A Very Christian Odyssey

Anti-Woke idiots have missed the conservative forest for the multicultural trees

The great irony of right-wing freakouts over Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is that the film is a profoundly conservative work of art, in the best possible sense of the word. Departing from its 2,700-year old source material, it is a film about morality, duty, masculinity, and religion, all framed in conservative religious terms. Nolan’s is not a Greek Odyssey — it is a Christian one.

1.

Let’s get rid of this quickly: the “anti-woke” outrage against the film’s (somewhat) diverse cast— particularly of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy — is a pathetic sideshow that has nothing to do with the film itself. The apoplexy is pathological, predictable, and quite idiotic, in at least four ways.

First, on the face of it, sure, it seems unlikely that a 8th-century-BCE century Greek would be as dark-skinned as Nyong’o. But then, said Greek would also not be as light-skinned as Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, and Tom Holland, who play the film’s central family. Hollywood casting has always been “race-blind” in this way; it’s just a matter of which race we’re supposed to be blind to.

Second, the mythical Helen of Troy was the offspring of a woman, Leda, and a god, Zeus, who came to her in the form of a swan and raped her. Perhaps racial phenotype may not apply under such circumstances.

Third, the real question should be whether Nyong’o succeeds or fails in her role, and in that the answer is obvious: she is utterly persuasive in the dual role of Helen and her twin (or half-twin) sister Clytemnestra. Her Helen is physically and emotionally scarred, both by the war purportedly fought in her name (the film suggests that the reason was money as much as honor) and by Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband Agamemnon upon his return from battle. As is often the case with Nyong’o’s performances, she comes across as totally committed, investing her character’s gestures and facial expressions with a dignity that the likes of Elon Musk cannot imagine. Her skin color is the least important feature of her performance.

Fourth, and in some contradiction to the previous point, the “multiculturalism” of Nolan’s Odyssey goes well beyond Nyong’o. The ignominious suitors who occupy Odysseus’s home in Ithaca are a diverse bunch; the image one gets is of a cosmopolitan Ithaca, where travelers from various lands converged. This may in fact be true; the Ancient Mediterranean was crisscrossed by trade routes and cultural exchanges. It’s quite plausible that Ancient Greece had its share of Nubians, North Africans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Persians, and others. Certainly I was willing to believe this for the duration of the film.

So, in a certain way, racists are right to be concerned. Because as soon as one reflects on the multiculturalism of the ancient Mediterranean, the vision of a monocultural, white “West” (which, Musk claims, is endangered by unenlightened hordes of less white migrants) is seen to be imaginary, stupid, and merely racist. Indeed, what is derided as ‘wokeness’ may be a better reflection of how civilizations have always interacted with one another, blending and shifting and changing over time. Perhaps the problem isn’t that The Odyssey is historically inaccurate, but that it is accurate in ways racists don’t want to admit.

But enough about the sideshow, which, thankfully, I completely forgot about within the first five minutes of the film.

2.

It’s odd to post a spoiler alert for a 2,700-year-old epic, but Nolan’s script does depart from Homer in a variety of ways, so consider yourself alerted.

The departures are not, to me, a problem, though some Homer scholars have protested that it is. All adaptation involves rewriting, and Nolan is, himself, an artist; his cinematography is not my subject here, but the film is as much a visual artefact as anything else. And so while Homer is his source material, he is not required to present it faithfully. I suppose it’s irksome that hundreds of millions of people think that The Odyssey is The Odyssey, but the same is true of every film based on a book, poem, or play.

What I do find interesting is how Nolan has transformed the material. The way Nolan retells the myth, Odysseus is haunted by the knowledge that he — like Robert Oppenheimer, the brooding hero of Nolan’s last film — has destroyed civilization in order to save it. If Oppenheimer saved the free world by developing a weapon so powerful that humanity could now destroy itself, Odysseus saved Greece by violating moral law to destroy a city and massacre its innocent inhabitants; he not only devised the trick of the Trojan Horse, but he took advantage of, and thus destroyed, hospitality codes which Nolan summarizes as “Zeus’s Law.”

In Homer, “Zeus’s Law” — xenia — is one theme among many; in Nolan, it is the dominant one. Zeus’s Law requires Penelope to feed and house dozens of hostile suitors for years. It (problematically) demarcates civilization and barbarism. And Zeus’s Law, it is said over and over, is all that saves humanity from violence, perdition, and death — much as Christ and Natural Law function in conservative Catholic theology.

