"It's JARRING!" Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey' DISMANTLED By Victor Davis Hanson & Nerdrotic

0:00Piers Morgan:And we're live on Matchday as Doug reaches for a Buffalo wing. He's got it. Oh, and he's gone for a can of Pepsi too. What a finish. There's no doubt about it. It just tastes better. Matchdays deserve Pepsi. The Odyssey is this epic fantasy story, but it's fantasy grounded in the real world. It's set within a very specific geographical location and time. It partakes of a trend that we have seen in recent years to sort of, let's call it, de-heroize Odysseus. The reason I smirked was because there's a long history in Hollywood of white people playing characters that shouldn't be black people. I mean, when, I mean, Charlton Heston is Moses was kind of wild.

0:41We're trying to challenge traditional beliefs. Well, that's something Christopher Nolan doesn't usually do. This is a game he doesn't usually play. To make this national epic, which the Greek people feel is a continuous tradition from the 7th, 8th century, and not have a single Greek, it's kind of jarring when you go out of your way to get other people who would cause controversy and sometimes in a subversive manner.

1:04Piers Morgan:Is it better for your business model that this is a massive turkey or a massive hit? With the notable exception of Top Gun Maverick, there's no longer such a thing as an epic blockbuster with no strings attached. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, based on Homer's Sparling Poem, is one of the biggest and most anticipated movies of the year. It's therefore no surprise that its release this week has been marred by furious debate about its historical accuracy, its colourblind casting and its reputedly feminist undertones. Critics say it's Snow White on steroids, a beloved classic shattered by the woke wrecking ball of demonic Hollywood.

1:41Piers Morgan:This time they argue it's gone too far. The victims of the alleged wokewashing are not merely fictional dwarf helpers, but the characters of a foundational text in the grand sweep of Western civilization. But are they missing the point? Isn't Hollywood's role to reflect the changing world around us and not simply parrot the legends of ancient history? We have not one but two epic panels to debate this, beginning with the classics. Daniel Mendelsohn is a scholar, critic and best-selling author of an odyssey, a father, a son, and an epic. His translation of Homer's poem was published this spring in paperback.

2:15Piers Morgan:A.M. Wilson is a novelist, biographer, and journalist. Also the father of Emily Wilson, whose feminist translation of the Odyssey is said to be the basis of Christopher Nolan's new movie. But first, let's talk to the historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, Victor Davis Hanson. Victor, great to see you. Great to have you back on Uncensored. Thank you. What's your beef with the Odyssey? It's kind of a minor one, I think, that I thought, because that is considered the national epic of the Greek people. It might have been magnanimous of Christopher Lloyd to include someone in the tradition of Irene Pappas or Melina McCurry, a great Greek-American actor.

2:50But the whole idea of cultural appropriation is very controversial. I have no problem with a character in a plane, a role that the original author did not really envision, as long as it's symmetrical. And by that I mean if you want to wear dreadlocks and you're white, that's fine. If you want to wear a blonde wig and you're black, that's fine. Just so it's reciprocal. The only problem is when the character is so far off from what the author intended that it affects the narrative. So I don't think it would be wise to make a movie with a white Martin Luther King bio or a black Abraham Lincoln. It would be too jarring.

3:29But I have no problem that he's using an African-American character for Helen and Clytemnestra. They're two characters. They were mythologically sisters, so there's no problem there. Zorba the Greek was played by a Mexican-American actor, Anthony Quinn. He did a brilliant job. It's only when it's so jarring that it deliberately interrupts the narrative in a way that it's almost impossible to follow So if it's a character deviation or, you know, if somebody has one arm and the character has two arms. But the Greeks were very tolerant of, and I don't really think that they had a notion of racial distinctions like we do.

4:11The Ethiopians are described by Homer elsewhere as the most noble of all people. So I don't think it's going to be, I don't think it will affect the reception of that character. and whether Helen and Clytemnestra are well-acted or whether they enhance or detract from the narrative or the film adaptation of it will depend on the quality of the performance.

