Lost at Sea
Robin Phillips on the Dawn Treader’s Voyage of Self-Discovery
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is probably the slowest of all of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, yet it is the richest and the most subtle. Unfortunately, the attempt to generate a blockbuster movie out of the story has resulted in a jerky succession of disconnected adventures.
To his credit, director Michael Apted has tried to bring continuity to the various adventures, yet he does this by introducing a storyline completely alien to Lewis’s book. The ship’s voyage is transformed into an apocalyptic struggle of good against evil, as the company on board the Dawn Treader must find seven swords and lay them on Aslan’s table to prevent an evil green gas from destroying all of Narnia.
Because of the book’s episodic nature, I knew it would be hard to convert The Voyage of the Dawn Treader into a movie. Yet it could have been accomplished. The pilgrimage theme—which combines a Homeric-type quest with elements of Augustinian restlessness—adds a powerful substratum of depth to the narrative. The various adventures the company experiences are given thematic unity by being rooted in this spiritual quest for the Utter East and Aslan’s country. As the travelers approach the end of the world, the tension builds like a Wagnerian overture approaching its climax.
We know that cinema can capture this type of aesthetic richness because we saw it happen with The Lord of the Rings.
Lewis’s Themes Subverted
I am not a purist. I realize that the move from a textual medium to a cinematographic one does sometimes require structural changes. But I do think we have grounds to object when primary themes are either reversed or subverted. Sad to say, this is exactly what the three Narnia films to date have done with a number of important thematic motifs.
Take the example of kingship. In an article in the November/December 2010 Touchstone (“Narnia Invaded”) Steven D. Boyer discusses Hollywood’s handling of this theme in the first two Narnia movies. He observes that Lewis’s notion of kingship was rooted in a hierarchical view of creation, which was itself grounded in his Christian outlook. Relationships, Lewis taught, reflect the hierarchical ordering that is imbedded in the created order. The Chronicles of Narnia are infused with this understanding, not least because they draw upon the rich tapestry of medievalism, being saturated with Spenserian imagery, lordly kings, submissive laborers, knightly virtue, and a complementarian rather than egalitarian approach to gender. In Narnia, everyone accepts his appointed position (everyone, that is, except grasping villains like the witch or Miraz), and not everyone’s role is the same.
Hollywood has tried everything it can to flatten out this dynamic from Lewis’s stories. In the movie version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, director Andrew Adamson commented that Lewis’s belief that females shouldn’t fight was “a sexist thing” and had to be changed because it “was very disempowering to girls.” Yet it wasn’t just the female characters who were “liberated” into Hollywood’s egalitarian utopia. As Boyer points out, the first movie presents maturity as Peter and Edmund learning to think independently even when it means going against orders from those higher in the chain of command.
This theme is accentuated in Prince Caspian, where kingship is reduced to the exercise of raw power. Boyer explains that when Peter starts a fight in the subway station, it is because he still wants to be treated like a king and his ego suffers when he isn’t. And the power struggle between Peter and Caspian shows that even when Peter is back in Narnia, he hasn’t learned his lesson and still thinks of authority in terms of the enlargement of his personal ambit.
In short, the movies have engaged in what Boyer terms a “quiet, unobtrusive devaluation of humble submission to rightful authority.”
Robin Phillips has a Master’s in Historical Theology from King’s College London and a Master’s in Library Science through the University of Oklahoma. He is the blog and media managing editor for the Fellowship of St. James and a regular contributor to Touchstone and Salvo. He has worked as a ghost-writer, in addition to writing for a variety of publications, including the Colson Center, World Magazine, and The Symbolic World. Phillips is the author of Gratitude in Life's Trenches (Ancient Faith, 2020), and Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation (Ancient Faith, 2023). He operates a blog at www.robinmarkphillips.com.
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