This article contains spoilers for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
In a different time, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey would have been celebrated by the American right as a conservative film. Nolan’s interpretation of Homer’s epic poem is about the unintended consequences of breaking with tradition in pursuit of short-term gain.
Matt Damon’s wily Odysseus breaks the laws of war with the ruse of the Trojan horse that allows the Greeks to pillage Troy; Agamemnon, the leader of the expedition, makes a grisly sacrifice in the name of his own power and greed; the suitors lusting after Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, exploit Zeus’s law of hospitality to drain the kingdom of Ithaca; Odysseus’s men massacre the Trojans and defile the temple of Athena, ignore the warnings of the gods, and die gruesome and lonely deaths far from home. Odysseus’s original act of perfidy, Nolan implies, has broken the world: The laws of the gods no longer command respect, because he has illustrated that they can be broken with impunity.
In Donald Trump’s America, however, many on the right loathe this film. Trump’s disregard for rules and institutions is the reason his supporters love him, and this film argues that such disregard has disastrous long-term consequences. The film can easily be interpreted as a conservative critique of Trumpist radicalism. That, however, is not why so many on the MAGA right have attacked it. The actual reason they hate the film is that there are Black and trans people in it.
Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, joined the online tantrum over the casting of the actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen, whose presence in Troy justified Agamemnon’s invasion. The trans actor Elliot Page plays Sinon, a poor boy from Ithaca who is brave enough to travel with Odysseus in place of the cowardly aristocrat Antinous, played by Robert Pattinson. Antinous lies repeatedly about his willingness to go to war in order to hide the fact that Sinon went in his place. One may detect in this a subtle critique of the reactionary masculinism represented by those crashing out over Page’s casting. There are those of us who talk about being brave, and those of us who have to be.
Musk called Nolan an “anti-White racist,” while other conservatives complained that Nyong’o was simply too ugly to play Helen. Although many tried to couch their complaints in critiques of the film’s historical inaccuracy, The Odyssey is a fantasy film that features magic and monsters. Moreover, these outbursts regularly occur whenever Black people are cast in popular feature films and series. Some reactionaries will always find a reason to demand all-white entertainment, regardless of whether there are mermaids, hobbits, or lightsabers involved. Their real problem is with people they consider beneath them getting roles that show them as the equals of white people—or really, specific kinds of white people. No one was complaining about the casting of actors of British, Australian, and German descent in Troy more than a decade ago; after all, they were largely blond.
The stakes are perhaps higher with The Odyssey than with The Lord of the Rings or The Little Mermaid, given the right wing’s tendency to treat the great accomplishments of human civilization as the exclusive patrimony of white people, and to project contemporary politics onto Europe in antiquity. “Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello,” Stephen Miller declared in a speech at the funeral for the assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk. “Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry.”
People “from third-world nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel,” are coming to America, Miller fumed on Fox News after the Supreme Court narrowly upheld birthright citizenship, “and they can just come into the country, have a baby, and then that baby is automatically a citizen?” This is a sort of racial stolen valor, which takes for white people of any background every accomplishment from ancient Athens to the Atlanta airport.
Similarly, after the Supreme Court determined Trump could revoke temporary protected status for Haitian refugees, the right-wing podcaster Megyn Kelly bellowed for the refugees to “go back to fucking Haiti” and said, “We know our country’s better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic and our culture and our values. You being here only dilutes it for us, those who built it and live it.”
But of course neither Kelly nor Miller “built this country,” and they have as much to do with, say, the writing of The Odyssey or the painting of the Sistine Chapel as I do—the fact that Kelly and Miller are white does not make these accomplishments theirs. People who espouse these views do not value the classics for what they can teach us about the ancient world or our own, but as bleached marble monuments to their own superiority.
There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s ancestors (although Miller’s were actually poor persecuted Jews from Eastern Europe, not ancient Roman senators). Honoring and celebrating the past achievements of those ancestors, however, is different from taking credit for them. All Kelly and Miller did was win the lottery of being born in the richest country ever, one whose institutions and traditions they are busy helping destroy with as much zeal as the Greeks in Nolan’s film defiled the temple of Athena.
When some on the right speak of reverence for “civilization,” what they’re doing is trying to anachronistically justify the hierarchy of race they would like to see enacted today by rooting it in antiquity. You cannot cast Black people in The Odyssey, because The Odyssey is a pillar of “Western civilization,” which they consider to be white. This faction of the far right imagines antiquity as a kind of idyllic Jim Crow universe of utterly separate civilizations, one in which the integration they despise could not possibly exist.
But Greece is not as far from Africa as the North American continent is, and the modern construct of race, a pseudoscientific product of the Atlantic slave trade, would not be invented until thousands of years after Homer. Black people are depicted in Greek art. Egypt, Libya, and “Aethiopia” are frequently referenced in ancient writings. As the Black classics scholar Frank Snowden Jr. wrote in the 1970s, at least one of the characters in The Odyssey, Eurybates, is specifically described as “black-skinned and woolly-haired.” As the Stanford classics professor Sarah Derbew notes in her book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity, Black people are referenced in plays by Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus. They also appear in the writings of Hesiod and Herodotus. One of the lost epic poems is The Aethiopis, in which Memnon, the Aethiopian king and an ally to Troy, plays a major role.
Black people were not as uncommon in the ancient Mediterranean world as Nolan’s critics seem to imagine. But even if they had been, color-blind casting makes sense as an artistic choice for portraying the classics precisely because race as it exists today did not exist when The Odyssey was written. And no contemporary actor can actually claim the same descent as Helen, who hatched from a swan’s egg.
As some have pointed out, Matt Damon is not even kind of Greek. If you want to perform Euripides in Tokyo, Lagos, Mexico City, or Washington, D.C., you’re going to run into trouble putting together a Greek cast, to say nothing of the fact that for much of the past two millennia, the Greek-speaking people living in what is modern-day Greece and Turkey would have identified as Romans instead. The stories of the classics survive and compel people across the globe because they are at once both alien and universal. They have been interpreted and reimagined for centuries, always reflecting the fears and concerns of the societies that retell them. The fact that the cast of Nolan’s Odyssey, an American film, looks like America is the least innovative thing about it.
As a teenager and a theater student at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C., I was assigned classic Greek plays as part of both my theater-history class and my English class. This being a public school in D.C., these classes were almost entirely Black, as were my teachers. My theater-history class was taught by Donal Leace, an actor and folk singer who made a tremendous impression on me. He taught us about the importance of these texts and how they shaped human storytelling, and I owe to him my lifelong appreciation for them. I have seen conservatives accuse liberals of dismissing the classics as the province of “dead white men,” but that was not what I was taught in the 1990s by Black teachers, in a Black school, in what was then a mostly Black city.
Shortly after graduating, I went to see Avery Brooks in The Oedipus Plays. I do not remember at the time interpreting his casting as an overt political statement, let alone thinking that anyone would consider these stories as the collective racial property of people born white thousands of years later, rather than as a form of sorcery allowing anyone in the present to speak to the past.
Mr. Leace, who died in 2020, gave this gift to generations of students at Ellington. As I was watching Nolan’s Odyssey, I recognized an actor playing Polybus, one of Penelope’s suitors: It was Corey Hawkins, an Ellington alumnus. Mr. Leace would have been proud.
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