4:35Piers Morgan:Yeah, I agree with that. I think that what has caught most attention, and I think you have a view about this, is that Lupita Nyong 'o, who plays Helen of Troy, she gave a recent press interview in which she seemed to criticise Homer for the lack of time he gave to women in his original work, instead choosing to tell the story from the masculine side, as she put it. Let's take a look. I'd be like, so, Homer, how do you feel about the screen time given to these women, considering how little you spent with them? Oh! OK. And then do you lean forward and look at him like that? Yes, like, hmm? Remember us?

5:17Piers Morgan:Now, at the premiere of the movie, Samantha Morton, who plays the Greek goddess and sorceress Circe took the opportunity to reinforce the idea that this was a feminist reimagining of the mythical story. Let's take a look at that. In history, women have been vilified, whether you're a midwife, whether you're a herbalist, whether you're a healer, whether you're just in tune with the moon. Women have just been vilified throughout history, and I think that that was my take on it. But also Chris's interpretation of the original text and then like kind of condensing it into this like essential oil of Circe was phenomenal.

5:58And I just worked from the text. It was all there for me.

6:04Piers Morgan:So basically, I think the modern vernacular would be Homer was a bit of a sexist pig. He made it all about men. And this film redresses the balance to make it actually more equal in terms of gender presence? I'm not sure that's accurate. That's my vernacular version. Yeah, Lupita, you know, she admitted that she had never read The Odyssey as an undergraduate or graduate. I don't know how you can do that in today's education in Hampshire and Yale. So if she had read it, I think she... And had thought about it for a long time. It's one of the most pro-feminist works of Greek literature. And it's really the seminal work because Homer is contiguous with the rise of the Greek city-state.

6:47And if you look, there's every aspect of womanhood in that play. There's the loyal, crafty, brilliant Penelope who saves the kingdom while Odysseus is gallivanting around or is enduring all of these perils. She outwits these men. You've got Circe who sort of reifies the idea that men can be pigs by actually turning them into pigs. She's all-powerful. You have Athena, kind of the Parthenos, the virgin goddess, but she's also the goddess of wisdom. She's the most stable of all the Greek gods and in some cases the most powerful. She's the person who allows Odysseus to get home. You've got Calypso who kind of has created her own area where she defines her own sexuality.

7:31Then you've got Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, and her sort of nefarious sister, Clytemestra. So you've got almost every type of expression, whether it's domestic or single or divine, in that epic. And then you even have the monstrous women, the Scylla, and the Sirens, who are all powerful and kind of evil. So the main character is a male, but most of the males don't end up well. or are not portrayed well, whether it's the 102 suitors or it's the crew of Odysseus that always breaks his advice to be moderate and temperate and not offend the gods, and they all end up dying, or it's the weak-kneed Menelaus, or it's the haughty but not very talented Agamemnon.

8:21So it's, I would say, I would say for that period in the, it was probably composed somewhere orally around 700 to 675, that that was one of the most enlightened works of Western literature in the history of Western literature. So I didn't understand the criticism of the actresses, but I haven't seen the movie yet.

8:42Piers Morgan:Well, let's bring in some of our other guests, A.M. Wilson and Daniel Mendelsohn, to start with. Well, A.M. Wilson, your own daughter, Emily, wrote what people have perceived to be a kind of feminist translation of the Odyssey. A.D. recognised that characterisation? I mean, from what Victor was just saying, it sounds like it didn't particularly need feminising, but what is your view? Well, I wouldn't wish to speak for Emily, whom I adore and admire, but the last speaker, Victor, was bang on right. This is a book very largely about females, and after all, don't forget the whole war broke out, partly because a female semi-divine figure, Helen was abducted and partly because the female deities particularly Pallas Athene but also Hera the sister stroke wife of Zeus the chief god wanted to happen so women are very very powerful figures in this story and they're certainly very dominant figures and also another person I'd like to bring to mind who isn't perhaps very familiar to all the audiences on both sides of the Atlantic is a Victorian scholar and writer called Samuel Butler, who was so filled with the ideas that Victor was just expressing that he believed that Homer was a woman.

