Posted by: @icarus

Vogue: Is there a story out there that you long to see a retelling of?

Gerwig: The bible, but from the point of view of all the women

For me, as a woman with an academic background in Bible studies (and also as a member of a denomination that was founded by a woman in the 1870s and was giving equal rights to women and men long before most of the rest of society caught up), this is really quite encouraging!  

As far as I've seen, most of the feminist critics who condemn Narnia as "sexist" are simultaneously condemning it for being based on Christianity — that often seems to be their underlying problem with it. (Scholar Devin Brown looks at several examples of this in his excellent address, "Are the Chronicles of Narnia Sexist and Racist?", which is available here on NarniaWeb and I hope Gerwig, or any other future directors of Narnia adaptations, might read it.) Whereas Gerwig doesn't seem to have an aversion to Christianity itself, just a desire to tell stories about it from a different point of view, in this case the women's point of view. That's nothing very new or radical. Feminist (or at least female!) Bible scholars and writers have been doing this for well over a century. In many cases (again speaking from experience), they've broadened and deepened their audience's appreciation of the Bible and Christianity, not turned them off.

The Narnia stories have several central female characters who are portrayed as being at least as brave and adventurous as their male companions, and who often prove to be wiser and more level-headed, and more spiritually sensitive (for want of a better term... I mean more in touch with Aslan, so to speak!), especially in a crisis. Lucy, Jill, Aravis and Polly are the obvious examples, plus Hwin for a non-human one! Even Mrs Beaver, who so often gets disparaged by critics for supposedly fussing about while our heroes need to escape from the White Witch, is — if you read what the actual book shows clearly — the one who has thought the situation out most clearly and is carefully planning according to how much time they've got, how much they can carry, and the fact that they can't actually outrun the Witch but they can keep under cover and go by ways she won't expect. She is in fact acting far more sensibly and wisely than most of the other characters in that scene — without her, they might well have fled into the snow at once with hardly any supplies and found the journey much harder — and yet her one consciously silly remark at the end, about taking her sewing machine with her, seems to get pounced on by critics as evidence that she's got no common sense and therefore she's a sexist stereotype. Sorry for that digression, but there's an example of how a more careful reading of the female characters in the Chronicles can turn up very positive things that most of the haters completely miss...

Getting back to the point — it is actually quite unusual for children's fiction published in the 1950s to have so many strong and positive female characters. Plenty of authors at that time were following the expected pattern of "boys have the exciting adventures, girls stay home and do the cooking and cleaning". Lewis, even as a male author with no children of his own, doesn't follow that stereotype. Or even when the girls are sent to do something different and less physically dangerous than what the boys are doing (Lucy and Susan in both LWW and PC, for example), their experiences and perspectives are covered in just as much detail and made an equally important part of the story. Lewis was way ahead of his time in that regard. Any fair-minded reader — which I hope Gerwig is — should be able to notice all these things and make the most of them.

Even Susan's famous "fall from grace" is deeply interesting from a feminist perspective, at least a non-reactionary one. She doesn't reject Narnia simply because she's "growing up" and interested in "nylons and lipstick and invitations"; she rejects Narnia because she's become so absorbed by popular culture's view of what being "grown up" means, that she manages to persuade herself that all her remarkable adventures in Narnia — and as a Queen of Narnia! — were just "funny games" that she and her siblings used to play as kids and now she's grown out of all that. (Which, tellingly enough, is exactly what the Green Witch in SC, through her evil magic, tries to persuade our heroes about Narnia and Aslan. Susan, one could say, falls under the same sinister spell in our own world.)

Seriously — there's a HUGE amount of fantastic material in Narnia for a director who's interested in Biblically-based stories and the female perspective on them. I could go on with plenty more, like Aravis's experience as a strong-minded and courageous young woman escaping an arranged marriage in a hugely misogynistic society that gives women virtually no rights at all... but I don't have all night and this is probably getting too far off topic!!  

