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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.
Social media has many customs, some of them positive. But its primary tradition now seems to be fomenting silly outrages to poke the pleasure centers of perpetually unhappy people.
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