Article

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Film & TV

25 August 2023

8 min read

Dear Greta Gerwig: how your Netflix Narnia can be a roaring success

Narnia fan John Kuhrt pens an open letter to a daunted Hollywood director on helping her handle the Great Story.

Jon Kuhrt

Jon Kuhrt is CEO of Hope into Action, a homelessness charity. He is a former government adviser on how faith groups address rough sleeping.

A film director stands next to a camera to look at its screen, while a camera operator looks on

Dear Greta,

Congratulations on being appointed Screenwriter and Director for Netflix’s The Chronicles of Narnia. I really enjoyed your films Ladybird and Little Women and I am seeing Barbie this week as I have been away. It’s great to see a writer/director of your standing getting this crucial job.

I know you feel daunted to take on this job and I am writing to share five thoughts on what you need to bear in mind to make the series a success. I cannot claim to know anything about producing films or TV series. But I do know about Narnia.

Like millions of others, the books have been very significant to me. I read them first when I was a teenager, but I have continued to re-read them into adulthood. They have given me a reference point for some of my deepest questions about purpose, faith, life and death.

Disney/Walden Media’s Narnia series faltered after three films. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) was a huge box-office hit but was followed by less successful adaptations of Prince Caspian (2008) and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010). I thought all three films had many good qualities but the abandonment of the project less than halfway through shows the challenges of bringing Narnia to visual life.

So, with all this in mind, these are my five tips for how to create a great Narnia series:

1. Understand the thinking behind the books

The author, C.S. Lewis, was both an academic expert in medieval literature and a high-profile Christian author and communicator. He was a brilliant but complex man. Understanding him, his beliefs and his aims in writing Narnia is fundamental.

The two best books on this subject are Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia: the Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis and Rowan Williams’ The Lion’s World: a journey into the heart of Narnia.

Ward’s book is a highly academic dissection of the hidden ‘key’ which Lewis implanted within each book (it was subsequently published in an abridged and more accessible version as The Narnia Code). The mish-mash of themes and diverse myths and legends in Narnia has puzzled and frustrated academic readers for decades. It was one reason why his friend J.R.R. Tolkein disliked the books so much. But Ward argues that the coherence and distinct atmosphere of each book comes from each being based on a different planet from the medieval cosmos. It is a thesis which has won almost unanimous affirmation.

Williams’ book is very different. It is a short but deep reflection on the theology that Lewis was conveying through the Narnia tales. His opening chapter discusses ‘The point of Narnia’ and he uses Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Augustine to explore the ideas in the stories. He also assesses and responds to the criticism the books have faced.

2. Recreate the distinct atmosphere of each book

No other books have given me such a vivid experience of ‘going into another world’ as the Narnia books have. I now realise this is because of the most fundamental, yet intangible, strength of the books: the atmosphere, mood or tone that Lewis creates.

As Ward writes, quoting Lewis:

“Lovers of romances go back and back to such stories in the same way that we go ‘back to a fruit for its taste, to a region for its whole atmosphere – to Donegal for it Donegality and London for its Londonness.’ ”

Lewis was fascinated by literature which drew the reader into enjoyment of a story by indwelling it: seeing ‘through it’ rather than ‘at it’. Ward coins the term ‘donegality’ to describe this hidden element which establishes an intrinsic quality: ‘…the inner meaning of a romance cannot be flagged up by the author without altering its true nature. It has to remain hidden, woven into the warp and woof the story.’

The challenge for Netflix is that each Narnia book has a distinct ‘donegality’ based on the ancient themes and characteristics associated with the seven planets. This makes them very different to the Harry Potter books, which have a more uniform feel and consistency. Capturing the distinctive essence of each book will be vital to re-create the atmosphere Lewis aimed for.

3. Embrace Narnia’s spirituality

All adaptations of Narnia have to grapple with how they will handle the clear spiritual themes within the books. Faith makes corporations nervous but ‘theological due-diligence’ will be a key part of the creative and strategic discussions. I would advise Netflix to be bold and as true to Lewis’ thinking as possible.

