Posted by: @waggawerewolf27

 

Quite so. We'd be told to discuss such matters in the Ditto Town Hall, but I'm not quite sure how we would do that, either, when it could be a whole topic of discussion within English Literature, all on its own.

 

I should have added that right up until WW1 Great Britain, Australia was still called The Colonies, despite our 1901 Federation, and Australians the Colonials

so my mistake about Colney Hatch, not being Colony Hatch might be more forgivable. Especially when people like Jadis who stole jewellery, hijacked a hansom cab and refused to pay the bill, could have been sentenced to hang, or ended up being transported to Botany Bay, another name for New South Wales, right up until 22nd May, 1840, or worse, still, to Van Diemen's Land, to where transportation didn't finish until 1853.  

And Western Australia, the last Australian colony to stop importing convicts, didn't cease from doing so until 1868. But Jadis's rampage in London occurred in 1900, according to the timeline that Lewis later wrote up. (Which also pretty much accords with the statement at the start of MN that the story takes place when "the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road" — The Treasure Seekers was published in 1899. It doesn't exactly accord with the description in LWW of Digory, now the Professor, as "a very old man with shaggy white hair", since Digory, as a 12-year-old boy in 1900, would be only 52 in 1940, but Lewis really wasn't good with dates and other such technical details, as we've all noted before.) So no matter what fates might have awaited Jadis in London that day if she hadn't been transported to what was to become Narnia, transportation to Australia wouldn't have been an option.  

I'm still looking for the exact references in the book, but Uncle Andrew seems to have fallen for her.

It's towards the end of the chapter "The Beginning of Uncle Andrew's Troubles":

Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind. At this moment Uncle Andrew was beginning to be silly in a very grown-up way. Now that the Witch was no longer in the same room with him he was quickly forgetting how she had frightened him and thinking more and more of her wonderful beauty. He kept on saying to himself, "A dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman. A superb creature." He had also somehow managed to forget that it was the children who had got hold of this "superb creature": he felt as if he himself by his Magic had called her out of unknown worlds.

"Andrew, my boy," he said to himself as he looked in the glass, "you're a devilish well preserved fellow for your age. A distinguished-looking man, sir."

You see, the foolish old man was actually beginning to imagine the Witch would fall in love with him. The two drinks probably had something to do with it, and so had his best clothes. But he was, in any case, as vain as a peacock; that was why he had become a Magician.

Posted by: @waggawerewolf27

Later he would call her "A dem fine woman", another rather idiomatic way of talking for so-called middle-class people at the time. A rather silly way of talking about her, too. 

I suspect (and I'm sure you do too) that it's actually a euphemistic spelling of a word that was considered too rude to say or put into print in respectable society in the Victorian era. You know, if you're also a Gilbert & Sullivan fan, the one that Captain Corcoran in HMS Pinafore would never use. Well, hardly ever...  

However, now that we have seen Jadis in Queen Victoria's London, for the rest of the film it would be mainly the originally creepy Uncle Andrew, who would become the more comical character, especially his change of attitude to Jadis, herself. And I bet the filmmakers could make more fun of him than of Jadis, herself.  

That's a really good point and one I hadn't really thought about — Uncle Andrew starts out as a very sinister character, when we first meet him in his study and he tricks Polly into taking a yellow ring, then blackmails Digory into going after her, along with all the creepiness of his account of how he came to be experimenting with Magic in the first place. But once we get to compare him with Jadis, the real and far more powerful and dangerous magician, he quickly becomes a figure of fun, and his actions are mostly comical for the rest of the story, especially once the Talking Beasts in Narnia decide to capture him and make a pet of him.

As Lewis says earlier in the same chapter I quoted above, comparing Uncle Andrew and Jadis: "One good thing about seeing the two together was that you would never again be afraid of Uncle Andrew, any more than you'd be afraid of a worm after you had met a rattlesnake or afraid of a cow after you had met a mad bull." And the rest of the story bears that out.

On that note, though, I did think earlier of another point that could be made about this scene in London where Jadis, terrifying as she is, becomes a comical figure for a short time. There's a quote attributed to Martin Luther: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." (I've searched for it online and found it in several Christian articles and blogs, but I cannot find a single one that gives any reference for it, which, as a trained historian, I for one find exceedingly annoying. )

The point is, anyway, that — well, Jadis is not literally meant to be Satan, but she is certainly one of the greatest agents of evil in the Chronicles of Narnia, and I would argue that this scene where she becomes a laughing-stock is a good reminder that evil, however terrifying and dangerous and destructive it is, is not the ultimate power in the universe, and it does not have the final word. Whatever the film version of MN does with Jadis, I hope that message will come across.

To ever so slightly steer the conversation back on track then, If everyone is in broad agreement that the scene as written in the book is played for laughs, I guess my two follow-up questions / concerns would be as follows:

• Even if the comical nature of the scene(s) just about avoids undercutting the dramatic tension of the overall story on the pages of a children's book, will that still translate well to a feature film which is (presumably) intended to have some degree of broader adult appeal - i.e. would the cinematic adaptation process necessitate that the scene be played with more serious tension and sinister threat.
• Is the "fish out of water" comedy trope of having a villainous fantasy character playing it super-serious in a world that is more bemused rather than terrified of them, not massively overworn at this point? In many ways i feel like audiences are even starting to wane on Marvel's over-reliance on this sort of irreverent comedic shtick which undercuts any development of serious stakes in their films.

Bear in mind though, I'm frequently critical of the Walden's films tendency to favour "scenes of mild peril" over the more interesting and whimsical elements of the book, therefore I wouldn't want it to go too far down that route either.

More just working through different thoughts and ideas at this point.

Maybe I should have put what I was trying to say this way.

If you absolutely had to choose, I would advocate focusing on the tense and exciting aspects of the scene since they're part of the plot. If the scene weren't funny at all, it could still conceivably work in its own way even if it didn't capture everything about the book's version. On the other hand, if the scene ended up being simply funny and viewers weren't worried at all, it would really be jarring since the rest of the story is played for drama (albeit drama with plenty of comic relief.) Also, like I said or tried to say, if viewers don't empathize with Digory and Polly's desperation to get Jadis out of their world, they might resent them for (unintentionally) bringing her to Narnia, especially if those viewers know the story of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

But...I'm really not convinced we need to choose between those options. I don't have a list or anything but I'm sure there have been action scenes in movies that were also very funny. It is true though what Icarus. I have heard people online saying they'd like less self-aware humor from their films and more sincerity. (Not sure I'd describe the humor in this scene that way though.)