🔒 How the Right's Odyssey Rage Shows They Will Never Win the Culture War

So Christopher Nolan has gone and done it. The absolute madman has committed the perfect sin. An act of treachery and defiance so brazen that only a .gif of Jack Nicholson nodding evilly can do it proper justice. He cast Lupita Nyong’o as, of all people, Helen of Troy.

 This is Lupita Nyong’o:

I’m usually fairly ambivalent about casting actors to play the roles of characters that are a different race in the source material. But given the wider context here, on this occasion, I couldn’t be happier. I had my fingers crossed since the rumors began. Perhaps even better is the rumor, unconfirmed at the time of this writing, that Elliot Page is going to be playing Achilles. Page, you’re probably aware, is transgender, and played exclusively female characters up until 2017.

 Now, I want to back up a moment and say that I’m not trying to use Nyong’o’s Blackness or Page’s Transness as a weapon against anybody, nor do I believe Christopher Nolan is. He’s not some troll; he has a creative vision and every choice he makes seems to fit that vision in some way. Nyong’o and Page are a fine actors and not just a couple of minorities. To fall into the trap of viewing them as such, or seeing this decision as an act of stunt casting just to piss certain people off, wouldn’t actually make one much better than the people who are actually mad about this.

 But boy, men on Twitter with marble statue profile pictures are shitting blood.

The so-called manosphere, and the far-right ethnonationalist movement that are the meat and potatoes of the Trump administration (though, at this point, I repeat myself) are obsessed with Ancient Rome and Greece as the … well, for want of a better term, the Platonic ideal of Western Culture. But as I have written before it is a fake image, sold by Hollywood and by the handed-down fantasies of European nationalists who have all envisioned themselves as the heirs to the mightiest empires that ever existed as long as you ignore the Mongols and Ottomans.

 The Iliad and its “sequel” The Odyssey are considered the pinnacle of the Sacred Texts among this crowd, right up there with Beowulf, the Poetic Edda, The Turner Diaries, the Trump Bible, and something called “My Struggle” whose authorship escapes me.

 With this context in mind, Nolan’s upcoming blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey crosses two bright red lines in Trumpworld: You do not mess with the whiteness of Helen of Troy, and you do not mess with the masculinity of Achilles.

You need to understand that what Christopher Nolan is doing here is the equivalent to slipping deep into a xenomorph hive and slapping the queen.

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