How White People Stole The Odyssey
I’m sorry to talk about The Odyssey again, but the scale of the right’s crash out is something to truly behold. During the height of the scandal I suppose we’ll have to call “Lupita Nyong’ate,” every far-right personality from Elon Musk down to your average comment section troll was betting everything on this movie flopping at the box office.
Their absolute certainty that a major fantasy epic with an A-list ensemble directed by one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of the 21st century, who was fucking knighted for his previous film that also won 7 Oscars including 4 of the Big 7, would utterly fail was based on one singular gambit: that audiences in the age of Donald Trump would object, to the point of boycott, a movie based on Greek myth that featured a partially multi-racial cast, as well as one white transgender actor.
They lost that gambit. The Odyssey has the box office on the ground begging audiences for mercy to ease up on the combat-strength money hose they’re firing at it, and the critics are forced to fall back on wild conspiracy theories about how Rotten Tomatoes is faking the audience score, or cinemas are faking ticket sales, or that the idea that a movie earning over a billion dollars makes it successful rather than a catastrophic failure is some sort of Hollywood accounting illusion.
But whether they foolishly deny or begrudgingly accept that people are, in fact, both watching and enjoying this movie, the anti-wokeness crusaders nevertheless remain insistent that their complaints about the casting are not racist. They’ll say “You wouldn’t cast a white actor as Black Panther” or “You wouldn’t make a MLK biopic starring Ryan Gosling.” You can counter by explaining that there are explicit artistic decisions for the casting of these characters, but then they will immediately hit you with this piece of Twitter copypasta as swiftly as pulling out an Uno Reverse card:
And you know what, let’s steelman the anti-woke race-casting side to examine how they really are kind-of-sort-of lying about their true objections.
This should go without saying, but I have no issue with people who don’t like this movie for good-faith reasons, because, I mean, you’re allowed to not like something. I just saw it this week and thought it was good but not great. The biggest let down was the dialogue, and I don’t mean the American accents—that didn’t bother me at all—I mean Nolan’s penchant for making characters explain the theme of the movie to each other in a way that’s too clear that they’re actually explaining it to you. (How many times, in a movie set during the Bronze Age collapse, does a character need to say to another character “The Bronze Age is collapsing”? More than a few, according to Nolan.)
Strictly on the subject of racial casting, though, the arguments against The Odyssey are dishonest bullshit.
First of all, these goalposts are on wheels. I’ve seen multiple people online ride the “historical authenticity” line of argument to its absolute conclusion: Not only should all the actors be Greek, but the dialogue should be spoken entirely in the 9th Century BC Northwest Doric dialect of ancient Ithaca. Subtitled, presumably. Or maybe not—maybe the audience should take it on themselves to learn the language in order to properly honor Homer.
It quickly becomes clear that this is a super disingenuous and post hoc rationalization about the specific complaint they have but can’t say outright. Consider that many of the same people lambasting this film for deviating from the story and not being cast with Greek people speaking authentic Doric have also suddenly discovered a newfound love for a 2004 Wolfgang Petersen flop called Troy.
Troy is based on The Iliad, the story to which The Odyssey can roughly be considered a sequel. It’s an okay effort by a decent director to revive the sword-and-sandal genre. It’s also an absolutely terrible adaptation of The Iliad. Nobody who nitpicks minutiae of Nolan’s retooling of the timeline of Odysseus’ journey gets to praise Troy for reducing the famously, importantly, prolonged, stalemated, ten-year Trojan Forever War to a five-day skirmish.
They don’t speak Greek, they speak Queen’s Latin—a type of mildly British-accented English dialect invented for sword-and-sandal films.
Nobody has a problem with any of this. Nobody is petitioning Mel Gibson to come in and do a Mycenaean mulligan on Wolfgang Petersen’s largely forgotten attempt to cash in on the early 2000s Lord of the Rings cinema craze. You know what they absolutely love about Troy? It’s this:
The gods are Aryan.