I could easily be wrong, and maybe Gerwig will indeed come up with an adaptation of Narnia that's so far removed from the original stories, and so stuffed with personal agendas that are contrary to everything Lewis intended, that it doesn't deserve to be called an "adaptation of Narnia" at all. But I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt until we see what (if anything!) she actually produces — and in the meantime, I'm at least reasonably optimistic.

Posted by: @courtenay

 

Getting back to the point — it is actually quite unusual for children's fiction published in the 1950s to have so many strong and positive female characters. Plenty of authors at that time were following the expected pattern of "boys have the exciting adventures, girls stay home and do the cooking and cleaning". Lewis, even as a male author with no children of his own, doesn't follow that stereotype. Or even when the girls are sent to do something different and less physically dangerous than what the boys are doing (Lucy and Susan in both LWW and PC, for example), their experiences and perspectives are covered in just as much detail and made an equally important part of the story. Lewis was way ahead of his time in that regard. Any fair-minded reader — which I hope Gerwig is — should be able to notice all these things and make the most of them.

Right. Hopefully Greta Gerwig doesn't fall into the conclusion of "Boys vs Girls", because I don't really think it is in Narnia.

Lucy participates at the Battle of Anvard as one of the archers (most likely for her safety so that she's not where the main part of the battle was taking place). Then Jill participates at the Battle of Stable Hill. Though she is instructed by Tirian to go to a white rock so that she wouldn't be where the main part of the battle was taking place.

So I don't think CS Lewis intended Narnia to be about "boys vs girls." And hopefully Greta Gerwig doesn't make it about that.

Greta Gerwig did a talk at the BFI Film Festival in London this week (see quote below from the Hollywood Reporter)

Gerwig said she was currently working on another project, without giving many details away. “I’m in the writing process,” she admitted, “and it’s hard because I’m having recurring nightmares.”

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/greta-gerwig-barbie-reactions-self-doubt-1235612250/

Potentially looking like she's started writing on Narnia? 

Also confirmation that Matthew Aldrich's scripts are not being used?

Doesn't look like she said anything much more than that though. However with the writers strike now over, it should hopefully mean we start to see some progress on the project as a whole.

https://news.sky.com/story/hollywood-writers-vote-to-accept-deal-ending-five-month-strike-12981586

Posted by: @icarus

Greta Gerwig did a talk at the BFI Film Festival in London this week (see quote below from the Hollywood Reporter)

Gerwig said she was currently working on another project, without giving many details away. “I’m in the writing process,” she admitted, “and it’s hard because I’m having recurring nightmares.”

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/greta-gerwig-barbie-reactions-self-doubt-1235612250/

 

Potentially looking like she's started writing on Narnia? 

Also confirmation that Matthew Aldrich's scripts are not being used?

Doesn't look like she said anything much more than that though. However with the writers strike now over, it should hopefully mean we start to see some progress on the project as a whole.

https://news.sky.com/story/hollywood-writers-vote-to-accept-deal-ending-five-month-strike-12981586

Incidentally, Lewis also had recurring nightmares while writing early drafts of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - nightmares about a ferocious lion!  

Posted by: @icarus

Greta Gerwig did a talk at the BFI Film Festival in London this week (see quote below from the Hollywood Reporter) 

Potentially looking like she's started writing on Narnia? 

Also confirmation that Matthew Aldrich's scripts are not being used?

I wouldn't say this is proof that Aldrich's work is wiped. Though, I've been under that assumption since the article reporting Gerwig was poised to direct and write new Narnia films.

Glad there's some movement again in the world of writers. For a while there, it looked like the strike was tracking to go a full 12 months!

Mind if I refer to something from long ago in this thread? I know it's annoying of me but what else can I do when I sudden realize what I should have written?  

This post is going to have to spoil the ending of Gerwig's Little Women and parts of the endings to her other movies. I thought of putting the whole thing in spoilers but that just seemed like a desperate cry for attention. I hope people not wanting these movies spoiled will be OK with just not reading this. 

