Just before the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, I posted an article on Medium titled “Putting a Cyclops In The Odyssey Is Woke Nonsense.”

A surprising number of people reacting to it didn’t seem to catch the fact that I was being facetious. The article was a satire of the overblown reaction from the far right to a highly anticipated film from an acclaimed director.

In my article, I pretended to hate the movie for casting a cyclops just to appease the monocular community. Of the 40+ responses I’ve gotten, included are…
“Boy Howdy you are so lame and petty!”
“huh?”
“if it weren’t for the pottery and penises reference I might have been unsure if this was satire. Well played but it’s too deep in maga rhetoric for me to be lol funny.”

Ever since it was announced that transgender man Eliot Page (formerly Ellen Page) was cast in the film, right wingers clung to rumors that Page was going to play famed warrior Achilles, crying in agony that a trans woman with the frame of a small boy being cast as a mythically strong warrior was “woke” stunt casting by liberals trying to destroy Western civilization. Whatever that means.

The truth eventually came out, that Page was actually cast as a minor character, a young man who was not meant to be a soldier but wound up in the war anyway. Casting a boy-like man, or small woman, or man-formerly-woman makes more sense in light of this. After all, Peter Pan has been played by a woman through most of that story’s history, and nobody cried woke about it.

But by the time the movie came out, it was too late in the minds of right wingers. The whole movie was going to be terrible, we won’t see it, and it will go broke for being woke.

The film made $264.1 its opening weekend, the biggest opening weekend of Nolan’s career. More than Oppenheimer. More than any Batman film he made.

I saw the movie. It did or didn’t “go woke,” because it’s hard to know what woke means anyway. If you’ve studied The Odyssey at all, you know the story is complicated as an artifact of Western literature. It’s an oral composition with few written copies attributed to a likely fictional author telling the story of mythical creatures and people in a fictional war. And the main character makes some horrible choices by both ancient standards and today. So what exactly is a faithful adaptation supposed to entail.

But that doesn’t stop far right wing loudmouths from calling for boycotts because there characters aren’t all played by white people. There were almost zero complaints about pale descendants of Celtic and Norse people playing characters like Odysseus and Penelope. But if Helen was Black, then we ought to religiously refuse to see it.

Nevermind that
1) Mediterranean culture combined European, Middle-Eastern, and African trade and exchange
2) You’re allowed artistic license when you interpret works of art
3) it’s a fantasy story!

The fascism isn’t subtle. These culture-shapers want a racist world but don’t want to be called racist. They want male aggression and hatred of women portrayed positively. And they want to celebrate a heavily pagan work while also calling the world they want Christian.

As Matt McManus writes in Jacobin, “The Right claims to defend Western civilization. Its hysterical reaction to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey shows how little it understands the tradition it claims to protect.”

It’s weird to see so many alleged Christians pine so hard for a thoroughly pagan rendition of a thoroughly pagan story. If you want to celebrate all of The Odyssey for what is, what exactly are you celebrating about Western Culture? And if you claim to identify your soul with a Middle-Eastern Jew who is from Heaven and not Earth, why do you feel the duty to promote wholesale Western culture as if it’s all that stands between salvation and damnation? That’s weird.

But it’s no doubt that Nolan’s apparent “stunt casting” might have paid off for him, because controversy breeds attention, and in our economy, attention breeds money. And for this reason my satirical take on right wing attitudes made me over $300 on Medium.

I don’t care if you didn’t like the movie or even feel like seeing it. As a work of art, it has its flaws. But the absolutely persistent hate that has bubbled up from the far right manosphere is beyond toxic. Get a grip, people.

Nolan’s retelling helps redeem The Odyssey in ways no cinematic treatment has done. And we have him to thank for that. It’s not perfect, but it’s an excellent and thematically cohesive epic. Go see it. With both your non-cyclops eyes.