How Woke is "The Odyssey"?

Should they have stuck with the original title: "White Devil Gets What’s Coming to His Honky Ass"?

Making a big-budget, high-profile movie forces a director to chart a course between left-wing and right-wing dangers. This type of dilemma has been known for millennia, and actually appears in the ancient Greek poem Odysseus’ Bogus Journey (sometimes translated as “The Odyssey”). Here’s the situation:

Faced with this dilemma, Christopher Nolan arguably tacked towards woke and put his film at risk of being ravaged by the right-wing social media beast. Nolan got flak for casting several non-white actors, infuriating those who would like the ancient Greek tale to exclusively star historically-accurate 5’4” hairy dudes and women with unibrows.¹ Nolan also cast the transgender actor Elliot Page as Sinon, causing some people to reveal that they have — and surely have always had — strong preconceptions about the physical appearance of Sinon from The Odyssey. But the cancellation attempts seem to have failed: The Odyssey made $264 million last weekend, which isn’t just sailing successfully past the metaphorical beast — that’s bringing the beast’s wife to a toe-curling orgasm and then leaving a huge deuce in the beast’s bathroom.

Is the movie woke, though? I would say so if I thought it was. I’ve been candid about the silly woke stuff that I saw when I worked in entertainment; though people are currently trying to cram these events down a very-crowded memory hole, there was a moment when Hollywood decided that everything from Darkwing Duck: The Next Generation to Anal MILFs 19 had to be a sobering comment on race and identity. That season of Master of None where Aziz Ansari turned into a Black lesbian did happen — it seems like a hallucination, but it was real. Though some people want to treat the woke wave like a college rasta phase — that is, they want to move on and never acknowledge that it existed — that stuff did happen and does happen, and I don’t pretend otherwise.

But IMHO, The Odyssey is not woke. Of course, maybe that’s partly why it’s set to make more money than God makes in a really good year.

To the extent that the film has a message,² that message might be one of the most small-c conservative messages possible, namely: If you disobey God, he will smite your ass and laugh about it. The gods in Nolan’s Odyssey aren’t impish, quasi-human pranksters: They’re an omnipotent police state that punishes every infraction with ruthless panache. The concept of “entrapment” doesn’t seem to exist in this world: At one point, the gods trap the sailors on an island containing nothing but cows and then punish them for eating the cows. The gods could have protected the cows by not letting the sailors near them to begin with, but they would apparently rather coax the sailors into a rule violation so that they can dispense some Ancient World justice. The plot is basically Dirty Harry in sandals.

What about the casting? Well, IMHO, Elliot Page is miscast. I have to be honest: When Page was on screen, my eyes did not tell me “That’s the grown-up version of the boy we saw earlier” — they said “Hey, its Juno!” But I’m aware that Page was in Inception and directors have actors they like working with, so that’s probably what happened here. If Scorsese remade Porgy and Bess, Joe Pesci would probably be in it; if Tim Burton made The Little Rascals, I’d back Johnny Depp to be Alfalfa. For better or worse, this is how directors work.

As for the race-blind casting, that didn’t throw me because hyper-realism was never at play. After all: There’s a cyclops in this movie. The poem is an ancient myth. Odysseus’ vessel is a Viking ship 2,000 years out-of-time, and the characters not only speak English — they say words like “dad” and “amazeballs”.³ Nolan made umpteen choices that serve movie-making, not realism, and the casting can be explained by this hilariously-unwoke-and-obviously-true explanation from Ridley Scott about why he didn’t cast an Egyptian lead in the movie Exodus: Gods and Kings.

"I can't mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Muhammad so-and-so from such-and-such.”

Progressive Twitter shat a Ziggurat of Ur worth of bricks at that statement, but Scott was right: Big movies require big movie stars. Matt Damon is one of perhaps four people on Earth who can lead a movie this size. Does Matt Damon look Greek? No. Does Charlize Theron look Greek? Haha fuck no. Do Anne Hathaway, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, John Leguizamo, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Travis Scott, or Hamish Patel look Greek? The answers range from “not really” to “pffft come on”. And you could demand that this movie be made with George Stephanopoulos as Odysseus and Pete Sampras as Antinous, but I propose that we be adults and acknowledge that Nolan simply chose actors that he thought audiences would like.

Nolan’s Odyssey — like Homer’s Odyssey — is not a story about race. And that, to me, makes the story not woke. The hallmark of wokeness is to make all things about race and identity. Race, gender, and sexual orientation are the omnipresent lenses through which the world must be viewed — wokeness slanders the word “colorblindness” as a smokescreen for privilege. Nolan’s “Ancient Greece” happens to look a hell of a lot like present-day America, and if people want to get hung up on the actors’ races, that’s their prerogative. But the movie’s sole comment on race seems to be “get over it”, and based on the box office and reviews, a lot of people are agreeing to that condition.

Which is yet another reminder that Twitter is not real life. Twitter is full of clout chasers who try to exploit division for personal gain. Right-wing rage peddlers tried to run the “THIS MOVIE IS WOKE!!!” play because that play worked on Snow White, The Marvels, Supergirl, and others.⁴ The people behind those campaigns got attention and clout, which are usually convertible to American dollars. And the exact same dynamic exists on the left. If a narrative resonates once, people will repeat it over and over again until it eventually fails — no one knows that better than Hollywood! But the failure of the “IT’S WOKE!!!” narrative in this case indicates that people might be ready for a new story.

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1. I kid the Greeks. Give it up for the Greeks, folks — they’re alright!

2. I’m more that willing to allow that The Odyssey — both the poem and the movie — might just be a collection of fun stories about monsters. Why does everything have to have meaning? Some stories — as Homer Simpson said — are “just a bunch of stuff that happened”.

3. They do not say “amazeballs”.

4. A theory: The “IT’S WOKE!” play works best when the movie is a snow-capped mountain of shit in the first place.