Disney Ditches Dawn Treader
The news out of Hollywood is that Disney, fearful that the Narnian franchise would fade fast in an inevitably overtapped market for fantasy films, has opted out of the financing partnership with Walden Media. Reports indicate that Walden intends to go ahead with the Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” in search of another partner. The movie has been in pre-production with Michael Apted as director, and was slated for a May 2010 release. Speculation is that Walden may link the Narnian series with Fox, which partners with Walden in the Fox Walden enterprise. More details in these news stories:

Cinematical

Hollywood Reporter

NY TIMES

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Why so serious?

According to reports, Prince Caspian was regarded as a box office disappointment for Disney, since The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe made $292 million in North America and $453 million internationally in 2005-06. By contrast, “Prince Caspian” brought in $141 million in North America and another $278 internationally, a drop in revenue of 45%. (Prince Caspian has just been released on DVD and Blu-Ray for the Christmas season, and will no doubt bring in some extraordinary revenue beyond box office when all is totaled.)

For a majority of movies, this would be plenty of net revenue to justify continuing the series indefinitely. (I mean, how many Saw, Freddie, Jason, or Alien(s) movies have there been with less provocation?) Why, then, the profound difference in audience reception and continuing ardor for this episode in the Narniad?

I won’t repeat my intense interrogation of the movie itself here, but let’s focus on what makes for happy, repeat moviegoers of literary classics and how they become enthusiastic evangelists to others? Here’s my list of components to be reckoned with:

Enough respectful fidelity to the original literary vision to captivate and fulfill without distraction.

Willingness to create new vistas, landscapes, and, as necessary, landmarks in CGI, without surrendering authenticity.

Principled rejection of derivative cinematography, setting, characterization, perceived contemporary audience “requirements” (e.g., a teenage love triangle).

Refusal to alienate primary audience through arbitrary plot subtractions or introduction of inorganic themes, characters, denouement.

In my view, Prince Caspian falls short on all four points, and makes the first Disney-Walden collaboration, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, seem that much more accomplished, though at first blush, I had some disappointments. Those seem minor now compared to the faux pas of this production. And that helps perhaps explain some proportion of the gap between the original movie receipts and those of this “sequel.”

If one feels patronized by the creators of a work that has its own built-in success machine (church folk of all communions, fantasy enthusiasts, dedicated Narnians and Lewis aficionados), one will not be as inclined to spread the good news. Or want to take others again and again. Or buy it for Christmas and Birthdays.

Reports that producers and financiers thought they had “improved” upon Lewis’s story betrays how little they seem to know about the Narnian worldview or Lewis’s imagination—and, perhaps as importantly, how little they knew the heart of the audiences awaiting the next release. I can tell you one thing: the audience wasn’t wishing for a Princess Bride–Harry–Golden Compass–Twilight mashup.

One can only hope that Aslan is still on the move. To a new studio.

Wondering what gift to get that C. S. Lewis lover in your family or friendship circle? I lean always toward getting folks primary materials—that is, books by Jack rather than about him. But here’s a hardly unbiased top ten list of C. S. Lewis gift items—and, through the magic of internet shopping, there’s still time to get them! (All items below, save one, are linked to Amazon but they are also available from many other providers.)

1. Yours, Jack. C. S. Lewis ($17.49; HarperCollins, 2008). My favorite book of the year—a great compendium of those letters of Jack in which he served his correspondents as counselor, pastor, teacher, and friend. This great editorial achievement by Paul Ford, the great Narnian encyclopediast, built upon the work of Lewis’s estimable bibliographer, Walter Hooper, is a manageable but engrossing volume that will introduce you to the amiable, approachable, indefatigiably orthodox and compassionate Lewis.

