The Woke Odyssey

"Myths which day has forgotten continue to be told by night, and powerful figures which consciousness has reduced to banality and ridiculous triviality are recognized again by poets and prophetically revived." — C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

The film has not come out yet, and already people are praying for it to fail. Not critiquing it. Not doubting it. They are publicly willing its ruin into being, refreshing the discourse for the first sign of blood in the water. A trailer drops. A casting notice leaks. And before a single frame has moved, before a single line has been spoken, the verdict is in: this thing is guilty, and the crime is *woke*.

I watched the arguments about The Odyssey roll in like bad weather. One of the most ridiculous arguments is that Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships, the most beautiful woman in the mythic imagination of the West, was cast as a Black woman. Despite the fact that Lupita Nyong'o face is obviously one of the most luminous ever to cross a screen, who is so beautiful it makes me ache with heterosexual yearning, so the objection cannot possibly be about beauty. Instead it is about the aroma of diversity. The film smells of multiculturalism. The wolfpack has been trained to sniff it out and hunt it down. Noses trained to detect a message. A reflex to boycott before the art has even been experienced.

But underneath it sits another question about representation be the Hellenic community. If we are going to insist that stories belong to the cultures that birthed them, then where are the Greeks in this film? This is a Greek story, the oldest in the Western canon, and there is scarcely a Hellenic surname in the leading roles. Odysseus is played Matt Damon, a man from Boston. Penelope is Anne Hathaway, from Brooklyn. Telemachus is Tom Holland, from London. Calypso is Charlize Theron, born in South Africa. Athena is Zendaya, from Oakland. If the principle is that ethnicity must match the character, then the outrage is aimed at exactly the wrong target, straining at Nyong’o while swallowing an entire ensemble of Americans and Britons playing the founding myth of a people none of them descend from. The consistency the critics claim to want would empty the whole cast, not just one seat in it.

Hollywood has never truly cared about ethnic accuracy, and neither, until about five minutes ago, did the audience. This is an American industry. It has always been an American industry, no matter how international it has learned to feel, no matter how many of its stars now arrive from London and Sydney and Johannesburg. It runs on American money and American stars and the American appetite for putting a familiar face at the centre of every story on earth. It gave us Charlton Heston as a Mexican and John Wayne as Genghis Khan and a British Jesus with an American disciple in every sandal epic ever shot on a backlot. For a hundred years the industry cast the most bankable body it could find and dressed it in whatever the story required, and the audience did not blink, because the star was the point.

Ask yourself a simple question. Why would Christopher Nolan, a director who can have any actor alive, assemble this particular constellation of the most sought-after faces on the planet, gathered under one myth? They were not chosen by accident nor by some quota handed down from a committee. Nolan chose these actors because they are stars who sell tickets, and because the story he is telling is not an anthropology of Bronze Age Ithaca. It is a myth he is adapting, not a historical reality. It is fiction.

An adaptation is not a photocopy. Something is always lost and something is always gained in the translation. The people demanding a pure Odyssey, fixed and racially sealed, are not defending the poem. They are misunderstanding what theater is - the craft of people pretending to be someone who they are not.

In the world of theater almost nobody actually believes ethnicity must match the character. If they did, it would be extremely hard to stage a play such as Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar or Romeo & Juliet without an entirely Italian cast. The complaint was never really about accuracy - it was about direction and suspicion of the message. A white actor playing a Greek reads as neutral, as default, as nothing at all, while a Black actor playing a Greek reads as an agenda. The same act of casting across a line becomes invisible in one direction and incendiary in the other. That asymmetry is not a principle, it is a bias wearing an idealist’s clothes.

This has become just another battleground for the ongoing culture war for what is and isn’t woke.

A strange quirk about human culture is that we often end up arguing about words, even when those words no longer signify what they actually mean. Take the word “woke”. To call a thing woke as if it were an accusation is to reveal something you did not mean to reveal, just like the way conservative’s criticize “progressives”. Because progress means to move forward, and to despise progress is to declare a preference for standing still, and standing still, in a living universe, is not neutral. It is not safe. It is death dressed as stability.

The word itself is stolen, twisted and misinterpreted until no one remembers what was meant anymore. You can trace it back through the music like a river back to its source. In 1938 the blues singer Leadbelly recorded Scottsboro Boys, his song for the nine Black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama, sentenced to death by all-white juries, dragged through retrial after retrial for a crime that never happened. At the end of the recording, he leaves them a warning. “Be a little careful going through there. Stay woke, keep your eyes open.”: That is the whole of it. That is the seed. Stay woke, don’t sleep, don’t let them catch you dreaming while they come for you.

It meant vigilance. It meant survival. It meant the difference between seeing the trap and stepping in it.

The word slept and woke and slept again across the decades. It was carried in speeches and editorials and late-night conversations, a warning passed hand to hand in a country that has spent centuries perfecting the machinery of harm. Then in 2008, Erykah Badu sang it out to the world on Master Teacher. Stay woke. She took a survival code, an old blues caution, and set it to futuristic funk, and it entered the bloodstream of the mainstream carrying its original charge intact: to be awake is to keep faith while the world around you sleeps.

