A chubby Digory with a schoolboy satchel on the streets of 1950s London. That may be no-nonsense Aunt Letty behind him.
I’ve been aware of director Greta Gerwig’s helming of this project for a while now, but my interest was only cursory since the news had been swirling around for a few years with nothing to show for it. However, in the past month, the actual filming has begun and from the set photos we’ve been able to get a glimpse of Gerwig’s vision – there’s been a major time change from 1900 to 1955, making The Magician’s Nephew set in a post-war England during the Cold War, not the late Victorian Age as was written.
A meta moment where a 1950s street advert for paint echoes Aslan’s creation of Narnia
Like a lot of fans I was surprised, and unlike a lot of fans, I’m very stoked to see this take on it.
Let’s start with this leaked pic showing Jadis’s stunt double riding a horse during her rampage through London. The dummy in front of her is supposed to be Digory (whose real face would be inserted in post-production later.)
My first thought is that Jadis’s outfit is homage to the Paco Rabanne inspired costumes used in the naughty 1967 SF film Barbarella. Rabanne was an influential fashion designer who specialized in futuristic pop-art outfits made of linked metal and plastic pieces. Though costume designer Jacques Fonteray actually created the Barbarella outfits, the Rabanne aesthetic was strong and even extended to the movie’s outlandish sets.
Poor Jane Fonda literally starved herself to embody the lithesome Barbarella. Note the fabric made of tiny metallic squares that looks like chainmail.
Of course, you could say this Rabanne aesthetic was out of place for the 1950s in a high fashion sense. But it would be what people of the 1950s would think a futuristic outfit would look like, from Hollywood movies and innumerable pulpy magazine covers.
Screen tests for Anne Francis in the 1956 SF film Forbidden Planet, which takes place in the 23rd century. Note the metallic silver to denote a future era and the use of plastic — both of which Barbarella lampooned. Even into the 1970s future fashions were defined by these elements.
I think Greta Gerwig may be playing around with that retrofuture aesthetic, that is, what Lewis himself might have been visualizing when he wrote The Magician’s Nephew in the early 1950s. Remember that he was a big SF fan and read a lot of what we would consider pulp fiction, the kind that had the fantastic, and often trashy and suggestive, magazine covers. Note as well he’d written three such books himself: The Space trilogy. Though more high-minded than what his contemporaries wrote, the books resided cheek-by-jowl on many an early SFF fan’s bookshelf.
(All that said, Jadis’s new glittery getup is likely for a distance shot where the finer details wouldn’t be visible. So the costume here would be different from the close up one which might likely be damaged during a vigorous ride on a horse. )
Given how the costume has retro associations, Charn in this film might not be not an ancient empire but a pseudo-futuristic one straight from the pulps, like that of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom novels or the Flash Gordon movie serials where high technology mixes with swords, sandals, and slaves. I had such a visualization when I read MN for the first time.
Still from the 1930s movie serial Flash Gordon: a stone castle, a “modern” laboratory, short-shorts on the men, and a guy in Roman armor with a sword. Decorated with a Chinese dragon. Part and parcel for the wackiness of the Flash Gordon universe.
Considering this context, Gerwig might be emphasizing Jadis as a warlike conqueror and General rather than a stately Queen who watches the battle from the parapets.Her costume is more armor than state attire. Her destruction of Charn by the Deplorable Word also ties in to the very real threat of nuclear annihilation in post-WWII Britain. In this sense Charn might look like what SF writers and artists visualized themselves for Earth’s future, as silly and clunky — and nostalgic — as it would look today.
This playing around with audience expectations comes across as very meta – that is, viewers are led to be aware of them as movies and their relation to the original book and how and when it was written. Which Gerwig already accomplished in her much-lauded Barbie.
As I write this, I realize another reason for the 1955 setting is the sheer drabness of London during that time. Austerity rations were still going on, and the country was still mopping up damage from the Blitz. The economy was just getting back on its feet and any new buildings going up were likely of the modern architecture Prince (King now) Charles so fervently hated, as well as being cheap and quick to construct. It would make the contrast with The Wood Between the Worlds, and the freshness and beauty of Narnia, so much more intense in a way that Victorian England, with its rich colors and elaborate decoration, couldn’t. Sort of like the movie Wizard of Oz, where Oz is in color and Kansas in B&W.
All in all, I’ll be happy to see this version.
Oh, and I also have to say from other set pics it looks like they got Strawberry’s coloration right, if that is Strawberry in the pic. So many illustrators have depicted him as white, like the classic version of Pegasus. The incident with the hansom cab could play out as the one in the book did, as even in the 1950s there were carriages in Hyde Park to give pleasure rides.
