Lessons from Nolan's Odyssey

We all know the problems with this film, including those of us (like me) who haven’t watched it and will never watch it. The problems:

• dis-enchanting modern dialogue and accents

• black Helen of Troy heading a general mystery meat cast of “Ancient Greeks”

• transgender warriors

• bad writing

• subversion of concepts

Let us first confront the dumb notion that you need to have watched the film to judge it (a la Douglas Murray). No, I don’t need to watch the film to know that it is wrong, stupid, destructive and subversive to depict Helen of Troy as black. It is likewise common sense to know how a mystery meat cast will affect the telling of a classical European story. I can also predict - accurately - what effect modern dialogue will have on a mythic ancient story, because anyone could predict that. Transgender Greek warriors speaks for itself. As for the bad writing, that isn’t my concern here - although it is a widespread phenomenon nowadays and very much of concern to me - because others can analyse that. Ditto the subverting of the story’s concepts. But I can condemn all of these things, easily, without having personally endured them in this particular instance, for I have endured all of them elsewhere.

Indeed, if progressives tell us we can’t condemn the film before watching it, why were they celebrating it before watching it?

Let’s get to the point: this film is a White humiliation ritual. You know that by how much progressives celebrate it, rally to defend it, and want more of it.

The specific nation/people of Greece are especially degraded by this (eg. by accepting their budget contribution but not having a single Greek actor in the film or including Greece in its opening “world tour”). This abuse of the Greek people is even more grotesque because they are today a small and harmless nation.

But all European people, both in the Old World and the New, are degraded by this film. It perverts a key foundational text of our civilisation, it callously inserts non-Europeans into our heritage, it offends against the Faustian drive (much as Ridley Scott’s execrable Napoleon (2023) “biopic” did), in the manner of egalitarian poison it (by using modern American dialogue and accents) negates our very concepts of hierarchy and “the classical”, and, typical of Nolan’s spirit-shrivelling rationalism it dis-enchants our mythology, casting gods and magic as merely “apparent”.

Mainstream conservatives, of course, are as bovine as ever, seeking out ways to agree with the progressives and suppress their instinctual disgust and disappointment, so as to kid themselves that they have not been (yet again) defeated and humiliated. Mainstream conservatives are (due to their financial clout) an entity in political circles but (due to their nature) a non-entity in political discourse. They are the Renfield to the progressive’s Dracula. They are the shadow of the progressive, the forlorn echo of the jubilant vandal.

Is Christopher Nolan a mainstream conservative? Probably, but one with unusual amounts of agency and curiosity. He certainly had a reputation for being “a bit right-wing”. This is why I think, for the progressives, The Odyssey represents the cucking of Nolan, the successful corrupting of the only director right-wingers thought might just possibly be on their side. The progressives feel they have collected another scalp, in other words. This explains a lot of their joy about The Odyssey. But I am not sure they are really correct. It is more likely that Nolan willingly decided to join them. Having sailed quite close to the wind in his films thus far, I think he thought “okay, time to stop playing around now, and start being more socially responsible”.

It is natural, but also a sort of cope, for right-wingers to assume that Nolan didn’t want to do this. I disagree. I don’t believe he did this out of cowardice (he seems genuinely pleased with himself, not embarrassed or ashamed) or even in pursuit of Oscars (he goes far beyond what would be needed to clear that bar). For example, if he absolutely “had” to have a non-white Helen of Troy, he could have cast a mixed-race woman, or someone vaguely attractive, a Halle Berry type. Instead he chose a woman who looks like she is straight out of the jungle. It was as far from the Aryan ideal as he could possibly get without leaving planet Earth. So it was not desire for acceptance that drove him, nor the cowardice that would lead to such arrant compromising. I don’t think he was compromising. I think he did this willingly and even gleefully. As to the reason why, I don’t know. I am just certain that he was not acting under duress. I think right-wingers should give up on that notion. Christopher Nolan is not our friend.

Let us look at the fatuous defences progressives have made of the Helen casting. Almost all of them are tedious examples of pretending not to understand:

• she is a fictitious character (so it doesn’t matter…?)

• she is only on-screen for a few minutes (irrelevant)

• we don’t know that Homer intended her as White (of course we do)

• the character has already been played by non-white actresses - Eartha Kitt in a 1950 theatre play by Orson Welles and Galyn Görg in a 1996 episode of Xena: Warrior Princess! (Neither of these was an adaptation of The Odyssey, and neither was “serious”, the first being an experimental surrealist stage show and the second being a tongue-in-cheek 1990s pulp TV show.)

