OPINION: Should race- and gender-bending be so acceptable in Hollywood?

The first book in C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia—The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe resulted from a picture that Lewis had seen when he was 16, of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. “Then one day, when I was about 40, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it’,” said Lewis. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is about four children who walk through a wardrobe into the magical land of Narnia. There they hear the legend of Aslan, the true king of Narnia. In the end, Aslan sacrifices his life to save that of one of the children, Edmund, even though Edmund had betrayed his siblings. But then, he comes back to life in the final battle with the White Witch. Lewis, a devout Christian, conceptualised Aslan as a representation of Jesus Christ.

And now, filmmaker Greta Gerwig is adapting The Magician’s Nephew, the sixth book in the series which is also the origin story of Narnia, into a Hollywood film, with Meryl Streep in talks to voice Aslan. This is not the first time that Hollywood has represented the divine as female, with those like Whoopi Goldberg and Octavia Spencer playing God in Little Bit of Heaven and The Shack respectively. Of course, Gerwig is a feminist who has envisioned a world ruled by women in previous films as well, like the superhit Barbie. But for hundreds of Christians all over the world, Aslan being voiced by a woman just does not sit right. It does not only skew the perception of the classics that we have grown up with, but it shakes the very axis of our beliefs. Narnia without its religious parallels is like a sentence without its subtext—flat and one-dimensional.

Of course, this is not the first time that Hollywood is breaking race and gender stereotypes. It got black actresses like Halle Bailey and Adele James to play Ariel in Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid and Cleopatra in Netflix’s docu-series on the Egyptian queen. India Amarteifio, with Ghanaian and German ancestry, played Queen Charlotte in the superhit series Bridgerton. This is, of course, progressive in many ways. Black actress Kyra Jones, for example, writes about the thrill of seeing someone who looked like her in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella when she was four years old, which starred black actress Brandy Norwood as Cinderella. “For those 90 minutes in 1997, little black girls around the world saw magic in their future far before it became a hashtag,” she wrote.

Still, there is something off-putting about historical characters being reimagined as black. In the world of Bridgerton, for example, rich black aristocrats studied at Eton and wined and dined in posh mansions. This is such a far cry from the truth that one wonders what the creators were trying to achieve by mixing history and fantasy. Creating some fanciful version of the past will never make it a reality.

Coloured people have their own stories and when you mine those, you get a lush undertone of authenticity. As done by filmmakers like Amma Asante whose biopic Belle tells the story of a slave girl raised as an aristocrat in 18th century London. Or Stephen Williams’s biographical drama Chevalier, about the illegitimate son of a French aristocrat and an African slave woman who became a renowned violinist and composer. As Jones said, “Though seeing black women portrayed as royalty is nothing short of magical, there is something even more enchanting about seeing us as ourselves.”

Each racial, religious and ethnic group has a storied past from which we dredge our truths. There is some indelible imprint of ourselves that we leave on these stories. We would not like to see George Clooney play Lord Krishna in a Hollywood adaptation, right? So why upset the narrative equilibrium by making Meryl Streep play Aslan?

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