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A couple of things. First, Ava DuVernay and Jennifer Lee, the screenwriter, were doing their best to hold what they saw to be the central message of the story while stripping it of its specifically Christian content: they wanted to make it universal.
It's not a terrible or un-L'Engleish desire if taken in a certain way: the scandal of her book when it came out was that she was willing to see truth, wisdom, in many of the world's traditions; in a key moment in the book, Jesus is listed as one of those who fought for the Light,
alongside others from history: Curie and St. Francis and the Buddha and so on, a litany of poets and saints and scientists. To update this list, to add more people, and even to bow to the worship of the contemporary, is not to destroy L'Engle's idea. But.
But. The abstracted-from-the-particular message that Lee thinks she has found and preserved is not the message of the book. The wisdom here is precisely counter-wisdom. "You have everything you need in yourself," a friend summarized it as we got ice cream after the movie.
She paused. "Boy, that's going to be a hard lesson for kids to unlearn."
L'Engle drives home with her story the fact that above all, you are not God. The universe is not God. You are not a part of the universe which is the same as God. You are you, unique and beloved and limited, and that you is the one who has an indispensable role to play.
In fact, if you're looking for a primer on classical theism for your intelligent nine-year-old, the first two books of the trilogy aren't a bad place to start: What is good, for L'Engle, is being; IT (and in The Wind in the Door, the Echthroi) seek to destroy what is.
This means destroying or denying love; denying that which makes one thing distinct from another and thus able to love; destroying individuality and community; matter and spirit; this star and that mitochondrion.
There are many stupid reasons to be disappointed in the movie, to feel in some sense betrayed by it. The non-stupid reason is that in making the lesson a pantheistic one, it sides with that which destroys what is. It does not mean to. Not at all. But it does.
A couple other things: #AvaDuVernay's Times Talk, she said one thing that was very puzzling: "We did update it. For example, the book was written in 1963. Bullying was not really a thing, was not part of the conversation. So we added a bully who wasn't there in the original."
but there were several bullies in the original: both in #WrinkleInTime and #WindintheDoor, bullying is a major theme. In the opening scene of the book-- on the SECOND PAGE--Meg is remembering her day at school:
teased by a scornful mean girl, provoked into a physical fight by a boy who teases her little brother. In the second book, Charles Wallace is bullied and beaten up by Calvin's brother. These kinds of things are explicitly connected to the evil that annihilates stars.
Of working on Selma and 13th, "directing people to be racist, directing people to be murdered-- it was hard. This-- I'm going to design a bunch of flowers, I'm going to put a blonde wig on Oprah;>>
>> "it's 'Oprah, do you want to be bedazzled with diamonds or rubies today?' -- I needed that. It saved me from dark places." I can understand this if she's talking purely about set design: yes. But it seems to me that she just didn't take the evil of IT seriously.
And the comment illuminates one very strange thing about the movie: in a movie directed by DuVernay, who is deeply concerned with the evil of racism, in a story which is meant to examine the connection between human and cosmic evil, there's no racism. There should have been.
She passed up a profoundly important opportunity to show that racism, which is at its core a hatred and fear of difference,
and a despair about the possibility of different people living together in a single community based on sharing a common human nature without an erasure of their differences, is a frighteningly perfect example of the nihilism, the drive to annihilation, of IT.
Ah well. I'll stop complaining. Here's what the movie did: It did show that bullying and cruelty are connected to cosmic evil, which, you know, they are. It did say that each of us is enlisted in a fight in which love is the key weapon, which is, you know, true.
And it provoked a whole new generation to pick up the book. Which everyone should immediately do, no matter if you have read it before, and no matter what your age.
I mean, not trilogy. Pentalogy?
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