5: About a decade ago, we had a very serious conversation about whether or not the Silver Surfer has a willy.

About a decade ago, we had a serious conversation about whether or not the Silver Surfer has a willy. The answer, you will recall, was “Up to Fantastic Four #70, no; after Silver Surfer issue #1, yes.

In Stan Lee’s inferior reworking of Jack Kirby’s Silver Surfer, the Christ-like herald of Galactus is revealed to be an alien hippy named Norrin Radd, who sacrificed his humanity in to order save his planet from the space-god’s wrath. The exiled super-hero spends page after page pining for Shalla Bal, his one true love who had to remain on his home planet of Zenn-La. 

The forthcoming and extremely promising Fantastic Four movie appears to have swapped the characters, so that Shalla Bal is the exiled Surfer and Norrin Radd the boy she left behind. It is far from obvious that this switcheroo would significantly affect the story. There is a minor subplot when Ben Grimm erroneously comes to the conclusion that the Surfer is hitting on his girlfriend Alicia; much, much later Dan Slott wrote a limited series in which the Surfer had a dalliance with a human woman named Dawn. Neither plot is central to the original Galactus saga. If you are adapting 1950s and 1960s comic books, there is always going to be a dearth of interesting female characters in the source material, and a bit of judicious gender swapping is a perfectly sensible idea. 

But I must admit that when I heard about the Silver Surferette, my first thought was “Oh dear. That is really a bit you know, obvious.” 

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4:If your school still had religious assemblies, you probably puzzled your way through Cardinal Newman’s Dream of Gerontius...

If your school still had religious assemblies, you probably puzzled your way through Cardinal Newman’s Dream of Gerontius, which worked its way into hymnbooks as Praise to the Holiest in the Height. 

O wisest love! that flesh and blood

  Which did in Adam fail,

Should strive afresh against the foe,

  Should strive and should prevail.

And that a higher gift than grace

  Should flesh and blood refine,

God’s presence, and His very self

  And essence all-divine.

Evangelicals are prone to reduce the whole of Christianity to the single proposition that Jesus was punished on the Cross for the transgressions of the human race: but the hymn asserts that human nature was change by the very fact of its being amalgamated with divine nature. A sentimental modern “chorus” has a jolly good go at putting across the same concept “Lord of infinity/stooping so tenderly/lifts our humanity/to the height of his throne.” The Athanasian Creed, which is I think still in the Anglican prayer book, says that although Jesus was both God and Man “yet he is not two, but one Christ; One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but by taking of the Manhood into God”. 

Lewis, in Mere Christianity, uses a vividly concrete image to explain the idea. Imagine that you could see the human race from an extra-temporal perspective, he says. Then the human race would appear, less as a collection of distinct individuals, more as a very complicated tree. Each branch of the tree would be a human life; long or short as the case may be; growing out of his father and mother and perhaps with children growing out of it. [I wonder if he was thinking of Robert Heinlien’s Lifeline when he wrote the passage?] If Christianity is true then somewhere in the middle of that vast four dimensional spider-web is one human life which is also the life of God: and the presence of that divine life changes the totality. 

“It is as if something which is always affecting the whole human mass begins, at one point, to affect the whole human mass in a new way. From that point the effect spreads through all mankind. It makes a difference to people who lived before Christ as well as to people who lived after Him. It makes a difference to people who have never heard of Him. It is like dropping into a glass of water one drop of something which gives a new taste or a new colour to the whole lot.”

This is a drawback to anyone who sees interplanetary missionary work as a theoretical possibility. If God specifically saved humanity by taking on a specifically human nature, then it is hard to see that he also redeemed Venusian nature or Kaled nature. 

So what does it mean to suppose or conjecture that Jesus took on the body of a Lion in another world or another universe? Are Peter and Lucy Kings and Queens of Narnia by virtue of Aslan dying on the Stone Table, or by virtue of Jesus having once shared their nature? Can God save mouse-nature or donkey-nature by amalgamating himself with lion-nature? Is it quite decent to even contemplate the question?