Icarus wrote that he was fairly confident Greta Gerwig would want to honor C. S. Lewis's intentions in her Narnia adaptations because the ending to her Little Women was all about authorial intent. Here's the spoiler part. According to her letters, Louisa May Alcott imagined the character of Jo as being a "literary spinster" like herself, but the storytelling conventions of her time demanded she give her a husband. Gerwig actually works this into her adaptation. Right before Jo and Prof. Bhaer declares their love for each other, we cut to the future where Jo's editor tells her despite her insistence that it's out of character, she has to end her book with the heroine married. Only when she agrees do we cut back to the romantic scene, implying it's imaginary. 

What doesn't seem to occur to Icarus is that Alcott's "authorial intent" already played into Greta Gerwig's goals. By his own admission, her movies end with the leading lady not getting together with her love interest and in the Narnia Facebook group, someone has shared a quote with her about how she wishes she could find a way to have stories about women be less driven by romance. If she had really loved the romance between Prof. Bhaer and Jo in the book and been saddened by the idea of undermining it in her retelling, then I'd be impressed. But can anyone find me a quote from her that says so? (I actually wouldn't be surprised if there is such a quote because, for a movie trying to make the case that Jo getting married is out of character, the 2019 Little Women sure emphasize how lonely and tired of being single she is in the last act. Despite how that might sound, I actually like that seemingly contradictory aspect of the movie. It's one of the things that makes it complex and interesting.) Really, it would impress me if someone would share any quote from her about something she disliked about Little Women but felt compelled to retain in her adaptation anyway out of respect for the material and the fans. Then I might get excited about her adapting Narnia. 

Posted by: @col-klink

By his own admission, her movies end with the leading lady not getting together with her love interest and in the Narnia Facebook group, someone has shared a quote with her about how she wishes she could find a way to have stories about women be less driven by romance.

Well... others may have said this already, but that in itself is at least somewhat encouraging. All seven of the Narnia stories have at least one strong and interesting young female character — Polly, Lucy, Jill and Aravis are the obvious ones, and of course Susan's inner conflict over Narnia, and her decision to reject it as just "those funny games we used to play", is a very interesting subplot in itself, which a film director could easily make a bit more of (perhaps give us more insight into it than Lewis does) without undermining or detracting from the main story. AND, more to the point, none of these young women's stories are the least bit "driven by romance". The closest we get is the fact that Aravis does marry Shasta / Cor when they're a bit older, but that's practically a postscript in the original book and doesn't play a major part in the actual plot of the story.

(Now a good director who wanted to keep within the spirit of that book could drop a few hints, in the course of the film, that beneath all their bickering and mutual annoyance, Aravis and Shasta are — without consciously realising it at this stage — gradually growing closer on a deeper level and if they were separated, they would find themselves genuinely missing each other, even though neither of them would want to admit it. I'd really love to see an adaptation of HHB that manages to bring that aspect of the plot out very subtly, without making it too obvious until the very end.)

That aside, though, Aravis's character arc is mainly about her being a strong and independent-minded girl in a society that is horribly misogynistic and gives women no real rights or power at all — she's born into "privilege" as far as wealth is concerned, but she has nothing ahead of her but an unwanted arranged marriage and the proverbial gilded cage, and she throws all that away and makes her break for freedom in a journey to a land where, as she has to realise, she may well be a nobody, but she'll be free. Her relationship with Cor is merely incidental to that, although of course it leads to her becoming a queen in the end, but Lewis never makes that the main point of her story.

Meanwhile, none of the other main female characters in the series have their stories conclude with marriage at all, and there's not even a hint of romance in any of them (except for adult Susan in HHB being pursued by Rabadash, and it's quite clear she recognises that as driven by lust and greed, not by any real love and respect for her, and she totally rejects him). We've already seen that the Walden film of PC didn't go down well at all with most fans where it tried to introduce romance between Susan and Caspian, which Lewis never even implicitly suggested in the original story (Susan barely gets to spend any time with him in the book). So I should think a director who actively rejects the cliche that women's stories must be "driven by romance", let alone conclude with the leading lady marrying her love interest, would be pretty happy with Narnia in that regard.

Of course, none of this gives us any idea of what Gerwig may actually do with the Narnia stories on the whole, whichever of them she ends up adapting. But if she does make changes to the female characters' roles and story arcs on some kind of feminist grounds — which I get the impression is what some Narnia fans are fearing — I'm guessing she at least won't introduce romantic relationships where the original stories definitely don't have them!!