2. The Personal Heresy. C. S. Lewis. Edited by Joel Heck. ($19.99; Concordia University Press, 2008). This splendid book by Lewis has been out of print, really, since 1939—though it did show up as a reprint in the mid-1960s. Editor Heck has done a superb job in this new paperback in annotating and explaining the original technical literary terms and allusions for contemporary readers and providing a much needed index. I can almost guarantee your friend or family member does not have a copy of this! What’s it about? In some sense, it’s about everything, but in point of fact, it is a debate between Lewis and a prominent literary scholar of the time, E. M. W. Tillyard, as they spar over the place of objectivity in understanding literature, but it is really a stage on which Lewis can perform some great soliloquies about what it means to possess a stable, healthy, inquisitive mind and not fall into the errors of subjectivism. If you want to know what it would have been like to be in an Oxford lecture hall listening to Lewis, here it is.(Personal disclosure: I wrote the Introduction to this work.)
3. Smoke on the Mountain. Joy Davidman ($17.95; WJK Press, 1985). This book, published in 1955 by Joy Davidman, C. S. Lewis’s late-in-life marriage partner, provides terrific insight into her mind and heart as she provides a commentary on the ten commandments. It is a tour de force in some ways, but it is helpful to those who want to understand more about the relationship she and Lewis had, and why he would have found her a formidable theological mind to reckon with. Lewis himself provides the preface to this work, and he can’t help but pique one’s curiosity with these words: “I do not of course agree with Miss Davidman at every point. In such a book every reader will have his own crow to pluck with the author. For my own part, what I would most gladly see altered are certain passages where she quotes myself for thoughts which she needed no sense save her own to reach and no pen save her own to express. But every old tutor (and I was not even that to Miss Davidman) knows that those pupils who needed our assistance least are generally also those who acknowledge it most largely.”
4. Till We Have Faces. C. S. Lewis ($10.71; Harcourt, 1957). Considered by Lewis his masterpiece, it is likely his least read work of fiction, and in genre unlike anything else he wrote. This is so even though he had been trying to write this book virtually his whole life. Subtitled as “a myth retold,” Lewis undertakes the challenge of evoking a dark, brooding pagan world and what it means to take the journey from unbelief to belief, all playing out in the heart, mind, and soul of female protagonist, Orual, the Queen of Glome. Many readers have given up too soon in fathoming this book, but it repays many readings to get the purpose and meaning of the work whose main character must learn to “die before she dies.” It is the sort of work Lewis himself loved to read, and one that the reader–the reader whom Lewis wants as his reader–best enters without too many signals or maps, for this journey is best taken alone. And then discussed and reflected upon in tranquility.
5. An Experiment in Criticism. C. S. Lewis ($13.95. Cambridge University Press). This delightful little book is Lewis’s last work of literary criticism, but don’t let the title discourage you: it is about how and why to read. I sometimes tell friends, it’s a kind of “theology of reading,” but, at the very least it’s a “rhetoric of reading”; you will come away knowing a lot more about history, literature, ethics, myth–and yourself. Not exactly a “how to” manual in the modern sense, Lewis explains the premises for a kind of approach to a text that allows it to speak through its time to ours while respecting the original context without erasing the reader in the present. It has one of the greatest crescendos for a book of this kind ever written. But who am I kidding? There has never been a book “of this kind” before. Lewis takes you by the hand and gives you a great tutorial in why reading matters, and how to make it matter in your life.
6. The Company They Keep. Diana Glyer ($19.80; pb. Kent State University Press, 2007). A towering, magnificent work on the Inklings that peers behind the curtain of Lewis and Tolkien’s personal and writing relationships—and offers the most responsibly fact-based, inspiring biographical treatment yet of their amazing friendship and continuing impact on all sorts of audiences. Diana’s work is a model for anyone who aspires to be a chronicler of any kind. To quote myself from the back cover of the hardback: “The Company They Keep is an astonishingly thorough work, lucidly and boldly illuminating the collaborative writing processes of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and their colleagues during the most fruitful period of their careers. Diana Glyer’s impressive achievement immediately supersedes in scope and authority all previous treatments of the Inklings in extant biographies and encyclopedia.”
7. Planet Narnia. Michael Ward ($23.96; Oxford, 2008). This is the past year’s most category-defying, argument-starting volume on Lewis’s Narniad, soon to be a BBC documentary under the title, “The Narnia Code.” Best fits someone with a mature knowledge of the tales and an appreciation for Lewis’s affection for the medieval worldview–and doesn’t mind being challenged by Ward’s own unconventional, thoroughgoing astrological take on the provenance of Lewis’s wonderland. Most readers seem to split right down the middle on its cogency and relevance—but you will never read a volume more committed to looking through the eyes of an author (Lewis) whose prodigious knowledge precludes ruling anything out as an interpretive scheme. Ward’s prose sparkles, especially as he recounts his scholarly detective adventure. Don’t wait for the movie!
8. Brooke Fraser, “C. S. Lewis Song” ($0.99; Amazon download). This treasure of a song comes from New Zealand Christian artist, Brooke Fraser’s album, Albertine, whose lyrics draw upon Lewis’s famous phrasing, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” A graceful performance produces a grateful heart. The whole album is worth attending to.
9. Through the Shadowlands ($17.99; Vision Video, 2004). This is the vastly superior 1985 BBC version of Shadowlands, starring Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom, that towers above the Richard Attenborough version starring Anthony Hopkins in authenticity and impact. Originally broadcast on PBS in the U.S., this DVD set contains both the 90 minute and abridged 78 minute version (first released to church audiences in the 90s). This screenplay captures much more of Lewis’s Christian testimony and its centrality to his romance to Joy Davidman.
10. C. S. Lewis: Life, Works, Legacy (4 vol., $240; Praeger Press, 2007). Caveat lector–I edited this 4 volume set and wrote several of its essays. Consider therefore the source of this recommendation. And, yep, you’ve got to really love Lewis and the person you’re buying it for to shell out this kind of dough, I realize. But it’s 20% discounted on Amazon, and I must say that its roster of contributors comprises the who’s who of major international Lewis scholars writing in their prime on the topics you’ve always wanted in-depth coverage of. Why venture out into the night to your library in the bleak midwinter when you can have this fine quartet of volumes right on your shelf? Don’t take my word for it; here’s the Library Journal review: “All in all, this is the most thorough and current collection available of analysis and opinion on Lewis. A suitable companion to the authoritative The C.S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia , it is recommended for academic and large public libraries.” –Paul D’Alessandro.

