OK fine... Let's Argue About "The Odyssey"

Perhaps you’ve heard that director Christopher Nolan has a new movie coming out in July based on Homer’s manly epic “The Odyssey.” Until a few months ago there was nearly universal excitement over this prospect. The anticipation was riding so high that when advance tickets went on sale, a furious arbitrage market sprang up, one in which lucky ticket holders were selling the best seats on the best days for many multiples of face value.

But all that changed almost overnight after anonymous trolls looking to farm social media engagement scanned the cast list on IMDB and found Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page’s names listed there without any indication of which characters they were playing. These same trolls then decided (without evidence, as the liberal media might say) that Page and Nyong’o must be playing Achilles and Helen of Troy, for no other reason than those were among the only high-profile Homeric characters not spoken for on the cast list.

And so, just as Helen of Troy’s face once launched a thousand ships, this unsubstantiated casting rumor launched a million online hot takes, most beginning with a word which, here in the social media era, has come to symbolize pure unadulterated bullshit…

“BREAKING”

In the waves of outrage that followed, hardly anyone stopped to wonder if A) the rumors were true or B) whether or not it matters who might be cast in two minor roles which have almost no part to play in the story.

Within hours of the first “BREAKING” post, Nolan’s new movie found itself labeled “woke” by much of the online right and a long list of additional outrages, most of them every bit as unsubstantiated as those first rumors about Page and Nyong’o sprang up like weeds in an unsupervised lawn. Online critics even seized on one line from a 2025 interview Nolan gave in which he spoke positively about a controversial feminist translation of Homer’s epic, and decided this must mean Nolan based his entire film on that translation. Once again, as with the casting rumors, this conclusion was reached without any real supporting evidence.

Nolan’s full quote on the matter was “I think it's the Emily Wilson translation that begins, 'Tell me about a complicated man.' The genius of the character, the cleverness, the inventiveness of him, that was a huge part of what interested me. He's not just a soldier. He's an amazing strategist, a very wily person." which is a very far cry from “I based my entire movie on this translation.” But let’s assume the accusation is true and Nolan did base his movie on this particular translation… unless you’ve personally read multiple translations of “The Odyssey,” how would you even know?

Perhaps the better question is “would it even matter?” As I learned when I sat down to watch “Snow White” a few months after it bombed at the box office, just because someone involved with the production tells you the movie is “woke,” doesn’t necessarily make it so.

Ultimately all this absurdity culminated in a very long tweet on X that got many thousands of views and which started with this sentence… “In order to understand Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, you have to…” followed by a couple hundred yada yada yadas about how “woke” the movie is, to which I responded that it is objectively hilarious to explain the best way to understand a movie which no one has yet seen.

This was, all of it, a trap… and an obvious one at that. Unfortunately, a lot of well-meaning people, mostly on the political right, walked right into it.

The online edgelords who traffic in this kind of engagement bait count on unsuspecting normies to bite down hard on the lure in order to drive traffic to their accounts. It’s their entire business model. Even better for the trolls if the controversy spills over into the offline mainstream, as this controversy did when it got picked up by the Penske-owned Hollywood trade magazines, their stories focusing on the worst most offensive online comments.

These publications, and others in the progressive entertainment mainstream, act as reinforcers of a political orthodoxy. They are a part of a permission structure which allows many of the men and women who keep Hollywood running to write off half their audience as backwards political troglodytes… racists, misogynists and homophobes all. And in this particular case, too many of us made this job easier for Variety and Deadline by reacting to obvious engagement slop like side-by-side photos of Diane Kruger and Lupita Nyong’o with the caption “biggest downgrade in history,” as if it’s anymore likely that Helen of Troy would have looked like a blonde-haired blue-eyed German than a woman of dual Kenyan and Mexican ancestry.

But the worst offense, beyond even gifting Hollywood exactly the racial controversy it wanted and expected from Middle America, is that so many conservatives decided to deny themselves an opportunity to see a movie they might have actually enjoyed, one almost certain to be chock full of masculine derring do, simply because of a bunch of online rumors that may not be true, and which probably won’t matter to the movie very much even if they are.

All of which reminds me of a favorite scene from “War of the Roses” in which a dinner guest says “A family tiff seems to be developing… I don’t know if we should leave, but I definitely advise skipping the fish course.”

Because of the bitterly divided culture in which we find ourselves, the only thing that matters is that this controversy can be used as a cudgel to advance a political agenda. And that is at the heart of why so many decent well-meaning Americans took the troll bait… because they are exhausted by political combat and they are sad that something they used to love, going to the movies, has been corrupted by our elite creative class into just another bloody front in the culture wars.

Here it must be said that while there were certainly racists who saw an opportunity to make a spectacle of themselves by complaining about a black actress appearing in a Hollywood blockbuster, contrary to what much of Hollywood believes about America, those idiots are as rare in public life as they are stupid. The vast majority of people who are reflexively annoyed by diverse casting are not racists, rather they are making a fair point that those who control the culture pretend not to understand because it’s much more politically expedient to shout “racist!”

It’s not skin color which offends middle American moviegoers but rather the way that diverse casting has become a one-way door, and also the way that the culture punishes anyone who dares to notice that this door only swings one way. No matter which side of this cultural chasm you’re standing on, we all understand that Professor Snape, Captain America and Helen of Troy can be black, but that Blade, Axel Foley and Apollo Creed can never be white.

Audiences also understand something else about this one-way door of diverse casting… that often when iconic characters are cast with a black actor, those characters become permanently and canonically diverse in a way that is never the case when the process is reversed, which of course it never is.