“But Andrew: these are not questions which would reasonably occur to anyone reading a fairy story; and they are not questions which Lewis himself was particularly interested in. The average occupant of the average pew has probably never heard of the Athanasian Creed, although they may have sung Meekness and Majesty. Can’t you just let a fairy story be a fairy story?”

I agree: these are not sensible questions. We don’t read Puss in Boots and ask whether a cat’s vocal chords could really produce human speech; we don’t watch Tom and Jerry and wonder about the physics and biology of a universe in which domestic animals can survive being physically flattened by anvils. It would not occur to me to ask such questions: unless reactionary Christians had started pre-emptively damning an unmade movie on the grounds that a famous actress will be speaking the words of an animated Lion.

Unless, that is, there were people who were  okay with Jesus being a Cat but not okay with Jesus being a woman. 

People who, would, I assume, want to change Sidney Carter’s cosmic hymn so it says 

who can tell what other body

he may hallow for his own

but it will definitely be a man’s body

because that’s the only one in which he would feel at home.

And who would amend Johnny Mathis to “waiting for one child: black, white, yellow, no-one knows, but one thing they do know, it will definitely be a boy.” 

People who think that Jesus’ humanity is inessential, but that his masculinity is indispensable.   

That God is irreducibly male and that Christianity represents the belief that the universe is governed by the male principle. [*] 

I am reminded of the old joke about the Jewish atheist who visits Belfast during the Troubles, and is asked whether he is a Catholic Jewish Atheist or a Protestant Jewish Atheist? 

“Is it bad theology to imagine that the Christian story might have happened on a planet of super intelligent asexual amoebas?”

“It depends. Are they boy super-intelligent asexual amoebas or girl super-intelligent asexual amoebas.” 

Continues.

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* This is not actually what they are saying, of course. What they are actually saying is that they hate on trans people, and that the pretend cat with the female voice can be drawn into their whining conspiracy theory.

3: There has been a good deal of fuss about the rumour — which is still only a rumour at time of writing — that Meryl Streep has been cast as the voice of Aslan in the forthcoming Netflicks adaptation of the Narnia saga.

There has been a good deal of fuss about the rumour — which is still only a rumour at time of writing — that Meryl Streep has been cast as the voice of Aslan in the forthcoming Netflicks adaptation of the Narnia saga. CS Lewis describes Aslan’s voice as deep and resonant, which are not necessarily the first words which come to mind when you think of the star of Kramer vs Kramer, although she did do a pretty good turn as Margaret Thatcher. But it is perfectly possible that Greta Gerwig thinks that an incredibly fierce CGI lion who speaks with a relatively soft, feminine voice would convey exactly the otherworldliness that Lewis’s Aslan ought to have. By no means can we infer that the director has unilaterally declared that Aslan is a lioness. 

But what if she had?

 Well, when Lewis goes looking for an analogy for the Crown of Thorns, he has the Witch shave off Aslan’s mane; which doesn’t work if They are a Lioness. And the scene in which the two girls romp through Narnia on the Lion’s back would, I think, have a slightly different emotional resonance if they were riding a Lioness. Unless, of course, Lucy and Susan are going to become Lucius and Simon; but that would spoil the analogy between the Pevensie girls and the women who went to the tomb of Jesus on Easter morning. I must admit that the  idea of Simon becoming obsessed with Levis, Lynx and night-club passes has a certain charm. Would we then have to say that Petra receives the Magic Sword from Mother Christmas? Or are swords purely male symbols, in which case she would get the healing potion. It’s complicated.

None of this is uninteresting. Switching a character’s gender is a good way of interrogating how gender works in your story. Helen Mirren is obviously correct to say that the James Bond franchise is built on sexism; but that is one of the things which might make a female 007 and interesting proposition. Asking “What if Bond were a girl?” could illuminate the character, in a way that getting Anthony Horowitz or someone to flesh out another spy story out of Ian Fleming’s waste paper basket might not. (Should we imagine a Jane Bond who flirts with Master Moneypenny and gives Willy Galore a slap on the arse for interfering in woman-talk?) But perhaps we don’t want an action packed spy-thriller to be either interesting or illuminating?

