It will be a celebration of Atheism.
In today’s edition of Hollywood Hates You More Than It Loves Money, Meryl Streep is in talks to play Aslan in Netflix’s upcoming Narnia movie.
Christian author C.S. Lewis made no secret of the fact that Aslan, the talking lion in his timeless Narnia series, was meant to be an allegory, a stand-in, for Jesus.
Netflix being Netflix, I expected Aslan the Lion to become Aslan the Black Panther. Sadly, my failure of imagination once again underestimated just how much Netflix and Hollywood hate and seek to alienate Christians, especially when they can do it with our own stories. So I should’ve known Netflix and feminist director Greta Gerwig (Barbie) would hire a girl to voice Aslan.
The girl in this case is Streep. The offer is not yet signed nor sealed, but once a casting story makes it to an entertainment rag like Deadline, it’s pretty much in the bag. The fact that this is being considered says it all.
This is nothing more or less than Netflix and Greta Gerwig trolling Christians. It’s a childish fuck you that says, We hate you so much we’re spending $300 million on this f**k you.
There is no artistic reason to make this choice. Actually, it’s an anti-art choice. Great stories become great through subtext, and one of the pleasures of the Narnia series is looking again and again for Lewis’s Christian and Biblical subtext—what Lewis wanted to explain to us about God, our relationship with Christ, and how it all tied in with our fallible humanity. Once you make a girl God, the story becomes a Big Nothing because Aslan is no longer God. Without that Christian thread to pull on, you’re left with $300 million in computer graphics.
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