Tilda Swinton: elemental force of nature

So I got to meet Tilda Swinton recently, and had to resist the urge to grovel at her feet, she’s so damn cool. We were talking about The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (my review is coming on Friday, but here’s a sneak preview: Kick ass) and she had just the right attitude about the Jesus-osity of the flick: It’s not religious, she noted, "it’s prereligious. The children’s story is about surviving and being self-reliant. It’s the opposite of relying on a belief system."

That’s how I feel, too: Narnia utilizes the same mythological basis that Christianity and a whole bunch of other fairy stories use (even if it was C.S. Lewis’s intent to write a Christian allegory). There’s not a lot of point in getting worked up about the film, like Polly Toynbee in the British Guardian does. Though she recognizes that "[m]ost of the fairy story works as well as any Norse saga, pagan legend or modern fantasy" and [SPOILER ALERT] "[t]he lion exchanging his life for Edmund's is the sort of thing Arthurian legends are made of," she also flat out says "adults who wince at the worst elements of Christian belief may need a sickbag handy for the most religiose scenes." And as an adult who does indeed wince at the worst elements of Christian belief and who has now seen the film twice and can’t wait to see it again, sans barf bag, I can say that that’s just not true.

I’m struck by the fact that Swinton has played two very similar characters this year in geeky spins on Christianity: Narnia’s White Witch, the evil queen of Narnia, and the rather demented archangel Gabriel in Constantine, as caustic and cynical a look at the Bible as I think I’ve ever seen. So I had to ask her if she saw any similarities in the characters. She pondered this for a moment, then said, "No. They’re bookends -- they’re very different. The archangel is righteous, and the witch is truly evil." And then she thought on it some more, and came to an interesting conclusion: Gabriel, she conceded, isn’t such a good guy; he’s "the illustration of the idea that the road to hell is paved with good intentions." The queen has no good intentions, of course, but like Gabriel, she’s "absolutely unswayable. They’re both without doubt."

Not that the Christian fans of either film will see that as a problem.