In the novel which became the movie “Man on Fire” the lead character John Creasy is described as a white guy from Tennessee, and the role was originated by white actor Scott Glenn in a little-seen and barely remembered 1987 version of the film. And yet no one cared, there was no racial uproar, when in 2004 director Ridley Scott cast Denzel Washington in the role.

Why not?

There was no uproar because Denzel is one of the greatest actors of any generation. He is beloved by audiences of every race, sex and creed. Denzel’s talent transcends not just his skin color, but national racial politics as a whole. Everyone understands that if Denzel wats to play the lead in your movie, you say yes, even if the movie you’re making is about Winston Churchill or Pope John Paul II.

Denzel was cast in “Man on Fire” because he’s “DENZEL,” not because he’s black, and Creasy’s race is not a factor in the story at all.

So, in a practical sense, there was no reason why Netflix couldn’t have cast a white actor in that role when they decided this past year to remake “Man on Fire” as a limited series... except that we all know exactly what would have happened if a white actor had been cast in a role that became iconic on the back of a generational black talent… “Whitewashing” discourse would have exploded like a Hamas executive committee boardroom meeting.

In the same way, there’s almost no one in America, white, black, liberal, conservative or other, who doesn’t think Idris Elba would make a fantastic James Bond. But within that widespread American enthusiasm for the idea lies a certain trepidation. The concern for a lot of Bond fans in flyover country, which is to say Americans who are annoyed by the forced march of maximal Hollywood diversity and “representation,” is that once James Bond is cast with a black actor, he would become canonically diverse, forever and ever, Amen… that for the rest of Bond’s existence as a movie franchise, the casting process would become a series of marketing gimmicks masquerading as “historic firsts”… the first Pacific Islander Bond… the first Gay Bond… etc etc.

This one-way-door of diversity casting isn’t just bad for the movies… it’s also a terrible development for the next generation of black actors and it has produced a whole host of nasty secondary effects.

For example… after “Backrooms” and its lead actor Chiwetel Ejiofor blew the doors off the box office in June, an online anti-racist activist named Charles Preston went viral with a series of tweets sent to his 33,000 followers which began this way:

Backrooms is racist film. It’s technically brilliant, but racist. And it’s a shame during a time where Black studies is being eliminated on college campuses because I fear people are overlooking the obvious tropes and racist callbacks the film ridiculously displays.

Like Denzel in “Man on Fire,” Ejiofor was not cast in “Backrooms” because of his skin color, he was cast because he’s a great actor and a joy to watch onscreen, full stop. Audiences, including white audiences, responded enthusiastically both to the movie and to Ejiofor as its lead. Until Preston’s tweet I never saw or heard of a single person, black, white or otherwise, utter a single complaint of any kind about Ejiofor’s presence in the movie.

But Preston wants you to ignore all the evidence of a post-racial America. He prefers to play the same tedious micro-aggressions game that has much of middle America throwing up its hands in frustration, because it is profitable for him to do so. Preston takes the risible position that once a black man is cast in a leading role, he or she may only play certain kinds of characters or else risk triggering the racial grifters whose entire existence is fueled by America’s cultural overreaction to every cry of “racism!” no matter how ridiculous.

Specifically, Preston is angry because Ejiofor’s character has a drinking problem, an anger problem, and needs to be saved by a white woman against whom he commits physical violence, and that this raises the specter of the awful racist tropes which have been used in the past to smear black men as mindless, violent and sexually dangerous.

This is obviously ridiculous… Ejiofor isn’t playing a black man in “Backrooms," he’s playing a man, and the fact is that men sometimes drink too much, get angry and commit violence. “Backrooms” is a performance. It is drama. It’s not reality. And it’s certainly not a racist trope.

It’s a character… played by an actor. That’s all.

Preston’s position, which is hardly an unusual one amongst our activist class, raises three problems… 1) it’s extremely limiting and I don’t know why any black star would want to live in a world where the characters they play are only allowed to exist within an extremely narrow dramatic range… 2) what do we think will happen to opportunities for black actors once the studios fully internalize that casting black actors comes with a complex and ever-shifting set of rules regarding what their characters may or may not do if the studio is to stay on the right side of the anti-racist mob? And 3) if Preston gets his way, what happens once audiences realize that every black man they see on screen will, by rule, turn out to be a decent, pure and completely uncomplicated good guy with zero emotional depth?

They’re going to stop going to the movies, that’s what, because predictable drama makes for boring movies.

All of this is exhausting. No one wants this. We just want to go to the movies and have a good time. But Hollywood, and the activist commentariat for whom they often seem to be performing, has made it clear that they can’t let us do that, and so it’s become easy for frustrated flyover audiences to just check out and stay home… which is exactly what some are now threatening to do with “The Odyssey.”

Which would be a damned shame. But I get it… I really do… and Hollywood ought to get it too, because our collective economic future hangs in the balance.

The saddest part of all this is that it’s occurring in the middle of the best year for theatrical Hollywood in a decade, thanks to the fact that Hollywood has once again started releasing movies that are simply entertaining rather than thinly veiled political messages. Even the failure of Star Wars’ latest steaming pile hasn’t been enough to dull Hollywood’s spirits. Blame the trolls if you want, but Hollywood and its obvious disdain for much of the audience has set the stage. If “The Odyssey” fails next month and Universal Pictures is denied a box office hit they desperately need, it will be because Hollywood has spent years enriching the soil for exactly the kind of poisonous fruit which grew last month in the sewers of social media.

They’ll have no one else to blame.

Though certainly, they will try.

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