Tags: Christmas Guide C S Lewis

Mark Boone of Baylor University’s doctoral philosophy program recently posted this intriguing reverie on the relationship between the themes of Jack’s The Abolition of Man and the FOX network serial, Fringe. (I am grateful to Michael Edwards for bringing this to my attention):

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I began watching “Fringe” on Hulu last night, and I am definitely hooked. One heck of an alternative for a “LOST” fan in the off-season. Not a show for children or adults with disordered desires, what with some extramarital sex (at least the man involved had plans to marry the woman involved) and the gruesome shots of cruel medical experiments.

But let’s dispense with the pleasantries and get right down to philosophy. One of the show’s scriptwriters is a dead Oxford don named C. S. Lewis. You can still read one of the early scripts he wrote for the show; it was rejected because it didn’t have enough violence and the people talking about science weren’t sexy enough, but you can still find it in a nearby library under the title “The Abolition of Man.”

The show’s nemesis is a vast and coordinated conspiracy to change mankind using biotech. We’re not sure what they’re trying to change about us or why they’re doing it, but they’re out there—tinkering with our bodies, our brains, our genes. But the protagonist, Olivia Dunham, and her two friends are trying to protect the human beings that already exist.

The premise of the show is a familiar one. There are many different ways of saying it: Technology is “progressing” so quickly that we can’t keep up with it. Technology is “progressing” so quickly that we don’t have time to figure out what all the ethical implications are. Technology is “progressing” so quickly that we don’t usually have the chance to stop and think about what we’re going to do with it before it’s been done. Technology is “progressing” so quickly that before we know it we’re doing things with technology we shouldn’t do. Technology is moving so quickly that we can’t tell whether it is helping us progress or regress. A formulation derived from Chesterton: We are learning to do so many things that we’ve forgotten there are things we shouldn’t do, and we need to relearn them. Lastly, there is Lewis’ formulation: Man is so dazzled by his new technological powers that he may in short time abolish man.

»» Read the rest! »»

Tags: Abolition of Man, Bulverism, C. S. Lewis, Narnia, Scientism

My annual birthday tribute to Jack.

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On the Occasion of the 110th Anniversary of C. S. Lewis’s Birth
(November 29, 1898-November 22, 1963)

Dr. Bruce L. Edwards
Professor of English and Africana Studies
Bowling Green State University

Renowned author and critic C. S. “Jack” Lewis was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland 110 years ago today.

Lewis, who died auspiciously on the day President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, November 22, 1963, will be remembered by some as a distinguished Oxford and Cambridge literary historian, especially notable for inaugurating rather than climaxing his scholarly career with a magnum opus.

