Bigots Always Find Something To Hate

Pearl-clutching, flakey snowflake bigots! Listen up! You have something new to hate.

On July 17, director Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon as Ithaca’s most famous son, will premiere. And, horror of horrors, Lupita Nyong’o – born in Mexico City to Kenyan parents and raised primarily in Nairobi – will be portray Helen of Troy, whose “face launched a thousand ships.”

Heresy! Sacrilege! Woke – to those who prefer sleepwalking through life.

Never mind, that Damon is not Greek. To have a dark-skinned woman playing one of the most beautiful women in literary history is just too much to bear for some white-skinned people, who represent a minority of the world’s population.

On May 13, Elon Musk claimed that Nolan “is pissing on Homer’s grave. Disgraceful.”

Two days later, Musk claimed “Chris Nolan desecrated the Odyssey so that he would be eligible for an Academy Award.”

On May 22, Musk, perhaps yearning for the apartheid of his South African youth, posted on X that “Chris Nolan is an anti-white racist.”

Musk, a constant examplar that money purchases neither class nor smarts, does not know or chooses to ignore that there were many variations before our current versions of Greek myths were finalized. Oedipus never left Thebes. Cretans knew where Zeus was buried.

There were variations on the story of Odysseus’s travels and travails as well. In one version, Penelope [Anne Hathaway] slept around.

In fact, as one who was studying myths before Joseph Campbell made the subject required reading for educated minds, I posit that the Penelope’s faithfulness represents the psychic shift from the pre-Hellenistic Pelasgians, who worshiped a Mother Goddess, to the patriarchal Greeks.

Most of the other Achaean heroes from Troy found themselves dispossessed [or worse] upon arriving home, where the queens determined who were the kings. Menelaus was king of Sparta only because he married Helen.

Changing times change perspectives. Changing perspectives change the interpretation of the myths.

Among the Trojan raw material Homer chose to ignore was the account that Helen [whom I think should be designated Helen of Sparta] was never at Troy at all.

A poet made a derogatory reference to Helen’s less than monogamous behavior. Now among the gods [another variation], Helen blinded him. He responded by recanting, saying that it was not Helen but a phantom Helen who went to Troy. The real Helen spent the war in Egypt where Menelaus fetched her on his way home. She restored his sight.

Other accounts have Helen married to Achilles in Hades. Myths provide the material for artistic development.

Virgil started with Aeneas, a Trojan survivor of the conflagration to write a “history” of Rome. Medieval English mythographers conjured up Brut as a descendant of Aeneas to found the first kingdom in Britain.

The Middle Ages also birthed the not-so-legendary tale of Troilus and Cressida, which both Chaucer and Shakespeare found story-worthy 200 years apart.

You cannot pin down myths.

Last century, in At the Fall of an Age, Robinson Jeffers has Helen murdered on the island of Rhodes by Queen Polyxo, resentful at the death of her husband during the Trojan adventure. Jeffers based his poem on the account which Pausanias, that peripatetic old-world traveler, picked up on his grand tour.

Ulysses, one of Tennyson’s most revered poems, has the old hero [Latinized] contemplating the melancholy dénouement of his legendary life before deciding “‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world … To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths/Of all the western stars, until I die.”

And, though Ulysses acknowledges the toll time has taken on his physical strength, his heroic heart is still “strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Nikos Kazantzakis, of Zorba fame, took that determination and fashioned The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. In 33,333 lines [with a fierceness rivaled only by Jeffers], Odysseus leaves Ithaka to become an instrument of destruction of the Age of Heroes, even picking up and jettisoning Helen along the way, as he explores the world and his mind.

The kernel of old myths produces a new yield. And that happens among more than Greek legends.

The story of King Lear [originally a Celtic sea god] predates Shakespeare. Just prior to King Lear, Edmond Spenser’s version in The Faerie Queene, based on an earlier chronicle, has “Ler” and Cordelia defeat the evil sisters. After Lear dies in peace, the children of the sisters revolt, succeed and throw Cordelia in prison, where she eventually hangs herself.

Wild West aficionados know that it was not until Tombstone and Wyatt Earp in the early 1890s that the Gunfight at the OK Corral [the empty lot next to Fly’s Photography Gallery] was portrayed with close attention to details which were fully documented in contemporary newspaper stories.

Director John Ford actually knew Wyatt Earp. His My Darling Clementine is a fine western, especially for its time, but the Earps did not arrive in Tombstone pushing cattle; Doc Holliday was a dentist, not a physician; neither Doc nor Old Man Clanton died in the gunfight, the latter having been killed two months earlier.

Variations in the story line can even appear in inerrant texts – sometimes in close proximity to each other. But that is a topic for other venues.

What Musk and others of his ilk cannot grasp is that change is the only constant in the world. Hence, their terror when anything differs from their narrow version of the norm.

In a May 22 interview with Elle, Nyong’o said, “It’s quite something to be a part of The Odyssey, because it is so grand. It spans worlds. So that’s why the cast is what it is. We’re occupying the epic narrative of our time.”

Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy from 2004 diverges often from Homer’s Iliad, including and modifying other fragmented sources to craft a memorable epic.

The differences between Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur [2004] and Joshua Logan’s Camelot [1967, from Broadway in 1960] show the flexibility of source material.

Changing times change perspectives. The universality of myths makes them appropriate for any performers talented enough to tell the story. Oscar winner Nyong’o has passed that test.

Helen was a renowned beauty. Nyong’o is a pretty woman. So is Diane Kruger [Troy]. But, if I say neither compares to a 22-year-old Brigitte Bardot [Helen of Troy, 1956], blame it on my impressionable youth and her incomparable beauty.

Nyong’o, for her part, told Elle: “You can’t perform beauty,” and reminded racist critics “this is a mythological tale.”

P.S. Don’t tell the haters: In this version of The Odyssey, Zendaya – most assuredly a goddess on any red carpet she honors with her Emmy and Golden Globe-winning presence – portrays Athena.