‘The Odyssey’ sparks classic duels over race — and – Latest News
It’s the controversy that launched a thousand X posts.
Elon Musk, who’s a fan of Homer, has kicked up a fuss by objecting to filmmaker Christopher Nolan casting the black actress Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in his forthcoming film model of “The Odyssey.”
The epic manufacturing presumably gained’t rise or fall primarily based on its depiction of Helen, the legendary magnificence who precipitated the Trojan War.
That battle, after all, is portrayed in “The Iliad” — whereas “The Odyssey” follows the Greek warrior Odysseus on his return home after the battle, a story that doesn’t characteristic Helen prominently.
The casting of Nyong’o, although, has raised the perennial query of what Helen seemed like, in addition to the more pedestrian matter of what the usual must be for actors enjoying people of a completely different race or ethnicity (or, nowadays, gender).
Helen was a Spartan girl, married to Menelaus, the King of Sparta.
When she left him for Paris of Troy, it began the long battle between the Greeks and Trojans.
Everyone who noticed her immediately understood why a years-long battle over her was price it: “No wonder the Trojans and well-greaved Achaeans have suffered long for such a woman — she is terribly like an immortal goddess to look at.”
The genius of Homer’s description of Helen is that he leaves it imprecise, and due to this fact up to the creativeness.
We know, although, that she wasn’t black.
Lupita Nyong’o attends the fifth Annual Academy Museum Gala on the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on October 18, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. Getty Images
The co-host of The View, Sunny Hostin, slammed all of the critics of the selection of Nyong’o as ignoramuses for not realizing that Africa was supposedly the source of Ancient Greece.
In so doing, she relied on a discredited e-book known as “Black Athena,” which maintained that historic Sparta and Phoenicia colonized Ancient Greece.
There is no proof for this by any means: One scholarly critic in contrast the e-book’s extremely politicized claims to “the Aryan science of the Third Reich or the Lysenkoite genetics of Stalinist Russia.”
Ancient Greece was Indo-European in origin; the people who lived within the space back then seemed, by and massive, just like the people who dwell there now.
Homer says that Helen was “white-armed,” suggesting that she was fair-skinned.
Other historic sources may be interpreted as saying that she had gentle hair and blue eyes, though there’s debate about this.
Certainly, depictions on movie have favored this interpretation: The 2004 film “Troy” solid the attractive blonde-haired, blue-eyed German actress Diane Kruger as Helen.
All that stated, what the position most requires is luminous magnificence — and there’s nothing inherently fallacious with casting actors in roles that don’t match their ethnicity.
Get opinions and commentary from our columnists
Subscribe to our every day Post Opinion publication!
Thanks for signing up!
Macbeth wasn’t African American, however Denzel Washington performed him compellingly in a film model.
The downside is that such casting choices may be distracting, and even parodic.
The Churchill film “Darkest Hour” had the wartime prime minister taking a random journey on the London Underground and getting a pep speak from a black laborer.
Why insult everybody’s intelligence with this sort of pandering?
And there must be a uniform normal.
Whenever a white actor or actress is solid in a position of one other ethnicity it’s condemned as “whitewashing.”
A furor ensued when Scarlett Johansson performed Motoko Kusanagi within the film model of the Japanese manga sequence “Ghost in the Shell” — though the character is a cyborg.
Johansson needed to back out of one other project when she, a cisgender girl, was solid as a transgender man.
A headline in Allure magazine on the time learn, “Scarlett Johansson Is Facing Major Backlash for Saying She ‘Should Be Allowed to Play’ Anyone.”
What’s good for Lupita Nyong’o must be good for Scarlett Johansson, and vice versa.
But Hollywood needs to put its finger on the dimensions.
It maintains preposterous, bean-counting requirements for what movies may be thought-about for Oscars primarily based on the inclusion of “underrepresented groups” on screen and behind the scenes.
If Nolan has completed his job, this “Odyssey” controversy will likely be overwhelmed by the facility of Homer’s work — maybe the second biggest story ever advised.
X: @RichLowry