In its 1980s, the BBC airbrushed spirituality out and this was one factor which made it a poor adaption. In contrast, Disney were braver in their films. As one newspaper wrote after the box office success of the first film ‘Disney finds a way to worship both God and Mammon’.

However, Disney never got to attempt some of the most theologically challenging scenes in the series. Narnia’s creation in The Magician’s Nephew and its apocalypse and depictions of heavenly re-creation in The Last Battle will be immensely difficult to convey on screen. These scenes will not work without confidence and clarity about what Lewis was trying to get across.

Rather than seeing them simplistically as allegories of Christian faith, it is best to see the stories as deeply infused with spiritual meaning. Rowan Williams answers the question ‘What is the point of Narnia?’ by saying that Lewis is doing nothing less than ‘trying to recreate for the reader what it is like to encounter God’. He is trying to

‘rinse out what is stale in our thinking about Christianity – which is almost everything.’

But this does not mean being preachy. Williams makes the point that ‘there is no church in Narnia, no religion even’.

Instead the spirituality is embedded within the ‘non-religious’ action: the bravery, treachery, sibling tension, bullying, reconciliation and forgiveness which are jam-packed into the stories. Spiritual truth is embedded and woven within each story.

4. Get the central character right

The character of Aslan stands right at the heart of the books. He is the only character who features in all seven books in the series, he sings the world into existence and presides over its end. He is the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and Omega of the whole story.

Aslan is very obviously an ‘authority figure’ but Lewis’ achievement is to craft a character who is both immensely powerful and enduringly attractive. And the key to this is the subversive nature of his authority. In an age where there is so much questioning of structural inequality and systemic injustice this is an aspect which Netflix should emphasise.

Rowan Williams draws this out with great insight: in Narnia ‘evil is cast as the ultimate force of reaction; we are invited to see ourselves as living ‘under occupation’ and summoned to join a resistance movement.’ Aslan’s wildness, his animality, represents the unpredictable world of grace which opposes the ‘ordered state of sin’ of the White Witch, King Miraz or (most deeply) the prisons we build for ourselves. Williams writes:

‘Transcendance is the wildness of joy; and the truth of God becomes a revolution against what we have made of ourselves’.

This is why Aslan’s victories lead to riotous partying. As Williams points out this is an ‘explosion of liberating festivity’ which (uncomfortably for some Christian readers) includes pagan revelry. At the end of Prince Caspian both the god Bacchus and a drunken Silenus make appearances to celebrate the liberation Aslan brings.

Aslan is the focus of hope not because he ‘saves souls’ but because he is the liberator of people and the whole of creation. Getting Aslan right will be a huge part of getting Narnia right.

5. Interpret it for a new audience

The Narnia books have faced criticism from authors such as Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling. When Disney released the first film, Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee wrote an article titled ‘Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion’.

Rowan Williams engages head-on with the accusations that the books have overtones of racism and sexism and that they glorify violence. Whilst allowing for the fact that Lewis was an author of his time, he accepts the discomfort that modern readers will feel, for example, in how the ‘dark-skinned’ Calormenes are presented.

He also discusses one of the saddest parts of the stories: that former hero Susan is ‘no longer a friend of Narnia’ by the end of the series. Williams fairly defends this plot-line from those who claim it as evidence of Lewis’ misogyny.

More obviously, the old-fashioned dialogue of the children (‘Golly gosh’, ‘By Gum, you’re a beast’ etc) is a turn-off for modern audiences. The Disney films modified this well and used the backdrop of the Second World War at the start of each of the films to provide a more gritty context than conveyed in the books.

If you hold fast to the core of the books (see points 1-4) then stylistic changes and wise handling of aspects which are uncomfortable for today’s audience will enhance the series. All stories needs reinterpreting for a new audience.

