One of the cardinal rules I have for op-ed writers is to avoid opening lines that list three newsy things before introducing the unrelated subject you want to discuss.
“With a war in Iran, rising inflation, and a looming AI apocalypse, it can be easy to forget about railroad maintenance.” Something like that. It’s lazy and cheap, like opening an essay with “since the dawn of time.”
But today, I’m breaking my own rule. Because with a war in Iran, rising inflation, and a looming AI apocalypse, people on the right seem mostly concerned with a film adaptation of “The Chronicles Of Narnia.”
Are you kidding?
“Ladybird” director Greta Gerwig is producing a movie version of “The Magician’s Nephew” for Netflix, a project with built-in buzz thanks to Gerwig’s last film, “Barbie,” another adaptation of a classic children’s property.
Things went haywire this week when it was confirmed that Meryl Streep would voice Aslan, the titular lion from “The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe,” and one of the protagonists of the Narnia series.
Based on how conservatives reacted to this news, you would think that Ms. Gerwig dug ol’ Clive Staples Lewis out of his grave and used his bones in an X-rated puppet show.
It’s woke! It’s an attack on Christianity! It’s poisoning the youth! Aslan is Jesus and Jesus is a man so the lion has to be a boy!
Do you hear yourselves?
Before I really get into it, let me clarify a few things this piece is not. This is not some self-righteous argument that we shouldn’t care about the adaptation of a Christian fable because Christians are being persecuted in China (although, come to think of it, that’s not a bad argument). But no, culture is important. The stories we tell ourselves matter. I actually much prefer talking about culture than about things like macroeconomics. But that’s not why this is silly.
Nor is this a Christian apologetic in which I point out that, no matter how much Greta Gerwig tries to blaspheme Our Lord, He remains the King of Kings. Although, again, the latter is definitely true. But I don’t think Greta Gerwig is trying to subvert Christianity; I think she just wanted to cast Meryl Streep. And, even if she were, having a symbolic Christ voiced by a woman is at least the fourth worst thing ever to happen to Jesus, after Piss Christ, Godspell, and, you know, the Crucifixion.
No, this freak-out is not worth our time because we’re talking about a film adaptation of a children’s book about an anthropomorphic lion.
Yes, I know Aslan is supposed to be Jesus. But he’s not. He’s a lion. And they’re different. The reason I know they’re different is that every Sunday when I take my family to church, we don’t kneel before a wooden carving of the king of the jungle.
I want to say this again, because I really don’t think conservatives who like “The Chronicles of Narnia” have internalized this. The lion is not Jesus. So, when commentator Kangmin Lee says the Gerwig adaptation is “a desecration of Lewis’s work,” I say: No, it’s not! You can’t desecrate that which isn’t sacred. And a fairy tale, no matter how inspired it may be by Christian teaching, is not holy.
So, no, you can’t get this mad that Greta Gerwig’s riff on Narnia is a David Bowie-inspired, gender-bent kaleidoscope. That’s what happens when you write fiction that enters the public domain or, as is the case here, is licensed to directors by the corporation that manages your estate.
It’s baffling to me that conservatives don’t get this. We Republicans are the party of reason, of reality, of “facts don’t care about your feelings.” We stand up and say that men can’t be women and criminals should go to jail and countries need secure borders and all these important things — and then we threaten to kill ourselves on social media because a hipster cast a lady to play a lion.
This isn’t just about this particular adaptation. Conservatives of a certain stripe are bafflingly obsessed with all of Lewis’s novels, as well as his pal J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord Of The Rings” franchise. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as nerdy as the next guy, and I like these books fine. But folks on the Right have imbued these retellings of the Bible with such meaning that they have a news cycle’s worth of a meltdown whenever someone dares change or criticize them.
This is dumb, just like it was dumb to freak out that “Hamilton” said our first Treasury secretary was a rapping Puerto Rican. Artists are generally liberal, and liberals love to do things like this. Some, like “Hamilton,” are good. Others, like most modern adaptations of Shakespeare, are bad. I don’t know where Gerwig’s “Narnia” film will fall, but I’ll tell you this: I would much rather my children watch a movie with a female Jesus lion than see any of the tantrums my fellow conservatives threw about said big cat.
Earlier this month, liberals lost their collective mind when a golf company released an ad that depicted a man bodychecking a woman. Our editor-in-chief Brent Scher rightly chastised the woke mob, saying, “Did I miss the time machine back into the height of cancel culture idiocy?”
He was right then, just as I’m right now. We on the Right tend to be better than most about this stuff, but when it’s our favorite things at stake, we clutch our pearls as ferociously as any blue-haired bozo. But we are, and ought to be, better than that. Some things — most things — matter more than Greta Gerwig’s “Narnia” movie. On some level, we all know better. We should act like it.
***
This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
