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Reformed Thought for Christian Living
How could the Trojans—and people today—be so naive? Like so many others, I have always been fascinated by Homer’s poem, The Odyssey, especially how Odysseus so cleverly outwitted the Trojans […]
Like so many others, I have always been fascinated by Homer’s poem, The Odyssey, especially how Odysseus so cleverly outwitted the Trojans through the gift of an enormous ‘sacrificial’ horse. But it seems that the naivety of the people of ancient Troy is being repeated today through a lack of discernment regarding Christopher Nolan’s novel retelling of the ancient Greek epic.
Sadly, many political conservatives, and also Christian commentators, have missed the woke agenda hidden within Nolan’s film. Ironically, the movie itself is a modern-day ‘trojan horse’, deceiving people into welcoming a morally subversive message behind the wall of their intellectual defences and so into their hearts.
For example, Ben Shapiro and Jonathan Prager have both provided glowing reviews. Christianity Today even contends that Nolan’s Odyssey ‘deconstructs Western culture’s glorification of aggression” with “the implied thesis” being that it is a personification of Christ’s beatitude, “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matt. 5:9). O dear, we really are living in the last days …
A large part of the reason that people have downplayed, or even missed altogether, the politically progressive messaging is not simply because the film itself is so audibly overwhelming and visually stunning. It is after all a Nolan film! It is because they’re suffering from what is known as ‘outrage fatigue’.
Most people knew and could identify what the potential ideological threats hidden inside the film was long before it was released. But as time wore on, those same people grew tired and were no longer as watchful regarding the ideological danger which still lay hidden within.
For example, I don’t have the energy to dissect Penelope’s feminist tirade at the end of the film where she whines to the suitors about how she should be king. Yes, even 3000 years ago the patriarchy was the blame. But as Matt Walsh pointed out:
In ‘Apocalypto,’ Mel Gibson transports you into the mind of a Mayan 500 years ago. In ‘The Northman,’ Robert Eggers transports you into the mind of a Viking a thousand years ago. In ‘The Odyssey,’ Christopher Nolan transports you into the mind of a liberal woman in 2017.
Yes the Odyssey is an almost three-thousand-year-old epic. And of course, every movie is going to be an adaptation. But that doesn’t give anyone the right to change the source material into something it was not. As one cultural critic observed, this is precisely what makes Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey such an “epic disappointment”. It’s like an atheist making a film about the Bible.
Perhaps the greatest example of outrage fatigue of all though, involves the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. Whereas in one breath the left applauded the expected cultural representation which occurred in Disney’s live action remake of Moana, they ridiculed anyone as a right-wing ‘Chud’ who had a problem with the race swapping which occurred in Nolan’s Odyssey.
However, not only is it culturally insensitive, as well as historically inaccurate, to present Helen as a black woman, but Nolan also subverts the very reason why the Trojan war began in the first place. What’s more, he also portrays her with a subtle but noticeable mark on her face to suggest she was a victim of domestic violence.
According to Christopher Nolan, the military conflict with Troy was not because of her beauty and subsequent adulterous affair with Paris, but rather the greed and duplicity of powerful men.
So many memes have been made at Nyongo’s expense that no one has the energy to argue why this even deeper subversion is so wrong. Why is it that only men in Nolan’s Odyssey are guilty of wrongdoing?
Surprisingly, hardly anyone is upset about the second character Nyongo plays in the Odyssey -Helen’s identical twin sister Clytemnestra. But in yet another egregious example of historical re-imagining, Nolan has Clytemnestra murder her husband Agamemnon in revenge for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia. Apparently, this was done to appease the goddess Artemis and secure favourable winds for his ships to sail to Troy.
However, in Homer’s original epic, Agamemnon’s murder is carried out by Aegisthus, who had had a consensual affair with Clytemnestra while he was away fighting in Troy. Aegisthus then invites Agamemnon to a feast upon his return and, with Clytemnestra’s help, has him slain. But hey, let’s not let the truth get in the way of a woke story.
By the way, just because Nyongo’s screen time is limited doesn’t mean that her inclusion isn’t significant. Like a crack in the wall, often a subtext is just as effective in weakening the defences of one’s opponent as escorting an enormous wooden horse through one’s front gate.
For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, every race on earth is present, all except of course anyone who’s actually Greek! It’s also why Nolan chose the African-American Travis Scott to play the bard at the start of the film. While viewers are distracted by his ridiculous futuristic armour, they forget that it is who is inside the Hellenic batman suit who really counts. According to Nolan it’s only women and non-white men who are truly righteous and can therefore be trusted.
All of which is to say, the real hero and only truly virtuous “male” in Nolan’s film is Sinon, a character who doesn’t even appear in Homer’s Odyssey and is played ironically, by the transgender actor Elliot Page, a biological woman playing the role of a man dressing up as a Greek warrior.
