It sounds almost like a paradox — like jumbo shrimp or true fiction: A woke director adapting “The Chronicles of Narnia” for the big screen.
This, however, is indeed what’s happening. Not only that, but the most Christian of young adult fantasy tales is in the hands of arguably the most famous — or, at the very least, most profitable — woke directors working today: Greta Gerwig.
Gerwig, a longtime fixture in indie acting and directing, became an international superstar as the director and co-writer of “Barbie,” the $1.4 billion feminist box-office sensation that was the highest-grossing film of 2023.
And now, she’s working on two separate “Narnia” films for Netflix, according to a report from the Salt Lake City Deseret News.
The outlet noted last November that “[d]etails about cast, release date and plot details have not yet been released.” However, in an interview with IndieWire published last July, Gerwig confirmed the films were in the offing but that she was “terrified” about approaching them.
“I haven’t even really started wrapping my arms around it,” Gerwig said.
“But I’m properly scared of it, which feels like a good place to start. I think when I’m scared, it’s always a good sign. Maybe when I stop being scared, it’ll be like, ‘OK. Maybe I shouldn’t do that one.’
“No, I’m terrified of it,” she continued. “It’s extraordinary. And so we’ll see, I don’t know.”
“Extraordinary” is, indeed, one word that people might use to describe it. But, couldn’t one argue that Gerwig might use a different tack to work on Narnia?
Would C.S. Lewis want the “Barbie” director adapting his books?
After all, as Netflix film chief Scott Stuber told Variety in November, the director “grew up in a Christian background.”
“The C.S. Lewis books are very much based in Christianity. And so we just started talking about it. And like I said earlier, we don’t have IP, so when we had the opportunity [to license] those books or the [Roald Dahl Co.] we’ve jumped at it, to have stories that people recognize and the ability to tell those stories,” he said.
“So it was just a great opportunity and I’m so thrilled that she’s working on it with us and I’m just thrilled to be in business with her. And she’s just an incredible talent.
As for how the adaptation would be done: “Obviously, ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ is kind of the preeminent one, but there’s such an interesting narrative form [to the Narnia series] if you read all of them,” Gruber said.
“And so that’s what she’s working on now with [producer] Amy Pascal and Mark Gordon and they’re trying to figure out how they can break the whole arc of all of it.”
This is one red flag; one of the reasons “Barbie” ended up working, so to speak, is because it “broke the arc” that the product had tried to cultivate by making the titular character a figure of women’s liberation. It may have been the first major theatrical release for the property, but Gerwig’s take on it represented a hard reboot of the property’s values. Controversial or not, it made money.
There’s a second red flag in terms of what constitutes Gerwig’s “Christian background” and what C.S. Lewis might have intended when he wrote the “Narnia” books.
For instance, there was a strain of thought among some conservatives that “Barbie” had secret encoded messages about Christian conservatism and embracing classical ideals of femininity instead of destroying them. It isn’t worth recapitulating the arguments, for they can be found easily enough online if one searches for them, but they exist.
Added to this is the fact that, as The New York Times pointed out, Gerwig “went to an all-girls Catholic school” — often pointed to by those who want to rationalize “Barbie” as being covertly Christian.
However, Gerwig herself was raised in what is inarguably the most theologically liberal of major Christian sects, the Unitarian Universalists. On the UU website, the group professes its “beliefs are diverse and inclusive.”
“We have no shared creed. Our shared covenant (our seven Principles) supports ‘the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.’ Though Unitarianism and Universalism were both liberal Christian traditions, this responsible search has led us to embrace diverse teachings from Eastern and Western religions and philosophies,” the website notes.
In a 2013 interview with UUWorld, Gerwig reaffirmed that she was a Unitarian Universalist, noting that her “parents ended up leaving the church for a time in the 1990s but have since returned.”
“My mom likes to say that having a time of a ‘walkabout’ is almost part of being a Unitarian. I think religion has always been something that has occupied me as a person, and Unitarianism is the most complete expression of my multiple and, at times, contradictory thoughts about the spiritual life,” she said.
“I think the openness of the community allows for a greater variety of personal faith and ideas. It isn’t oppressively open, but generously so.”
While there is a certain universality to the Christian fable of the Narnia books, it’s not necessarily the same thing the UU talks about when it talks about being universalist. It’s difficult, for instance, to reconcile the Unitarian Universalist belief with the works of the man who wrote this about Jesus Christ in “Mere Christianity:”
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Given the evidence, it is enough to believe Lewis would likely be rolling in his grave over the fact that the woman who woke-ified “Barbie” is now in charge of the “Narnia” books for Netflix, a streaming service not known for a paucity of wokeness in its library.
It may well be that a faithful adaptation is in the works, particularly given Gerwig’s seeming reverence for the source material. However, pretending the red flags aren’t present is an avenue that, as Lewis might put it, is not open to us — nor have the principals intended it that way.
