Is C.S. Lewis’s Narnia the next in line for the left’s cultural sledgehammer?
It was news that sent a shudder down my spine: Greta Gerwig, a 39-year-old Barnard College grad who turned Barbie into a leftist, feminist avatar, is going to direct two Narnia movies for Netflix. This is like asking a coyote to guard some chickens, for C.S. Lewis is a Christian and traditionalist, while Gerwig is a vandal.
The Narnia books function at two levels. Most obviously, they are child-sized bites of epic adventures in a magical, medieval realm.
At a more sophisticated level, they are profound ruminations about faith and personal growth. Through the Narnia books, young readers learn about honor and honesty, sacrifice, courage, moral fortitude, the existence of evil, and the qualities a just God values. And all that in seven wonderful adventure books about six children traveling to a fantasy land.
When 2005’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was released, I was worried. Walden Media, one of the production companies, was conservative, but Walt Disney Pictures, the other production company, was already sliding into the leftist abyss. The movie, though, respected the book’s ethos as well as its plot. Indeed, the movie even stood as a bulwark against “toxic masculinity.” The second and third movies abandoned (although did not offend against) C.S. Lewis’s strong messages about Christianity and traditional morality, and they disappeared from theaters.
Image: Greta Gerwig. YouTube screen grab.
The knowledge that Greta Gerwig will direct the Narnia movies on behalf of Netflix is cause for concern. We already know about Gerwig’s savage leftism in service to the Mattel corporation and the Barbie franchise. For some, though, Gerwig’s visually lovely 2019 version of Little Women is cause for hope. I’m not so sure.
I didn’t see the movie when it first came out because I suspected that Hollywood would be incapable of refraining from using the classic girl’s novel as a vehicle for leftist ideas. It was bad enough witnessing the 1994 movie that rewrote the book’s fundamental principles.
Alcott’s entire book is about Jo March and her sisters finding true happiness by learning to subordinate their selfish desires to the service of others. The 1994 movie turned that message on its head, with Jo, as played by Winona Ryder, spouting an inane message of self-love and self-gratification. A ittle research confirmed my fears about Gerwig’s Little Women.
As with the 1994 production, Gerwig’s Little Women is a lavishly beautiful movie that reinvents the book by inventing a whole new character: It opens in 1868 with Jo March, a writer who is obviously Louisa May Alcott, trying to sell a publisher on her book, with most of the movie then told in flashback form.
The vignettes that are shown in the movie are ostensibly true to the book. We see Marmee persuade the girls to give their Christmas presents to a poor family, Meg regret being poor, and Amy burn Jo’s manuscript, etc.
The messages in each of these vignettes—the lessons that Alcott’s little women learn—are clear: Love and service to others bring more rewards than money or fame, and especially more rewards than selfishness does. Indeed, in Alcott’s telling, by her novel’s end, Jo is set to marry Professor Baehr because she has earned the love of a good man by putting aside her ego.
In Gerwig’s movie, though, the 1868 authoress trying to get her book published writes a fake Jo-Baehr love story into the book to placate an obviously patriarchal publisher. Or, as he says, “And if the main character is a girl, make sure she's married by the end. Or dead, either way.” That may be true of Alcott’s experience, but it is not true to the book she created.
In other anachronistic feminism (something Insider and The New Yorker lauded), Amy lectures about the inequities in mid-19th century society:
And as a woman I have no way to make money, not enough to earn a living and support my family. Even if I had my own money, which I don't, it would belong to my husband the minute we were married. If we had children they would belong to him, not me. They would be his property. So don't sit there and tell me that marriage isn't an economic proposition, because it is. It may not be for you but it most certainly is for me.
The constraints on women in the mid-19th century were real, but they weren’t in the book.
It’s not just the rewritten principles that offend me. Early in the movie, which takes place during the Civil War, we get this:
Marmee March: I've spent my whole life ashamed of my country.
Susan Robbins: No offense meant, but you should still be ashamed.
The Alcotts were abolitionists, and Louisa May destroyed her health nursing soldiers in D.C., but they were never ashamed of America as a whole.
If you add together what Gerwig did to Little Women and Barbie, you can see why I suspect she’ll take a hatchet to C.S. Lewis’s strong and overarching religious and moral principles. Gerwig strikes me as a woman who enjoys the form of the classics but despises the substance. Do you really think she’ll be more gentle with C.S. Lewis’s principles? I can readily imagine Aslan coming to the screen as a lioness.