(Editors’ note: This article was originally published at Challies.com.)
It was Carl Trueman who introduced me to the idea of a deathwork, though the concept is Philip Rieff’s. According to Rieff, a deathwork is an assault on something that is hallowed to an established culture. It isn’t a critique or argument that the culture is untrue, but a means of profaning something that is sacred in order to make it seem ridiculous or repulsive. Trueman summarizes it as “the act of using the sacred symbols of a previous era in order to subvert, and then destroy, their original significance and purpose.”
In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Trueman uses the example of Andres Serrano’s repulsive 1987 photograph Piss Christ, which displayed a crucifix immersed in the artist’s urine. He says, “Serrano is not simply mocking the sacred order in this work of art; he has turned it into something dirty, disgusting, and vile… The sacramental is made into the excremental.” By putting a crucifix in urine, Serrano makes the holy an object of mockery.
In a later article at First Things, Trueman extends the category to priests who wear the LGBTQ rainbow when carrying out their liturgical duties. To do so is to use a symbol that is sacred, in this case the rainbow, and profane it. “Such actions are deathworks, the willing subversion of the sacred in the service of the profane. The priests and ministers who perform them are simply helping the church become just like our world: a place where the sacred symbols that give church life meaning are degraded and parodied until nothing but chaos remains, and the things intended to remind Christians of God’s faithfulness become objects of ridicule.” He returns to deathworks in his recent The Desecration of Man and says, “Often deathworks will subversively use the idioms or the symbols of something once considered sacred to destroy any notion of the sacred.”
The New Aslan
And that brings me to the forthcoming film adaptations of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. These films are being adapted and directed by Greta Gerwig, who established her directorial credentials with hits like Lady Bird, Little Women, and Barbie. The first of them, The Magician’s Nephew, is expected to arrive in theaters in early 2027 and land on Netflix shortly thereafter. For several months, we heard rumors that Aslan might be voiced by a woman, and sure enough, in a preview of a feature for Empire magazine, Gerwig confirmed the role has gone to Meryl Streep. We also learned that Gerwig was inspired by David Bowie, “both for the look of Aslan (who has multicolored eyes and a red-striped face in this version) as well as the essence of the movie, according to Gerwig. She described wanting the movie to be ‘big and transporting’ and feel like a ‘rock opera.’” The early images show Aslan with not merely a stripe on his face and different-colored eyes, but rainbow coloring as well.
Not surprisingly, Narnia lovers and purists were dismayed by this gender-bending of Aslan, and with Gerwig’s tampering with a beloved character and story. Samuel James argues that it is essential to the character of Aslan that his voice evokes a father; Pierce Taylor Hibbs explains that Aslan must be male because Aslan’s maleness is essential to the story Lewis wrote; Anne Kennedy says Gerwig “is taking a thing of sublime beauty that opens a door of the soul for Christ to step through to heal and restore what is broken and wrong” and says Gerwig herself is the one desecrating it.
Profaning Aslan
When I learned the news, I found myself pondering this question: Is Gerwig’s Aslan an example of a deathwork, or at least similar to one? Is it a subversion of something holy in order to profane it?
Aslan is not holy or sacramental, of course, since he is fictitious. But for Lewis and those who love his books, Aslan is a Christ-figure: He sings Narnia into being, he is the son of the great Emperor-beyond-the-Sea, he is the King of Beasts, he sacrifices his life for the sake of others, he returns to life after dying, and so on. It could hardly be clearer. Though Lewis did not intend for Aslan to be Jesus, he explicitly intended for him to be like Jesus — to be a supposal, an answer to a question like this: Supposing there were a world that was different from this one, how might its story be like the biblical story?
So how might a glam, rainbow, gender-bent Aslan be like Jesus? The simple answer is that he can’t be. Gerwig has reframed Aslan so that one of several things must be true: Either she no longer means for him to parallel Jesus, she reinvented Jesus and then created her version of Aslan to match him, or she failed to think in Lewis’s theological categories. Whichever it is, this Aslan is not, and cannot be, the Aslan of the books. Perhaps Gerwig means to convey that there is nothing essential to Aslan (and therefore to Jesus) that depends upon his being male. Yet as the critics have made clear, that’s not the case, and Aslan is, and must be, male — for his voice must evoke fatherhood. I might go a step further to suggest that this Aslan is aligned with today’s cultural ethos, and therefore opposed to the Bible’s ethos, in appearing to be both male and female or, if you prefer, neither male nor female. He may be a Bowie-like character, but he is not a Christ-like one.
I want to acknowledge that Gerwig claims to love Lewis’s works and that she is creating these films as an expression of her love for the stories that were part of her childhood. Yet I would respond that someone can be so immersed in one culture and so opposed to another that her tribute is actually a profanation. It is not impossible, despite her appreciation for Narnia, that for her version of Aslan, and perhaps for the rest of her version of Narnia, the things that are intended to evoke Christ actually ridicule Him.
So is this Aslan a deathwork or something similar to one? Does he desecrate something sacred? Does he mock and subvert? We will need to see the whole movie before we can decide the matter definitively, but I would say that the early evidence suggests it’s entirely possible. Again, Aslan is not holy or sacramental to Christians, but he is meant to parallel and represent one who is. He is meant to evoke the kind of joy, love, and awe that Jesus evokes in those who meet Him, know Him, and follow Him. Gerwig’s changes to Aslan appear to mock Jesus rather than respect Him. Not only that, but if a new generation comes to know this Aslan, the old one may seem dated or possibly “problematic” by comparison. In that way, this reinvented Aslan may change not only a culture’s character, but also its taste. It threatens to supplant the real Aslan with a version that is better suited to what the culture wants anyway.
Conclusion
We are still months away from seeing Gerwig’s vision for Narnia, but if the earliest looks at her world and descriptions of it accurately represent its finished form, it may have far more of a resemblance to the story of the culture around us than to the story that motivated Lewis to engage his imagination in the first place. It may be her tribute not to Lewis and the story he told, but to the one she wishes for instead. It may just be a deathwork, a work of art that defiles what is sacred to an old world and remakes it in the image of a new one.
— Tim Challies is husband to Aileen, and a father to two girls and one son who is waiting for him in heaven. He serves as an elder at Grace Fellowship Church in Toronto, Ontario.