In keeping with Nolan’s film Inception, here we see the dream within a dream via a biological American woman pretending to be a Greek man. As risky as this is, someone has to say it – the emperor has no clothes! (or in this case, testicles)
For months people have been outraged by Nolan’s inexplicable insertion of the character Sinon into the story. So much so in fact, that for the first time ever a Nolan film was ‘review bombed’ with overwhelmingly negative reactions. Note, very few conservatives predicted the movie would financially flop, they simply expressed their online resistance to the tiresome woke agenda being thrust upon them.
I realise some will object that role of Sinon is also not very significant—much like the physique of Elliot Page—but the truth is, it’s not. Like a drop of poison in a glass of wine, Page’s feline figure frames Nolan’s entire story. Indeed, without the character of Sinon, his whole narrative arc,and associated woke messaging,would fall apart.
This is because Sinon is the lynch pin involving the fate of not only the protagonist Odysseus, but even the antagonist Antinous! In one of the most crucial scenes in the poem, Odysseus travels to Hades where he is supposed to speak with his departed mother, Agamemnon and especially Achilles. Nolan gives to Sinon the privilege of mansplaining—yes I know, another irony—to Odysseus what needs to be done if he is to return home successfully from the underworld.
Nolan’s faux male soldier then is crucial to the plot. Sinon reproaches Odysseus for using him as a military pawn regarding the ruse involving the Trojan horse. At the same time, he also exposes Antinous’s cowardice and treachery, revealing to Odysseus that he was coerced into taking Antinous’s place in the Greek army.
Odysseus’ journey to Hades was supposed to reveal the error of pursuing of one’s own glory. However, according to Noalan, the fictional character of Sinon is presented as being the true hero through eternal victimhood.
Both reproaches to Odysseus are complete fabrications and foreign to the original literary work. In particular, there are two important fabrications which Nolan commits regarding Sinon, a character whom Homer never even mentioned.
First, in the original Odyssey, after Odysseus tries to comfort Achilles in Hades by reminding him of the ‘glory’ he earned through his death on the battlefield, the great warrior responds:
“Nay, seek not to speak soothingly to me of death, glorious Odysseus. I should choose, so I might live on earth, to serve as the hireling of another, of some portionless man whose livelihood was but small, rather than to be lord over all the dead that have perished.”
Many people will remember the actor Brad Pitt’s portrayal of Achilles in the 2004 blockbuster movie Troy, and in particular how prominent the theme of personal glory was. However, whereas many believed glory was to be found in an heroic death, Homer inverts this and concludes that it’s better to a nobody and alive than a somebody who is dead. As wise King Solomon once wrote, “For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.” (Ecc. 9:4)
The second fabrication Nolan commits involves the character of Sinon himself. When he does later appear in Virgil’s Aeneid, we’re told how he was a clever and deceitful trickster rather than an unsuspecting dupe, let alone political pawn: “So spoke Sinon, as artist in perjury, setting his ambush. And we believed him. He fooled us with well-staged weeping and ruses.”
Rather than Sinon being deceived, he was a willing agent involved in the deception and subsequent victory over the Trojans via the military stratagem of the wooden horse. For Nolan, the character of Sinon is crucial to the development of his own theme regarding the immorality of war and its accomplice, toxic masculinity.
This also explains why in Nolan’s version, Odysseus is perpetually plagued with intense psychological guilt and deep emotional shame because of his involvement in the Trojan wars as well as why he ultimately needs to return home. According to Nolan, the suitors—led by Antinous—must be slain because of Sinon’s betrayal as well as to atone for Odysseus’ numerous war crimes.
For Homer, meaning and purpose are not to be found in the glory of the battlefield but in the peace and quiet of one’s ancestral homeland and family. This theme is actively undermined by Nolan when he has a Gujarati Indian actor Himesh Patel give the line: “We are the Greeks”. It’s not meant to be funny; it is said with the utmost gravity and seriousness.
The real message of the movie according to the man himself can be summarised by what Nolan calls “Zeus’ Law”. This is also a subtle distortion and even perversion of the Greek concept of ‘Zenia’ regarding hospitality. In short, how one treats strangers is important because they could be a ‘god’ in human form.
The implication for foreign policy, and especially as to how one treats migrants, is not difficult to make. This is reinforced though by the mention of the mysterious “People from the Sea” who are presented as some kind of existential threat to Bronze Age civilizations. However, in the film’s twisted ending, Odysseus realizes that the Sea Peoples are in fact the Greeks themselves!
Perhaps this is also why we have the bizarre ending where Odysseus and Penelope happily sail off into the sunset. Apart from the issue of being once again on the open sea, which was the realm of Poseidon, the god whom he had previously offended, just where exactly are they supposed to live?
