The C.S. Lewis Way to Watch a Movie
An under-appreciated book shows his approach to art
C.S. Lewis only saw a few movies and most likely never owned a television. Despite that, he gave principles for criticism that we can apply to film, TV, or any type of art in his book An Experiment on Criticism.
In it, Lewis distinguishes between two ways of engaging with art—using and receiving. He say using is the path of the many, but the proper way, the way of the few, is to receive the art. Using can do things to our lives, but only receiving can add to our lives.
Understanding Lewis’ two approaches to engaging art can help us understand how people can watch a movie like The Odyssey and come away with such wildly different opinions.
Divergences can come from significant works of art with numerous themes. Different viewers may resonate with one idea put forth, while someone else may be put off by another equally present concept.
But much of the public rhetoric surrounding movies that capture the cultural consciousness like The Odyssey flows from people using it. In one sense, this is an understandable reaction. You filter art through your experiences and how it speaks to you.
“It is very natural that when we have gone through the ordered movements which a great play or narrative excites in us—when we have danced that dance or enacted that ritual or submitted to that patter—it should suggest to us many interesting reflections,” Lewis writes.
Those reflections aren’t wrong in and of themselves. Often, when I review a movie or a show, I’ll instead call it a reflection because I’m not reviewing the work based on its inherent worth.
Rather, I’m sharing how this work reveals or rejects some truth about God and His creation. That revelation may often exist without the knowledge or intent of the artist, so I’m using their art to speak to something else.
When we do that, however, we should be careful about what we credit to (or blame on) the artist. Lewis says, “We may thank Shakespeare or Dante for that muscle, but we had better not father on them the philosophical or ethical use we make of it.”
So, if we want to move beyond using, how do we receive art as Lewis would? These three steps, drawn from An Experiment on Criticism, are a good start.
Surrender yourself
Lewis is clear. Surrender must be your first step in engaging rightly with art. “The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way,” he writes. You have to give yourself over to the artist and enter their world according to their rules.
For Lewis, you do this out of humility and curiosity. First, you recognize that you aren’t omniscient. You can learn from others, even those you may disagree with. Second, you want to gain new perspectives. “We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own,” Lewis says.
“The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.”
— C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
When we refuse to surrender and go in determined to force ourselves onto the work, we shouldn’t be surprised that all we see is our own reflection. “We are too busy doing things with the work that we give it too little chance to work on us,” Lewis says. “Thus increasingly we meet only ourselves. But one of the chief operations of art is to remove our gaze from that mirrored face, to deliver us from that solitude.”
This is more difficult than we often expect. We come into a show, book, movie, or any piece of art with assumptions about the artist and their work. But to fully and fairly engage with any work, we must start with surrender.
That doesn’t mean you must engage with every work. Obviously, there are more shows, movies, and books than anyone could possibly read. But if you choose to engage, you must do so in a posture of surrender.
Reject suspicion
It is difficult to surrender at all, but it is impossible when you begin from a culture war perspective. As Lewis’ writes, “You cannot be armed to the teeth and surrendered at the same time.”
The skeptical viewer is one with their eyes closed. “No poem will give up its secret to a reader who enters it regarding the poet as a potential deceiver and determined not to be taken in,” Lewis writes. “We must risk being taken in, if we are to get anything.”
This viewer is like the dwarves from The Last Battle. Surrounded by beauty in Aslan’s Country, they refuse to be “taken in” and thus miss all that could be theirs.
If you begin a show with the assumption that it will be bad (or “woke” or “right-wing”), you’ll find all the evidence you need to support your assumption. But you’ll also miss anything else the show has to offer.
This is why Lewis describes the philosophy that encourages young readers to approach every work with skepticism as “especially poisonous.”
“The armed and suspicious approach which may save you from being bamboozled by a bad author may also blind and deafen you to the shy and elusive merits—especially if they are unfashionable—of a good one.” Lewis writes.
As Lewis wrote in The Four Loves, “To love at all is to be vulnerable.” He would apply the same logic to engaging with art. We have to start from a place of vulnerability.
Even after you’ve surrendered and put aside your preconceptions, some shows will still be disappointing, but that shouldn’t change our starting point. “There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out,” he writes.
Evaluate fairly
This becomes even more difficult because the culture war allows no neutral ground. Every piece of art is judged purely based on whether we feel affirmed in our perspective by the artist. But our criteria must be more than, “Do I agree with the artist?”
“A true lover of literature should be in one way like an honest examiner,” Lewis says, “who is prepared to give the highest marks to the telling, felicitous, and well-documented exposition of views he dissents from or even abominates.” Elsewhere he writes, “We delight to enter into other men’s beliefs … even though we think them untrue.”
“We delight to enter into other men’s beliefs … even though we think them untrue.”
— C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
Leaving aside our opinion of the creators, is the movie good? Is it creative? Does it do well what it intends to do? Did it cause me to think and consider a new perspective?
The question is not: Is there a bad interpretation of the show? What fault can I find? You will always be able to draw out a bad interpretation, to discover flaws. Lewis says we must go deeper.
“In calling the book bad we are claiming not that it can elicit bad reading, but that it can’t elicit good,” he writes. “This negative proposition can never be certain. I may say ‘If I were to take pleasure in this book it could be only the pleasure of transitory thrills, or wishful reverie, or agreement with the author’s opinions.’ But others may be able to do with it what I can’t.”
What do we gain?
You may think this increases the likelihood a viewer will be had by propaganda. In a world full of conspiracy theories, AI-composed “art,” and individuals and groups who benefit from ensnaring people and stoking controversy, we will undoubtedly encounter propaganda.
But the solution is not to avoid all art or to keep a perpetually skeptical mindset. “The best safeguard against bad literature is a full experience of good,” Lewis writes.
In fact, Lewis contends that “no novel will deceive the best type of reader. He never mistakes art either for life or for philosophy. He can enter, while he reads, into each author’s point of view without either accepting or rejecting it, suspending when necessary his disbelief and (what is harder) his belief.”
As you repeatedly engage with art in the way Lewis advises, you are more able to identify propaganda. You’ll also find all types of unexpectedly good art. You’ll gain new insights and new wisdom because you were humble enough to listen to others.
“The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison,” he writes in An Experiment in Criticism. “My eyes are not enough for me, I will see through the eyes of others.”
The C.S. Lewis way to watch a movie is to do so not with our eyes only, but through the eyes of the filmmaker and all the artists who helped craft the film. Their eyes, their perspective, even when we disagree with it, expands our vision to better see God, the world He made, and the people He created in His image.
This post is an adapted summary of a series of articles I wrote a few years ago going deeper into An Experiment on Criticism.
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