Lucifer, We Hardly Knew Ye

I spent much of Friday night and some of Saturday morning watching the long-anticipated adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman on Netflix. I have heard some complaints (or to be more accurate, I have heard many complaints about the complaints) about the race- and gender-swapping that occurred between the adaption from the comic to the show. Frankly, I don’t care one way or the other; it makes surprising little difference to the storytelling, which remains superb. But then it is neither horrifying blasphemy nor a brave necessary redressing of an error. As far as characters are his creations, he has every right to control their representation.  But while Neil Gaiman can retrofit his own work as much as he likes, I do not think he should have made the DC canonical figure of Lucian into Lucienne (though I think I can see the dramatic reason why he did it).

Nor do I have any problem with the character of Lucifer Morningstar being played by a woman. Angels (even fallen angels) have no gender; this is why Gaiman himself first imagined Lucifer as the androgynous rock star David Bowie. There is no reason why it should matter one whit whether the devil is played by a man or a woman. But I was rather hoping for something more like this:

Tilda Swinton as the angel Gabriel in “Constantine”

Rather than this:

Sorry, that was actually Florence Foster Spencer, renowned as The World’s Worst Opera Singer. Here is Gwendoline Christie as the Netflix Sandman Lucifer:

You can see my momentary confusion. I’m not saying the Fallen One cannot or should not be played by a woman; I just don’t know if this lipstick Lucifer would be the image I would choose for the role.

I don’t know, though. She’s giving off kind of a Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) vibe. I guess that’s pretty evil?