If you thought the ancient war between the Trojans and the Greeks was epic and bloody, you should see the culture war currently being waged over Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of The Odyssey. I’ve never seen anyone this worked up over a 2700 year-old poem – even my old literature professors – which leads me to believe that all the furor and rancor surrounding director Christopher Nolan’s casting, prop and costume choices are less about The Odyssey itself, and more about culture war grievances.
The first controversies surrounding the film focused on its armor. The costumes are not “accurate” versions of Bronze Age armor. The story of Odysseus and his crew, and of the Trojan War itself, takes place in the mythic days of 12th century BC, hundreds of years before Homer first recited his verses. Ancient, in other words, to ancient Greeks. A time of cyclopean horrors and gods who spoke directly to men and interfered in their destinies.
That controversy, which felt more consigned to wannabe history buffs looking for YouTube clicks, soon extended to the film’s longships, which in the trailers looked more like Viking longships than the type of longship Odysseus himself would sail in.
Of course, there is and always has been a distinction between realism and authenticity, between what a film’s visual language signifies versus what was actually true. Mel Gibson’s epic masterpiece, Braveheart, had all his Scotsmen dressed in kilts and tartans. That was not realistic for the time period (centuries too early, in fact) but it signaled to audiences that these were Scottish men, and so it rang true and authentic to audiences, even while distancing itself from realism.
Nolan is clearly doing something similar with his armor and costume choices. And to the average moviegoer – aka not the loudest voices on X and Reddit and so forth – a Viking longship signals “warrior ships of old.” Very few people watching this film will think to themselves, “Ah, but actually you see, Grecian boats in the time of Odysseus were much longer and flatter!” Nor will they spend much time thinking about whether Matt Damon’s armor is the right color.
And Christopher Nolan, I assure you, cares much less about the exact details, the perfect historical accuracy, than he does about conveying what seems to be true. The helmets might not be what ancient Greek soldiers wore, but to the average moviegoer, they seem authentic. Same with the ships.
The one area where this might not hold quite as much water is the dialogue. American English certainly is a bold choice, especially with phrases involving the words “mom” and “dad” which sound extremely modern. Nolan’s intent here was to have everyone speak naturally. Surely even ancient peoples had casual words they used to address their parents. But it is off-putting.
Helen Of Troy Starts Yet Another Pointless War
The biggest and loudest and most cloying of all controversies surrounding this film, however, involve the casting of non-white people like Travis Scott and Lupita Nyong’o and one trans actor, Elliot Page, who was at first rumored to be playing the great warrior Achilles (this was not true). I take what I believe is a pretty common sense, though hardly uncomplicated, view of casting and representation when it comes to film and TV. It’s not black and white. I’ll try to explain.
Here’s how I see it:
I don’t believe that “representation” is the be-all, end-all when it comes to promoting more diversity in Hollywood. Simply adding more racial diversity to a film is not some grand masterstroke for progress. I do think that it’s more important to tell more diverse stories representing more diverse cultures than it is to merely cast more diverse actors. However, that does not mean casting more diverse actors is not a good overarching goal.
At the same time, I think you can approach historical epics or fantasies or legendary myths in very different ways. Something like The Odyssey, which is 2700 years old and has been told countless times, or something like Shakespeare’s work which has also been performed and filmed myriad different ways over the centuries, is obviously going to have more leeway than a modern book adaptation. The Odyssey has been adapted into films like Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? for instance, dropping the old Grecian myth into the American South. Romeo & Juliet has been modernized, replete with handguns and sports cars. Denzel Washington starred as Macbeth in one film version of that play. He’s neither white nor Scottish, but who cares? Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth has, like so much of the Bard’s plays, been done to death.
In other words, these older tales can and ought to be told in many different ways or we’d likely get a little tired of them. One way is to simply have colorblind casting. This is not the same as tokenistic representation. It is simply a creative choice. Another is to really focus on historical realism. A different version of The Odyssey could have been cast with all Greek or Greek-looking actors and would have been totally valid as a creative choice as well. I wouldn’t call that film racist anymore than I would call Nolan’s film “woke.” These are two different creative visions.
Where I find myself bothered by race-swapping is when something is indeed intended to be very historically accurate in every way, but ignores the realism of the culture and time. The adaptation of Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King, for instance, employed colorblind casting. This didn’t work because Cornwell’s entire point was to create a “realistic” Arthurian story that delved deeply into the actual cultures of 5th century, the turbulent “Dark Ages” when Romano-British chieftains fought to defend the island against invading Anglo-Saxon tribes following the collapse of the Roman Empire. A black Merlin in this particular version of the Arthurian story makes no sense, and robbed another character of his unique status as the only black character in the land.
However, if you were to tell a different Arthurian story, like the many fantastical “knights in plate armor” versions that sprung up in the Middle Ages, you could toss that kind of realism to the wind. You could go full Hamilton and have an all-black Arthurian fantasy. (I recently read a piece about someone who saw a version of Hamilton in which George Washington was white, and at first this bothered the writer, but the actor was so good in the role that it ended up working regardless; alas, I can’t remember where I read it).
Similarly, if I’m watching what is supposed to be a historically accurate version of the Vikings invading England, it makes little sense to cast black actors as either Vikings or the Anglo-Saxons. But if you were to tell a fantastical myth involving Norse gods and monsters, I wouldn’t be at all bothered if, say, you included Kratos of Sparta, or an African hero or a Samurai or whatever. Shows like The Great and My Lady Jane toss all historical accuracy and realism out the window, and that extends far beyond colorblind casting. Why should these shows, purposefully disregarding historical realism, be forced to cast all white actors?
