Hollywood’s Double Cop-Out

Christopher Nolan, Hollywood’s current rock star, has the Intertubes all a-flutter over his upcoming epic adaptation of Homer’s epic, The Odyssey. At first, the Left got on his case for failing to cast a single Greek in a movie about... Greeks. And not just a movie about Greeks, but arguably the most famous Greek story in existence. Instead, he loaded it with A-listers... and bent the knee to the lords of diversity.

Because, of course he did.

Because, even the mighty Christopher Nolan, with $6B worth of box office, with Oppenheimer and Inception and Interstellar and Dunkirk and his Batman trilogy and much more, dares not risk being locked out of Oscar consideration by failing to fill the DEI checklist the Best Picture category requires.

So, we get the Kenyan-Mexican Lupita Nyong’o as the “fair-haired,” “white-armed,” goddess-like-faced Helen of Troy, a character of such great beauty (she was, after all, half-goddess, being the daughter of Zeus) that a ten year war involving over a hundred thousand warriors was fought over her.

No disrespect to Ms. Nyong’o, but the casting reeks of stunt and deliberate pot-stirring.

And, we get Zendaya, who is German, Scottish, and Nigerian, as Athena.

Again, no disrespect to Zendaya (though as many have noted, her acting skills range from… Zendaya to… Zendaya)… not very Greek.

Aaaaand, we (might) get Elliot Page (checking the transgender identity box) as... possibly the ghost of Achilles? Unconfirmed as I type this, but that’s the rumor. A five-foot nothing waif of an actor (of English and Scottish heritage) cast as the Greeks’ mightiest warrior? Dude, seriously?

That’s after we ponder Matt Damon (English Scottish Finnish Swedish) as Odysseus, Tom Holland (English Irish) as his son Telemachus, Anne Hathaway (English Irish French) as his wife Penelope, Robert Pattinson (English) as Antinous, Charlize Theron (Afrikaner) as Calypso… you get the idea. Again, not a single Greek. Or even half-Greek or near-Greek. No Italians, no Balkans, no Greek-adjacent among the main cast on the IMDB page. I checked.

Worth noting, Colombian-Spanish-Basque-African John Leguizamo, who has famously griped about non-Latinos being cast in Latino roles, is playing Eumaeus, a friend to Odysseus. Need I note that Eumaeus is a Greek character?

I’m putting that one in my pocket for future reference.

Fine, Nolan wants to take some creative liberties. His movie. Universal Studios’ money. I don’t get a say beyond a decision to attend or skip. If he makes a good movie and it sells a lot of tickets, all will be forgiven. If it’s a dud, the scolds will find reasons to blame... racism, the Right, Internet trolls, the anti-woke, etc., and not the badness of the movie itself.

The point I want to make today is about the double dose of Hollywood hypocrisy underlying all this controversy.

The “better than thou” progressives in the entertainment world yell at anyone who questions “color-blind” casting (scare quotes are deliberate - I’ll get to them in a second) in roles that have a traditionally “of pallor” description as mere bigotry. That it doesn’t matter if Snow White is played by a Latina or Cleopatra or Helen are played by black women. No matter the source material - or actual history in Cleopatra’s case. Of course, the scare quotes are about this being a one-way street. Try casting a white actor as a canonically black character, and see what happens.

That’s the obvious hypocrisy.

The less obvious lies in the more sordid reality that Hollywood is a business. Sure, it pretends to be - and presents itself as - art, and every so often someone with deep pockets funds an art piece, but the art pieces are bought by box office, and box office requires some alchemy.

Here’s what they don’t like to fess up to.

Epic tales like The Odyssey aren’t made into movies merely because they are good and interesting stories, or because they are adaptable into visual format, but because they are already well known. This is why Hollywood prefers sequels and remakes to original material. Audiences are more apt to go see something they’ve already got some familiarity with. By itself, this is fine. It’s business.

The intersection of this business reality with the pretense (yes, pretense. These casting decisions were deliberate) of “color-blind” casting is where the hypocrisy lies.

Rather than saying “we want to promote actors of color, so let’s find source material from Africa or Asia or Latin America and write stories based on those myths and legends for them to star in,” they tokenize (as an internet commenter put it) those actors of color by casting them as characters everyone knows to be white. This may make the auteurs and other Best-and-Brightest feel good about themselves, but it really is condescending as [redacted]. Sub-Saharan Africa alone has 49 nations, over a billion people, and millennia of history. The amount of cultural source material and myth and legend should be enough to fuel Hollywood for centuries. But, they won’t risk audiences saying “huh?” to a tale based on Anansi or Sundiata or Bumba or the Kalahari ghosts or any of countless other African folklore characters, even though that would be true diversity rather than cheap casting stunts that just piss people off.

Of course, pissing the right people off makes these better-than-thou types happy. Better to feed the stereotypes and perpetuate the culture wars than to expand horizons and actually offer people something they haven’t seen before. Better to feel righteousness by angering those they already don’t like than to build bridges and pave new roads.

In sum, while it’s easy to get lathered up over the controversial (though by now wholly unsurprising) casting decisions, it’s the astroturf aspect of it all that should be where we draw true offense. As should Hollywood’s minority actors. Yes, most of them elevate the opportunity to be in a Nolan film over the questions of tokenism, but why not question why movies based on their heritage aren’t being made, if it’s about culture and art and promoting diversity?

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As for the movie itself? I’ll await its release, and reviews based on the movie itself rather than trailers and teasers and casting rumors before making a final decision as to whether I’ll feed its box office, but I’m pretty skeptical based on what I’ve seen so far.

As a Greek, I’m put off by the implicit dismissal of concerns over something so culturally fundamental. With everyone and their grandmother getting to cry “appropriation!” every time a stone is upturned, I figure I’m justified in applying Saul Alinsky’s Fourth Rule For Radicals and “make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If they can complain about cultural appropriation, why can’t I? It was bad enough that Cleopatra, a Ptolemaic Greek (and an actual, living person), was miscast in a purported biopic a couple years ago. Now, Helen, the epitome of classical Greek beauty, is... not Greek looking at all??

This is Klelia Andriolatou, a Greek actress that some have suggested would bave been an eminently suitable choice for Helen.

That’s just one issue. I didn’t dive into Nolan’s potentially problematic decision to use a recent and controversial translation of The Odyssey as his source material (I await the movie), or rapper Travis Scott as ancient Greek bard, or the decision to clad the Greeks in black armor instead of the bronze they would polish to blind their foes, or a host of other plaints I’ve read.

Plus, it looks dreary as [redacted].

But, again, I abide. If I see a big IMDB score and a spate of positive reviews, I’ll back-pocket my distaste at the insult to Greeks that the movie represents and give it a go. If the reviews (the real ones, not the troll wars) point me away, I’ll move on. I may be semi-retired, but my free time is finite, and I do have a blog to write...

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A final note. The identity politics people put all Europeans into one pallid cookie jar, so they are apt to dismiss complaints about lack of Greeks in a film that has plenty of white faces as synthetic outrage. We make a big mistake when we let them do this, because it gives them license to sort us as they choose and in service to their agendas. It’s how such absurdities as the AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) identity group became part of the vernacular. It puts Mongols and Maoris into the same identity group, and conflates Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans - three ethnicities with very different cultures that take deep offense if mistaken for each other. But, it’s OK to conflate them if you’re a progressive, apparently, just as it’s OK to make a movie about Greeks and fill it with Northern European actors topped with a sprinkling of diversity so that you qualify for the Oscars. If you look at all this for just a moment from an honest perspective, you realize how condescending and dehumanizing it all is.