In Homer’s version, Odysseus is at peace when he returns home whereas in Nolan’s edition, peace can only be found when white people go back to where they came from – wherever that might be. For to make atonement for his war crimes against humanity Nolan presents Odysseus as a king in self-pronounced exile.
Also latent within the belly of Nolan’s cinematic equine is the message that all war is evil. Nolan’s reframes the entire epic as a brutal, anti-war meditation on the emotional trauma and social degradation caused by armed conflict. Thus, instead of being a triumphant adventure, the film functions as a severe condemnation of the Trojan War, i.e. Western imperialism.
Nolan does this in a number of key ways:
First through the PTSD and post-war disillusionment of Odysseus.
Second, by reframing the victory achieved via the Trojan Horse as a cowardly and horrific betrayal of xenia, or Zeus’ Law of hospitality.
Third, through the speeches of female characters who condemn violence and especially the patriarchal systems that drive it.
Four, by stripping the Trojan War of any romanticized mythology. Odysseus even admits to Penelope that Helen’s elopement was merely a pretext for the conflict!
Five, by presenting the war scenes in a brutal and unromanticised way. Nolan includes the terrified screams as well as atrocities committed against the men, women and children of Troy.
However, not all warfare is evil. And there even comes a time when it is a moral good in restraining human wickedness. All civilisations are built upon victories achieved through military action. Just ask the veterans of WWII.
As the Bible itself acknowledges, there is a time for war as well as a time for peace (Ecc. 3:8). To contend otherwise is like accepting a gigantic wooden horse into your city …
Whereas Greek religion was concerned with maintaining the cosmic divine order, Nolan makes the Odyssey about an individual seeking emotional healing from his own psychological trauma. But in so doing Nolan is thumbing his nose not only at the mythology integral to Greek religion but is also undermining the role of the supernatural.
Even the feminist academic Emily Wilson, whose translation of the Odyssey Nolan relied on for the film, has argued that the movie focuses too heavily on Odysseus’ guilt, trauma and shame rather than his heroic pursuit of glory, calling the portrayal “a modern, psychiatric reinterpretation of the ancient character”.
One particular aspect which Homer himself would have found most troubling, is the be-heading of Athena by Odysseus. To modern audiences this means basically nothing, but to an ancient Greek worshipper this would have been considered one of the greatest blasphemies and religious sacrileges one could commit.
It would be unthinkable for any god-fearing Greek in the ancient world to conceive of ever doing such a thing to the image they worshipped – especially when the god in question was also the active divine agent believed to be responsible for one’s military success as was the case with Odysseus.
Not without significance, the posters promoting the film carried the tag-line, “Defy the gods”. In Nolan’s cinematic universe it’s not the gods who are in charge—none of the male deities even make an appearance—but the empathetic human emissaries of social justice.
Imagine being a Trojan soldier standing at the gate of the walled city and seeing an enormous horse being brought in. According to Virgil, the character of Sinon claimed the horse was a special offering to the goddess Athena (Minerva) which had been specially constructed to atone for the theft of one of her sacred relics from Troy.
Sinon further warned the Trojans that if they damaged the gift then Athena would destroy the city. However, if they brought it inside their walls, then the favour of the gods would be upon then and Troy would ultimately conquer all of Greece.
Apparently a Trojan priest named Laocoön even suspected a trap and he famously warned the people, “I fear the Greeks, even those bearing gifts“. Then he threw a spear at the horse’s flank. However, almost immediately, two giant serpents emerged from the sea and killed him. The Trojans falsely interpreted this as a divine punishment for desecrating the sacred horse. But according to Homer, the reason the gods sent the serpents was that they favoured the Greeks.
To any reader of the Odyssey, it was clearly a mistake to bring the “holy object” inside. And yet, almost three millennia later many are willing to make the same mistake. A deadly woke worldview lies hidden within the belly of Nolan’s film. And yet people are enthusiastically celebrating it because they think it’s a sign of worldly success and even divine favour.
Nolan’s Odyssey will undoubtedly make a lot of money. Very few conservatives argued that it wouldn’t. But that is not the point. The issue is what will happen if you accept Nolan’s cinematic gift? Like Laoccon, I’d suggest that the message which Nolan is giving is not to be trusted and should be left alone outside the gate.
In my office I have a picture of John Waterhouse’s beautiful Ulysses and the Sirens. The original is found in the National Gallery of Victoria, and I was so struck by the painting when I first saw it that I purchased a life-size print. For me it is a timeless reminder to be single-minded and not be distracted by the siren song of other voices—as seductive as they may be—seeking to distract me from journeying home to heaven.
What is the lesson? Either fill your ears with wax and don’t see the movie. Or do what Odysseus did and prepare to be tempted in advance by fastening yourself to the mast of God’s truth. Either way, be a Christian and don’t be a chump by finding yourself having been taken ideologically captive.
– Mark Powell
