Into the Wardrobe

I spent several years of pre-adolescence wishing I could kiss Prince Caspian, so maybe we'll just chock this one up as a small victory for the girls

Leia gave Luke a kiss "for luck" in Star Wars.

And I sort of agree with Dan that the movies can legitimately have a slightly different audience than the books. When you take something written for an orchestra and try to play it with a rock band, its going to come out different.

Boy, this brings up odd "feminist" feelings in me. I say "odd" because I probably wouldn't normally be one to bring up typical feminist ideas, but I find it strangely resonant in this case. I wonder if I can describe them here (and I don't know where it is leading by the way, only expressing something I haven't quite analyzed yet).

In both the Leia and Susan cases (or at least just the tiny bit we know and the "larger part" that we're only guessing at), it seems to have a sort of "I'm giving myself to you" sense. Perhaps that is ok in a mild sense, but think about it the other direction. If Luke or Caspian had done the kissing, we would tend to think of them "taking" a kiss from Leia or Susan, but when Leia and Susan do the kissing, we think of them "giving" a kiss to Luke or Caspian.

I don't know, it just strikes me uncomfortably and I'm not sure how to analyze it or even whether my uncomfortable feelings about it are even appropriate (I'll note that what I'm describing here is not what I felt back then when watching the Star Wars movies, but is what I'm feeling right now reading and thinking about this subject currently). If Peter was leaving too, he would, I guess, give Caspian a handshake or a hug maybe, and presumably Susan could do the same, but adding a kiss gives it an undeniably sensual aspect that gives me a bit of the creeps for the type of movie it is supposed to be (or that Lewis wrote the book as anyway). Maybe Lewis should have written a line in PC similar to the one in LWW -- "Relationships get ugly when kisses get involved":-)

Of course we don't know how it will be handled in the movie until it comes out and we can see it in context, but our discussion here reminds me a lot of my comments about the meeting of Tumnus and Lucy in LWW when that movie first came out. That is because the book's more fantasy/archtype/children's style was replaced in the movie by a more mondernist "internal pschological realism" (eg, Edmund's internal struggle with his missing father, etc), and that change necessarily led to vague uncomfortable feelings for a modern audience about the idea an "adult male" encouraging a little girl to come to his place alone. Because the book was written in a quite different manner (a manner that the film could easily have adopted if the director had chosen to go in that direction too), the book did not present or suggest this sort of uncomfortable "sensual" feeling at all in the scene.

And I guess that is my concern about the Susan kissing Caspian scene in PC. Even though the kissing scene is not in the book, if the movie were done in a sort of fantasy archtype style, such a kissing scene could be just as perfectly "innocent" as the book version of the Tumnus summoning Lucy to his lair scene. But if the PC movie is done in the same "psychological realism" style that LWW film was (and we have to assume the same director will follow the same pattern at this point), then the kissing scene could very well have the same potentially uncomfortable "sensual" feeling as the film version of the Tumnus scene in LWW.

At least those are my feelings. I know that when I discussed this back when LWW came out, there were pretty fierce reactions of "how could you even think about the possibility of such things in that scene!" (and one thread was even locked over the discussion), so it may be my own bias showing in how one would interpret such a scene in PC here. But I would maintain that it is not what I bring to the movie (except that I am a modern "current culture" person), but instead that it is that psychological realism style that the movie was filmed in that allows the sensual elements to be present in the first place.

Any thoughts? (again, I'm just tossing out my unanalyzed thoughts at this point, not sure where they will eventually lead or whether I'll even end up agreeing with them later. And of course the context of actually seeing what is done in the movie will resolve or confirm the issue most likely so properly we'll have to wait till then. But we can play around with ideas in the meantime:-)

--Stanley