In the opening scene of Homer’s The Odyssey, Zeus laments to his favorite daughter Athena that mortals love to blame the gods for their problems – They themselves are the cause of most of the misfortune.
“Look how people accuse the gods! From us, they say, all evil comes. But through their own perversity, and far beyond what was intended for them, they heap suffering on themselves,” cries the Lord of Olympus. Humanity, through its own folly, obsessions, impulses and weaknesses, is ruining itself. From personal pain to interpersonal conflict to epochal wars and atrocities, the lament extends far beyond the epic itself.
This week, it was all on view on X, a platform Homer could never have imagined. Billionaire Elon Musk and a crowd of deranged racists have gotten themselves into a furore sparked by the casting of Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film “The Odyssey.”
Nyong’o’s skin color as a problem
Her main point of criticism: Nyong’o is black. The hyperonline right had already made the same complaint against adaptations of “Snow White,” “The Little Mermaid” and other film adaptations of myths and fairy tales in which people of color appear. It is a particularly absurd form of outrage against fictional characters – to quote Homer – that arises solely from “their own wrongness”.
Musk complained on
The thing is: the civilizations Homer describes in his two great epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, are fundamentally different from the visual representations presented to Western audiences from the European Renaissance to the present day. Homer supposedly lived in the 8th century, a time when the visual language of storytelling was still very limited. The epics were spoken and performed. Individual scenes can sometimes be seen on pottery or surviving frescoes and mosaics. The first written fragment of the “Odyssey” – written in Egypt – was written down around 500 years after the lyric poem was written. It was not until the 17th century that George Chapman presented the first complete English translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey.
In every cycle of interpretation or translation, the classicists and artists’ own prejudices as well as the zeitgeist of their era flow into their work – consciously or unconsciously. The Trojan War and the Greek kingdoms that form the setting of the Homeric epics spanned the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. The people who lived there were diverse – and not at all, as the great masters of Europe later portrayed them, a race of lily-white, blushing Aryans with beautiful chests or the muscles of a bodybuilder.
Helena as a projection surface
The portrayal of Helena is complex. She came into being through the spoken word – a mythical Spartan beauty that anyone who listened to the epic could imagine as their own idealized goddess turned mortal. Back then she was probably a slightly glorified version of the prettiest girl on the market, a blank space for beauty ideals that have been perpetuated over more than 3,000 years and across all cultures and societies. Early depictions show a laconic woman with dark hair. Descriptions in Homeric mythology and other sources vary regarding eye color, hair, and complexion. She is often depicted as strong, athletic and even muscular – as would have been expected of the women of Sparta.
During the European Renaissance, artists—easily misled by the white marble statues that had once been brightly painted by the societies they sought to depict—approached the famous queen with their own ideas of extraordinary beauty. English translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey took the liberty of interpreting Greek terms for lighter skin tones as a reference to blonde whiteness. The era produced depictions of Helena that almost always show a blonde, blue-eyed appearance with a gentle, feminine appearance. The gods of the Hellenistic pantheon received similar treatment. Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus depicts the goddess of love, fertility and desire with many of the same characteristics found in contemporary visualizations of Helen.
In 2004, German director Wolfgang Petersen and screenwriter David Benioff delivered the version of Helena familiar to most modern audiences. The film “Troy” – a wig- and sex-heavy adaptation of “The Iliad” with Brad Pitt as Achilles and Diane Kruger as Helena – presented a Helena who, like all Helenas before her, was a child of her time: the early 2000s ideal of slim-but-curvy (the voluptuous curves that Jacques-Louis David and Guido Reni had painted were gone), with ice-blonde hair, clear blue eyes and a meltingly beautiful Orlando Bloom as Paris.
Anachronism was always allowed
“Troy,” still the most direct point of comparison to Nolan’s upcoming “The Odyssey,” was a thoroughly anachronistic film. He took countless artistic liberties to make the story more digestible for audiences, much to the chagrin of classicists and historians. The gods are completely missing. Patroclus was recast as Achilles’ cousin to avoid historical debates about the possible sexual relationship between the two warriors. Paris and Helena escape into a supposedly happy future, their enemies dead or otherwise occupied. In mythology, Helena is returned to her husband and Paris falls in battle.
Somehow, Musk — who describes himself as an ardent admirer of “The Iliad” and reportedly insists on historical accuracy — has repeatedly praised “Troy” as an “epic” film while simultaneously accusing Nolan of trampling on Homer’s grave.
“Troy,” like many other works about her, flattens Helena into a mere cipher for a very beautiful woman who everyone desires. The film highlights the tragedy of their mythology. She was a woman who – for all her undeniable beauty – was cursed by a goddess, as it were, as a reward for Paris. She was kidnapped by Theseus as a child. She was forced to leave her own child behind and watch a once-stable kingdom crumble because her husband honored a political pact her father had made when she was young. Even as Helena is torn by guilt and pain over what is happening to the Trojans in her name, Aphrodite continues to humiliate and bully her to serve as an emotional support to the childish, cowardly Paris.
Helena’s role in the Odyssey
In “The Odyssey” Helena only plays a small role. After returning to Sparta, Odysseus’ son Telemachus visits her and Menelaus to get information about what happened to his father after the war. Helena tells about Odysseus’s trick – and in a moment that is reminiscent of a witch’s kitchen, secretly mixes drugs into the wine of the dinner party, which are supposed to take away all pain and sadness for a while.
A dark-skinned Helen would not be out of place in any adaptation of the Homeric epics. At its core, it is a mirror through which the audience is invited to glimpse their own romantic ideal of beauty. She is a woman who, throughout her mythology, has become the plaything of the follies and weaknesses of the men around her – men who can see nothing but their own desires. But beneath the surface lies a figure who is deeply scarred: by a decade of separation from home and child, by the pain of becoming a bargaining chip in a goddess’ favor towards an unworthy man, and by the destruction of her extended family that would follow the war.
Psychosexual fixation on white people
The racist reaction to Nolan’s casting of Nyong’o has nothing to do with fidelity to Homer’s intent or with the integrity of the Greek classics. The Greek classics have been reshaped and reinterpreted so often that the original stories are hardly known to most audiences today. The right-wing outrage revolves around the refusal to see Helena as anything other than a projection surface for one’s own psychosexual fixation on whiteness as goodness.
So far, Nolan has only released a few teaser trailers for his film, which hits theaters in July and has already sold out IMAX theaters across the country. We don’t yet know what the renowned director will ask of Nyong’o as Helena, nor do we know how intensively he will engage with one of the most fascinating female characters in the world literary canon. Nolan will undoubtedly have to sacrifice parts of “The Odyssey” to the editing – but ultimately he is interpreting a myth.
Still, the frothing mob that heaps hate on Nolan and Nyong’o is not the guardian of the role Homer played in shaping art, culture, and the West. She is simply unable to engage with him or The Odyssey in any meaningful way.
