Why is Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey' causing so much controversy? The backlash explained
The star-studded blockbuster has faced some controversy online but the criticism doesn't stand under scrutiny
WHEN YOU take a text as fundamental to the literary canon as The Odyssey and try and adapt it in any capacity, you’re going to get some backlash. He may be the film bro’s favourite blockbuster director, but Christopher Nolan is by no means immune.
At the time of writing, the final countdown trailer for Nolan’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning Oppenheimer is sitting on nearly 600,000 dislikes on YouTube. The comment section is filled with people dunking on the clips. “First time I’ve ever walked out of a trailer,” wrote one, while another said, “My only regret is that I can’t dislike it twice.” So, where on earth did it all go wrong?
Unfortunately, it seems like The Odyssey is already being targeted by right-wing review bombers taking issue with the casting of Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page for reasons hard to pin down as anything except racially and transphobically motivated, respectively. Right-wing circles online are accusing Nolan of pushing a ‘woke’ agenda. Somewhat inevitably, Elon Musk has eagerly fanned the flames. “Chris Nolan desecrated Homer and grovelled on his knees just to meet the woke rules required to win an Oscar. What a worm,” he wrote on X.
Christopher Nolan isn’t the first and only person to be accused of turning The Odyssey ‘woke’ in the last ten years. In 2017, classicist Emily Wilson became the first woman to publish a complete translation of the poem into English. Most critical reception to her translation was positive, praising the academic for undoing centuries of euphemism, Christianisation and misogyny present in previous English translations but not necessarily in the original text. However, a vocal minority accused her of imposing her own anachronistic bias onto the text, even though Wilson’s primary goal was to preserve the pace and length of the original, while also exploring nuances in translation that were lost in the eyes of previous male translators. A lot of the common controversy, outside of academic circles, was simply misogynistic: Wilson did not conduct her translation with the same male-centric lens as the many male poets who came before her.
Other than the obvious bigotry fuelling the backlash, there’s an issue at the core of this controversy: in what world is Christopher Nolan, the mastermind behind British dad blockbusters, a ‘woke’ director? Oppenheimer was criticised for flattening its female characters by many, while Spike Lee pointed out how it suffered from a lack of Japanese perspective. Dunkirk received multiple accusations of whitewashing from journalists and academics alike, for its failure to pay any attention to the many Indian and African soldiers deployed by the British Army in France. The Dark Knight Rises faced controversy for casting Liam Neeson (a white Irish man) as Ra’s Al Ghul (a North African supervillain). It’s hard to tell whether these are simply oversights or choices, but what’s more likely is that the ‘agenda’ Nolan’s being accused of pushing just isn’t something that crosses his mind.
The latter appears much more likely: in 2020, John David Washington became the first Black actor to have a lead role in a Nolan film, which he explained at the time was a much bigger deal for him than it was for the director. “I think what was so brilliant, which is one of the reasons I know Nolan is a real one, is because he didn’t sensationalise it,” he told Deadline. “He didn’t say we’re on the precipice of history or anything like that. He just said, ‘He’s a man. He’s the protagonist. I know who I picked.’” For Washington, though, it was at the forefront of his mind. Being the first “Black dude with a beard” on the cover of a Nolan film, he said, was “rock and roll”.
For a storyteller like Nolan, who I would suggest prioritises narrative and style over depth of character in the first place, it makes sense that factors like the ethnicity of his protagonists aren’t as much of a consideration. Regardless of how you frame his casting choices, the controversy fuelled by online American right-wingers is grounded in a single bigoted, misguided accusation.
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