NETFLIX’S NARNIA PROBLEM: You Can’t Modernize C.S. Lewis Without Losing Him.

Start with the lion. Lewis did not consider Aslan an allegory. He called him “an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia.’” In other words, within the story Aslan is Christ, and Lewis gave him the title to match: the son of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea. That makes the voice a theological decision, not a casting one. For Lewis, masculine and feminine were woven into the structure of reality, prior to biology and above it. In Perelandra he wrote, “Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex.” And in That Hideous Strength he went furthest of all: the male we could escape, because it exists only on the biological level, “but the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.” To invert that order is not to update Lewis. It is to take a crowbar to his metaphysics. The masculine none of us can escape, and Netflix may be about to find that out when it reads its box office receipts.

Defenders say the voice will be deep. A person who has seen the film told Relevant that “Aslan is clearly male,” and NarniaWeb reports that [Meryl] Streep gives the lion a deep, gravelly voice. Maybe so. But surely the best place to look for a gravelly masculine voice is a gravelly masculine actor. Hollywood isn’t short of them, but it seems short of the will to cast one. When you have to retune a woman’s voice so it sounds like a man’s, you’ve conceded the point and then hired a sound engineer to hide the concession. Lewis told us Aslan is not a tame lion, but Netflix seems determined to make him a lame one.

Things are looking dicey for a film based on religious-themed source material with the combination of “Stairway to Heaven” in the trailer (see Page, Jimmy and his interest in the occult, at least while Zeppelin was still a working band) and this headline: Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: Why the Director finds ‘Jesus is Lord’ statements ‘creepy.’

The Critical Drinker adds (via YouTube’s transcription, which was cleaned up by ChatGPT):

Casting a woman in an iconically male role like this, based around the central male figure of Christianity, was definitely a bold move on Gerwig’s part. I’ll say that much. And her justification left people with more questions than answers.

Quote: “I wanted someone who was profound but not pretentious, who had gravitas but not morose self-seriousness. Someone who could communicate depth and pathos as well as joy and delight. I wanted someone who was older than 70, so there was a wisdom of experience, but who also had the capacity for fresh wonder like a child, and also to be one of the greatest actors to ever do it. That list is not a long one.”

Oh, really?

That’s funny, because I can think of plenty of male actors off the top of my head who would tick all of those boxes, like Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins, Patrick Stewart, Charles Dance, Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley.

I don’t know, man. Maybe if you’d just been honest and said you really wanted to work with Meryl Streep and this was a good opportunity to do it, people might have been a bit more receptive. As it stands, it sounds like you’re arrogantly dismissing way more appropriate actors with a pretty flimsy excuse because you’d already made up your mind who you wanted to play Aslan.

And there’s no getting away from this one: considering Gerwig’s history with subversive feminist film projects, the inevitable assumption was that she wanted to put a subversive feminist spin on a traditional male-led fantasy series with Christian undertones. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t, but optics and perception are everything in this business. And it feels like she walked straight into a major controversy before the film even started shooting.

And for what? To get Meryl Streep on the credits? I don’t know, man. It doesn’t seem worth it to me.

We’ll find out in February, which as the Drinker goes on to note, is usually a dumping ground for movies Hollywood didn’t consider good enough to succeed in the much more lucrative (and thus much more competitive) summer and Christmas release seasons.