Sumanariu F. Alexandra-Mariana, CCBCG, anul II, sem.

Britishness in Richard Attenborough s

Shadowlands
I can say I love Shadowlands, even though I watched it just one time. As a
biography of C.S. Lewis, it is a little bit misleading - as well as factual bits and pieces
like the fact that Joy had two sons, not one (and they probably aged a bit over eight years)
and that Lewis worked for Cambridge in the 1950s as well as Oxford, the depiction of
Lewis as a sexually naive and socially awkward man is, shall we say, not the impression
one gets from his autobiography. And Hopkins' performance, though
wonderful, mesmerising and all-round brilliant, is fast and frenetic, rather than the
slow and thoughtful manner of a man who may have been the inspiration behind
Treebeard. None of that matters though, because it's a film, not an historical document,
and as a film, it is wonderful (Lewis' stepson Douglas Gresham has also observed that is
does a good job of capturing the emotion, if not the facts, of that time).
Appropriately for a biopic of someone who loved Classical literature so much,
there are a few Classical references scattered throughout the film. During one of
my favourite scenes, in which the wonderful James Frain's Whistler falls asleep in
a seminar, Lewis is teaching Aristotle's views on character. Some of Aristotle's rules for
drama have become accepted an essential to all good fiction (stories should probably
have a beginning, middle and end), others less so (unity of time and place is so rare as to
be a novelty). This one is somewhere in the middle - Lewis talks about Aristotle's
suggestion that the audience/reader should not be told why a character acts in a certain
why, but shown it through their actions. Anything involving Whistler is a highlight in this
film - especially his observation to Lewis that we read to know we are not alone, which
feels very true.
Another scene has Christopher Riley needle Lewis about the soul in Roman
terms. I'm sure I once read somewhere that Christopher Riley is a fictional character, a

sort of composite of Tolkien (who is noticeably absent, presumably because of his reallife disapproval of Lewis 'strange' marriage, which he wasn't told about until afterwards)
and other friends of Lewis' (probably Owen Barfield and Charles Williams, though I can't
remember if either of those were atheists). Riley is a staunch atheist who prods Lewis
about this intermittently, and at one social gathering he mixes that up with a big old
dollup of two thousand-year-old sexism, as he insists that men have intellect (animus)
where women have soul (anima). In Latin, both could be roughly translated as 'soul' or
'mind', but animus refers to the rational, logical mind, anima to the emotional. Joy puts
him in his place, and very satisfying it is too.
The description of the shadowlands of the title given in the film doesn't
entirely reflect Lewis concept of the shadowlands, which he sets out in The Last Battle.
The idea is related to Plato's myth of the cave, which Lewis had already drawn heavily
upon in the climax of The Silver Chair (in which the Witch-Queen of the Underworld
tries to convince our heroes that the world above, the sun and Aslan are just a dream). In
Plato's Republic, Socrates imagines people watching shadows projected on the wall of a
cave, and how dazzled they would be to walk out into the real light. Lewis imagines this
Earth (or Narnia) as the cave and shadow-pictures, and the afterlife as the real world. The
way the idea is brought up in the film makes it sound more like a grass is always
greener sort of problem, or a statement about how you never know what's round the
corner (it's mentioned immediately before Joy collapses and is diagnosed with cancer).
Lewis idea is a little bit deeper than that, though for the most part his ideas on grief and
suffering are well represented in the film.
This conversation, by the way, is also one of several points in the film where
someone observes that when Lewis asks a question, he already has the answer waiting.
Towards the end of the film, the couple go to Herefordshire, which is
another minor alteration. In real life, they went to Greece a few months before Joy died.
It's an interesting change. It's mainly aesthetic - the film is so British it hurts. But the shift
in scene and the introduction of the idea that the young Jack thought the valley they visit
was heaven generates a rather simpler view of heaven than Lewis usually described (it
actually seems more like one of the simple hobbit pleasures Tolkien was so keen on).
This image of heaven being in a wet English valley is more like a readers or filmmakers

view of Narnia, the element of Narnia that is Northern Ireland. But the real Lewis chose
to go to Greece, the only time he left the UK except to fight in France in World War One.
Greece is a land of pagan wonder, of ancient mysteries and stories that are as difficult as
they are fascinating. Greece is closer to the Narnia that's filled with Roman
woodland spirits and pagan gods of ecstasy, the Narnia that tends to be played down or
edited out of cinematic televisual interpretations. That would have been a
rather different scene in the film, with a very different tone.
Shadowlands is a beautiful film and well worth seeing. It's also an excellent
advert for Oxford as a tourist destination. The performances are uniformly excellent,
especially Hopkins and Frain - and just make sure you have a big box of tissues to hand
for the end.