shadowlands | c.s lewis, a path through suffering
Sunday, November 14, 2004 at 02:12PM There can be little doubt that Sir Anthony Hopkins
is one the great actors of our time - he has proven it again and again in roles
both large and small, and most particularly in those quieter, more serious
films like "The Remains of the Day" and "Shadowlands" both
of which I saw again recently and was again, deeply moved. Here, I'd like to talk about Shadowlands
because it is likely the lesser seen of the two and most especially by younger
people.
To understand the full complexity of the love story
or perhaps, love stories, in Shadowlands you must first understand something of
the writer C.S. Lewis - author best known for the Narnia chronicles, beginning
with <I>The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe", a book I remember
reading as a child, and for many months perhaps years that followed and even
now, trying to push my way through the back of the wardrobe in my bedroom (in
England we still had those freestanding wardrobes - a kind I haven't seen much
of in America, alas.). Mine was in my
bedroom and stacked heavily with the riches just as in the book; old coats, my
grandmother's one fur, her funny fox-fur stoles that had the head of the fox
still on them and the tails, six of them strung together to form a kind of dead
fox scarf that was, remarkably, at some point in time considered the epitome of
fashion. I remember their dead, glassy eyes. But what I remember most is the
many nights I climbed into that wardrobe, hoping like hell that
<I>this</I> time, the back of the wardrobe would give and I would
find myself in the enchanted, snowy land of Narnia where I meet all of the
magical occupants and stay awhile and have great adventures. I'm quite sure that almost every child who
read the Narnia chronicles, if they had a wardrobe of even glimpsed one, were
just twitching trying to push through the fur and into their private
Wonderland.
But though C.S. Lewis was incredibly famous for
these books, he was more than this. He had started out as an atheist, ("a
lapsed atheist" he would joke) and later in life became deeply and
profoundly religious but not in any conventional sense. Lewis, as the story in
Shadowlands lays out so well, believed that our God "wants us to
suffer." Our God is not a nurturing god who is there to coddle us. Hopkins plays this role with all of the
fervor, intelligence and charm of C.S. Lewis - the duality of the man- and this
makes for what in so many ways is perhaps the role of a lifetime for Hopkins
(barring Remains of the Day in which he is also absolutely outstanding). But in Shadowlands, we see and more
importantly perhaps, through Hopkins, we hear the words of C.S. Lewis spoken
with authority. God wants us to suffer, he tells us. God wants us to "get
out of the nursery and to grow up." OF course, I happen to believe this.
He deals with the unfairness of the world - when someone asks, "how could
God let that happen..." a question we hear again and again and a fair one,
of course. If there is a God, how could he let us suffer? To which Lewis
replied, as Hopkins replies authoritatively, Because God wants us to learn and
to grow through suffering, for it is only through our suffering that we find
each other and that we find love, we find other people.
It's a tough racket, and not the argument we long
to hear, yet for anyone who does believe, the only God that does make any sense
in the God of the Old Testament, C.S. Lewis's God - he of fire and vengeance
("for your God is a vengeful God..."); a God who watches us suffer day
after day; who watches whole families get killed, and millions of children who
starve to death and die in pain; and today, with war, we see worse and here in
America, we've had our own wake up call and we ask ourselves How can a God let
this happen? The story of Shadowlands is the story of C.S. Lewis trying to
reconcile himself to this God, and yet still believing. HE notes, we re nothing
more than "God's grand experiment. So many rats in a cage. A laboratory
experiment." Yet still, through suffering, he maintains, we find love, we
grow up, we move on, and that is how we live our life. To say in the nursery of
la la land is not to live. To live in fear, to live in a world without God is
far worse and frankly, far simpler, than to reconcile ones' self to a God that
isn't always kind and who may in fact, wish us to suffer.
For the first part fthe film, it is hard to see how
this suffering affects Lewis. He is well placed and well respected at Oxford.
He has throngs of adoring old biddies and colleagues who come to hear his
lectures, he is a well-published author with many, many books on religion and
faith as well as his Narnia chronicles and the like, but he is a man shut off
from the world in many ways. For all of his talk, C.S. Lewis is protected -- no
harm can touch him as well buffered as he is, as long as he safely shuts himself
off from romantic love, Eros, then perhaps these rules he applies to others do
not apply to him quite as much.
It is here that we meet Debra Winger as the
"crass" American, the unwelcome woman at Oxford, who has been an avid
reader of Lewis's back home, is a lapsed Jew, she says, formerly an atheist,
and now a Christian and a convert, and we gather, mostly from the writings of
C.S. Lewis with whom she has been corresponding for some time. But unlike the
many other correspondents, something about Joy (Debra Winger) captures Lewis's
attention and he agrees to meet with her and her son who wish to come to Oxford
for a visit. Initially, the meeting is
awkward; the differences between the quiet and reserved British culture and the
more forward American are shocking and a bit alarming. One feels embarrassed
for both Joy and Lewis, for they come from such completely different worlds yet
are drawn to each other.