10:03Piers Morgan:That's really? That the author of The Odyssey must have been a woman because he was so sympathetic to the female point of view. So I don't think Emily Wilson, who's a great woman and has herself in a recent interview in one of the newspapers, the Financial Times, said she doesn't really hold herself as particularly modern. She thinks of herself as a sort of late Victorian. I think she's following along in this Victorian tradition of realising that the Odyssey is very sympathetic to the feminine. So, just to be clear, I mean, you're not speaking for Emily, but... No, I'm not. She wouldn't like me to speak for...

10:35Piers Morgan:Right, but you know her view about this. I mean, is she a little bit taken aback by this raging online debate about the supposed over-feminising of the movie because that in some way goes against the integrity of the original Odyssey. Well, Emily is a US citizen. She knows what the United States is like and she knows that there are sort of culture wars going on all the time. So she's not taken aback by anything, I don't think. Let me bring in Daniel. So, Daniel, you've been quite critical of the translation for being too keen to strip the heroic and masculine out of the original Odyssey. Is that right?

11:15Piers Morgan:Sorry? Which translation? Well, of Emily's version for the movie. Well, I think, I mean, I don't... My criticism of Emily's translation, I think, has to do with the way that it partakes of a trend that we have seen in recent years to sort of, let's call it, de-heroise Odysseus. So I think, you know, when there's a choice between two alternative possible translations for a word describing Odysseus, she'll use the most pejorative possible words. So, for example, there's an adjective in Greek that most people translate as extremely cunning or extremely clever. She translates it as liar, you know.

12:05And I've seen this in other movie versions. For example, the movie The Return that came out a couple of years ago sort of strips away all of the glamour of Homer's Odyssey. You know, Homer's Odyssey has its protagonist, a character who is brilliant, funny, charming, insinuating, seductive, as well as being, you know, a Bronze Age hero. He's not averse to violence. He's not averse to trickery of a very dastardly kind. But he's an extremely complicated, to use Emily's adjective, character. And I do see in recent both scholarly writing about the Odyssey in this movie, a kind of stripping away of Odysseus, what used to be seen as these sort of glamorous, brilliant, scintillating qualities of the character and making him into this as somebody just on Twitter referred to Odysseus as a mass murderer.

13:06you know uh so i do think that's a problem i think you have to give this character all of his many facets and in my own translation i'm trying to sort of be as scrupulous as possible not in in trying to turn homer into something that fits our ideas of masculinity or whatever but as somebody who reflects the values of a you know a very remote culture in which a certain kind of as we would say performative masculinity was not considered to be a bad thing. OK.

13:40Piers Morgan:Let me bring in... We can talk like this for this. Can I just reply to that? Yeah, I wanted to give you a reply. Because, I mean, I think Emily is enormously charmed by a disuse, just to make that point. And one of the points she makes is that charming men often are extremely dishonest. But, I mean, Virgil, for example, who was Homer's greatest fan and created his Aeneid out of the Trojan story, one of the very first things that the Trojans were wondering whether to bring a wooden horse into Troy, which is what led to its destruction, says, is this really the way that we understood Ulysses' character?

14:18Piers Morgan:They call him Ulysses, we call him Odysseus if we're Greek. But in other words, Odysseus, among many other things, was a notorious liar and he lies and deceives and gives different versions of events throughout the Odyssey. And that's part of the humour. I mean, among other things, it's a very humorous epic. And one of the things that we enjoy about Odysseus, certainly I know Emily because I've known her for over 50 years, she enjoys about his character is that he is dishonest. And I don't think Homer, to give her her old-fashioned Greek word name, I don't think Homer wants to deceive us into thinking that Homer was...

15:01Piers Morgan:Thinking that Odysseus was a very upright film. Has he been unheroed in the way that Daniel just articulated? I don't think so, because he's shown to be very brave. He's shown to be a good dad. Thinking back to your... An earlier guest on the programme in which somebody was sharing the most horrific details with his son about erections and so forth, a man called Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson, yeah. But, I mean, I think there's a very good... Not bromance, but a very good relationship between Telemachus and Odysseus. And they weep together. And also, it's a very... Among other things which we haven't mentioned, Odysseus is sitting with this beautiful woman, Talipso, having what many of us, if we were sad old men, think was rather a wonderful time on her island, having lots of sex and food brought to himself.

