A culture war has erupted over Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, with the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page as a Greek warrior drawing ire from traditionalists. Homer’s repeated epithets for Helen — “fair-haired” and “white-armed” — are absent from the film. Instead, as the New Statesman puts it, this is “tea-drinker Christopher Nolan’s” version, more Hollywood than Homeric.
Nolan has described the Homeric source material as “foundational” for his work, and the film continues his devotion to classical storytelling. The Odyssey offers a paradigmatic example of the “monomyth” or “hero’s journey”, a concept embraced by Hollywood screenwriters. Nolan’s characters are typically solitary men defined by their actions — as Rachel Dawes tells Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins, “it’s what you do that defines you”. His protagonists are often drawn in abstract terms: “The Man” in Larceny, “The Young Man” in Following, and “The Protagonist” in Tenet. Even the astronaut abandoned in space in Interstellar is named “Mann”. The British soldier in Dunkirk is known only as “Tommy”.
“Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey faces backlash over casting of Lupita Nyong'o and Elliot Page.”
Nolan’s concern with subjective experience in films such as Memento and Inception has drawn comparisons to phenomenology, but these films also echo epic poetry in their exploration of revenge, justice, and understanding. The maze designer in Inception is named Ariadne, a nod to mythological allusion. The Dark Knight Rises saw Bruce Wayne’s reclusive withdrawal compared by the late critic Philip French to the plight of Philoctetes, the injured archer whom Odysseus entices from his island.
Nolan was briefly attached to direct Troy, a version of The Iliad, but the fragmented story of a solitary male wanderer mining cunning and resilience to return to his family is a closer fit for his habits. His adaptation of The Odyssey is, in thematic terms, a large-scale restatement of his artistic philosophy — one that may sit uneasily with those who insist on Homer’s original text.
