Deathworks: what they are, what they do
Oh great glory and splendor, looks like the shitlibs have found another lovely old classic to piss over, befoul, besmirch, and totally ruin.
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.”
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.
“Not surprisingly” being the operative turn of phrase here, of course. At this late stage of the game, nobody can credibly claim to be the least bit surprised at anything they say and/or do.
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