• the White actors in the film also aren’t Greek! (they can pass as Greek, are far more plausibly Greek than any non-white actor)

• why do you even care about the actress’s race…?! (then why do progressives care about it enough to feverishly celebrate it?)

Then there is the moronic and disingenuous argument that, if you can accept ghosts, giants, sea monsters, magic and a cyclops, then you can surely accept a black Helen of Troy:

As usual, Rotten Tomatoes is dutifully presenting the picture that everyone just loves this film. Now, it might be chicanery. I think it is, especially with the public reviews. But if it isn’t, that bodes very badly for public tastes. And either way, we know that mass numbers of them are paying to watch this film.

And that brings us to the matter I really want to discuss regarding this film. The people I want to reach are those who were hoping beforehand that it would fail, finally marking the end of “the woke era”.

To the contrary, The Odyssey stands as a “proof of concept” for Hollywood and all other media producers. If even Helen of Troy can be depicted as black, anyone can be (and therefore must be). If you think that, after this, some low-budget film is going to get away with having an all-White cast, you are kidding yourself. The precedent has been set: a $250m epic can thrive commercially with a diverse cast, even one that includes the hideous Zendaya and the hideous Lupita Nyong’o. That means all films will now be expected to do the same (or more) in terms of diversity casting.

Also, it is a proof of concept in terms of multiple new ways to distort European history and Western civilisational heritage. It has gone right back to the beginning of European history and globohomoed even that. If you think that, after this, any mainstream film is going to get away with faithfully depicting more recent periods in European history - say, Ancient Rome, Renaissance Italy, Restoration France, Edwardian England - you are kidding yourself.

So I think we now have to definitively put away the notion that “woke is being put away”. Woke is dead and discredited, and we were correct to perceive that. Woke is also getting a bit slicker and more tactful, and we were correct to perceive that. But we were wrong to think that these factors meant it was being retired as “the official global state ideology”. In fact, the very “battering ram” / “shock and awe” effect (2015-2022) which exhausted people to wokery was also what established it as default, omnipresent and unanswerable - the norm. After the fact, people are tired of it, tired of fighting it, but it has become unfightable anyway.

At least, it has become unfightable in the sense that the institutions are clearly never going to “put it away” voluntarily. They have shown that with The Odyssey.

They have also shown that another canard is false: “go woke, go broke”. We desperately need to give up on that one as well. Whenever you hear someone say it, you should ask them how the weather is in 2015. Mock them, insult them, make them embarrassed about their gormlessness. While it is true that some woke films make a loss at the box office (Joker: Folie à Deux, Snow White, Supergirl) it doesn’t even matter then because the studios are massively wealthy and can withstand huge losses. You can’t “hurt” them by refusing to buy their poison. If you are hoping that the general public will unify to do that for you, again, you are kidding yourself. The masses will buy whatever they are told to buy. They have about as much agency as they have taste.

In Britain we have seen similar “elite narrative control” in recent weeks: Ann Widdecombe’s brutal murder was minimised and memory-holed (because she was right-wing), and Andy Burnham’s manufactured ascent to No.10 has reinvigorated the Labour Party in the face not only of its own hollowness and ineptitude, but also of Britain’s dire condition. You can distract the masses from almost anything and make them do almost anything.

In the case of The Odyssey, the advertising machine made sure that the masses did as required. In its opening weekend alone, the film made $264m, exceeding its $250m budget. It needed to make twice as much in order to fully recoup its costs, but that was achieved with its second weekend. And now, every ticket being sold is a bonus.

So it has worked out for them. This butchering of our civilisational heritage has been successful. Why? Because they have the tools and the hegemony to ensure that their projects are successful.

This brings us to the ultimate problem in countering wokery. The difficulty is not production - which is much easier than twenty years ago and is destined to become infinitely easier with AI - but distribution and, as an adjunct of that, “ascension” into mainstream culture, achieving of “legitimacy”.

These, not the production of our own media, are the dilemmas we need to confront now. People triumphantly say “we can make our own media now” and that is true, but it is irrelevant if nobody is going to see (or pay for) what we make.

I don’t have the answers. I just think The Odyssey has helped to show us what the correct questions are.