I don’t know of any Terry Gilliam film not just including Monty Python that doesn’t have some element of satire. He’s a true master, right? But you have to learn what satire is for sure, in order to see what’s going on.

Then I once heard at a CS Lewis Foundation event…they brought a choir in and they choir sang every title of every Lewis book, but in some funny ways. When they got to The Problem of Pain, it was “The Problem of Pain, The Problem of Pain.”

Then a couple of years ago, I wrote an essay in recognition of the possibility of Lewis idolatry. I wrote an essay on Lewis’s use of the word “and.” CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society published it for me. The scary part is that I actually found stuff to say.

The moment I met him, he said, Hello, how are you and he invited me into the house and he’s just so kind and talking to his cat, “No,  you can’t go outside. He wants to take this picture.” And at that moment, I realized Oh, that is Walter smiling. That is his happy face.

Crystal

I’ll give you three examples. One from when I was about 10 years old, and I was in Pioneer girls, and I got the most badges at our award ceremony. When I came down the stage. The first thing my father said to me is Oh, he didn’t say, Oh, congratulations, Crystal. You got the most badges. He said, “the way you were standing up there, it made you look so fat.” That was the first thing he said to me. So here are this generation of women who are told that they’re supposed to look like Barbie dolls, and that that pressure on them.

Then after I got my PhD, I applied to a Christian college and part of the application process a male said to me, (again from a Christian College) said Crystal, your recommendations for grad school are too good to be believed and we wonder what you did to get them. That was back in the 90s. So it’s easy to say well, that was a while ago.

But in 2018 I went to a CS Lewis lecture and then reception afterwards, I happened to be the only woman there and someone brought up what is the cause of the polarization in our country, and I talked about the fact that early capitalists like Carnegie and Stanford and Rockefeller, they loved Herbert Spencer who coined the phrase survival the fittest, Darwin didn’t invent that he later borrowed it. And so they just celebrated Herbert Spencer. Yes, capitalism is about survival of the fittest. Well, survival of the fittest automatically creates what tends to be called “Nature red in tooth and claw.” You know, you’re just trying to be the fittest. And so I said, you know, that may have contributed, and someone at the CS Lewis reception said, “Well, I think the reason our culture is so polarized is because of women demanding their rights.” And right after I had made my statement.

Another one of the real cheesy and this has become a trope and it’s just a bad trope is directors if they want to show someone is upset. They have them go barf and you just see that in TV shows films. How do we quickly show someone being upset, rather than their mental process of, you know, “I can’t believe that person said that to me, and I can’t believe it.” And so either the voiceover or the little vomit see, is problematic. So how do you externalize the internal and that is what a film adapter has to think about.

But we don’t, I mean we shouldn’t be afraid. We shouldn’t be afraid. If the question is, is Greta going to make a good one or not? The answer is, I don’t know. But I am excited to find out.

Let’s pause before we do wrap and learn more about each of you.

Crystal, let’s start with you.

Crystal

I started writing about film and after publishing about 50 essays in both secular and Christian journals on film, I wrote my first film book, so it was my fourth book, it’s called Salvation From Cinema: The Medium Is The Message. Which is kind of what we’re talking about.

Film is a different medium than a novel. If you’re going to have a film adaptation, it has to be different in several ways from the novel. Part of what I’m arguing in that book is how Christians often reduce film to a content delivery system. They pay no attention to the medium.  Many times if you see a character who’s just kind of like in a cruciform pose on the dirt bike, that must be a Christ figure, when there’s nothing else in the film to support it. My work was published as an emphasis on religion and film, but they wanted me to extract a lot of the Christian discussion.

The book was for Rutledge, a secular press. And they said, we want this as a book in universities that have religion and film classes. So please deemphasize the Christianity, which at first depressed me. But then it got me excited. How can I sneak past watchful dragons as CS Lewis says. I used Jacques Derrida and deconstruction and basically Derrida saying that Christianity is the only religion that doesn’t function by an economy of exchange. Where you do this, you get that Christianity is the only religion that has a gift…

I just signed a contract for another book on film work and will use all my Christian material because I discovered at the Wade that Dorothy Sayers loved film, and when her letters were published, four volumes, almost 2000 pages, the editor left out every single letter where Sayers praised cinema. Which is great for me, because that lens is so the title of this next book is The Wages of Cinema: Looking Through the Lens of Dorothy Sayers.

I’ve got to get in the Christian implications that are in Greta Gerwig’s, Barbie movie, because it’s very similar to Sayers when Sayers that it’s filled kind of like this bright, Heaven seen where Barbie meets her Creator, Ruth Handler. And Barbie tells her I want to make meaning, not just be a thing made.

That is profound. That’s what all The Wade authors are doing. They want to make meaning. And after she says, I want to make meaning. She says, “You’re my Creator.” Well, that’s straight, Dorothy Sayers what she argues in what CS Lewis calls an indispensable book, The Mind of the Maker, she says that when we’re told we’re created in the image of God, male and female, He created them Genesis 1:27. That means that the God who is described in Genesis 1 is a creator. So, creativity, making meaning is the Imago Dei.

The same publisher who was going to rerelease those books has also re-released my singular children’s fantasy, King Lesserlight’s Crown. Out of all my books that’s my favorite. And so I would love for people to take a look at that. I’ve written three books on CS Lewis, one involving Lewis manuscripts are especially a very mysterious manuscript called Light. One name is on Lewis’s theory of myth and the other on his theory of reality and those are called The Faun’s Bookshelf and The Lion’s Country.

My middle earth, that is my fantastic world that has been with me throughout my entire lifetime, just as Tolkien had his own world, though mine isn’t anywhere near as good, of course, is part of a series of science fiction books that I’ve been writing since the 80s. So, this has just been a long project of love and imagination. In my secondary world, the first of those books is called The Heart of Light, and they are all about the tales of Solomon Star. And for the last year or so, I really set a lot of academic writing aside, although I’ve had to do a little bit and I’ve just been working on the fourth novel, just having fun writing a novel that is part archaeological mystery, part murder mystery, part theological pursuit of God, and part political intrigue. I’ve just tossed a bunch of things together in a bag…Have you ever written something that was just a little bit too large to manage? That’s what I’m feeling right now.

The thing that I do recall is my experience of the three Narnia films that were big budget, the first film I thought was a good movie and a faithful adaptation. Second film was a real difficulty for me because I thought the adaptation was bad, but I still found myself enjoying the film. It was a good movie. But not exactly an adaptation so much as a kind of a resemblance is the word that smart work study student and I came up with for that. But then by the third film, it was so far away from the book that I couldn’t enjoy it even if I tried to focus on the cinematic side of things. And, and probably part of that is because it was also a bad film. But, you know, they all have certain charming moments, right? And that’s, I suppose that’s part of what I’ve enjoyed about The Rings of Power on Amazon Prime. There are scenes that you want to just enjoy. And you know, so there were bits where I thought were such a great idea, but it’s not Tolkien…

So, I’m optimistic and hopeful [about Narnia]. Hopeful is a better word. I’m hopeful. I don’t know if I’m optimistic. But I certainly hope that I’m going to enjoy them (what Gerwig makes).