In recent years, conservative pundits have compiled an unbroken record of attacking the American entertainment industry’s biggest stars and then finding themselves on the wrong side of public opinion. They disparaged Greta Gewig’s Barbie as woke and anti-male, only to watch it become the highest-grossing movie of 2023. That same year, they badmouthed Taylor Swift for her nonpartisan advocacy of voting (“Taylor Swift is dumb and her music sucks,” wrote Sean Davis, the CEO and co-founder of The Federalist), even as her Eras Tour became the highest-grossing concert tour of all time. Then, last year, they protested the choice of Bad Bunny to headline the Super Bowl halftime show because of the Puerto Rican rapper’s criticism of ICE raids. His performance averaged 128.2 million viewers, 3 million more than tuned into the game itself and 122 million more than watched Turning Point USA’s conservative alternative featuring Kid Rock.
It was perhaps predictable, then, that right-wingers would fulminate over Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey before any of them had seen it. When Nolan confirmed that Lupita Nyong’o would play Helen of Troy, Elon Musk accused the director of “desecrating” Homer to win an Oscar, and conservative commentator Matt Walsh called him “a coward.” The fixation on Nyong’o’s race was, of course, just racism. The ancient Greeks knew of and traded with Black Africans, whom they called Ethiopians, and Homer himself praised their virtues. A Black Helen of Troy is hardly more of a stretch than a man of English and Nordic descent, Matt Damon, playing Odysseus. Still, other Nolan choices, such as casting trans actor Elliot Page as the Greek soldier Sinon, convinced conservatives—who pride themselves on being more in touch with ordinary Americans than liberals are—that The Odyssey would flop. “Nobody is going to go see this woke movie, and it’s going to be a box office bust,” predicted Newsmax commentator Katie Zacharia.
Then the movie came out. Suddenly, conservatives had to contend not only the fact that it brought in more revenue in one weekend ($264 billion) than it cost to make ($250 million), but that, as Ben Shapiro conceded after watching it in IMAX, “it’s really, really, really good.”
In moments like this, when ideologues are mugged by reality, a period of adjustment ensues as political allies attempt to get their story straight. We are in that sort of moment now. While some conservative dead-enders are still grousing about the movie’s multiracial casting, others are testing out, to borrow Kurt Cobain’s phrase, “a new complaint.” The complaint is that Matt Damon plays an Odysseus wracked by a kind of liberal guilt foreign to the character in the ancient text. “The main struggle for Nolan and his producer wife is that they can’t make the ancient Greeks too heroic, masculine, iconic because that would uphold the Euro-supremacist roots of all Western Civilization,” conservative cultural commentator Peachy Keenan wrote on X, “so you cast a woke manlet as the King.”
On his eponymous CNN show, Fareed Zakaria helped advance a less vulgar version of that argument by asking classics scholar Daniel Mendelsohn whether he thought the film was “woke.” Mendelsohn did not quite go there. But he did complain that whereas Homer’s Odysseus is “a trickster” who is “sly,” “seductive,” and has “brio,” Damon’s character is “a modern, guilt-ridden, anguished anti-hero” who is “made to feel guilty about the destruction of Troy”—a guilt with which the ancient Greeks did not wrestle.
The truth of that observation is obvious to anyone who has both read the epic and seen the movie. But Mendelsohn then said that “every adaptation legitimately projects … the ideas of a given moment”—and that is not quite right. The sensibilities Damon’s Odysseus expresses are not merely “of the moment.” They were forged over more than a century of total war. They began with the pointless slaughter of World War I; accelerated with the unrivaled carnage of World War II, the Holocaust, and the use of nuclear weapons on populations; crystallized in the U.N. Charter’s prohibition on cross-border aggression and the Genocide Convention; and were reinforced in the public consciousness by subsequent horrors from Vietnam to Rwanda. This worldwide, century-long effort to hem in civilization-threatening forms of warfare is a manifestation of enlightenment, not wokeism. Nor is it wholly modern. It is one of the underlying themes of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, to say nothing of The New Testament.
For Nolan to have made a film in which pillage and butchery were simply part of the fun would be like someone today making a movie about the antebellum South that celebrated working Black people to death, raping women, and selling children. Some conservatives may, in their darker moments, hanker for such a film. But I suspect that most would be horrified, as would the vast majority of people around the globe. Had Nolan rendered an Odyssey in which the hero reveled in mass slaughter of the innocent, many of those same conservatives would have condemned it as the inevitable product of sick, post-modern, morally relativistic progressive thinking.
Matt Damon’s character is tormented not because he’s exquisitely sensitive but because, in Nolan’s rewriting of the epic tale, the hero sees the consequences of his actions in ways informed by modern understandings. Near the end of the movie, Odysseus explains to his wife Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway), that the siege and sacking of Troy was not about retrieving Helen but about wresting control of trade routes. As he speaks, he suddenly realizes that he and his comrades are the “people of the sea”—the rumored and much feared invaders whose lawless attacks threaten the whole of society. The dialogue in that scene channels modern scholarship suggesting that the fall of the Greek Mycenean civilization depicted by Homer was the consequence of disrupted trade and mounting warfare within and between fortified cities, all of it likely accelerated by natural disasters such as earthquakes and long-term droughts.
It is not too much of a leap to see Nolan’s The Odyssey as a warning about the potential consequences of the Trump administration’s abandonment of international norms, double-crossing of allies, and performative machismo. That, I suspect, is where the evolving conservative critique will ultimately land: it’s all just Trump Derangement Syndrome. What these conservatives can’t seem to understand is that Nolan’s moral sensibility, which they claim to hate, is also what makes his film a masterpiece—and a blockbuster.