Posted by: @courtenay

(Now a good director who wanted to keep within the spirit of that book could drop a few hints, in the course of the film, that beneath all their bickering and mutual annoyance, Aravis and Shasta are — without consciously realising it at this stage — gradually growing closer on a deeper level and if they were separated, they would find themselves genuinely missing each other, even though neither of them would want to admit it. I'd really love to see an adaptation of HHB that manages to bring that aspect of the plot out very subtly, without making it too obvious until the very end.)

Oh yes. I actually see Cor and Aravis's romance as more of a C-plot. Hey, they start out as two young children. One of the things I'm actually kind of worried about is that if it gets turned into the A-plot (which would require to age them up, which I'm sure we don't want either).

Posted by: @courtenay

Meanwhile, none of the other main female characters in the series have their stories conclude with marriage at all, and there's not even a hint of romance in any of them (except for adult Susan in HHB being pursued by Rabadash, and it's quite clear she recognises that as driven by lust and greed, not by any real love and respect for her, and she totally rejects him).

Right. I would actually be in favor of seeing Rabadash as a seemingly nice guy at the start and watch him reveal his true nature as the story progresses. It would actually make an interesting plot twist.

Posted by: @courtenay

We've already seen that the Walden film of PC didn't go down well at all with most fans where it tried to introduce romance between Susan and Caspian, which Lewis never even implicitly suggested in the original story (Susan barely gets to spend any time with him in the book). So I should think a director who actively rejects the cliche that women's stories must be "driven by romance", let alone conclude with the leading lady marrying her love interest, would be pretty happy with Narnia in that regard.

I wasn't a huge fan of the Caspian-Susan romance in the Walden PC. Oh, it's still an enjoyable movie,  but I thought the Caspian and Susan romance was unnecessary and felt a bit forced. But I guess that's Hollywood for you. In the book, the girls actually didn't meet Caspian until near the end. I guess I would be fine if they decide to give the girls more interaction with him, and there doesn't have to be any hint.

Posted by: @courtenay

Of course, none of this gives us any idea of what Gerwig may actually do with the Narnia stories on the whole, whichever of them she ends up adapting. But if she does make changes to the female characters' roles and story arcs on some kind of feminist grounds — which I get the impression is what some Narnia fans are fearing — I'm guessing she at least won't introduce romantic relationships where the original stories definitely don't have them!!

Oh yes, and I am, for sure. You never know what filmmakers are capable of. Narnia does have some romance. The only ones I picture are Caspian and Ramandu's daughter (and I much rather had that expanded on a bit than the non-canon Caspian and Susan romance), Frank and Helen (the married couple that become the first king and queen of Narnia), and of course Cor and Aravis (which is more of the C-plot).

@courtenay That's what I thought at first but then I remembered that what Icarus described (there's some kind of romance but the wouldbe lovers don't end up together) is actually the exact same thing that happens in the Prince Caspian movie.  

Posted by: @col-klink

@courtenay That's what I thought at first but then I remembered that what Icarus described (there's some kind of romance but the wouldbe lovers don't end up together) is actually the exact same thing that happens in the Prince Caspian movie.  

True, but that's in a previous movie, made by a different studio and director, which — in that regard — was definitely not true to the book and was only a fairly modest success at the box office. If Greta Gerwig really is interested in preserving the author's original intentions, as well as in avoiding romantic cliches, then I can't imagine why she would do a rehash of the infamous "Suspian" subplot.

That's all I was trying to say, really — whatever else she may possibly decide to change about Narnia, at least we can be reasonably assured she won't introduce romantic relationships that aren't in the original books!  

@courtenay 

Right. I don't think she would rehash that whole "Suspian" thing anyhow. Though I would be fine if she wants to give the girls more interaction with Caspian (that is, if she does PC).

Then of course, with the cases of Caspian and Ramandu's daughter and Cor and Aravis and even where Rabadash wants Susan for himself, I think we can also be assured that she'll at least keep it in within the PG-rating.