When adapting a work of fantasy like Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings, or Robert Jordan’s The Wheel Of Time, I mostly want consistency and adherence to the source material. Both authors were very precise about their geographies and peoples. The Lord of The Rings isn’t particularly diverse, but colorblind casting made the TV adaptation, The Rings Of Power, feel unmoored to place and culture. I would have much preferred the Hobbits introduced in the first season to encounter darker skinned Hobbits in the second season, because those second-season Hobbits lived in the desert. The show had an opportunity to introduce diversity in a way that was geographically logical rather than tokenistic. This internal logic would have been more grounded and the show would have been a little less terrible in the process.
HBO’s House of the Dragon started off with grounded diversity by making House Velaryon’s characters black, and this actually played into the story in really interesting ways with Rhaenyra’s bastards (her husband was Velaryon, but her children were pale as snow). By Season 3, the casting has become much more tokenistic, however, which doesn’t fit the tenor set by its parent show, Game of Thrones (though it’s hardly something to get worked up about, either).
Likewise, in Amazon’s Wheel Of Time, colorblind casting did a great disservice to the many cultures that Jordan created and that our heroes would have encountered along the way had the show not been cancelled. The dark-skinned Seafolk. The very diverse Seanchan from across the sea. The Two Rivers should have been racially homogenous because it was isolated, making Rand’s own red hair and complexion stand out (the Two Rivers folk could have all been dark-skinned for all I care, so long as it was consistent and Rand was clearly not native to the land). Introducing more diversity once our heroes reached grand cities like Tar Valon, Ebou Dar and Cairhien would have made that world feel more real despite it very much being a fantasy world. The point is, that show could have still been enormously diverse without ever feeling tokenistic. But its creators, like those of The Rings Of Power, lacked both vision and talent. That, to me, was the real problem.
But there are other fantasies where colorblind casting does make sense. The wonderful Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, for instance, or perhaps my favorite fantasy film of all time, Willow (which, despite being made in 1988, had black “Nelwyn” characters – George Lucas’s version of Hobbits).
The truth is, when it comes to casting and filmmaking in fantasy and historical drama, it isn’t just about “realism” and we make a grave error when we demand a strict adherence to realism in every project, ignoring every other creative consideration.
Nolan’s The Odyssey is his own distinct creative vision, and that vision is one that largely ignores race entirely. That doesn’t make it “woke” or DEI or whatever buzzword is en vogue. I think his vision is actually tied to his use of the vernacular. Everyone speaks in a modern American dialect. This story is being told for people now, the way Americans speak and look and (in many ways) behave.
A different director might have chosen a different approach, hewing to realism in casting, and that would have been just fine also. These are simply creative choices, and our current culture war obsessions – on the one side, those demanding diversity even when it would break the verisimilitude of a more realism-based approach (the discourse around the video game Kingdom Come Deliverance, for instance), and on the other, with any diversity at all labeled as “woke” – is just politics corrupting art in the worst sort of way. It’s tiresome. The endless teeth-gnashing and garment-rending grew stale and boring and irksome long ago. Same with the corporations who use diversity as a shield for bad writing and production (sorry, Rings of Power would have still been terrible with a lily-white cast).
One of the most common arguments I see is “Why does it never happen the other way around?” and then people post images of Ryan Gosling as Black Panther or the Polynesian cast of the live-action Moana. There are, of course, several reasons:
- First, the racial element of Wakanda is key to that story in a way that race is simply not in The Odyssey. Our entire concept of “race” is very different now than it was thousands of years ago. The Odyssey is not a story about race at all.
- Second, The Odyssey itself is a foundational text in Western Civilization in a way that a small, largely untold story from Polynesia never has been. We don’t learn the niche mythologies and stories of people from small island nations in high school. They have not helped form the bedrock of the dominant global culture.
- And finally, Hollywood absolutely did whitewash a great deal for decades, from blackface to white people playing Native Americans to Mickey Rooney in Breakfast At Tiffany’s (as just one very egregious example). White people have been the dominant storytellers and actors and producers and writers in the history of filmmaking since its inception. I’d say it’s a matter of common sense, then, and common decency and decorum. But all those things are in short supply.
I prefer a world in which creative people are free to follow their own vision. A world where the discourse around film and television and video games is less about these culture war spats and more focused on story, cinematography, writing, game design, the way all these elements interact to tell an effective (or disastrous) story. Alas, that is not the world we currently live in.
Ironically, I suspect that ancient people – Norse, Greek, etc – would have cared a great deal less about these things. They, like most of us now, mostly just wanted to be entertained (are you not entertained?). To be made to feel something. To engage with thought-provoking tales, or immersed in history, to escape to fantastical worlds. To lose ourselves in quests and battles or find ourselves terrified, mortified, weeping, grieving, laughing hysterically. Isn’t that the point of art and literature and film? To make us feel and think and to deepen our empathy and understanding of the world and one another?
I prefer nuance to ideology, though, so you might as well lock me up in the loony bin and throw away the key.
P.S. Elliot Page has a very small role. He is not a “great warrior” but rather a brave young man who left to go to war as a boy in place of a spoiled rich brat, and who died bravely having been lied to by Odysseus. You don’t have to be big and strong and macho to be brave or to die a hero. Likewise, Helen of Troy, played by Lupita Nyong’o has barely any screen time at all, though her small role has once again proven to be the kind of thing that starts wars. If these casting choices are truly breaking your immersion, I’m afraid you’ve missed the point of Nolan’s Odyssey entirely. Of art itself. More’s the pity. It’s a magnificent film, though without its flaws.
Read my review of The Odyssey right here.
