Prince Caspian Lite

Before the Pevensie children are jerked out of the London train station by Prince Caspian’s blowing Susan's magic horn, Susan has already been deftly characterized as a loner liar and Peter, rather crudely, as a short-tempered brawler. These flaws seem to be the direct result of their tenures as Queen and as High King in Narnia. An inauspicious beginning for Director Andrew Adamson’s essay at translating C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian into a commercially successful movie, but these character defects help explain why Susan and Peter fail to see Aslan when innocent little Lucy does.

"Prince Caspian" the movie actually begins in media res with a scene not seen but implied in the book: the wife of King Miraz giving birth to a son. But Miraz is usurper of the Telmarine throne of Narnia and murderer of the former King Caspian, who was his own brother and Prince Caspian’s father. Thus, the birth of Miraz’s son as heir to the throne is a death sentence for the youthful Prince Caspian, Miraz’s nephew and rightful heir to the throne. Prince Caspian’s consequent flight results in his meeting the Old Narnians who adopt him as their champion against Miraz.

The quick transition from baby delivery to chase scene as Miraz’s horsemen pursue Caspian works well, cinematically, for a movie full of such chases, two big battle scenes (one newly conceived for the movie), and the single combat of High King Peter and King Miraz. Not for nothing is this children’s story rated PG 13. NPR’s movie reviewer noted a bit sourly that the battle scenes take up the better part of the 2-1/2 hour film. All this fast-paced combat action along with their special effects certainly enhanced the movie’s $56-million first-weekend box office, but the time lavished on them didn’t do much to advance the moral vision of C. S. Lewis’s original.

Nevertheless, the theme of belief vs unbelief is retained as the children and their dwarf companion make the ill-advised decision not to follow Aslan when Lucy sees him and understands his invitation to follow him on their quest to bring aid to Prince Caspian at Aslan’s How (“a low hill”). Later on Aslan tells Lucy that she should have followed him even if the others would not. And the question of why they had not seen Aslan troubles Peter and Susan as revealed in their dialogue with Lucy.

Arrived at Aslan's How, High King Peter prematurely concludes that Aslan has left the execution of the rescue of Narnia up to the kings and queens and their Old Narnian supporters. When his rash plan to make a sortie into the relatively lightly guarded castle of King Miraz ends in a costly rout, he and Caspian blame each other and even get into sword play.

So why are Lewis’s largely exemplary heroes characterized as and behave like such jerks? Simple: The decadence of popular culture in the West is such that had these two teenagers acted as responsibly as their originals, they would have been “like totally unbelievable" to the target audience of movie goers, teenagers and up. Good little girls like Lucy may be tolerated, but virtuous teenagers are oxymoronic.

Even worse, in a misguided effort to dazzle us with special effects and toy with vengeance, the film sensationalizes the Black Dwarf Nikabrik’s introduction of the Hag and the Werewolf and their proposal to revive the White Witch—by reviving her. Thus, she actually appears with a demonstration of her ice-producing power in Aslan’s How, a fortress shrine to Aslan complete with the remains of the broken stone table on which Aslan had been sacrificed for Edmund. This desecration of the fane of Aslan is offensive enough, but her witchcraft is so powerful that she easily mesmerizes both Peter and Prince Caspian who feebly protests, “This is not what I wanted.” Edmund, a teenager but apparently still young enough to retain some virtue, bursts in just in time to save the day.

The revised message of this scene seems to be that the power of witchcraft is so great that it can neutralize if not control the will of the two main heroes. But this flatly contradicts what Lewis was demonstrating. Instead, in the book we see that even at this, the lowest point of his military fortunes, Caspian had quite enough chest to reject with indignation the madness of using witchcraft to substitute the evil Witch for the evil Miraz: “So that’s your plan Nikabrik! Black sorcery and the calling up of an accursed ghost.” His imagination fed by the chivalrous tales of Old Narnia, the real Prince Caspian of Lewis’s book was impervious to such a proposal. But in this scene, the movie Prince Caspian comes across as a slightly doltish Telmarine (complete with a non-descript East European accent) who lacks the virtue to resist the power of the White Witch’s mere ghost.

Thus, Disney subverts one of the central themes of Lewis’s book: An adult mentor's loving nurture of the moral imagination of children through teaching them to love the right stories creates men and women of moral conviction who will act in accord with the virtues they have imbibed from those stories. This subversion is a profound betrayal of Lewis’s vision because the conversion of Telmarine Prince Caspian first to solidarity with his hereditary foes, the Old Narnians, and finally to faith in Aslan parallels Lewis’s own conversion first of his imagination by George MacDonald’s classic fairy story, Phantastes, before his later conversion to faith in Christ. Indeed, I am not alone in believing that Lewis put something of himself in Prince Caspian.

Furthermore, The Chronicles in general and Prince Caspian in particular are Lewis’s artistic response to the poverty of imagination, the inhumanity of the dominant naturalism of the Europe of his as of our day. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis discursively skewered this philosophy (quintessentially Ayers’s Logical Positivism) and its academic camp followers such as the authors of the infamous “Green Book.” But through his fantasy, Lewis gives us a story to capture the imagination of children and so help parents to actually give us men like Caspian, men with chests.

If ever the culture of the West comes to its senses and recovers its Christian roots, this seriously flawed if entertaining attempt to translate Prince Caspian into film must be redone, retaining and emphasizing both of Lewis’s two great themes: 1) The vital role of the right kind of children’s stories in the moral formation of men with chests and 2) The long walk of faith that demands hard steps of obedience to the King.