This is not at all the theology of Homer. Homer’s Odysseus is not a brooding, good man wracked by conscience; he is a schemer who tries to outwit the gods, who struggles against fate, loses everything, but prevails in the end. And the gods, mostly absent from Nolan’s film, are a capricious bunch, scarcely more moral than humans. (See above re: rape of Leda.) Moreover, in the words of Homer translator (and Nolan critic) Emily Wilson:

Deception, warmongering, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abusing women and yearning for honour – all perfectly fine in the world of Homer — are, in this version, very bad. This is not in itself a problem, but it is a problem if the film’s own values and vision don’t hang together, and if the characters’ motivations don’t make sense on their own terms.

Fair enough, though I’m more open to the film’s internal logic than Wilson is. Certainly, the men in Nolan’s Odyssey are overwhelmingly venal: Penelope’s suitors, Menelaus’s courtiers, Odysseus’s men. It’s not only Circe who says that men are pigs; it’s Nolan as well. There are very few good men in the film, and very many evil ones. In Nolan, “Zeus’s Law” really means God’s Law, and it is the only way human beings can experience salvation, or at least lift themselves out of the moral gutter.

Moreover, unlike in Homer, xenia is largely a matter of faith. In Nolan’s version, unlike Homer, the only visible goddess is Athena, and it is revealed that the image Odysseus has of her is actually that of a young girl murdered in the sack of Troy. She is, in essence, Odysseus’s conscience, and a Christian conscience at that. The chaotic world of Homer, filled with scheming deities at odds with one another, is replaced by a quasi-monotheistic world in which Zeus’s Law is the sole source of salvation, and Athena the conscience who guides Odysseus to it.

Nolan’s choice to render the Odyssey into such a monotheistic worldview does come at a cost. In Homer, there are many voices with many conflicting values: Polyphemus the Cyclops, Calypso, the gods themselves. In Nolan, they are rendered mute or close to it. Polyphemus is a kind of monster, the gods mostly silent. There is a fundamentalism in this Christian Odyssey, as if the world can only contain one articulation of morality. If Zeus’s Law is dominant, others are subordinated.

Arnold Böcklin, Odysseus and Calypso (1883) (Wikimedia Commons)

3.

Broadly, though, while I am receptive to Wilson’s and other commentators’ objections to Nolan’s conservative rewrite of Homer, ultimately I found it compelling — as I also find the core of conservative religion itself.

I’ve written and spoken about the dilemma many times in the newsletter: that, with the decline in some forms of organized religion, group identity, the value of work, and trust in shared institutions, Western societies are experiencing what John Vervaeke has called the “Meaning Crisis,” that there is a ‘religion-shaped hole’ at the center of our society — a gap created for very good reasons, because these traditional forms made full humanity available only to some people and not others (including yours truly). But a gap nonetheless, with attendant social consequences, not least the resurgence of nihilism across the political spectrum, and, on the right, the recourse to hyper-conservative nationalism, masculinity, and religiosity.

Neither I nor Vervaeke nor any liberal who thinks about these questions wants a return to old-time religion, with its rigid hierarchies, oppressions, ethnocentrisms, sexisms, and the rest. Certainly as a queer Buddhist Jew, I would not survive in such a world. And is the mistake of religious conservatives (JD Vance, Peter Thiel, R.R. Reno) to believe that their preferred solutions to the Meaning Crisis are the only ones that exist. Moreover, I do not experience this crisis, as I wrote several months ago:

I derive plenty of meaning from my spiritual practices — Judaism, Buddhism, meditation, psychedelics, earth-based and otherwise — and in my family, queer tribes, friends, culture, politics, and work. But I’m well aware that opt-in, liberal religion (or post-religion) remains a rather boutique affair, and my other sources of meaning can have high bars to entry as well. My sources of meaning work well for hyper-educated people with the time and interest for such pursuits, but maybe not for most people.

Yet liberals must admit that thus far at least, progressive versions of religion — what I have called “religion with a lower-case r” — has not successfully filled that religion-shaped gap in society as a whole. Progressive religiosity is at the center of my life and work, but it appeals only to a relatively small number of highly-educated people, not (yet?) to anything like the numbers of people who have affiliated with conservative evangelicalism or Catholicism in the last several decades.