The Great Story…

Narnia is a great story, but a key reason for its enduring popularity is because it reflects something of the Great Story of which we are all a part. As Lewis puts it himself in the conclusion of the final book:

“Now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

I wish you all the best with the production of the series and I look forward to seeing the result.

Thanks,

Jon Kuhrt, Narnia fan, South London (aged 51).

PS: You might be interested in this talk I gave on The Magician’s Nephew, my favourite Narnia book.

(This article was first published on Jon Kuhrt's Grace+Truth blog in August 2023).

Article

Comment

Justice

20 February 2025

7 min read

Just where does the arc of history bend towards today?

What happens when the optimism bubble bursts.

Roger Standing

Roger is a theologian and author with a particular interest in the relationship between faith and culture.

The feet and legs of someone walking on a white rug, beside the words Justice and Government woven in to it,

Obama's Oval Office rug.

The White House, via Wikimedia Commons.

"Yes we can!

Yes we can!

Yes we can!"

There was something magical about hearing Barak Obama speak to a crowd. The rhythm of his sentences, the rhyme of his words and the melodic cadence of his baritone delivery had the ability to hold you spellbound. It felt so positive, so uplifting, so inspiring.

The call and response with the audience only underlined the positivity of the impression: ‘Yes we can!’

It was listening to Obama that I first heard the quote:

‘The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.’

I loved it. Obama used it a lot, and so did I.

It seemed to epitomise the hopefulness his presidency embodied. Implicitly, it advocated the qualities of patience and persistence that are so important in working for a better world. It doesn’t happen overnight. It also acknowledged his rootedness in what had gone before, ‘As Dr King used to remind us …’. Obama was borrowing the line from one of his own heroes.

In fact, the quote was with him all the time in the Oval Office of the White House, to the right of his desk. Along with four other quotes it was woven into the perimeter of a 23 by 30-foot oval rug that almost filled the room.

The one-liner still delivers a punch, just as it did for Martin Luther King. However, I am increasingly convinced that it doesn’t stand scrutiny. As much as I want it to be true, and long for it to be true, I do not believe that it is.

The sentiment was of its time. Not the 1950s and 60s of Dr King, but the 1850s of the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker from Massachusetts. The germ of an idea originated with him in a sermon entitled, ‘Of Justice and the Conscience’. At this point it was a complicated paragraph rather than a pithy one-liner.

‘You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.’

Parker was also responsible for ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ that Abraham Lincoln would go on to cut and paste into his famous Gettysburg Address during the Civil War. It also appeared on Obama’s rug.

The intellectual circles of the 1850s were alive with many new ideas like progress, equality and the abolition of slavery, and ‘transmutation’ (or evolution as it would become known). In science, industry and social life things were moving forward and getting ever better.

As the century moved on this conviction continued to grow and become more widespread. By the early years of the twentieth century Parker’s thought itself had been distilled down into the single line we’re familiar with and included in popularly published collections of aphorisms.

Prosperity and progress informed the narrative of Western culture and ideas of evolution were imported into other disciplines. In anthropology, for example, this gave rise to ‘social evolutionism’ and the categorisation of societies into a developmental sequence ranging from ‘primitive’ to ‘civilised’.

Of course, it doesn’t take much imagination to recognise that there was a darker side to such notions. Here was also an underpinning for a colonial worldview and an intellectual justification for racial hierarchy. Western culture was more ‘evolved’.

These views were epitomised in psychology where, for example, in Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913) he speaks of indigenous people as ‘the most backward and miserable of savages’, comparing the way they live with features of a neurosis and mental disorder.

The carnage of the First World War effectively popped the bubble of an overly optimistic ‘progressivism’. I do wonder whether we are now at another ‘bubble popping’ moment in the West.

Is your ‘bubble of optimism’ in danger of popping, or has it even popped already, like mine?

In the decades since the Second World War we have succumbed to our own narrative of progress. We have witnessed amazing technological advances and stunning scientific discoveries. The forward movement is obvious, and the promise of an even better future is clear.

