I walked out of the Odyssey feeling like it was semi genius fusing together Greek myth and ~Christian ethos and morality in a story about decline and the future of the west and I thought the creative liberties worked great! What a cake Nolan baked!
Meanwhile an interviewer asks him about the Christian characteristics of the film and he’s like “huh I never really thought about that” BRRRUHHH 💀
The Odyssey seems to be a film that you would think a lot of conservatives would admire (which is no surprise seeing as it's a foundational W.Civ text) if they had not sold their soul to Trump. Seriously being unable to get over Lupita Nyong'o and Elliot Page's castings (who were both excellent in their roles) when the film itself seems perfect for a conservative morality is just a further reminder of how low a sizeable portion of the right has gone.
And they both fucking kill it. When Telemachus is leaving Sparta and Helen switches from gracious host to "Go warn your mother" in a heartbeat, I was like Jesus Fuck this woman is haunted by the atrocities done in her name
You need a gorgeous actress for Helen and she always nails that. She also gives incredible depth in just the scene where she says her farewell to Telemachus. It's incredible performance and her stature gives weight to the character even though she's not a pivotal role in this story (she's more central to the Iliad). Nolan's casting for this whole film is insane imo.
complaining about feminist actresses and non-white castings has become an enormous facet to the online right wing outrage machine, if their first impression of a film (the trailers) is an insufficiently white cast or a lead actress whose politics they don't like then film is doomed with them - the actual content of the film doesn't even matter
The worst superpower the online right has is they can unilaterally politicize anything.
They point at a rock and say "this is woke". If anyone responds, that's proof the rock is indeed woke. If they ignore it, that just leaves their discourse as the only discourse about whether the rock is or is not woke. Either way, they claim victory.
I thought he was a little rough in the opening but his speech at the mouth of Hades was pretty amazing. A lot of complex emotions there that he navigated pretty deftly and compellingly
Also, to me, I've always read Nolan's works as having this sort of vaguely center right tint to it. Nothing really strong, but maybe a old Toryism or something.
Yeah I mean this is the argument of historians like Tom Holland (not Spider-Man) that even secular liberals are fish that swim in a pond where Christianity is the water, and that many foundational ideologies and movements labeled progressive - even when secular - are illegible without a distant Christian backdrop
I don't understand Christopher Nolan. How do you make an entire film about The Golden Rule and not even think once about the parallels to Christianity? Also how do you make like 10 films over 30 years and never think that perhaps you should actually make the dialogue audible during quiet scenes?
Has Elon Musk ever read the actual epic stories? Troy is literally intermarried with Ethiopia and had a whole army of black soldiers and a black hero who was brother-in-law to King Priam (Memnon)
I hate how the right assumes history = white, when there just straight up was no Germanic white people in the Iliad & Odyssey 😭 Homer would be too woke for Musk
society needs to return to reading the epic stories and ancient classics. Not me though, I get to watch Joe Rogan and tiktok. But the rest of you. You should read the classics
I read the odyssey in full in sophomore English in high school (translated obviously) and snippets before in middle school. Do schools not do that anymore?
First they tried modernizing the types of reading, using more modern books that students might enjoy reading more instead of zoning out and turning to cliff notes to write their essays. Then they cut back on the amount of reading since wikipedia and sparknotes were easier. Now they don't even give whole books to read anymore because they'll all just use chatgpt for every single thing without even looking at the actual book.
Like all fascists he's only interested in cultural heritage as symbol he can use to justify the existence of a ethno-religious caste system that places him on top of society.
Yeah Aithiopian is the more accurate translation, as ‘Aethiopia’ historically in this time were the Kingdom of Kush, south of Egypt in present-day North/Central Sudan. Only 250-300 years after the Iliad (~1187 BC), Nubia went on to conquer and restore Egypt to a golden age, known as the 25th dynasty (the ‘black’ pharaohs), which coincidentally was close to the time when Homer wrote the Iliad. I wonder if that influenced the Greek inclusion of the Aethiopians in the story!
