Age Of Wonder

I saw the Chronicles of Narnia movie last night and left the theater without experiencing a religious conversion. The movie itself was entertaining, but it didn’t evoke the same kind of substantive sense of dread and foreboding that I experienced in all three of the Lord of the Rings movies. Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth felt like a fully realized world, while the Narnia presented here seems somewhat two-dimensional. But that might be more a flaw with the source material. This film was aimed at a decidedly younger crowd, with cute kids in the starring roles and an abundance of talking animals. As for the Christian imagery, it’s certainly there, but it’s not emphasized any more than it is in the book. I doubt that it will turn off secular audiences. The movie’s impressive first-weekend box office receipts won’t do anything to discourage Hollywood from greenlighting more fantasy-themed projects.
A few years ago, science fiction author David Brin wrote a column in Salon criticizing Lord of the Rings (and most of the fantasy literature it spawned) for promoting an antiquated and anti-democratic worldview. He reflected on the reasons these kinds of stories may be enjoying such a surge in popular appeal:
Wouldn’t life seem richer, finer if we still had kings? If the guardians of wisdom kept their wonders locked up in high wizard towers, instead of rushing onto PBS the way our unseemly “scientists” do today? Weren’t miracles more exciting when they were doled out by a precious few, instead of being commercialized, bottled and marketed to the masses for $1.95?
These movies tend to express an affection for a kind of benevolent feudalism that seems to sit quite well with a lot of people. Brin’s analysis makes me wonder if we are an instinctually reactionary people, constantly looking over our shoulders at a gauzy past while the future rushes towards us like a bullet train.