6, 1, 5, 2, 3, 4, 7.

For some of us, born between, say, World War II and Y2K, these numbers were memorized in our childhood. I just typed them from memory (unlike most of my posts, which require a trip to Wikipedia for confirmation before I can sound erudite), although it’s been at least 20-odd years since I’ve had reason to reference them.

They came back to me now because I finally made time to watch The Chronicles of Narnia. Those numbers are the internal chronological order of the seven novels, a key thing to learn if you’re ten years old and intend to move your imagination into Narnia full-time for a few years.

(At least, they were the order of the novels, until recent editions of the series reordered the books to make them match the chronology. There are some of us who consider this to be blasphemy on the order of a child being forced to watch The Phantom Menace before being allowed to watch Star Wars. For both Narnia and the Lucasverse, the order of consumption is obvious: first-time readers and viewers should watch them in the order they were created; after that, the next 100 or so repeats can be in any order desired.)

Those of you who have neither read the books nor seen the movie should be spanked and sent to bed without supper. That way, you can’t read this, as this post is nothing but spoilers from here on in.

It was a strange experience watching the movie, in that it’s no exaggeration to say that I read the Narnia books upwards of 40 times as a kid. The thing is, I have an awful memory for fiction—I sometimes have to read a novel most of the way through before I have the slightest idea that I’ve read it before. So even though I memorized the books so thoroughly that I can still picture the cracks I put in their spines, if you had asked me three hours ago what Lion was about, I’d have said, “Um… big lion, some English schoolkids, and there’s something about a candy called Turkish Delight.”

So prior to the movie, I was wondering if I’d get the same sort of childlike glee that came in brief doses during Superman Returns. (Largely due to its soundtrack; the rest of the movie, not so much.) Turns out that I’m not twelve anymore, and the wall is now pretty damn solid in the back of my wardrobe.

Sure, the movie has its merits. It’s beautiful to look at, and even under the thrall of the White Witch, Narnia looks like a more pleasant place to be than Middle-earth. I’d personally nominate the film for the Academy Award in Best (and Damn Near Only) Actors and Screenplay Where The Children Actually Act Like Children. And credit where credit is due to the actors and director, as throughout the first half of the film I wanted to drown Edmund with the same hateful fury I felt towards him twenty-five years ago.

But the thing is, back when I was twelve, I kinda missed that whole Jesus thing. Yeah, I know, it’s a big thing to miss, but hey—I’m Jewish. And there’s something about video allegory that just makes it much more honking obvious than it is in print. Not that Narnia laid it on too thickly, in my book; for that, I’ll refer you to Matrix Revolutions. But there’s still something, well, insidious about feeding subliminal messages to non-Christian children that Jesus is a superhero.

The Guardian said it much better than I can:

[H]ere in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America—that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right. I once heard the famous preacher Norman Vincent Peale in New York expound a sermon that reassured his wealthy congregation that they were made rich by God because they deserved it. The godly will reap earthly reward because God is on the side of the strong. This appears to be CS Lewis’s view, too. In the battle at the end of the film, visually a great epic treat, the child crusaders are crowned kings and queens for no particular reason.

Actually, to me, the crowning scene was mainly notable in that it was so similar to Star Wars I expected to see C3PO and R2D2 in the audience.

That’s really what got me. Four human children (or to put it more accurately, four white Western human children) show up in fantasyland. Humans are a special breed there, everyone else being nonhuman. Actually, since all of the humans are immediately royalty, you can more accurately say that everyone else there is subhuman. One of the humans, who maybe started shaving last year, is made a military leader and outranks what appears to be dozens of field generals and colonels. His next action is to lead an outnumbered and underpowered army into a head-on attack, in a textbook example of what not to do when you’re outnumbered and underpowered. Of course, he wins.

Am I reading too much into this? Possibly. Like I said, I spent much of my childhood in Narnia, and I joined neither Jews for Jesus or the College Republicans. But ever since I read David Brin’s scathing essay on the lessons of Star Wars, I’ve given a lot of thought to cultural myths. It doesn’t take a great leap from the feel-good warm fuzzies of the Narnian war of liberation, to the mindset of Iraqi invasion in 2003—and perhaps to a lesser extent, to the mindset that we don’t torture people because we’re the good guys, so anything we do is presumptively not torturous. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is one hell of an allegory for Westerners being greeted with flowers and parades by their intellectual and genetic inferiors; no wonder that it’s such a popular British import.

Read Brin’s essay if you haven’t already. Then, if you feel like it, watch some of your favorite American mythological fiction, and see how you feel.