Some people think that “respect” for the author demands absolute, literal fidelity to his work. “Adaptation” is simply a matter of transmuting the authorial words into moving pictures. A sufficiently perfect adaptation would give the person who has only seen the film precisely the same experience as the person who has only read the book. And, indeed, it has been said that some very popular novelists — Dan Brown and John Grisham, perhaps — compose “novels” which are no-more than descriptions of films, which readers then bring to life in their heads. And if you take this view, then to change the colour of a character’s hair or the timbre of their voice is to posthumously insult the writer and alienate the entire fan-base. Comic book fans are already in high dudgeon because it appears that in the new Fantastic Four movie, Mister Fantastic will have acquired an entirely non-canonical moustache. 

But some of us feel that adaptation is much more akin to translation. If a modern poet says he is going to translate Gawain and the Green Knight into modern English, I don’t  say “Well, hopefully, this time he will get it right and no-one will ever have to do another translation ever again.” I say “I am certainly looking forward to finding out how this particular writer, with the particular writer’s unique experience, creates a new poem based from the medieval source.” 

But some people go a lot further than this. Their problem is not just that bringing new ideas to an adaptation is an insult to CS Lewis. They think that saying that Aslan is, or might have been, a female Lion is the same as saying that Jesus is, or could have been, a female human, and therefore that God is, or could be, a female deity. And this, they think, is a calculated affront to Christianity. 

Now, for all I know, it may in fact be a calculated affront to Christianity. Greta Gerwig is nothing if not iconoclastic. Barbie was an unashamed celebration of all things pink; but it was also an unsubtle attack on the stereotyped notions of femininity that pink toys arguably promulgate. It would not be at all surprising if her Narnia movies both celebrate and subvert their subject matter: a faithful and inspirational cinematic recreation of a cherished Christian allegory which also stuck two fingers up at the  patriarchal conception of God. And that could be done well or badly: it could be interesting or it could be boring. If I heard that someone was translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into the language of hip-hop I wouldn’t say “That’s an insult to the author, to King Arthur, and to everyone who has ever studied medieval literature.” I would say “Weird idea. I’ll look forward to finding out how it works." [*]

There should be no possible objection to the use of the Lioness as symbol of Jesus. All sorts of things have been used as symbols of Jesus: unicorns and shamrocks and lumps of rock. Medieval allegorists said he was like a mother pelican, because the mother pelican will peck at her own chest to feed her chicks. Jesus compared himself with a mother hen. (And also to a burglar.) In the book of Proverbs the Divine Wisdom uses female pronouns. There is even (I have read) a tradition of depicting the wound in Christ’s side as a woman’s vulva. 

It only becomes a problem when you insist on the latter Narnia books and sat that Aslan is the [Son] of God, incarnated in the body of Lioness; just as Jesus was the [Son] of God incarnated in the body of male Jewish artisan. This clearly gets us into an absolute buffer zone between orthodoxy and heresy: even discussing it feels vaguely indecent. [*]

Continues

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[*]  Yo—way back when crowns were claimed with steel,
Kings rode deep, swords flashin’ like they real.
Legends born in the grime of the field,
Blood wrote truth, no fake, no shield.

From Troy’s fall came a fire, a new breed rose,
Rome got built, then Britain froze—
Cold land, brave hearts, story unfolds,
Where Arthur sits, and the Green Knight rolls.

[** ] It took the Church about a hundred and twenty five years (from 325 to 451) to decide what it meant for the Son of God to “become” a man. The answer could arguably be summarised as “he just did, okay?” It had taken the best part of three centuries, from the Crucifixion to the council of Nicea, to establish exactly what was meant by “Son of God”.