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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28535 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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Ready for some mild 36 year old culture war material? In 1988, BBC released their adaptation of C.S. Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe". I watched this adaptation with my children this weekend, and having recently reread the Chronicles of Narnia series, I was surprised how little the script deviated from the book. Indeed, the essentially verbatim reproduction puts a spotlight on the few deviations.

In the book, the children meet Father Christmas who gives presents to ready them for the coming fight.

"And the dagger is to defend yourself at great need. For you also are not to be in the battle."

"Why, Sir," said Lucy. "I think—I don't know—but I think I could be brave enough."

"That is not the point," he said. "But battles are ugly when women fight."

The BBC adaptation follows the book word for word until the last sentence (as best as I can remember: I couldn't find the script online):

 
"That is not the point.  But you will be needed after the battle."

The original reading was a powerful statement, even in the time that Lewis wrote the book, and fully in keeping with his complementarian perspective. In the BBC adaptation, the interaction with Father Christmas ends unsatisfactorily, without any larger point than to provide the children with tools. The scene is robbed of the emotion and power of the original text.

Of course, the Disney adaptation is even worse, making is seem like Father Christmas is giving Susan permission to fight, and possibly intentionally subverting the original text:

Lucy: Thank you, sir, but I think I could be brave enough.

Father Christmas: I’m sure you could. But battles are ugly affairs. Susan. Trust in this bow and it will not easily miss.

Susan: What happened to "battles are ugly affairs"?

Neither the BBC or the Disney is "rewriting history"; every adaptation has to make compromises to fit the medium. However I would desire that any adaptation treat the source with respect and not neuter or subvert it. In many ways, C.S. Lewis was and remains a counter-cultural force. Watering down his work to be palatable to modern audiences is a direct contradiction to his intentionally medieval outlook.

Was C.S. Lewis truly counter-cultural at the time? I think it’s only because the counter-culture and the mainstream flipped in recent years that C.S. Lewis’ views would be considered anything transgressive. His attitude towards women was fairly standard for a mid-20th century British man and his Christianity would have been shared by the majority in society.

Lewis and his society were simply closer to the reality of war.

Even to this day, this attitude is held when the rubber meets the road. Ukraine didn't put both men and women on the frontline and Ukraine did not stop women from leaving on the grounds that they had to fight and there was very little outrage about it.

People just don't want to be told they can't do X, even if they had no intention of actually doing that thing.

Uh, doesn't Ukraine put women in combat?

Frontline duty is 100% voluntary for women, while men are both drafted and assigned to the frontlines.

Even if you had complete equality in the draft, sending women to the frontline would be poor practice for the same reason that sending 50 year old men to the frontline in a total mobilization scenario would be poor practice, or for the same reason that you wouldn't train people with terrible eyesight to be pilots if you had the choice.

Not even as FPV drone pilots? I know my wife gets seasick when I show her J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's cooking videos, but surely not every woman's vestibular system is this underdeveloped.

Any skill requiring 3-demensional thinking and hand-eye coordination favors men. Video games and chess have proven this beyond all doubt.

I can't comment on the viability of women as drone pilots in the absence of men, but if you have men available you would obviously want them as a first option.

Beyond all doubt you say. What studies would you pull out if people demand evidence?

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