The Weird Right-Wing Freakout Over ‘The Odyssey’

Few filmmakers regularly inspire weirder freakouts than Christopher Nolan.

You saw inklings of it with The Dark Knight and his casting of Heath Ledger as the Joker. It’s easy to forget now—for nearly twenty years The Dark Knight has been the go-to descriptor for comic book movie excellence and Ledger’s Joker is the gold standard against which every movie villain is measured—but this was a wildly controversial choice. The pretty boy from the teen romcoms? That guy? As the Joker? Nolan’s gone too far this time!

Now, freakouts over superhero movie castings were nothing new, as veterans of the Michael Keaton wars will remember. But this was just a taste of things to come. For its refusal to regurgitate a pat message about the dangers of climate change, Interstellar was condemned by some because it was “closer to climate skepticism than it is to climate fiction.” The Dark Knight Rises was an “evil masterpiece” advocating a “fascist police state.” Dunkirk was decried as “whitewashing” for not focusing on the Indian and Muslim soldiers in the British military during World War II. Some critics refused to review Tenet since they considered it irresponsible to release a film in theaters during COVID, and I remember more than one critic glibly suggesting Nolan was getting people killed for his own vanity. Oppenheimer, like Dunkirk, was guilty of “whitewashing.”

I will say that I was a little surprised by the source of the inevitable caterwauling about The Odyssey, however, as Christopher Nolan is broadly appreciated by conservative filmgoers and The Odyssey is the sort of classic that the right has long championed adapting for the masses. Sadly, the Very Online Right, spearheaded by its grand leader, Elon Musk, has decided that The Odyssey is bad now. It has too many black people, you see, and there are rumors that a trans individual might be playing Achilles.

The “Elliot Page is playing Achilles” rumor is the most intriguing element of this whole idiotic kerfuffle, as it seems to have kicked off after an unconfirmed guess as to Page’s identity in the latest trailer was published on a clickbait website. That guess quickly morphed into conventional wisdom in X the Everything App’s more reactionary corners. Achilles might be who Page is playing—and really, if you wanted to show Achilles as a ghost of his former self, Page isn’t a terrible person to choose for that withered form—but it doesn’t really pass the smell test. The line uttered in the trailer (“Who’s looking after your wife and son?”) seems closer in spirit to what the ghost of Elpenor or the shade of Tiresias says to Odysseus during his trip to the land of the dead.1

The reason why Elon Musk has tweeted repeatedly about the casting of Lupita Nyong’o is more straightforward: Musk, a South African émigré, is just mad a black lady is playing Helen of Troy. Never mind she’s not only an Oscar-winning actress but also a renowned beauty, and thus likely a good choice to play Helen (and, in a nifty bit of casting, Helen’s murderous sister Clytemnestra). She’s black. Can’t have that now, can we? It is, apparently, offensive to . . . the Greeks? More offensive than having Will Hunting play Odysseus? Sure, why not.

The whole thing is a pretty perfect distillation of the tendencies of the so-called “woke right,” that cohort’s obsession with racial and gender purity serving as a mirror image for the previous panics over the “whitewashing” of Nolan’s previous historical epics. We can debate about how rooted in history The Odyssey and The Iliad are, but they are, at heart, mythical stories, tales of gods and monsters, of journeys to hell and disquisitions with ghosts. None of the leads—not the American Matt Damon, nor the Brits Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson, nor the South African Charlize Theron—is Greek. And just like their more progressively minded predecessors, these are almost certainly completely contrived outrages, an effort to find something in a movie to get mad about while chasing the endorphin rush they got for screaming online about the terrible live-action Snow White movie or the awful Buzz Lightyear.

I had a blast taping this video on the ten greatest war films with Mark Hertling and I hope you check it out. I don’t think you’ll be surprised by the top pick on the list—spoiler: it’s the one with the greatest opening twenty minutes in movie history—but you might be intrigued by some of the choices along the way.

Guy Ritchie has a new movie out, his eighth (!) since 2019. It’s an odd duck of a movie—you can understand why it’s been on the shelf for a while; it has the feel of a movie that’s been taken apart and put back together with a couple of key pieces excised—but still quite charming. From my review:

It also feels like more of a sketch, a doodle, than a proper, fully fleshed-out feature film. Rife with voiceovers that hop us from plot beat to plot beat as Rachel (Eiza González) explains how she will recover a billion dollars owed to private equity powerhouse Bobby (Rosamund Pike) by international criminal Salazar (Carlos Bardem). It’s all quite convoluted and the legality of everything under discussion is so opaque that you just kind of accept that Rachel is able to command the courts over the course of a few days to seize all of Salazar’s assets. Indeed, Ritchie’s stylish enough and the cutting by Martin Walsh is electric enough that you almost don’t realize that Rachel is quite literally narrating everything we’re seeing happen in order to help us make sense of the plot, but that is very much what’s happening.

Ritchie has always been a somewhat vibes-based director, and I mean that complimentarily: Even if you don’t care about diamond heists and bare-knuckle boxers or American pot dealers cornering the market in British weed, his films are a pleasure to look at and luxuriate in because the characters all look so damn cool. In the Grey is no exception. This is a movie of very carefully popped collars and rolled sleeves, of impeccable layering for combat in any clime. It’s a movie in which we are, for no reason other than the fact that it looks cool and screams class, shown step by step how to make a Stovetop Negroni (Negroni Svegliato).

On the podcast with Mark Hertling, I mentioned that Black Hawk Down is one of the best-looking 4K discs I’ve ever seen and this is true. You should pick that up if you’re looking for a reference-quality disc. But the story itself remains so compelling and so tense that it’s worth watching even on streaming. And it has the sort of cast where every once in a while you’re just like “Wait, is that … yup, sure is.” The funniest iteration of this, at least for me, was a couple of years back when I was watching and was like “Wait, is that … the villain from Kindergarten Cop?” And, sure enough, Richard Tyson is in the movie. A veritable treasure trove of “That Guys.”