Not every actor in Troy is blonde and blue-eyed, but the closer they are to divinity, the more this is emphasized. Helen of Troy, the daughter of Zeus, is played by German actress and model Diane Kruger. Achilles, the half-nymph quarter-demigod epic hero of Greece is played by Brad Pitt, a white American actor whose ancestry is Scots-Irish, German, and Dutch. Investigate further afield to the other, darker-haired main cast members and you still find mostly Irish, Scottish, English, German, and Scandinavian. The geographically Greekest cast member, Eric Bana, a white Aussie, is German and Croatian—his real last name is “Banadinović.”
The point is that most of the actors in this movie trace their ancestry to Northern European countries that are further from Greece than Ithaca is from Troy. This should bother cinematic Homer purists if they were actually being honest about what they want.
Of course they move the goalposts here and say that the truly important thing is that the actors are all European or of European descent. And hell, maybe diversity is positive here as long as it’s European diversity, because this story belongs to Europeans. So it would be okay to have a mix of Greeks, Italians, Scots, Germans, maybe get really spicy and cast someone Slavic. But when they get to propose their own fantasy casting, you know which ethnic group is going to be cast as the best Europeans. The ones descended from Olympus.
In actuality, what bothers casting critics about Nolan’s Odyssey isn’t its faithfulness to Homer, nor to Greek culture, nor even to Western culture. This is a skirmish over whiteness, and, paradoxically, when it comes to the question of “who is white,” the Greeks don’t quite make the cut, although we’re rather happy to take elements of their mythology and bleach-blonde them until they are acceptably Nordic.
Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now:
This is just a less dramatic version of a European fantasy trope that’s much more pronounced in, for example, Lord of the Rings. Middle Earth is supposed to be ancient Europe, and all of its inhabitants technically Europeans, but… well, there’s Europeans and then there’s those Europeans:
I’m not calling Tolkien or Peter Jackson or Wolfgang Petersen or any of these filmmakers racist or white supremacist or anything like that, but you can tell a lot about fantasy fandom by its reaction when you mess with this formula even a little bit.
White nationalism has always had a complicated relationship with the status of the Mediterranean. In the early 20th century, southern and eastern Europeans were not widely considered white outside of the European continent and, as a matter of government policy in the United States and Australia, were restricted by immigration laws that only permitted the free migration of Nordic and Germanic people. Mediterraneans were treated with the same suspicion by “white people” that was cast on Jews. They were all, at best, white-adjacent. I won’t repeat what they were considered at worst.
But you will notice a bit of a contradiction here. Half of the people who are pissed off about The Odyssey have Greek statues or philosopher busts in their profile pictures. And, in fact, why would they be so pissed off about this in the first place if they didn’t consider the Greeks to be absolutely foundational to the white identity?
Those statues themselves might actually have something to do with it. Those beautiful milk-white marble artworks and pillars. The medieval Church preserved the wisdom of the Greek and Roman philosophers, so we knew the beauty of their thought and of their prose and, in the case of Homer, their poetry. Through their art, we also know what they found to be physically beautiful in the human form—whiteness. Pale, uncorrupted purity.
We now know that the statues were a lie. The Greeks and Romans painted them brightly in colors you might even call garish by modern tastes. The ravages of time, sunlight, erosion, and burial stripped most classical sculpture of its paint, and those that remained with traces of their ancient decorations often fell victim to conspiracy—museum curators scrubbing it off to maintain the lie.
Christianity in Europe was sculpted by Greek and Roman thought and literature, but at the same time they were offended by its paganism. The explanation that they often used was that the pagans had been divinely inspired and, although they got the religion part wrong, all of the smart stuff they came up with came to them from angel muses communicating to them the wisdom of God.
Theologians like Clement of Alexandria took Greek texts like Plato and Homer and tried to Christianize them. The classics that were worth preserving were lifted from the sewer of the Pagan Mediterranean in which they were scribed and “improved” to better serve the theology of northern and western Europeans.
