Why the casting of Nolan’s Odyssey sparked controversy

Even before its release, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey had become a subject of culture war. The choice of Lupita Nyong’o and Zendaya has revived fantasies about a supposedly “white” Antiquity. But does Homer really say that?

Well before the release, The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan was already a battlefield. As soon as the first names of the casting were revealed, social networks were ablaze: Lupita Nyong’o as Hélène, Zendaya as Athena, the suspicion of Elliot Page chosen to play Achilles (which is not the case…). Too diverse, too inclusive: for some, these choices betrayed Homer. Elon Musk himself went so far as to describe the filmmaker as an “anti-White racist”, believing that he was rewriting Antiquity in the name of an ideological agenda.
The paradox is that this controversy is largely based on a received idea: that of a white, homogeneous and fixed ancient Greece. However, this image ultimately owes less to Homer than to our own imagination.

The detractors’ argument, however, seemed unassailable. In The OdysseyHélène is well described as “with white arms”. But, as the Hellenist Pierre Judet de La Combe reminded the magazine, this formula (leukolenos) does not refer to skin color. It is a poetic epithet which describes radiance, light, desire. In Homer, beauty is basically a luminous quality much more than a physical characteristic. “We can be black, it just has to shine,” summarizes the specialist.

More broadly, Judet de La Combe reminds us that the Greeks simply did not think of the world the way we do. “They had many faults – they could be extremely violent, for example – but they were not racist,” he explains. Their myths are populated by travelers, exiles, people who meet and gods who constantly change their appearance. Identity is moving, it seems fluid today, multiple origins, porous borders. Far from a fixed vision of belonging.

And it was only in the 19th century that this representation of an exclusively white Antiquity developed. Romantic Europe gradually transformed ancient Greece into the cradle of a civilization supposedly pure, homogeneous and founding of the West. A cultural reconstruction which will then nourish numerous ideological recuperations. “We must break this myth, because it is simply false,” says Judet de La Combe.

For Arnaud Saura-Ziegelmeyer, specialist in the reception of Antiquity, the controversy above all reveals an amusing contradiction. “We demand white actors in the name of historicity, but we are talking about a myth which has nothing historical. And where there is really History, we are much less careful. » In other words, we demand documentary fidelity… to a story which is precisely a myth.

Seen from this angle, Nolan’s casting perhaps speaks less of a desire to provoke than of a certain way of reading Homer today. The director also partly relied on the translation of Emily Wilson, the first woman to have translated alone The Odyssey in English. Hailed for its precision as much as for its fresh perspective, this version brings to light characters long relegated to the background: women, servants, slaves, all those that centuries of translations had sometimes left in the shadows.

After seeing the film, one thing becomes clear: the controversy tells a lot about our times, but ultimately very little about the cinema of Christopher Nolan. His casting is not a manifesto. It is part of a long tradition of adaptations where each generation rereads Homer through its own questions. We never adapt The Odyssey “as is”. For almost three thousand years, poets, painters, writers, translators and filmmakers have offered their own reading of the text. Christopher Nolan doesn’t do anything else. In an explosive geopolitical context, his Odyssey is a reflection on war, on the tribute that men pay to it… The real subject has never been the color of Helen’s skin or the face of Athena. But the way in which each era ultimately chooses to reinvent Homer.

Find our special report on The Odyssey (with an exclusive interview with Christopher Nolan) in the summer issue of Première, available on newsstands and on our online store.