Greta Gerwig’s Rock-Opera Takes On A C.S. Lewis Classic
(ANALYSIS) During a fistfight, a young David Bowie suffered an injury to his left eye, leaving its pupil permanently wide open, with one blue eye looking radically different than the other.
Bowie didn't have heterochromia — different-colored irises. But his mysterious gaze was a key trait of Ziggy Stardust, his genderbending, rainbow-hued stage persona mixing glitter, bright lipstick, platform shoes and various female fashion trends.
This early 1970s bolt of glam-rock lightning was part of the cultural storm that shaped Greta Gerwig’s imagination, leading to her “rock opera” vision of “The Chronicles of Narnia,” the classic C.S. Lewis novels for children.
“David Bowie saved my life,” Gerwig told Empire Magazine, while discussing “Narnia: The Magician's Nephew,” poised for release in early 2027.
“Paul McCartney saved my life. David Gilmour saved my life. Pete Townshend saved my life. ... When I heard their music, I had this deep sense of [thinking], ‘You're gonna be okay.’” She added: “Narnia is literally a world made out of music. It is a world sung to life by Aslan.”
In Narnia, Aslan is the Christ figure, repeatedly described by Lewis — an Oxford don and Christian apologist — as the “King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. ... The Lion, the great Lion.” In “The Magician's Nephew,” Narnia's creation story, Aslan is first described as “a Lion. Huge, shaggy and bright," with a basso profundo voice "deep enough to be the voice of the earth.”
Gerwig ignited an online firestorm by choosing the legendary actress Meryl Streep to provide Aslan's voice. And the director moved “The Magician’s Nephew” from the early 1900s to the 1950s so that its young Digory Kirke hero would grow up in the world that produced Bowie and other rock visionaries. Thus, the “Narnia” timeline created by Lewis will, in its climactic books, move from World War II Britain to the cultural and sexual revolutions of the 1960s and ‘70s.
Also, the Empire cover offers the first portrait of the character some call “Ziggy Aslan.”
Gerwig’s Aslan has one blue eye with the other amber. The face has “feathered eyes, dragon-like skin, a lipstick red nose and rainbow whiskers,” noted Annie Crawford, director of a C.S. Lewis Studies program at the Logres Institute, based in Holland, Michigan.
“Everything about Gerwig’s visualization of Aslan speaks to breaking the gender binary and the celebration of transgressive identities,” Crawford added in an online essay. “By casting a woman as the voice of Aslan, Gerwig twists an icon of Christ into a different form.”
Filmmaker Phil Vischer, creator of the “VeggieTales” videos and a frequent commentator on Christian culture, noted how Streep's voice could shape key “Narnia” events.
“Help me out here ... only male lions have manes, and shaving his mane is the ultimate humiliation the White Witch puts Aslan through,” he posted on X. “So if Meryl Streep is Aslan ... is Aslan a female lion with a mane? Or a male lion with (a) woman's voice? I'm not thrilled with either possibility.”
Meanwhile, Tim Rice of The Daily Wire said many conservatives are acting as if “Ms. Gerwig dug ol’ Clive Staples Lewis out of his grave and used his bones in an X-rated puppet show.” Rice wrote: “It's woke! It's an attack on Christianity! It's poisoning the youth! Aslan is Jesus and Jesus is a man, so the lion has to be a boy! ... Yes, I know Aslan is supposed to be Jesus. But he's not. He's a lion. And they're different. The reason I know they're different is that every Sunday when I take my family to church, we don't kneel before a wooden carving of the king of the jungle.”
Meanwhile, Crawford noted that observers interested in what Lewis would say can consult his essay “Priestesses in the Church?”
Suppose that someone said, “we might just as well pray to ‘Our Mother which art in heaven' as to ‘Our Father,’” wrote Lewis. “Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form. ... It is surely the case that if all these supposals were ever carried into effect, we should be embarked on a different religion. Goddesses have, of course, been worshipped: many religions have had priestesses. But they are religions quite different in character from Christianity.”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.