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Telegraph - Bacchus, Aslan’s rival as God’s son, by Christopher Howse

I wonder if audiences are looking out for the wrong things in the films of C.S Lewis’s Narnia books. The danger is simply to think “Aslan = Jesus”, and then to puzzle out how the one allegorically illuminates the other.

That is to miss a theme that runs all through Prince Caspian, the second of Lewis’s Narnia books to be turned into a film (and topping British box-office takings last weekend). Indeed the film-makers seem to have missed much of it, too. What I mean is demonstrated by a scene in the book where the heroes are gathered inside Aslan’s How, a round barrow built over the Stone Table that featured in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

“They were not using the Table nor sitting round it,” says the narrator in the book, “It was too magic a thing for any common use.” Yet in a scene later in the film, Lucy is shown lying on the table, as if it were a sofa, pensively waiting for news.

A good point.

When Prince Caspian asks his tutor if two stars, Tarva and Alambil, which are in conjunction, will collide, the answer is: “The great lords of the upper sky know the steps of their dance too well for that.”

This is a pre-modern, pre-Copernican, way of looking at the cosmos. It could be called sacramental, because it sees physical things as signs. By contrast the assumption implicit in Prince Caspian is that modernity is wicked, ugly and blind. The Telmarine race, which has put Narnia under despotic rule, is given to vandalistic behaviour such as cutting down trees. In the film this is represented by their construction of siege-engines and military bridges.

The important thing about Prince Caspian himself is that, though a Telmarine (a human being), he does “love the Old Things”, as Lewis writes, using capital letters. These include the mythic creatures of Narnia, the satyrs, fauns, centaurs and giants that Lewis borrows from Greek and Latin literature.

Lewis went as far as to identify himself, in his inaugural professorial lecture at Cambridge in 1954, as “the spokesman of Old Western Culture”. He shared with J.R.R. Tolkien a distrust of modernity, in the shape of machines, the press, armaments and totalitarian regimes. …

Lewis’s approach comes out clearly in a lengthy scene in Prince Caspian that the film?makers did not dare include: a corybantic romp by Bacchus and his Maenads, with Silenus on his donkey (conventionally depicted elsewhere with a giant phallus, as, surprisingly, on the Victorian cover of Punch magazine each week). In something of an understatement, Susan remarks in the book: “I wouldn’t have felt safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls if we’d met them without Aslan.”

Yet Bacchus, or Dionysius, as well as being a mythic god of drunkenness, is as clearly an off-the-shelf figure of Jesus Christ as Lewis’s invented Aslan. Lewis as a classical scholar was fully aware of the mythic power of Dionysius.

“I am Dionysius, the son of Zeus,” the man-god declares at the beginning of Euripides’ play, The Bacchae. “I have put off the god and taken human shape.”

Instead of daring these complications, the film prefers to insert a long battle scene not in the book, expanding its duration to two-and-a-half hours of clangorous Dolby Digital. I’m not sure Lewis would have cared for that.

In these modern times, I think it’s best to just keep one’s allegory to oneself. People just can’t be trusted with them. There’s another famous children’s movie, Grave of the Fireflies.

It’s about war, and children, and bad things happen in the end, and people (Americans) always say “Oh it’s an anti-war movie!” Completely missing that it’s an allegory about the dangers of pride (Japanese pride which got the country into this mess, the boy’s pride which got his sister into that mess). And to take the wrong meaning from the movie means to look at the main characters in completely the wrong way (”Oh, that poor little boy,” that boy being the semi-autobiographical account of the writer’s own guilt about the death of his sister, in other words, that boy not being the victim here).

Anyway, it all just drives me crazy. I don’t pretend to be the world’s greatest allegorist-person, but I’m not adapting beloved books into films nor writing the blurb on the box explaining what the film is about.