Reflections on A Wrinkle In Time

There is a musing in my mind today as I review and read about Ava Duvernay’s adaptation of “A Wrinkle In Time”, staring Reese Witherspoon and Oprah Winfrey as two of the large names attached to this monstrosity of a film.

I've been chewing on this for a few weeks since the film debuted and finally got around to expressing my modest concerns.

Though it largely escaped my notice as a child, “A Wrinkle In Time” is a determinedly Christian book. Not necessarily in the same sense of Catholic intellectualism as I have been presented with over the weeks and months of the past year. But from what I recall there were definitive echoes interwoven in its telling, as Allissa Wilkinson of Vox deftly explains, regardless of what philosophy you subscribe to.

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The film appears as a garish modernist interpretation on the basic universal theme found in every culture, that of the struggle of good triumphing over evil. However, aside from the basic elements of Meg, her little genius brother Charles-Wallace, and would-be love interest (later husband in subsequent novels), seeking the help of three supernatural beings to find her long-lost father, the film has none of the intellectual teeth about responsibility, consequences, and love that allow Meg to grow internally to reconcile her internally perceived flaws and the realities of the world and adulthood, as well as overcome the primary antagonist of the novel, IT—a giant, brain that is the representation of all evil.

I have not seen the film, and have little desire to; however a few things strike me as a common chord that often appears in the writings of Christian intellectuals across the board, and that is the call not only for universal holiness and struggle within God, but the main point is the struggle against the regimentation and totalitarianism of secularism of groupthink—as is often seen in socialist or communistic society—against upholding the individual as uniquely beautiful within the body of the Jesus Christ, as uniquely beautifully made within God’s organized world.

IT’s world was a terrifying vision of uniformity, as Meg and Calvin search through an endless array of same homes and neighborhoods to the central nervous-system of IT’s headquarters, a gray office building. Everything is the same; everything is uniform, dull, but perfect. There is no individuality, just…cookie cutter perfection to the tiniest detail and no differentiation. Even the children the two encounter essentially look the same from one to the next, playing and speaking all the same. Sameness. Uniformity.

This call to uniformity is a common evil in the current world, a theme called out in such works as “The Abolition of Man” by C.S. Lewis and warned of in Rudyard Kipplings “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”, written decades ago by intellectuals, good and bad in their own rights—everyone has flaws mind you, even you—who foresaw the pitfall of specialization leading to stagnation, to equilibrium of thought as everything started the trend towards standardization, especially in education.

My favorite edition, in large part because of the art by Leo and Diane Dillon.

Even the three beings—Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit—have direct and obvious echoes of Christian elements teaching sacrifice and love, especially through repeated quotes from Biblical Scripture. Even one of them sacrifices their form and becomes transformed to help the children on the next leg of their journey, at the cost of themselves.

As Wilkinson so adequately explains the true evil of IT that is utterly dispensed with within the adaptation “For L’Engle, the power of evil is not just to make us bad and angry and violent, but also to put us to sleep to what is going on in the world by controlling us — the way we live, the way we think, the way we desire — until we are all the same.”

This mode of thought is no more apparent than in a three-page excerpt that was cut originally from the text of the novel. In the lead up, Meg and Calvin are rescued by Meg’s father Mr. Murray once they find him through tesselation, or the folding of space-time to travel large distances. However, her little brother is left-behind, already held tightly in the telepathic grip and groupthink of IT. As L’Engle notes in the cut excerpt, the ultimate evil is conformity, sameness, and regulation.

And herein lies a disturbing trend in the current thinking of Western society: a division between head and heart.

We are told on a constant basis to exist in a state of alleged moral relativism, when in fact it is moral nonrelativism, as explained my Prof. Michael Gorman in his talk to the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C. There is no longer a universal truth, only an adherence to selfish truth that trumps all other mores and standards to allow for the personal selfish fulfillment of ones desires, as seen in the stoics and destroyed by G.K. Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy. 

And when there is no universal binding truth such as Jesus Christ and God, as evidenced in Christianity in which we are to strive for, we are given the saccharine dilution of morality in the universalist theme espoused in DuVernay's "A Wrinkle In Time", in which we rely solely on ourselves to find and utilize the strength of this world to overcome. But this is false. Humans fail.

Walter Ciszek was a Catholic priest who was destroyed in his 23 year imprisonment. He felt as though he failed when he finally signed a confession to the NKVD -- Soviet Secret Police -- stating he was a spy for the Vatican. He felt broken and ashamed in relying on himself as a holy man of God who stood above others because he was so virtuous, only to betray God, in his mind anyway. It was in giving himself over fully and submitting truly to the Father's will that he was able to overcome and survive through 23 years of captivity.

Relying on ourselves is a false sense of security, and a false message that leads to arrogance and failure, in the end. It does not allow any longer for unique beauty as individuals, meant to use our gifts individually for the glory of God, but for the continued sleepwalking of others to live in comfortable means. To not rock the boat, and to no longer act as the salt and the light. We merely become hedonists of the same self-indulgent cloth.