Do a Google search for “Greta Gerwig Narnia” and you’ll quickly find the corner of the internet that thinks the Barbie director is the worst thing to happen to C.S. Lewis’s beloved fantasy series. “Gerwig directing Narnia is a colossal mistake,” one reviewer says. Scamper over to Reddit, and you’ll find that perspective heightened by eleven.
We don’t know exactly what Netflix has planned for Narnia. It bought the rights to make films and streaming series in 2018 and assigned Matthew Aldrich as creative architect in 2019. A few months ago, The New Yorker buried the lede that Gerwig had been drafted to “write and direct at least two films” in a potential Narnia Cinematic Universe (yes, I’m calling it that already). The persistent criticisms of Gerwig’s role in Netflix’s plan—that she’s a feminist, that she doesn’t (publicly) adhere to Christianity, that she’ll erase what makes Narnia Narnia—overlook that the Narniad is, first and foremost, a fantasy series. When Lewis wrote these tales, in the words of novelist Lev Grossman, he split the atom on the modern fantasy novel.1 Before the stories are adapted as anything else (from Christian allegory to personal improvement parable), they must be adapted as fantasy. And not just any type of fantasy—portal fantasy.
Before Barbie, Gerwig had zero experience making fantasy stories for the screen, and some would argue that’s still the case. But Barbie is the angst-inspired auteur’s transitional film: it has a reality-focused story centered on the female experience that is Gerwig’s hallmark, but it also has a distinct fantastic element, evidenced partly in the plastic, candy-toned, physics-defying, technicolor world of Barbieland. Gerwig’s Barbie story is a portal fantasy, and it has been an artistic and commercial success.
Admittedly, Barbie is a weird place from which to speculate on what Gerwig’s adaptation of Narnia could look like. Still, the similarities between that film and the formula of the portal fantasy genre cannot be ignored. At best, Gerwig is entering her fantasy era, and adapting Narnia is a logical leap for someone who admits that “having another big canvas is exciting and also daunting.” At least she understands the essential elements of portal fantasy, and that understanding will serve her well.
Read the full piece in Christ & Pop Culture.