Taming Dragons

There are few things as malevolent as art that lies. This is especially true of film, which has such a forceful impact on the senses. The manipulation of our minds and emotions in a direction that is contrary to the moral and spiritual laws of the universe is toxic to the soul.

A Seductive Lie

It’s the risk we take when indulging in a book or watching a movie. When they are in harmony with reality and are authentic explorations of the human drama, reading or watching them can be wonderful experiences. But when they serve to undermine reality and lie about the nature of things, we experience confusion, a dissonance that lingers after the credits finish rolling or the book is closed. Still it is even worse when a person is so seduced by the lie as to experience no dissonance.

Take, for example, a Hollywood love-scene (of the bedroom variety). The setting, lighting, and background music tell us that something tender and loving is happening. And yet, the couple portrayed is unmarried, within the context of the story they are only casually related, and logically the audience should assume they are practicing some form of birth control (although they never show that part). Hollywood wants to have its cake and eat it too. The filmmaker may wish that sex could be casual, care-free, and intentionally sterile while at the same time expressing meaningful, tender love; but it’s just not so. The scene is a lie.

An artist only needs to be honest in order to produce something that is catholic — something that testifies to beauty, truth, and goodness. Sometimes the witness is indirect, taking a character along twisted paths of anger, despair, and darkness. But we can benefit from these too, as even the darkest corners of human existence can be found reflected in the Psalms and other passages of Scripture. The cardinal sin is the deliberate manipulation of the imagination to make an ideological statement, the abuse of creative powers to try to make reality fit a presupposition formed in rebellion against reality.

Monsters Are for Killing

This abuse of the imagination can be particularly dangerous in art intended for children. This was addressed by Canadian artist Michael O’Brien in his book A Landscape with Dragons. O’Brien was disturbed to see an evolution in children’s art by which traditional symbols deeply rooted in Western culture were being turned upside down. O’Brien thinks that some symbols are not arbitrary; their meanings are universal and any attempt to employ them in a false manner does violence to reality. One such symbol is the dragon. Dragons are found in the literature of many cultures, but in Western culture especially they represent the spiritual enemy of mankind, as in the biblical book of Revelation where the dragon is a symbol of the Devil.

Dragons (and other monsters) represent real spiritual and mortal dangers, they are meant to be fought and killed. O’Brien protests that dragons can’t be tamed, “and it is fatal to enter into dialogue with them.” But there is a trend in children’s art to do just that, to tame the monsters. We have gone from St. George slaying the dragon to Dragon Tales. O’Brien sees this, in part, coming from questionable premises based a pop-psychology analysis which would have us embrace our “dark side,” considering “evil” to be merely some un-integrated part of ourselves and rejecting the truth that an evil being outside of us hates us and seeks our destruction.

Fortunately, that idea is not as prevalent today as it once was (terrorism perhaps making actual evil more believable), but the danger remains of distorting the nature of good and evil and the spiritual warfare that is at the heart of the human drama.

As with the Hollywood love-scene, the domestication of monsters clashes with reality. There is a serpent that roams the world seeking to devour the children of God, and it does great harm to deny that like St. George, we traverse a landscape with dragons and must do battle with them. Of course, this spiritual truth is highly annoying to a spiritually sedated culture. In England, whose patron saint happens to be St. George, some Anglican clergymen have recently proposed doing away with George on account of his image being too “warlike” and potentially offensive to Muslims. One has to wonder if this antipathy to the dragon-slayer doesn’t actually come from a sleepy and guilty conscience.

A Turn for the Worse

O’Brien praises J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, and George Macdonald’s short stories. These works stand in the tradition of Western fairy-tales which were permeated by an unconscious but distinct Christian sensibility. “Magical” items represented supernatural grace and fantastic journeys elaborated moral and spiritual truths. The turn for the worse probably began after the era of Tolkien and Lewis. Already in Madeleine L’Engle’s popular fantasy books O’Brien sees some Christian themes being woven into pagan mythology in a syncretistic fashion. And today’s fantasy genre seems to have little of the authentic spiritual quality that characterized the fairy-story from the Grimms to Tolkien.

The wildly popular Harry Potter books are often said to stand in this authentic stream but the reality might be better described as a tainted tributary. The Harry Potter books do draw on traditional material, but their representation is much different. Where an invisibility cloak may have symbolized grace in an older tale, such devices in Harry Potter serve only to enable Harry’s self-will. There is a big difference between using magical objects to represent reliance on a supernatural order for sanctification, and using these same objects to promote self-reliance and to glorify fallen wills. Incidentally, there is also a “good guy” in this series with a fondness for monsters and who literally tries to tame a dragon.

While J.K. Rowling seems to be at least trying to stand within the traditional stream, this can not be said of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Nearly as popular as Harry Potter in some places, Pullman’s books have won awards for children’s literature, and will be made into a movie in 2007. Pullman may exemplify the cardinal sin of art, using fantasy and imagination — whose history is rooted in the religious perception of the world, and so connected to hope — to propagate the Enlightenment myth of secular man and its consequent nihilism and hopelessness. Pullman writes with an axe to grind against the Catholic Church and religion in general. The fact that Pullman is a talented writer only makes matters worse, as a child’s imagination would be cunningly enticed to something that is ultimately empty and false. To give smoke and mirrors the intensive allure of beauty is an evil trick — the devil himself presents himself as angel of light.

It’s inevitable really, considering the conscious turn away from Christianity going on in our culture, that a spiritually confused society reflects that confusion in its imagination and art. Traditional Western fairy-tales were permeated by a Christian ethos. Writers like Lewis and Tolkien were also talented counter-cultural critics of the ills of their time. Today’s authors of children’s literature have neither the critical sense that Tolkien and Lewis had, nor the unconscious lived Christian sensibility reflected in the older literature. Unintentionally (and sometimes intentionally), their stories reflect the confusion that is part of today’s society. In these times, Christian parents must do a lot of discerning before opening the doors of their children’s imagination.

Brian Killian is a freelance writer and a columnist for the Atlantic Catholic. He writes from Nova Scotia and enjoys receiving feedback at numena1@gmail.com.

A version of this article previously appeared in the Atlantic Catholic and is used by permission of the author.

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Brian Killian is a freelance writer living in Nova Scotia. He is writing about the meaning of sexuality at his website http://nuptialmystery.com

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