Conservatives expressed grave concern when director Greta Gerwig happily announced that her forthcoming movie Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew would star Meryl Streep as the voice of Aslan – the lion that author C.S. Lewis clearly used as a Christ figure.
This kind of gender confusion gives off vibes of James Talarico announcing that God is “non-binary.” She’s giving Narnia a “rock opera” makeover, so who knows how many miles she’ll depart from Lewis’s source material.
But we know that Gerwig is riding a cinematic high after making the Barbie movie in 2023, which was drowning in feminist schtick. Film critic Christian Toto counted 10 utterances of "patriarchy" in that ridiculously popular movie. "Barbie was invented first," Gerwig told Vogue at the time. "Ken was invented after Barbie, to burnish Barbie's reputation in our eyes and in the world. That kind of creation myth is the opposite of the creation myth in Genesis."
Beware the feminist with a Catholic school upbringing.
Gerwig spoke to Empire magazine about her odd casting of Streep without elaborating on gender. “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,” she said. “I wanted someone who was older than 70, so there was a wisdom of experience, but who also had the capacity of fresh wonder, like a child.”
She also made it clear she chose Streep in part because she’s one of the most celebrated actors of our time. But this doesn’t match Lewis’s description of Aslan, with a voice "deep enough to be the voice of the earth.”
Nobody’s actually seen this movie yet, so the early protests might seem overwrought. The casting of transgender actor “Elliot” Page in The Odyssey seemed designed as an outrage point to sell tickets, but Page was only on screen for about five minutes.
We should expect the elitist media won’t churn out any outrage in this controversy over Christianity. It’s quite unlike the passionate pre-release loathing of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ in 2004. It was without question the largest antisemitism story of 2003 on the TV networks, since nearly every one of the 66 network segments about Gibson’s movie on ABC, CBS, and NBC touched on those complaints.
But when the secular left turns Christianity in another direction, the networks promote it – as with The Da Vinci Code movie adaptation 20 years ago, which was “faithful” -- to the anti-Christian source material. If a conservative Christian energetically adapted The Da Vinci Code into an orthodox tale, the media would have had a cow.
Let’s just state the obvious, perhaps overly played point: Greta Gerwig making a rock-opera about Mohammed the prophet would never get a five-minute meeting in Hollywood. “Mohammed is non-binary” would never get off the ground. If a film managed to be made, the filmmakers would need a bomb shelter.
The media cover movies as a kind of fictional or artistic version of their own liberal crusading. It’s “brave” and heroic to firmly push the leftist hive-mind version of history or culture, whether in fiction or nonfiction. Making a movie with a conservative thrust or an orthodox Christian worldview is bound to be depicted as a wooden propaganda film, if it’s not painted as a dangerous provocation of hate.
When we choose our news-media options, it can seem like two starkly differing narratives, or two different movies. So it’s not surprising that these same silos bring their opposing ideologies (and theologies) to the cineplex or the streaming platforms.