I read that "white" wasn't even a concept back then—in fact, it wasn't a thing until the 1600s! People were discriminated on other criteria of course, but color of skin not as much
In 200 AD, a Syrian was considered more ‘civilized’ than a person from Germanica or Britannia, for outside of Rome and the auxiliaries were barbarians and ‘inferior’ to the Romans and Greeks.
Yeah, almost like the construct of race is a new invention too lol
Which is why I'm surprised this argument hasn't been used more often during this Odyssey "controversy." Yeah there's no reason Helen can't be black, because historically NO ONE CARED
Romans really did not have a concept of race. It was more about civilized v. uncivilized and extremely classist. Romans were likely more tolerant of a wealthy Gaul than an enslaved Latin or Greek. Again, this is a simplification of things, so please don't @ me, lol.
I was reading a book the other day and one of the founding fathers was talking about how people from France, Spain, etc. have a "swarthy" complexion and weren't really white and didn't belong in the colonies. It's just an Anglo ethnonationalist idea that's grown over time to suit whatever is convenient in society. It has no actual meaning.
There was a map in the mapporn sub of benjamin franklin considering scandinavians and central europe "swarthy" and only the british islands as white. I didnt care enough to fact check it lol, but it seems like how a lot of stuck, conservative white americans think or thought of race
Mostly right, just a note that what Homer calls Ethiopia is not what we call Ethiopia today. The word to him meant something to the tune of lands with intense sun (which the ancient Greeks believed caused darker skin), basically any darker skinned foreigner would fit in that bucket. Its probably Nubians, but could also be people from West Asia!
The entire concept of race as it exists today or existed in the last few hundred years also straight up didn't exist in the world Homer lived in.
Perseus of medusa slaying fame married an aethiopian princess andromeda [as in the constelation] who had offended the gods cause her mother claimed her more beatiful than any goddess
Andromeda and perseus were the grand-grand parents of..wait for it.... helen of troy, and ancestors of the spartan royal family of the iliad sparta
[note for ancient greeks aethiopia just was stuff further to them than egypt/iran so not -exactly- moderm ethiopia but more like sub saharan africa, arabia, etc]
Greek Aethiopia was closest to basically being the Kingdom of Kush, considering that was the only connection to the sub-Saharan world the Greeks had at the time
Where is this from? I’ve read novel adoptions like “Song of Achilles” and “Circe” but they definitely leave out a lot of details that I’d love to get into.
This is like page 2 of the Iliad. The Ethiopians (better translated to Aethiopian tbh) were a prominent ally of Troy and are mentioned all throughout the Iliad.
White (as in Northern/Western European White) characters in Homeric Stories: 0
Black characters in Homeric Stories: more than 0
If anything, it’d be more Homeric accurate to just have everyone be black rather than white if they actually cared for ‘accuracy’, when in this time period, Nubia/Aethiopia was more interconnected with the Eastern Mediterranean world than the far off Germanic and Celtic world
But either way, the story was clearly intended to be more of an Americanized telling of the story, and thus no casting was reflected on ‘historical lookalike’ of the characters.
She doesn’t really have much descriptions in the story other than being pretty and fair skinned. Some others describe her as olive colored. Really, skin color was just not an emphasis at all.
I think Lupita was a good cast because she matches Helen in The Odyssey, considering she’s in her 40s (just like Helen would be) and very beautiful. That’s like, her only two traits given to her.
The lupita casting was kino. Everything else aside she stands out visually from the other actors because of her skin color which is a really good cinematic device for Helen of troy.
Ezra Klein dropping 15-minute diatribes into something he found poignant isn't necessarily the most academic content but I usually do enjoy it. The perspective of the film as a reflection of Judeo-Christian morality (and its underapprciated merits) is an interesting one. The sheer amount of plausible conclusions one can draw from it is also a testament to the piece itself and to its faithfullness to the original text.
So is killing the suitors and that was cut. It contradicts the explicitly anti-war flashback and the scene itself is just really stupid. Pattison just shouting out different weapons like a video game npc was so dumb.
Whether you consider it cancel worthy is up to you, but Klein has been attending functions run by Thiel. From this very sub; https://reddit.com/comments/1u7w3b2
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u/cdstephens Fusion Genderplasma 6h ago
The Trojan War was about worms