Then, supported and monetised by the market economy, our lives are tempted, enhanced and festooned by the latest products and services that our money can buy. From smart doorbells to wearable tech and TikTok to ChatGPT our world is constantly changing and upgrading and the movement forward is undeniable.

The narrative runs in our wider life too. We celebrate the triumph of the suffragettes, the defeat of fascism and the collapse of old-school communism. Francis Fukuyama may have been premature declaring the end of the Cold War as the ‘end of history’ in 1989, but it did seem like Western-style liberal democracy was what the world was striving for.

Then there are the advances in our shared life together in Britain. If Acts of Parliament in some measure illustrate the pulse of the nation, the direction is clear. Take, for example:

the Sexual Offences Act 1967
the Sex Discrimination Act 1975
the Race Relations Act 1976
the Childrens’ Acts of 1986 and 2004
the Disability Discrimination Act 1995
the Human Rights Act 1998
the statutory instruments protecting against discrimination in employment on grounds of religion or belief (2003), sexual orientation (2003) and age (2006)
the Gender Recognition Act 2004
the Equality Act 2010
the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013

This list isn’t exhaustive and there are campaigners who are very keen to add to it. But we live inside this narrative, and we know the plot. It is familiar to us. And it would be so easy to be seduced into a new myth of inevitable progress, ‘The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice’.

‘Social evolutionism’ was so deeply embedded in late Victorian culture that its ‘self-evident’ truth went largely unchallenged. The vast majority believed their own hyperbole and complacently embraced the fruits of burgeoning industry and an expanding empire. They lacked the self-critical capacity to comprehend the flaws in their worldview and to understand what their world was capable of in the infernal, apocalyptic catastrophe that was unleashed in 1914.

Maybe, embracing a more contemporary myth of progress has a similar effect on us. We presume that our way of life will inevitably continue moving forward unchallenged. That we have a right to experience a tomorrow that will always be better than yesterday. And that those who do not subscribe to our notion of ‘progress’ are clearly inferior, ill-informed or backward in some way. But such a mindset also lacks a culturally self-aware and critical edge and is oblivious to how easily things could fall apart.

At this moment in time the world seems far less secure than at any point in my lifetime. Our community hosts refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong, a friend has only recently returned from working with a voluntary agency in Israel and I am about to meet up with another friend who has just flown in from the United States.

Populist, anti-democratic and disruptive forces are more blatantly at work around the world than for many a long year. Developments in AI, cyber-terrorism and digital warfare create a disembodied sense of ‘existential threat’. And then there is the climate crisis. Fires in California, floods in Europe and the unprecedented sequence of six tropical cyclones in the Philippines in late 2024 seem to have had little impact in accelerating the response to global warming.

Is your ‘bubble of optimism’ in danger of popping, or has it even popped already, like mine?

Of late I have found helpful insight in observations made by Jesus. Rather than fixating about what might happen in the future, he encouraged those who had attached themselves to him to live in the moment,

'Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.'

For those who were concerned about what might be happening and felt the world was falling in around them, he offered reassurance. He counselled that such events did not signal the end of the world. Rather, this was simply the kind of thing that happened.

'You will hear of wars and rumours of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen … these are the beginning of birth pains.'

Rather, the early Christian ethic was rooted in God’s loving, supporting and strengthening presence during unstable times.

Writing to the Christian community that had formed itself in Rome, the apostle Paul was convinced that whatever befell them – trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, or weaponised violence – that nothing would be able to ‘separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’

And right at the base of this ethic that Jesus advocated was an unswerving commitment to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’

Which takes us back to Obama’s rug and the West Wing office.

On the left-hand side of his desk was a quote from President Theodore Roosevelt:

'The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us.'

And that really is it. History may not bend towards justice, and hard-won progress we’ve achieved can likewise be lost, but our future will always hang on the ‘welfare of all of us.’

Well said Mr. President!

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