IT and Aslan: The Similarities
I wrote this about a year ago and I wanted to post it here because it’s October and seemed fitting.
I watched IT a few weeks ago. I’d read the book and decided that since I knew where all the jump scares were I could handle the movie (turns out I was very wrong). I recently picked up The Silver Chair, and I was struck by how similar the interaction between Aslan and Jill is with Pennywise and Georgie.
There’s something in me that abhors comparing Lewis and King, but here goes.
When Georgie sees Pennywise in the sewer, he’s terrified. When Jill encounters the Lion, she’s terrified. It’s not that awe inspired fear either. She genuinely thinks the Lion will eat her.
Both Georgie and Jill initially recoil. Neither run away because both Aslan and Pennywise have something they want. For Jill, it’s a drink of water. For Georgie, it’s his boat. The children are torn. They know they’re facing monstrous things; their instincts tell them to run away, but Aslan and Pennywise keep their attention with a question.
Aslan: ”Are you not thirsty?”
Pennywise: “Want your boat Georgie?”
Both Pennywise and Aslan offer them the thing they want. It feels like a lure.
As the children approach, the differences between Aslan and Pennywise are revealed.
Pennywise says, “Can you smell the circus Georgie?”
“Suddenly he [Georgie] could smell peanuts! And vinegar! The white kind you put on your french fries through a hole in the cap! He could smell cotton candy and frying doughboys…”
Pennywise offers Georgie more than just his boat, and I think that should be what gives Pennywise away as evil. He has the boat, but Pennywise implies that Georgie can also indulge in all the treats he wants.
Aslan doesn’t promise Jill anything more than a drink of water. Unlike Pennywise, when Jill asks if Aslan will eat her, he does the opposite of re-assure or comfort her. He says:
“I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,” said the Lion. It didn’t say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.’
Jill’s looking for a reprieve from her anxiety, but instead of giving her that, Aslan exponentially increases her fears by telling her about all the other tremendous things he’s swallowed up as well as girls. It’s as if he’s saying, “Yes I can eat you and you would hardly warrant a crumb.” Granted, Lewis writes that Aslan didn’t set out to boast and make her fearful, but that’s clearly Jill’s reaction to what she hears. At this point, Jill probably has more reason to be suspicious of Aslan than Georgie does of Pennywise.
In the end, both Jill and Georgie take up the respective offers. Jill drinks “the coldest, most refreshing water she had ever tasted.” Georgie gets eaten alive.
It’s odd to think that Aslan was more menacing. He increased Jill’s anxieties and fears, but he ended up being the good guy. Pennywise was the most comforting, but he ended up being the bad guy.
Pennywise offers Georgie an immediate reprieve from his fears because Pennywise is desperate, and knows that just offering the boat won’t lure Georgie; he needs to offer balloons, pastries, and other treats as well in order to mask that he’s evil. I have a hunch that if Pennywise didn’t promise all the extra goods, Georgie would have ran away.
Aslan doesn’t offer a reprieve to Jill’s fears or promise additional treats because he doesn’t need to hide his motives and has nothing to prove. Although Jill doesn’t know it, he’s concerned with something much bigger and better. By withholding a reprieve, Jill is ultimately released entirely from her fears of Aslan.
Sometimes evil is the thing that guarantees comfort and excess. Sometimes goodness is the thing that doesn’t promise comfort or excess at all (at least initially). Sometimes goodness takes away all of those things, and thrusts a person into even more anxiety for the purpose of freeing them completely.
