As I reported at the end of March, rumors were swirling that Netflix's upcoming adaptation of the "Chronicles of Narnia" by C.S. Lewis was going to feature the central figure of the entire story, the lion Aslan, as a female.
Moreover, the rumor was that Meryl Streep was in talks to voice the character.
The fact that talks were happening with Streep were later confirmed by Deadline. While no deal has yet been struck as of this reporting, the fact that Netflix is even talking with Streep for the role is not a good sign at all.
The question becomes... why do this?
It's pretty clear that casting the great lion as a female will cause Netflix's take on Narnia to arrive dead on the scene. For one, it's kind of hard to have a story where one of the more heartbreaking moments that helped define Aslan's sacrifice can't happen because he doesn't have a mane. Aslan suffers the humiliation of being shaved before he's murdered by the witch on the stone table, triggering his resurrection and breaking her claim to Narnia.
But that said, you could just chalk this up to Netflix being Netflix, and DEI, inclusivity, and other leftist values still ruling the roost at the streaming service. However, I would say it goes deeper than that.
Understand that Lewis wrote Aslan as an allegory for Jesus, and I don't think this has escaped Greta Gerwing, the woman set to direct its creation.
You may have heard of Gerwig due to her directing the Barbie movie, a film that had women cheering due to its feminist messaging. However, as I wrote around the time of its release, the film starts to take on the identity of a Shakespearian tragedy when viewed through the lens of Ken, a man who wanted to be more than the accessory he was, and almost freed the Kens of Barbieland from oppression before lies and trickery from the Barbies put the Kens back into subjugation.
The rebelling Kens were painted as extremely misogynistic to grease this plot development into something excusable, but many saw through it.
(READ: The 'Barbie' Director Accidentally Made a Very Anti-Feminist Shakespearian Tragedy)
It's also worth nothing that Gerwig grew up in a religious household and that Biblical themes actually make it into her movies. As one critic pointed out, Gerwig's Barbie movie was an inverted flip on the Garden of Eden story, where a woman invented a woman in her own image and gave her a companion of the opposite sex.
Her film Lady Bird was a coming-of-age tale of a girl set in a Catholic home and school. I've not seen the film myself, but reports are that the film wasn't an attack on Catholicism, and even treated it with nuance. Gerwig's views on religion don't seem necessarily hostile, so it's entirely likely that she's well aware of Narnia's religious themes and what they mean to the story.
However, it's pretty clear that her dedication to feminism overshadows her sense. Depicting Aslan as a woman cements this, and as such, I can easily draw a conclusion about Gerwig's aim here.
Gerwig wants to feminize Christ.
She wants to take His power and authority and slap a woman's mask over it in order to redefine what Christ brings to the table as something that takes it from the masculine, and gives it to the feminine. As you've seen time and again from Hollywood, femininity becomes the authority, not masculinity.
That's not to say that femininity can't be powerful in its own right, or even authoritative in its own way. However, Aslan is uniquely masculine because he is the stand-in for Jesus in Narnia, and as he hints later at the end of "Voyage of the Dawn Treader," he has a name in our world that we must learn. To strip Aslan of his identity as a male is to strip his connection to Christ, and if you strip his connection to Christ, the entire story falls apart.
Gerwig casting Aslan as a woman is Gerwig trying to move viewers into a view of Christ that isn't real, but can at least plant a seed that will further drive people into a view of Christ that lends more to her ideological positions.
In other words, not Christ at all.
This is a subversion of the image of our savior at its core. Accessing the image of Christ through his allegorical representative in Narnia is a not-so-sneaky way of doing this.
Again, it's still not in stone that Streep will play Aslan, but if she's being considered for the role, then it's likely Gerwig has made up her mind how this story will be portrayed already.
