SteynOnline Clubbers may have noticed there was no Q&A today. That is because we're saving it for Friday (3 p.m. American East Coast Time) as we will have two (not just one, but two) special guests! Tomorrow, we'll have Laura's Links as usual, and below, Tal's Odyssey continues.
As I was saying last time, controversy has been building around British film director Christopher Nolan's forthcoming film, The Odyssey, since last year. And it's only intensifying as the release date approaches (July 17). To fully appreciate the debate, you need some context. Here's a snapshot.
Amid Hollywood's declining cultural importance, Nolan has carved out a fantastically successful career over the past quarter century. His movies have grossed over $6 billion, making him the seventh-highest grossing film director in history. He's won every honor and award any director could dream of — Oscars, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and even a knighthood from King Charles in 2024. Movies like Inception, The Prestige, The Dark Night trilogy, Interstellar, and Oppenheimer, have entertained millions around the world. And through it all, he's repeatedly demonstrated unusual fidelity to the science behind the stories.
For example, for his 2014 hit Interstellar (starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain), Nolan hired astrophysicist Kip Thorne to ensure every detail of his time-travel/wormhole plot matched up with the science. And when Thorne published a book later that year entitled The Science of Interstellar, Nolan wrote the foreword. (Three years later, Thorne won the Nobel Prize for his research into gravitational waves). Nolan would hire Thorne again a few years later to work on Tenet, another movie dealing with time-travel.
Another example: For his 2023 biopic Oppenheimer, Nolan held extensive consultations directly with nuclear physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory so as to ensure everything in the movie was perfectly accurate. He even hired a few of the scientists to appear in the movie as extras.
So with Nolan, we're talking about a guy with a history of making that extra effort to get everything right. This makes Nolan's decisions in The Odyssey look even stranger.
The most controversial decision is how he has treated the role of Helen, Queen of Sparta. As you might recall from last time, the backdrop of the Greek hero Odysseus' ten-year journey home was a war started by the adulterous misbehavior of Helen, who ditches her husband, King Menelaus, to run away with the Trojan prince, Paris.
Crucial to Helen's character is her beauty, which by implication explains male reaction to her (that is, the events that follow her decision). In Book Three of The Iliad, for example, Homer describes the older men of Troy gazing at the stunning newcomer Helen, agreeing they can't blame the Greeks for fighting to retrieve her: She looks like a goddess, they say. Except they say something more: She not only looks like a goddess — she looks dreadfully, horribly, awfully, terribly, like a goddess. The Greek adverb is αἰνός, or ainós. Troy's town fathers have been around the block a few times; they know trouble when they see it. Helen is the most beautiful woman anyone's ever seen; she knows it; male sexual hardwiring being what it is, Helen therefore wields power over any man who sees her; but she can't be trusted to wield that power responsibly. In a word, she embodies toxic femininity. "It is better for her to go away", the older Trojan men conclude, "and not stay here as a future affliction for us and our children".
What exactly is it about her beauty that gives her that kind of power over the male characters? According to the relevant texts, the short answer is: she's a fair-skinned blonde. Homer directly refers to her white skin (his word is λευκῶλενος, or leukōlenos). Other ancient Greek authors, including Euripides, Sappho, and Hesiod, mention her blonde hair (their word is ξανθή, or xanthos). These features highlight both her alleged descendance from the god Zeus, and her noble status (in that she didn't have to be out working in sunbaked fields). And although other famous Greeks shared these lighter features (Alexander the Great, King Menelaus himself, Achilles, etc.), they were evidently rare enough for ancient authors to mention.
So Helen's dazzling, unusual, light-colored beauty is crucial not just to her character, but to all the events described in both The Iliad and The Odyssey. It's what originally aroused Paris' sexual fervor. It's what made Menelaus want her back. It's what "launched a thousand ships" and a ten year war effort to recover her. It's what by extension dragged Odysseus away from his comfortable life as young king of Ithaca, and away from his beloved wife and infant son. It's what leads Odysseus to endure a full two decades away from home. It illustrates a key mechanism of female power over men (that is, it illustrates a perennial male vulnerability. And for a classic example of this perennial male stupidity, I mean "vulnerability", see this clip from the British game show, Golden Balls).
All of which is to say, Helen's appearance isn't something a conscientious storyteller would distort. And yet, rather than cast someone who matches the Homeric description (and three thousand subsequent years of Greek description) of Helen as a beautiful blonde Greek woman, Nolan has cast a full-blooded member of Kenya's Luo people: the 43-year-old black-African, Mexican-born Lupita Nyong'o, who you might have seen in The Black Panther movies. In addition, Nyong'o will also play Helen's sister, Clytemnestra.
But there are other unusual decisions.
According to several reports, Nolan has also cast "Elliot Page" to play Achilles. You might have first seen Elliot as a young lady named Ellen Page in the 2007 movie, Juno, for which she won an Academy Award. You might also know Ellen felt so uncomfortable within herself, that a few years ago she underwent surgery to try to become male (hence the new name, Elliot). I suppose I should also mention that the vegan-activist Page looks unnervingly frail, stands around five feet tall, and can't weigh more than 100 pounds. To see a photo of her is to instantly worry about her health, just on a human level. Yet Homer describes Achilles, the character she reportedly plays, as "large", "god-like", unusually "swift-footed", long blond hair, with a dominant presence, and so physically powerful as to be invincible (except for his heel).
Further: Contrary to longstanding screen-epic convention, Nolan's actors speak with an ordinary North American accent (as opposed to an elevated English accent). They speak in colloquial language. Certain warriors (but not all) appear in armor so heavily stylized, even caricatured, they look like characters out of a Batman movie. There is also the matter of the translation Nolan most heavily relied upon, about which more later.
And one last point for now: Even though Homer's epics constitute the Ur-text of Greek civilization, not a single Greek actor appears in the movie. The movie features a Colombian (John Leguizamo), an Indian Hindu (Himesh Patel), an African (Nyong'o), a half-African-American (Zendaya), two Jewish guys (Jon Bernthal, Benjamin Safdie), a Mexican (Jimmy Gonzalez), an Afrikaner (Charlize Theron), a Korean (Will Yun Lee), a few WASPs, but no actual Greeks. Huh.
So, all these issues and more have provoked online debate. In fact, to me, the debate's a lot more interesting and revealing than the movie itself. More on that next time.
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