And as we’ve seen by the disgusting attacks on the eminently ethical James Talarico in Texas, a whole lot of people remain deeply suspicious (to put it mildly) of progressive religiosity. It seems fake to them, which in a sense it is, if by ‘fake’ we mean unmoored from theological doctrines, infallible clergy and scriptures, or promises of punishment and reward.

I see the world not unlike Christopher Nolan does in The Odyssey: human beings are deeply flawed, possessed of capacities for evil as well as good. And if the ‘strictures’ of traditionalism are to be torn down — as they must be for justice to expand — we need something other than anarchy and nihilism to replace them. “Zeus’s Law” is conveniently non-oppressive, but it is also, in the way Nolan depicts it, basically fictive. The real God’s Law requires more than just the Golden Rule; it is based on a set of theological and philosophical foundations that cause harm.

Again, from where I sit, it is obvious there are other choices between anomie and conservatism. My liberal and radical communities are deeply ethical ones — more ethical than the conservative ones of which I was a part earlier in my life. They uphold commitments to equality, respect, and compassion, perhaps sometimes to a fault. (Many of the excesses of wokeness that so unsettle Mr. Musk could well be described as excesses of empathy unbalanced by other values.) But I am aware that it is not always thus.

I remember a moment — a bit more prosaic than Circe’s Feast — when I first wondered about this, over twenty years ago. It was at the “Critical Tits” bike ride at Burning Man, in which hundreds (maybe thousands) of women ride their bikes topless through the playa in an act of mass empowerment and liberation. Modeled on the “Critical Mass” bike rides of the 2000s and on the “Take Back the Night” marches of the 1990s, Critical Tits was about reclaiming space that could often be unsafe.

As I was cheering from the sidelines, I noticed a man videotaping the event — back in those days, camera phones were not ubiquitous, and he was using a fairly obvious camcorder, which also lacked the special tag that the Burning Man organization gave out to licensed journalists. Trying to be non-confrontational, I said something like “Excuse me, but I feel like the people in the ride haven’t given their consent to be recorded.” The dude told me to mind my own business, and when I protested that this was all of our business, he threatened me and told me to fuck off.

So, here it was: a radical event devoted to women’s empowerment, hijacked by an asshole who may well have sold the footage to Girls Gone Wild. This is why we can’t have good things, I thought: assholes like this guy.

Both conservatives and progressives have clear retorts to this asshole: his behavior contravenes not just Zeus’s Law and God’s law but any concept of human dignity and autonomy as well, including the Golden Rule and Burning Man’s own Ten Principles. But it is also true that, perhaps thanks to two thousand years of practice, or perhaps to the unique ways in which religion imprints itself on the mind, the conservative retorts can seem more persuasive. I don’t if this guy could’ve been dissuaded if he believed in heaven and hell, or Divine punishment of some other kind, but I feel like if he had a serious religious practice, he would at least know that what he was doing was wrong. And, a conservative would add, the permissiveness and nudity at Burning Man is also a bit part of the problem; it gave him license to sin. Mess with conservative values, he might say, and inevitably you get a mess.

The world of Nolan’s Odyssey is one that seems on the edge of decay. The old values no longer hold sway; the strong oppress the weak because they can; old men are beaten up by soldiers; the powerful mock and exploit the powerless. In other words, it is a world not unlike our own. I resonate with the yearning for a moral order that could set it to right, even as I reject any attempt to do so that, itself, leads to more oppression and more cruelty.

This is not the world of the Ancient Greeks; they had different concerns and different theologies. But it is the world, it seems to me, of the 21st century, in which billions of people are reaching for reactionary ideologies in the face of bewildering technological, economic, and social change. There are other choices besides these two; I know, because I and my communities have made them. But Nolan is right to insist that some choice must be made.

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Thanks for reading. Here are some articles I’ve appreciated this week:

• I linked to it above, but Jamelle Bouie’s “Why Do We Tolerate Elon Musk’s Racist Commentary?” is an excellent survey of how far down the racist rabbit hole Musk has descended — and its titular question is well-taken.

• Speaking of conservative religion, conservative Catholic writer Valerie Pavilonis notes in Arc Magazine that JD Vance seems to lack one of the most important aspects of Catholic life: community.

• In his newly rebranded newsletter Redeeming Democracy, Robert P. Jones reflects on the data correlating Christian Nationalist beliefs and support for the most lawless and unconstitutional actions of ICE.

• Keeping up with voter suppression? Watch the shenanigans around mail-in ballots.

See you next time.