And then, in 2016, it reached its widest audience yet in Childish Gambino’s Redbone - a song that Jordan Peele chose for the opening of Get Out, a horror film about the theft of Black bodies and racial paranoia - the old warning, slowed down and made strange:

“that’s what [Get Out] is about. I wanted to make sure that this movie satisfied the black horror movie audience’s need for characters to be smart and do things that intelligent, observant people would do.” ~ Jordan Peele

Language is living thing and some slang is too vivid to stay contained by subculture. Once it leaks all the way out into the mainstream culture, past its roots and context it’s easy for others to warp or invert it completely. The anti-woke propaganda channels who took control of this world did not take its history. They took only the sound of it, emptied it of all its context and filled that shape with contempt. Thus the same word now gets spat as an insult by white Fox News pundits and alt-right social media influencers, a slur for anyone who insists on looking at what others would rather not see. The caution became the crime. The word for staying alive became a word for everything the comfortable would like to sleep through. It is remembered by everyone and understood by no one.

But strip the culture-war varnish off the word and something older is underneath it. To be woke is to be conscious. And consciousness is not a political position. It is the deep water. It is the ocean in which intelligence swims, the medium and not the message, the vast dark mystery in which the small bright lamp of thought is lit. Consciousness is spiritual before it is anything else. It is cosmic. It is the oldest question wearing this year’s clothes.

Which is the joke the culture war refuses to get: both sides are reaching for the same thing. Because the right has its own version of woke.

The Great Awakening is a phrase QAnon chose to champion a few years ago, borrowed from the religious revivals that swept the American frontier, the tent meetings and the speaking in tongues and the conviction that a great unveiling is at hand and the sleepers are about to rise. Two movements, two vocabularies, one buried longing. Wake up. Open your eyes. You have been asleep and now you will see. The progressive and the regressive, the left hand and the right, both convinced that the other is the one still dreaming, and both, without knowing it, worshipping at the same altar. They are the split personality of a single mind that cannot agree on what it is.

The fantasy did not stay online with Q. It put on shoes and rented arenas and went on the road. The ReAwaken America Tour, launched in 2021 by the disgraced former general Michael Flynn and an Oklahoma entrepreneur and former wedding DJ named Clay Clark, has carried this gospel from megachurch to sports complex across the country, part revival, part QAnon expo, part MAGA rally, all under one tent. Clark says God told him to do it. The bill of fare is unlike anything in ordinary politics. There are baptisms in metal troughs on the patio. There is speaking in tongues. There is the casting out of demons, the laying on of hands, the shofar raised and blown over a crowd in American flag shirts. Prophets take the stage to announce that Donald Trump is the rightful president, anointed by God and robbed by a Luciferian cabal. Onstage between the exorcisms move the luminaries of the movement, Flynn and Roger Stone and Mike Lindell and the Trump sons, each stepping into their pool of light to preach that the nation is under siege by a satanic enemy who wants to muzzle you, replace you, poison your children. Attendees are told to put on the whole armour of God. They are told, again and again, that this is a war, the battle of their lifetime, Team Jesus against Team Satan. And somewhere between the baptismal tubs and the merch tables selling patriot coffee and five-hundred-dollar bedazzled handbags, the political and the spiritual dissolve entirely into each other, until there is no line left between a rally and a resurrection.

This is not a metaphor reaching for religion. This is religion, wearing the flag, having a genuine mystical experience about American politics. Strip away the specific enemies and the specific prophet, and the structure is identical to the thing it hates. A people convinced they are the only ones awake in a world of sleepers. A promise that the scales are about to fall from the nation’s eyes. A great unveiling. A rising. Stay woke.

In The Great Awakening, the battle against woke politics overlaps the debate about science and religion. At the most extreme, these awakened zealots can be found embracing creationism and refusing evolution. Evolutionary theory describes the natural world as a work unfinished, that form flows into form, that what exists is a draft and not a decree. Creationism says the opposite: that we were made complete, in the image of God, once and for all. Never mind the original sin stitched into us, the failing backs and the blind spots and the appendix waiting to burst. We were made perfect and imperfect, the doctrine holds, and that contradiction is not a problem to solve but a sacred arrangement to defend. It is the desire for the world to hold its breath and stay exactly where it is. And anyone who tries to change it, anyone who suggests the draft might still be revised, is a heretic. A progressive. Too Woke.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. ~ Carl Jung

Psychology gives us the frame the culture warriors are missing. There is the conscious mind, the lit room where we believe we live. And there is the unconscious: the shadow, the vast unlit house, the self we do not know we are. And here is the thing the language keeps whispering: to be unconscious is to be asleep. To be driven by what you cannot see. To act out a script you never read and call it your own free choice.

This map was drawn most fully by Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who broke from Freud a little over a century ago and spent the rest of his life charting the deep structure of the mind. Where Freud saw the unconscious as a private basement of personal repression, Jung saw something far larger beneath it. He called it the collective unconscious, a shared inheritance running under every individual psyche, stocked with the same recurring figures that rise up in the myths and dreams and religions of every culture on earth. He named those figures archetypes, the inherited grammar of the human imagination. He gave us the shadow, the part of ourselves we refuse to own and so cast onto our enemies instead. And he gave us the word the whole culture war is unknowingly arguing about: consciousness. For Jung, the labour of a human life was individuation, the slow work of becoming whole by making the darkness conscious, by turning and facing the parts of ourselves we had banished into the dark. When he spoke of waking and sleeping, he did not mean it as a figure of speech. He meant it as the fundamental task of being alive. To wake up was to become who you truly are.

