The universal themes addressed by one of humanity’s greatest storytellers more than merit Hollywood box-office treatment
The Magasphere’s endless appetite for culture wars is wearily familiar. But who could have foreseen that Greek literature would become the new casus belli? Ahead of its much-anticipated general release next week, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey has triggered Elon Musk and other supposed defenders of western civilisation. Directorial decisions such as the casting of the Kenyan-Mexican actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, Mr Musk ranted incoherently, amounted to “pissing on Homer’s grave”.
The absurd insistence on the white skin of a mythological figure reveals nothing we didn’t already know about the owner of X. The rest of us can move on and look forward to a lavish cinematic take on a story that has inspired artists for almost 3,000 years. Homer’s account of Odysseus’s 10-year struggle to return home from the Trojan wars has been reworked by Virgil in the Aeneid, relocated to Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and given a feminist treatment by Margaret Atwood in her Penelopiad. Now for the 21st-century Hollywood treatment.
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