15:45Piers Morgan:And he sits weeping, thinking of his wife at home. And she, similarly, in Ithaca, is weeping, thinking of him, even though he's been deceiving her all through the marriage, and she knows that. but nonetheless they love one another. So there's been no deliberate Wilson plot? I don't think there's a Wilson plot. Dear hero. No, very much not. And heroes are not the same as saints. And heroes are full of... Mostly flawed characters. They are flawed characters. Think of Achilles with the other great Homeric poem, The Iliad. He's full of the most terrible flaws. And you've got to leave us. Thank you very much indeed for joining us.

16:22Piers Morgan:We really appreciate it. It's amazing. Thank you so much. Expert family response. And the great thing is that we should always read... I mean, the first speaker, Victor, saying he couldn't understand students going to a university and not reading Homer. And I can understand it, but I do wish they would because it's just the best book in the world and Western literature has just been downhill ever since. Well, well said. They should. And Victor, I think, would absolutely agree. Thank you very much indeed for joining. Thank you, Piers. We're going to sub you out, A.M. Wilson, with a brilliant contribution.

16:52Piers Morgan:We're going to bring in two of our, or three of our, regular guests, actually, to talk about a lot of the more negative reaction to the Odyssey movie. It's being driven in part by the movie fan community on YouTube, which is very vociferous. So we're going to bring in two of the biggest names in that space, Will Jordan, a.k.a. The Critical Drinker, and Gary Buechler, who's the nodrotic, of course. That's rounding off our truly epic panel, host of BET News, Mark Lamont Hill. So welcome to the three of you. And Victor has kindly agreed to stay here. Now, Victor teed this up by saying, at the start, critical drinker.

17:26Piers Morgan:The fuss exclusively about the choice of having Lupita Nyong 'o, a black woman, African-American actress, playing Helen of Troy was, you know, somehow wrong. Because mythology has her, even though she's not a real person, has her as a white woman, this shouldn't have been the case. What is your view? yeah i mean it's worth keeping in mind that something like the odyssey is this epic fantasy story but it's fantasy grounded in the real world it's set within a very specific geographical location and time and like any geographical location and time it has demographics of people that are believable in that time and people who are not and the best way to to contextualize this kind of decision is say you had a movie set in pre-colonial africa and one of the tribal leaders was a random white guy and none of the other characters thought that that was even remotely strange no one reacted to it and there was no explanation for it that's kind of the similar situation to what you have with the odyssey it doesn't really make sense contextually and i think that's what people are reacting to and this is coming off the back of a period within hollywood movie making where there has been a lot of rather bizarre race swaps of characters.

18:46I mean if you go back to you know things like we produced over here in the UK we've had an Asian Sir Isaac Newton we've had a black Anne Boleyn these are real historical characters but we're now supposed to pretend that they're a completely different race and it doesn't make sense.

19:01Piers Morgan:Right Martin Monhill I saw you smirking with derision there I think I think I'm right in identifying the nature of the smirk um but if i said to you look i'm going to be starring as othello next week in a massive broadway version of shakespeare's great play would you feel that would be appropriate given i'm a white guy uh first you you read my my smirk correctly your powers of observation and analysis have really sharpened since i started coming on the show you're welcome um i i think for For me, the question is always, is it historically accurate? Yes. But also, what's the genre? If it's mythic, if it's fantasy, or if the artist is explicitly saying, hey, we're not playing on historical accuracies precisely because of the fantasy aspect of it, I'm fine with it.

19:53But if you're actually not doing that, you're not eyes wide open, you don't show your cards, then it would be a problem. So if you were playing Othello and we had that conversation, I'd be fine with it. The reason I smirked was because there's a long history in Hollywood of white people playing characters. It should be black people. I mean, when I mean, Charlton Heston is Moses was kind of wild. You know what I mean? Was it Lawrence Olivier who played the Mahdi in the 70s film about Mohammed Ahmed and Mahdi in Sudan? I mean, it's fascinating to me to see to see the outrage now, particularly since the characters.