The golden promise of the internet is that everyone has a voice. We could be all be citizen journalists. We can publish our art and writing without gatekeepers. It has largely delivered on the promise. But not everyone is an artist, and a lot of people prefer to be an armchair critic. Online culture has metastasised into toxic fandom.

Everyone has a verdict, a rating, a takedown loaded and ready. And the overwhelming majority of the pundits have never sat alone in a room and tried to pull something true out of the nothing and call it art. They have never faced the blank page and lost. They have never experienced the particular courage it takes to place the private, tender, half-formed thing inside you and setting it down in public where anyone can throw stones. They have never grappled with the genuine difficulty of saying something original. Because it’s so much easier to tear something down than to create yourself.

If they had, they could not do this. If they had ever made something and watched it fail, really made it, really failed, they would recognise the human being on the other side of the screen. They would know that behind every casting choice and every clumsy line is a real person who was trying, who put their imaginary creatures into the world and hoped. And knowing that, they could not take such open, gleeful pleasure in the failure of people who are only trying to tell an interesting story and make a good thing. Cruelty toward artists is almost always the signature of someone who has never dared to be one. And of course, joining into the latest wave of clickbait criticism canbe great for getting good with the algorithm.

Understand what is actually being fought over here, because it is not what the combatants say it is. It is not diversity quotas. It is not who gets hired or who gets cast or which pronoun goes on which form. Those are the surface chop. Underneath them the real current runs, and the real current is this: we are fighting about what we suspect the film might be trying to say (without having watched it). Is it propaganda or art? And if it is art what does it mean? What is the meaning of life, and who gets to decide it. Each side is certain it is the one with its eyes open. Each side is certain the other is dreaming. And neither side considers, for even a moment, that their certainty itself might be the deepest sleep of all. We are having the oldest argument there is, and the movie trailer is just the latest setting for the battleground. We are arguing metaphysics in the language of popular culture.

So what is it we are actually arguing about with The Odyssey? A story three thousand years old, about a man trying to get home from a war, who spends ten years lost at sea because he will not stop, will not settle, will not accept the world as it is handed to him.

The Odyssey is not a monument. It has never once sat still. It has been sung and rewritten for three millennia, translated into every tongue, dragged into every century’s quarrels, its hero recast a thousand times over. The very row we are having about who gets to play Helen is simply the latest verse in a song continuously sung since before Rome was built. The people demanding the story be preserved do not understand that the story has survived precisely because it was never static. It is a journey.

And so are we. We are Odysseus, all of us, together, a single restless civilisation ten years and three thousand miles from a home we are not even sure exists, blown off course, wrecked and rebuilt, seduced and imprisoned and lied to, telling ourselves stories about who we are in order to survive the crossing. We have not arrived. We were never meant to have arrived. The pile-ons and the boycotts and the prayers for a film to fail, all of it, is simply the sound a crew makes when it is lost at sea and has not yet agreed on which star to steer by. It is a culture that has not yet decided what it is. It is the ocean describing itself.

We are fighting battles over the idea of consciousness. Trying to plant a flag in the collective mind and declare it ours, ours to define, ours to police, ours to wake or keep asleep. But here is the cosmic irony; we can’t fight over the collective consciousness because we are the collective consciousness, fighting with itself, in real time, out loud. Culture is not the territory being claimed. Culture is the sound the claiming makes. It is not a monument or a possession. It is not a fixed and finished object that some rightful owner can encase in amber. It is a verb pretending to be a noun.

We expect a species that has been globally conscious for less than a single human lifetime arguing about a schizophrenic identity crisis. It has been less than thirty since the world wide web wove itself across the planet. Less than twenty since the social networks reached out and wired every one of us into every other, seven billion nervous systems suddenly sharing a single feed, a single digital bloodstream of grievance and wonder and rage, and every one of these ugly little culture wars is another mile of the voyage, part of the long, loud, necessary process of becoming global citizens.

But hold onto this one mercy. For all the venomous fandom and the toxic armchair critics, all the pleasure taken in other people’s failures, all the flags planted in the dark corners of the internet, all the general negatron energy, we are having a conversation.

We may be fighting about one of the oldest stories there is, but we are doing it with words and reviews and podcasts and art and movies instead of with violence. Measured against the whole bloody arc of history, against every previous century’s answer to the question of who gets to be awake and what is true, that is not nothing.

People have been killed for offending another’s sacred stories in the past. Now, we just make a podcast and discuss the intricacies of ethnic authenticity and representation. Maybe that’s progress?

The journey is far from over but the ship is still afloat. The crew are arguing about the stories told by the stars but no one has yet thrown anyone overboard and someone needs to make sure we don’t crash into the coastline in the middle of the dark night.

So stay woke.