2 of 3
Unaided by any special skill or even sound taste in language, the author leads us up a stair of unpredictables. … He builds whole worlds of imagery and passion, any one of which would have served another author for a whole book, only to pull each of them to pieces and pour scorn on it. The physical dangers … here count for nothing: it is we ourselves and the author who walk through a world of spiritual dangers which make them seem trivial."
—Of Other Worlds, "On Stories"
This "marvelous or supernatural" was in fact what he strove to achieve in all of his stories, and is the common attribute of every story he admired critically, from King Solomon's Mines to Paradise LostParadise Lost. And it was the film version of King Solomon's Mines that bothered him.
Lewis complains that the producer of the film, "for me, ruined the story." This narrative ruin came about through the substitution of one danger for another, and that substitution of danger was an outworking of a literary paradigm of excitement. "Where excitement is the only thing that matters kinds of dangers must be irrelevant. Only degrees of danger will matter. The greater the danger and the narrower the hero's escape from it, the more exciting the story will be." Lewis goes on to explain that different kinds of dangers produce different kinds of fear—fear with awe, fear with horror, fear with disgust, numbing fear, and a quivering almost pleasurable fear. The imagination responds differently to these fears. They change the personality of a story accordingly.
While I notice simple shifts in description—Why does the white witch have blond dreadlocks? Where are her red lips? What happened to the charismatically, seductively, dangerously, beautiful Jadis? What happened to her palace? Why is it made entirely of icicles?—I finally come to the first shift in danger, the first place where the writers felt Lewis lacked "excitement."
The children are in the Beavers' house, and Edmund has left them. In the book, we immediately sense betrayal. Peter wants to follow Edmund, but the Beavers make him see the folly of this, and they all trek off as quickly as possible (leaving behind Mrs. Beaver's sewing machine). The children must trek stealthily, always listening for the bells of the witch's sleigh behind them (the wolves were sent to the Stone Table to discover if Aslan really had returned and to cut off the children if necessary). If you have ever done any sneaking with the fear of followers and ambushes, if you have ever attempted any stealthy and yet speedy treks across the park, across the lawn, or simply shifting hiding places from the bedroom to the hall closet, then you know this tension, this sensation of breathless, bottled-up, speedy caution.
But for the film, such understated tension isn't exciting enough. The children follow Edmund to the witch's ice castle, only then deciding to run back to the dam, pack up, and leave. Rather than sending the wolves ahead to the Stone Table, the witch sends them directly to the Beavers' house, and we have our necessary excitement.
The children are inside the house when the wolves begin tearing through the walls. I sit, wondering how the writers expect to believably get them out and all the way to the Stone Table with wolves on their heels. But the writers hand us a minor deus ex machina, and Beaver confesses to his wife that he has a secret tunnel that leads to Badger's house. We are then off on a wolf-chase climaxing on thin ice beneath a thawing waterfall. The waterfall tumbles, the ice shatters, and everyone washes down the frigid river, but nobody drowns, and because Spring is coming, there is no danger of hypothermia.
share this page
RSS Feed