OF course, a relationship does develop between the
two, but there is <I>never</I> so much as a kiss that passes
between the two for many, any years. This is pure and platonic. First, Winger
has a husband back home - and though he is alcoholic and abusive and sometimes
violent, we still sense that Winger wants to clean up business there first and
Lewis would never approach any woman, let alone a married one. No this must be cleaned up first. The two keep up a friendly correspondence
for years, until eventually, Joy leaves her husband and moves to London with
her child, Douglas (a big fan of Lewis's). But a year goes by before she
informs Lewis that she is in London, and when he comes to her little flat, she
is as combative as ever, always pushing and asking the tough questions - it is
only Winger, out of all of Lewis's safe little circle of yes-men and yes-women,
it is only this American woman who challenges him. But she needs a favor; she
needs him to marry her so that she may legally stay in Britain with her son. A
marriage of convenience, taken place in a county courthouse and so it is. Lewis
agrees, but no must know, he says. It will be, "as if the marriage had
never taken place; she will retain her name and we will continue to live
apart." Still, one senses a real
love developing here and though nothing has happened, let's not forget Lewis's
watchwords that a thing once attained is not wanted as much as before. Penelope
Cruz in Vanilla Sky would call him a "pleasure delayer."
We've all known people like this; who hold out til
the very last moment, who like a Tandy painting "dance on one toe at the
edge of a cliff" for the sheer thrill of it; those who have flirtations
that are long and extended but never satisfied sexually because the doing may
not be as good as the wanting and the dreaming. No doubt, they believe they are
right, but this is not living. This is a "sort of living" and a fear
of failure, a fear of being hurt, and it's hard to have any respect for this.
Holding back is not about honor or any of the stupid things we tell ourselves.
It is the fear that the doing may not be as good as the dreaming and maybe
that's true -- maybe the dream is always better, but if you ask me, I'd rather
have done a thing, lived it and been able to say that I've lived my life and
not la la la dreamed it away because I was stuck in the nursery.
All through this film we see Joy aching to be with
Lewis. The attraction between based on a mutual respect, an intelligence, but
an undeniable chemistry that is physical as well. IT is Lewis who holds back,
and likely out of a fear of insulting her and also, a fear of despite what he
practices, being hurt. He may talk a good game about love, about suffering, but
even Joy confronts him saying, "What chances do you take?" He is, for
once, rather speechless.
Until, Joy one day collapses rater suddenly and is
rushed to the hospital with seriously advanced bone cancer. The doctors tell
Lewis that she is dying, and it certainly looks like she is and will die any
day. Her bones crumble. At last, Lewis feels something. How can he help it? He
now must face losing the only woman he has ever really loved romantically and
intensely and all along, he has been denying himself, denying her and for what?
Some higher ideal? Is the thinking then really better than the doing then? In
this case, are the dream and the want enough to make you not wish like hell you
had done more when she was alive?
Clearly not. Lewis prays every day, and believe me,
this guy must have a hotline to God for miraculously, Joy recovers and it is
before then though that Lewis tells her that he wants to marry her "before
God" to "live as man and wife." With this news and his prayers,
Joy lives, and indeed, they live at Oxford as a married couple where no doubt,
there are those men who took a great belly laugh at the irony of our C.S. Lewis
getting married. They were fools. It was foolish of him <I>not</I>
to have done it before. He take his vow, "With my body I thee
worship." And "Let no man tear asunder" - all of it is deeply
meaningful to any couple, but perhaps to this couple in particular.
Joy will live only a couple of years, yet in those
brief years, C.S. Lewis will finally learn the meaning of living without
fear - of practicing as he preaches and
learning that yes, while we find each other through suffering, when you love,
you do not wish that person to suffer. You "need them not to suffer"
and you "do anything to take that suffering into you!!!" He is right, of course, and I think all of
this makes Lewis not only doubt his own teachings for a while, but perhaps his
very faith in his God again. Ultimately,
what he has preached has been not entirely true; this while industry of C.S.
Lewis and yet at the end of the day, such suffering is, as is normal and as
would be for <I>anybody</I> in love or not, to lose one who you
love so very deeply will always be unbearable. There are no two ways around it.
I have lived this myself and seen some I love suffer greatly and God, I don't
think I grew from it in any meaningful or useful way. I saw no reason for God
to make my dear friend x. have such a terrible accident that he died twice and
had to be pieced together again with steel and pins. I suffered as I watched
him suffer and while I certainly grew out of the nursery, my God, I did not
need this to help me get there.
Sadi ranson-polizzotti
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