This work, The Allegory of Love (1936), established Lewis as a formidable critical talent whose scholarship on medieval and renaissance literature would set the standards and the terms of debate in scholarly circles on both sides of the Atlantic for decades to come. And in numerous publications over the next 25 years, Lewis would prove himself to be both prolific and profound in his understanding of the literary foundations of Western civilization.

But it is not this “scholarly Lewis” whose life and work will be primarily commemorated this weekend, estimable though his academic achievements may be. Rather it is the “other Lewis”-the risk-taking writer of supernaturalist science-fiction and fantasy, the winsome Chronicler of Narnia, and the last century’s most popular and influential Christian apologist—whom the vast majority of his readers adore, and whose religious canon and eventful spiritual biography will be given honor.

Lewis is memorialized first and foremost for his vocation as a orthodox Christian apologist in a time of militant irreligion and preferred New Age mysticism, and this is one of literary history’s great ironies.

»» Read the rest! »»

Tags: Birthday

The Oxford University C.S. Lewis Society & the Donald Swann Estate are producing the second premiere of PERELANDRA, an opera by Donald Swann (music) and David Marsh (libretto) based on the eponymous novel by C.S. Lewis.

The piece was written between 1960 and 1964, with the enthusiastic support of C.S. Lewis. In a 1962 letter to Marsh, Lewis wrote: ‘I think [the libretto] just stunningly good. It brought tears to my eyes in places’. Done right, ‘it will be terrific. I very heartily congratulate you’. The opera was also very dear to Swann’s heart, and contains some of his most lyrical music.

The opera opened to enthusiastic reviews in Oxford, Cambridge, London, and later New York. The sale of the film rights shortly after Lewis’ death, however, placed a long-term embargo on its performance. The opera is now receiving a long-awaited second premiere in its original, three-act form. It will be performed in Oxford, UK, on June 25th, 26th and 28th, 2009, and recorded by Oxford Records.

The performance run will be accompanied by a two-day international colloquium on C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra in all its aspects: literary, theological, philosophical and musical. A keynote address will be given by Walter Hooper. A Call for Papers is now available on the website.

A competition for subject-related artwork for display at the performance and on its products has also been announced. Alan Lee, best known for his Tolkien illustrations and conceptual artwork for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, is to judge the competition. The closing date is February 15th, 2009. The full announcement is available on the website.

Please visit www.perelandraproject.org for more details, or contact the production team at admin@perelandraproject.org.

Tags: Perelandra

Coming May 13-15, 2009, NYC will be the grand venue for a terrific academic conference sponsored by Cedarville University focused on the music, work and influence of U2: U2: The Hype and the Feedback. (You may have noticed the info box on the right menu that has been posted since October.) Registration info may be found at the u2conference.com site.

Many readers of this blog will be aware of Bono’s affection for C. S. Lewis, and how Lewis has influenced his theological commitments. You hear the echo of Lewis’s trilemma here from the book, Bono in Conversation, distinguishing “karma” from “grace,”

which, Bono declares, is a “mind blowing concept…that keeps me on my knees.” “At the center of all religions” Bono tells his skeptical interviewer, “is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics—in physical laws—every action is met by an equal or an opposite one.”

“And yet,” he says, “along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that…. I’d be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge…It doesn’t excuse my mistakes, but I’m holding out for Grace. I’m holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don’t have to depend on my own religiosity.”

Later in the interview, Bono says, “Look, the secular response to the Christ story always goes like this: He was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting guy, had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius.”

“But actually”, he says, “Christ doesn’t allow you that. He doesn’t let you off that hook.”

“Christ says, No,” Bono continues. “I’m not saying I’m a teacher, don’t call me teacher. I’m not saying I’m a prophet. I’m saying: ‘I’m the Messiah.’ I’m saying: ‘I am God incarnate.’ . . . So what you’re left with is either Christ was who He said He was—the Messiah—or a complete nutcase. . . . The idea that the entire course of civilization for over half of the globe could have its fate changed and turned upside-down by a nutcase, for me that’s farfetched.”

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Join hundreds of U2 fans, academics, culture bearers and culture critics, at what seems to me to be the perfect marriage of scholarship, spiritual devotion, and hard-headed analysis. And it may just be a fun place to meet and talk about “mere Christian” topics of all sorts. I hope to attend, and, if selected for a panel, would plan to address the topic of Bono’s transformative Christian rhetoric about Africa and Africans.