My older brother woke me up one night in the late-seventies to watch Jason and the Argonauts on TV. I was six. My parents had already ruled on this, and the ruling was that the movie came on too late and the skeleton warriors would scare me, and my brother apparently filed an appeal with himself and won. So there I was on the floor in the dark watching a bronze giant named Talos creak to life and come after a boat, watching the gods lean over a board on Olympus and move mortals around on it like game pieces, watching seven skeletons claw up out of the ground with swords while Jason and his guys hacked at them. It scared the hell out of me. My parents were right. I have never once regretted it.
Years later the same brother took me to see Clash of the Titans, the real one, in a theater. Bubo the mechanical owl, Medusa in the firelight, Laurence Olivier in a bathrobe on Mount Olympus playing Zeus like a man doing his taxes, pushing little clay figures of the mortals around exactly the way the gods did it when I was six. I loved every second of it.
Here’s what neither of us did, not that night on the floor and not in that theater. We didn’t check anything. It never occurred to either of us to ask whether the Argo was a plausible Bronze Age vessel, or whether Greeks in 1200 BC would have sounded like members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, or whether a forty foot bronze man was a documented feature of the Mediterranean. Harryhausen’s Greece is wrong in every single way the internet currently claims to care about. Take Bubo, a robot owl in ancient Greece, which is a bigger leap in engineering than a Viking longship by a couple thousand years. Nobody said a word.
I mention this because Christopher Nolan has made his version of the Odyssey and grown men have spent two months auditing his boats.
You’ve probably seen the complaints. The ship in the trailer is the Draken Harald Hårfagre, a modern Norwegian vessel built to look like a medieval Viking longship, which puts it roughly two thousand years past its due date. Agamemnon’s helmet looks like Batman’s cowl. Telemachus calls Odysseus “dad.” The dialogue is plain modern English, and one line has Antinous telling Telemachus he’s pining for a daddy he never knew, like some sniveling bastard, which is not a construction you’ll find in Fitzgerald. And the film took some inspiration from Emily Wilson’s translation, which keeps getting called “liberal,” a word that has nothing to do with whether a translation is accurate.
That’s the list they’ll say out loud. Here’s the list underneath it. Lupita Nyong’o is playing Helen of Troy, and Elon Musk and Matt Walsh both had something to say about that. Elliot Page is playing Sinon. Travis Scott is in it.
The first list is a decoy for the second list, and the giveaway is that nobody has ever enforced the first list in the history of motion pictures.
Gladiator has stirrups in it, five hundred years early, in a movie whose entire pitch was that you were finally seeing Rome, and it won Best Picture. Braveheart stages the Battle of Stirling Bridge in an open field with no bridge in it, and the bridge is the only reason the Scots won that battle, and it won Best Picture too. A Knight’s Tale opens with a medieval crowd stomping to We Will Rock You and people adore it. The Lion in Winter is Hepburn and O’Toole trading twentieth century zingers in 1183, and it won Goldman the Oscar for the screenplay. Every knight in every movie ever made speaks modern English, and Shakespeare himself put a striking clock in Julius Caesar. Nobody organized against any of it, because organizing against it would be stupid, and because everyone in those movies was white.
Which brings us to Troy, and Troy should end the argument by itself. Same war, same characters, same source material, 2004. Wolfgang Petersen cut the gods out entirely, which is the most radical thing anyone has ever done to Homer, since the gods are the reason any of it happens. He killed off people who survive in the poem. He compressed a ten year war into a couple of weeks. He cast an Australian, an Englishman, a Welshman, an Irishman, and Brad Pitt from Shawnee, Oklahoma, all doing accents from countries that had nothing to do with the Aegean or with each other. Diane Kruger played Helen, and there was no discourse about her arms, and the only complaint anyone remembers is that Brad Pitt sounded like Brad Pitt. A blonde German actress played the most beautiful woman in the world and the internet had nothing to say. That’s the control group, and the experiment only has one variable in it.
And then there’s Nolan, who spent ten years on Batman. Batman has a canon so documented and so litigated that people have gone to court over it, and Nolan rewrote it constantly and cheerfully. He gave Ra’s al Ghul no Lazarus Pit. He put Bane in a luchador brain and took away the venom. He built a Batmobile that looks like a municipal works project. He ended the whole thing with Bruce Wayne retired in Italy having a coffee, which is not a thing Batman does or has ever done or can do. The same people now measuring a Homeric adjective with calipers threw the man a parade. He also made Dunkirk, a movie about specific ships at a specific beach where actual men actually died, and the ships are wrong, and the Spitfire marks are off, and the beach isn’t the beach. Nobody organized. When Nolan says the pre-release discourse is irrelevant and points at his Batman decade, he isn’t dodging. He’s showing you the receipt.
So the rule was never fidelity. Here’s the rule.
The Helen objection runs on two words. Homer describes her with “white arms,” therefore Nyong’o is a race swap, therefore Nolan went woke, therefore admit it, coward. But “white armed” is leukolenos, and it’s filler. Homer was singing this out loud, from memory, to a room full of people who couldn’t read, and he needed words that fit the meter, so he kept a stock of ready-made phrases and dropped them in wherever the line came up short. Homer sticks it on Hera. He sticks it on Andromache. He sticks it on Nausicaa and on Helen and on basically any woman who needs the right number of syllables in front of her name. It means something closer to “female and highborn,” or as we’d say in the deep south, high falutin’, than it means anything about pigment, and treating it as a swatch from a paint deck isn’t a reading of Homer, it’s a man who found a search result.
