Movie Reviews for Writers -- Shadowlands

There's this one scene in Shadowlands that always grabs me. Young Douglas, after meeting THE writer of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, is exploring the C.S. Lewis' house and discovers a wardrobe in an apparently unused room. You can almost feel the sense of wonder and longing (or Sehnsucht as Lewis wrote about it in his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy) Douglas is feeling in the film as he walks to the doors and opens the wardrobe. He reaches inside to feel the emptiness that will allow him to make his own journey to Narnia -- only to be disappointed when he touches the back. As a viewer, particularly if you remember the Narnia books strongly and through the eyes of nostalgia, you feel that same let down. 

But here's the rub. To be honest, both you and Douglas knew fact from fiction (even at his age), but the power of Lewis' fiction made the longing for fantasy to be a real, actual experiential something. The adventures of the Pevensies made readers all over the world (I'm willing to bet) check on their own wardrobes or closets and hope for the best even though they knew it just couldn't be true. 

And that's what I need to remember as a fiction writer. Fiction has power. Fiction is as spiritual as religion in many ways. Fiction can fuel longing. Fiction and create wonder. Fiction works with emotion and imagination in a way that facts typically can't. And as a writer, that singular power exists in every story I create. I hold worlds in my mind and in my pen, and maybe, just maybe, one day one of my readers will open the metaphorical wardrobe to feel that Sehnsucht toward or about something I've written. 

This amazing movie also shows the truth that writers often turn the totality of their human experience into art, including their grief, as this is the story of Lewis' experience of pain in the wake of Joy's death and his suddenly becoming father to her children. It's a grief that became perhaps the best biography of the pain of loss in the history of writing, A Grief Observed. 

But for me, as a writer, this movie almost always boils down to watching Douglas open that wardrobe.