20:26We've got our issues with those pieces of casting as well. Yeah, I was. I think that happened. I'm not sure. I made an entire video about terrible casting choices in Hollywood, and one of them was John Wayne playing Genghis Khan in The Conqueror. I think that's completely absurd as well. So I've got plenty of issues with bad whitewashing casting over the years, but that was 50 or 60 years ago. I can't do anything about that now.

20:49Piers Morgan:Daniel Mendelsohn, one of our other panellists here, penned a column for the New York Times entitled, Does Matt Damon Look Greek? No, so stop complaining about Lupita and Yongo. In it, he asks, so what is Mr Nolan up to? As it turns out, the auteur is using Helen, just as the Greek authors did, to provoke, challenge, and discomfort how we think about beauty and identity, about who we are and how we relate to the world. By that criteria, what's wrong with it? What's wrong with it? What I primarily point out for the film is the hypocrisy from Hollywood. If you're trying to be provocative, then you're being subversive.

21:29You're just coming out and saying, Yes, we're being subversive. We're being provocative with this casting. So it's not the best person for the role. And it's not for authenticity. We're trying to challenge traditional beliefs. Well, that's something Christopher Nolan doesn't usually do. This is a game he doesn't usually play. And let's not forget that these beliefs, these quote-unquote values of diversity and inclusion are baked into the awards rules. So they're baked into the company's rules and the awards rules. and we just had a film that completely flopped Moana, the live action remake that was, you know, touting how authentic it was to that culture.

22:08Well, that's just a fantasy. Why does it matter? And my argument is if it doesn't matter, then why change it? It's the motivation behind the change that people sense. And it also is a red flag for how we're going to treat the source material and how we're going to go through. Like I saw this with the rings of power, The Rings of Power, they changed. They had black dwarves and black elves. And oh, by the way, they completely went off the text. So it's a red flag for something else. Now, Lupita Nyong 'o, if I'm mispronouncing her name, I apologize. But if she's in it for a little bit, like the movie could still be good.

22:46It could absolutely still be good. But it's a red flag and it's subversive casting. So it does rile people up. It's meant to rile people up, just like the casting of Black Snape.

22:58Piers Morgan:OK, Victor, let me bring you back in here, if I may. What's your response to that argument? I think you have to make a good point about subversive. When we talk about people of different races playing characters, the complaint about Hollywood, say, pre-1980, was that white characters, Burt Lancaster, Charles Bronson, Audrey Hepburn, who played Native Americans, and the issue was there were probably Native American actors who would have been more authentic. I don't know if they were as good actors, but there was no effort. But the point I'm making is they tried to look or appear as they were Native Americans.

23:33So when a Mexican-American actor played Zorba the Greek, Anthony Quinn tried to look Greek, and it was enhanced because he looked Greek in some ways. When Laurence Olivier applied to play Othello, he was white, but he tried to look like he was North African. And this is, but I think the other guest was right about trying to be subversive. In the case of Lupita, I mean, it would be kind of absurd in modern sensibilities to have an African-American actress or African-British actress than where, I guess we could use that word white face so she would appear more authentic as far as the actual text of Homer goes.

24:18But it's so it is a subversive act. It's saying that we're going to take somebody who does not appear anywhere near the look of Helen and why it might have been less subversive for Clytemnestra of other characters. After all, Helen is a central character and caused the Trojan War. I have no problem, as the other guest said, about being subversive if that's openly your point, is to draw attention that you're trying to destroy characterization or traditional stereotypes. But it's not being authentic to what the author imagined. It might be your interpretation of what he imagined, but it isn't. And again, I think just to finish, we have a whole tradition of, it is kind of insulting to, you know, it's very unpopular.

25:10There's a lot of controversy in Greece. It would be as if you made, oh, an epic, remade how the West was won, and you didn't have one American actor in it. You all had Europeans or Africans or Asians. So to make this national epic, which the Greek people feel is a continuous tradition from the 7th, 8th century, and not have a single Greek actress or actor, it's kind of jarring when you go out of your way to get other people who would cause controversy and sometimes in a subversive manner.