And even if it meant what they want it to mean, we are talking about a story with a one eyed giant in it, and a witch who turns men into pigs, and a woman whose singing kills sailors, and a guy who keeps the wind in a bag. The man demanding photographic accuracy about a woman’s skin tone has already signed off on the cyclops. He isn’t confused about genre. He isn’t confused about anything.
Sinon is where the mask comes off, because Sinon is nobody. He has about a paragraph in the whole tradition, the guy who talks the Trojans into rolling the horse inside, and that’s it. There is no Sinon fandom, no Sinon canon, no constituency of people who were protective of Sinon in 2019 and are heartbroken now. When a Fox News writer describes Elliot Page as a “5-foot-nothing biological female,” that is not a note about the character, because there’s no character there to have a note about. It’s a man who wanted to say something about a trans actor and needed a movie to say it about.
The dialogue complaint is the smartest of the bunch, because it’s adjacent to a real thing. “Dad” landing wrong in a Greek epic is a defensible taste reaction and plenty of people who have zero problem with the cast still winced at that trailer. But watch what they want instead. They want thees and thous and haths. They want the Odyssey to sound old, and the sound they mean by old is the King James Bible, which is a piece of seventeenth century English with precisely no relationship to a Bronze Age Aegean oral tradition. It isn’t ancient. It’s Jacobean. The people demanding authenticity are demanding that a Greek poem sound authentically British and about twenty seven hundred years too late.
Wilson’s translation isn’t liberal, it’s plain, and it’s plain because she made an argument out loud and in print that Homeric Greek was ordinary language to the Greeks, that it was performed rather than studied, and that dressing it in fake antique diction makes it less faithful rather than more. You’re free to disagree with her and classicists do, at length, which is what classicists are for. But she was also the first woman to translate the poem into English, which took until 2018, and that’s the detail that keeps ending up in these threads, and not because anyone’s arguing about her Greek.
Now the part that settles it. Charlton Heston played a Mexican in Touch of Evil with his face darkened. John Wayne played Genghis Khan. Elizabeth Taylor played Cleopatra. Jake Gyllenhaal played the Prince of Persia. Scarlett Johansson played Major Kusanagi. Tilda Swinton played a Tibetan monk. Emma Stone played a woman named Allison Ng in Hawaii. Every one of those got criticized, and the criticism came from the people getting erased, and the answer from the right was always the same and always immediate. It’s just a movie. It’s called acting. Best actor gets the part. Stop policing art. You people find racism in everything.
Same crowd, opposite rule, and the only variable is which direction the swap runs.
And then there’s the prediction, which is the part I enjoy most. Go woke, go broke. That’s the whole theory, that a movie with the wrong people in it will fail, and the failing is what proves the wrongness. Matt Walsh announced that nobody on the planet actually thinks Nyong’o is the most beautiful woman in the world. Somebody else noted that Nolan had cancelled his influencer screenings and was only letting approved critics see it early, which meant he was waving the surrender flag, and that they knew they had a financial disaster on their hands.
That was posted while AMC’s ticketing app was falling over. People sat in a queue for an hour in June trying to give Universal money. Fandango slowed to a crawl. The early reviews came in calling it staggering and the must-see event of the summer. There are twenty-four theaters in America showing it in the format Nolan actually wants you to see it in, and getting into one of them is its own war.
This is the part where I’m supposed to say the numbers will settle it, but they won’t, because the numbers never do. Captain Marvel made a billion dollars and the same people who said it would bomb said the billion was fake. Barbie made a billion and a half and that was somehow also a defeat. The Little Mermaid made over half a billion without China even showing it, and the goalposts moved to marketing costs and profit margins, which measure how much Disney spent and not how many people wanted to see the movie. The prediction isn’t a prediction, it’s a wish, and a wish can’t be wrong, it can only be unfulfilled, which is why these guys can run the same play every year and never once file a correction.
I’ll give them one thing. There’s a version of the ship complaint made in good faith, and I’ve read it, and I have some sympathy for it. Nolan built a career on practical effects and getting it right, and “wooden-hulled, built with ancient technology” is a dodge he’d never accept from another director. The costumes look a little dull. Some people got as far as saying the real problem isn’t the history at all, it’s that the armor is boring, and they might be right about that. Movies are for arguing about and I’ve spent forty years arguing about them.
But that complaint had a room to itself for about ten minutes. What showed up in May was something else, and you can tell because it has no history. Nobody upset about the Draken was upset about the Moonstone. Nobody keeping a ledger on leukolenos ever kept one on the stirrups. The standard was invented the week it became useful, because you can’t say “Lupita Nyong’o is Black” out loud and have it count as film criticism, and “he didn’t do the research” sounds like you have principles.
My brother woke me up at six years old to watch skeletons fight a man with a sword, in a Greece that never existed, made by an Englishman with clay figures and a camera, and it made me love a story that’s three thousand years old and still going. That’s what these movies are for. Homer’s people didn’t sit still for a lecture on shipbuilding. They sat still because a guy was telling them something amazing and they wanted to hear how it came out.
The Odyssey has survived Rome, the fall of Rome, the loss of Greek in western Europe for a thousand years, its own rediscovery, Alexander Pope, high school, and Troy. It’ll survive a longship. Whether it survives Elon Musk having thoughts about it is a different question, but I like its odds.
Add Comment