. Lewis’s original story was not. Two weeks ago, in the Globe & Mail — I think it was this article, though I’m not entirely sure, now that it’s gone to subscriber-only status — there was this item:
The filmmakers did make one significant alteration to the source material. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which was written in 1950, is run through with the sexism common for its time. It includes a scene in which Father Christmas distributes weapons to a trio of children in anticipation of battle. “Battles are ugly when women fight,” he tells the girls, Susan and Lucy.
The line caused some consternation for Adamson and led to a discussion — characterized by the producer Mark Johnson as a “fight” — with [co-producer Douglas] Gresham over the director’s desire to change the line. “That may have been acceptable in the 1940s,” recalled Adamson, “but after doing two movies that I think are empowering for girls [he co-directed Shrek and Shrek 2], I didn’t want to them turn around and say: ‘Susan, you don’t get to use that bow, you have to rely on your brother.'” Gresham, who is the protector of C. S. Lewis’s words, accepted a compromise line that doesn’t single out the girls.
So, even after the movie version of Aslan says “It is finished” — a line that appears nowhere in the book, and a line that, as far as Adamson was concerned, had nothing to do with Christianity and everything to do with Aslan’s sadness that he had to commit acts of violence — the film still throws in one extra, gratuitous scene in which Susan kills a dwarf. So it seems that, contrary to what Aslan said, the violence wasn’t quite finished. All hail empowerment!
But now Stephen Hume writes in today’s Vancouver Sun:
Mind you, it’s writ small and seasoned with some dated misogynystic prejudices. For example, the notion that too much thinking and assertiveness is a detriment in a girl like Susan and she should take her lead from a handsome (although not overly smart) boy of action like her chivalrous older brother Peter.
What’s amusing about this comment is that the film’s insistence that logic and intelligence just get in the way is original to the movie, and is, if anything, contrary to the spirit of Lewis’s books. So much for Adamson’s “empowerment”, then? Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this film celebrates visceral thrills over intelligent thought, for both boys and girls alike.
Of course, any and all concerns about the portrayal of women in Lewis’s stories must take into account his clear admiration for Lucy, if these concerns are to have any merit.
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