You Can't Kill the Magic Lion
Writing in The Times of London, Minette Marrin correctly (if hardly originally) points out the hypocrisy of those "enlightened" secularists who claim the mantle of tolerance and diversity -- yet get the vapors over "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe," a film with explicitly Christian themes.
I saw the movie yesterday, and marveled at the way it had brought the book to life. Aslan, the White Witch, the talking animals and all the rest came to glorious life -- and the allegory behind Aslan's sacrifice and resurrection couldn't have been clearer. The movie had the ring of truth -- a truth deeper than the supposed "insights" we are supposed to glean about the "human condition" from dreadful (but celebrated) films like "American Beauty" or "Crash."
Funny that it is so threatening to so many. And funny that Minette Marrin would choose to condescend so to CS Lewis and his audience of believers and non-believers alike ("I now find the Narnia stories crude, cobbled together in a clumsy pastiche and sometimes distasteful or sententious."). Can s/he produce something of such incandescent loveliness and eternal truth, or is s/he merely limited to sniping from the sidelines?
Don't mind the secular fundamentalists who, as Minette Marrin puts it, are "desperate to kill the magic lion;" don't mind even the "sophisticates" like Marrin, who want to defend the rights of the beknighted to see the movie but are desperate not to be too closely associated with its Christian message. They are more to be pitied than blamed.
And, above all, don't worry -- the "magic lion" cannot really be killed. Remember?
I saw the movie yesterday, and marveled at the way it had brought the book to life. Aslan, the White Witch, the talking animals and all the rest came to glorious life -- and the allegory behind Aslan's sacrifice and resurrection couldn't have been clearer. The movie had the ring of truth -- a truth deeper than the supposed "insights" we are supposed to glean about the "human condition" from dreadful (but celebrated) films like "American Beauty" or "Crash."
Funny that it is so threatening to so many. And funny that Minette Marrin would choose to condescend so to CS Lewis and his audience of believers and non-believers alike ("I now find the Narnia stories crude, cobbled together in a clumsy pastiche and sometimes distasteful or sententious."). Can s/he produce something of such incandescent loveliness and eternal truth, or is s/he merely limited to sniping from the sidelines?
Don't mind the secular fundamentalists who, as Minette Marrin puts it, are "desperate to kill the magic lion;" don't mind even the "sophisticates" like Marrin, who want to defend the rights of the beknighted to see the movie but are desperate not to be too closely associated with its Christian message. They are more to be pitied than blamed.
And, above all, don't worry -- the "magic lion" cannot really be killed. Remember?
posted by LadybugUSA at 8:17 AM
1 Comments:
What did you think of the depiction of Aslan? Personally, that was the one part of the movie that I wasn't completely taken with--too much of the tame and not enough of the unsafe. I'm curious whether anyone else felt the same.
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