And even still, this wasn’t racism. This was culture and theology. The ancient Greeks were not the white supremacist utopia that Marble Statue Twitter wants them to have been. You would be surprised about how recent the concept of racism actually is. We never really did “race” until the mid-19th century when northern and western Europeans came up with Nordicism and a white identity that could marry their new concept of the biological superiority of pale people with their love of the classics.
To them, the ancient Greeks actually were Nordic White, descended from Scandinavia. The only reason they have dark hair and olive skin today is because they got too close and cozy with Africa and the Middle East and started interbreeding through the centuries, so now they were tainted and lost. So, according to the Nordicists, you get to shun the mongrel souvlaki-munchers while still appreciating Homer knowing that he actually looked like Alexander Skarsgård.
The Christian entanglement with Nordicism explains a number of things. It explains this:
…and it explains why the most vocal critics of Christopher Nolan’s casting decisions are so very, very upset about this. It isn’t just a casting decision, it is literal blasphemy.
The gods are Aryan. Nolan’s unforgivable sin is that his casting decisions for the representation of the divine in Homer not only isn’t Nordic, it’s not even European.
Nolan’s movie, if you watch it, is very clearly not a history lesson and it’s not a close, literal, scene-for-scene adaptation of The Odyssey either, and isn’t meant to be. It has themes (the right hates those) and it’s very clear (as clear as Nolan ever is, which is very, very clear) that the film is saying something about us as a species, not just white people. It would actually disrupt the message Nolan is trying to give (clunky as it may be) if he targeted it specifically at white people.
Ordinarily, if you don’t want to watch a movie, if you think you won’t like it or even that it will make you very angry, then you are allowed to not watch it. It’s a different story if it is literal blasphemy. That means its actual existence is wrong and it’s not enough to not watch it. It has to be destroyed.
Nolan’s critics, of course, can’t un-make this movie. Despite desperate and pathetic attempts they made to prevent its production, up to and including efforts to get the Greek or American governments to intervene through lawsuits or just some sort of direct action, it happened, and way too many people are buying tickets to look at the Golden Calf. So now a campaign, led by Elon Musk, are in a desperate hurry to contain it by producing their own “better” adaptation, either by quickly slapping one together with AI, or by convincing and funding Mel Gibson to create a version without casting it with a pack of n*****s.
On the AI side, a Twitter account called “Heavy Pulp” created a proof of concept that Musk has been promoting as “historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.” It only further proves how distorted through Nordicism’s lens their view of “historically accurate” and “true to Homer” really is. It depicts an interaction between Odysseus and the goddess Calypso. Unsurprisingly, this is the historically accurate Greek Calypso:
Who, later in the sequence, I shit you not, is ordered to release him by a Christian Archangel.
True to Homer indeed.
Here’s the whole video, if you want a good laugh at what Musk and the rest of the box office conspiracists think has a good shot at dethroning Christopher Nolan once they boil Lake Michigan to expand into a three-hour-plus slop pile. Take bets on how far you can make it through these three minutes.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey isn’t the greatest movie ever made, and I think the culture war surrounding it has affected the discourse’s loudest voices on either side to make it sound like this is either the history of cinema’s magnum opus or, to quote more than a few Twitter accounts, the literal end of Western civilization. Ironic, because the literal end of Western civilization brought about by people like Elon Musk who lack basic kindness and empathy is the actual main theme of the movie!!!
Still, considering the cast and crew and director who made it, its subject matter, and its summer blockbuster competition (Minions vs Monsters and Live Action Moana) I’d be shocked if the culture war moved the needle on this more than 1% in either direction.
It’s an artwork in a visual medium that a guy and his artistic partners made to deliver a message that they thought was worth telling. If you’re someone who is offended that they’re using The Odyssey as a vehicle to deliver this message, then you can watch any one of the over a dozen other film adaptations that still exist and you are still allowed to watch. One of them has Kirk Douglas in it, you will probably like it.
Or, maybe not. Half the cast are Italian.
So hey, I'm writing a book about toxic masculinity, online culture, and how it all led to Trump. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and if you like this newsletter then you'll probably like my book. If you're unsure, the good news is I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop.
Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now:
