Do Epics Need Heroes?

By Orlando Reade

As the credits rolled at the end of The Odyssey, the Long Island cinema burst into applause. This struck me as strange: the hero had just confessed his guilt for the trick at Troy, disguising a weapon as a gift to the gods: a transgression that would lead to the collapse of his world. There seemed little cause for celebration. Was the audience cheering the hero’s victory over the bad guys, or were they taking a side in an ongoing culture war?

When Christopher Nolan adapted Homer’s epic to speak to a world where American power is being challenged in new ways, it was inevitable that it would provoke the right. Even before the film came out, the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen launched a thousand tweets, and Elon Musk threatened to use Grok to make another version with ethnically Greek (though AI-generated) actors. But it’s not only the casting that made Nolan’s film controversial. It’s also, I think, a more general debate over the genre of epic.