Posted by: @courtenay

That's all I was trying to say, really — whatever else she may possibly decide to change about Narnia, at least we can be reasonably assured she won't introduce romantic relationships that aren't in the original books!

That's what I'd assume too. But I won't be surprised if she'll put some kind of romance in the story just so she can make a point of not having it be a successful one and then all her fans will praise her for being progressive when she's doing the exact same thing as the screenwriters for Prince Caspian who were male screenwriters and commercial ones at that. (If that last part sounds catty, it's directed at the critics, not at Gerwig or even the Caspian screenwriters. )

Posted by: @courtenay

If Greta Gerwig really is interested in preserving the author's original intentions, as well as in avoiding romantic cliches, then I can't imagine why she would do a rehash of the infamous "Suspian" subplot.

Well, that's all I was trying say, really. The quote only said she was interested in avoiding romantic cliches, not about the author's original intentions. 

Posted by: @col-klink

That's what I'd assume too. But I won't be surprised if she'll put some kind of romance in the story just so she can make a point of not having it be a successful one and then all her fans will praise her for being progressive when she's doing the exact same thing as the screenwriters for Prince Caspian who were male screenwriters and commercial ones at that. (If that last part sounds catty, it's directed at the critics, not at Gerwig or even the Caspian screenwriters. )

That's a possibility, I suppose, but it seems a very long bow to draw when we've got no evidence at all, so far, of what Gerwig may intend to do with Narnia. We do, however, have a statement from her to the effect that she'd like "stories about women to be less driven by romance" (I haven't seen the original quote, as I'm not on Facebook). So, based on that alone, why then would she want to add a romance — even an unsuccessful one — to a story that doesn't have any?

If you want to show that stories about women don't have to be driven by romance, then it's surely far more progressive to portray stories of women or girls who are strong, interesting, adventurous, well-rounded characters in themselves without having a romantic partner or a romantic interest at all — and just about all of Lewis's main female characters fit that bill pretty well (including Aravis, if you stick to the book and don't make her eventual romance with Cor into a significant element of the plot). Throwing in a failed romance might show that the woman in question can move on from heartbreak and disappointment and be happy without needing to have "that special someone" in her life, but that's still having a good deal of the plot focus on a will-they-or-won't-they relationship, which is a cliche in itself even if it doesn't end in "I Do".

It sounds like Gerwig might be interested in female characters whose stories aren't defined by romance — successful or unsuccessful — at all, which would be something different (and quite refreshing). And considering that the Narnia books are aimed primarily at the under-12 age group, which means it wouldn't be appropriate to bring any serious romantic relationships into them anyway...  

Even if Greta Gerwig stays closely to the books, there's also promotion to consider.

Well, as it turns out, a movie doesn't do well not just because audiences don't like it. In some cases, it could be because of lack of promotion or very little of it. So promotion is kind of a big deal.

So even if she does follow the books closely for Narnia movies, it will also count for something if she finds different ways to promote it.

I'm cautiously optimistic for a couple of reasons.

The first is that Gerwig is extremely talented as a writer and director, probably the most in either category to adapt the books. I certainly share the concerns that are out there about what kind of changes will be made, but for me it's hard to imagine much more problematic changes than what Walden did to Voyage of the Dawn Treader. 

My second reason is because, as much as I enjoyed the first two Walden movies, I was concerned about the fact that they seemed to see the series as just a young adult action series (I.e. Lord of the Rings for younger audiences), and I think that misses the mark of what Narnia is primarily about. Yes, many of the books have battles and action sequences, but those are not really the heart of the books. This problem came to a head in Voyage of the Dawn Treader - a book that has very little action in it and no major battles. They invented a major battle for the film's climax and rearranged major parts of the book (including Eustace's dragon transformation) to fit this change. 

Where I'm excited about the choice of Gerwig is that she isn't really an action director. She's about characters and story, which to me gets more to the heart of these stories. Now, obviously she could end up butchering Lewis's themes, but the choice of her to run point on the series fills me with some (albeit, not absolute) hope that they're thinking the right way about the series.