by liberal japonicus
Apologies for the radio silence, been watching lots of discussion about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. I limit myself to full length youtube videos, and I avoid shorts like the plague, but here is your invitation to post anything related that you think might be interesting.
Elon Musk says Grok is making a non-woke version. FFS.
Non woke, AND in original Homeric Greek poetic form.
Sure, and Musk’s “The Boring Company” needs some work, so …
The 1968 TV version is still the one coming closest to the original in spirit by far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Odyssey_(1968_miniseries).
It also shows that one does not need bombastic special effects.
Polyphemus is the only exception and Mario Bava (who did those scenes) did his usual excellent job of making it believable without showing off. The series is a bit minimalist at times but this does not detract but rather enhances the general impression of being truly archaic. Not popcorn this!
The same director also later did the Eneide but imo with far less success.
Why stop at Ulysses?
We need historically accurate depictions of Paul Bunyan, Speedy Alka-Seltzer, and the signifying monkey.
This is an interview in the Sunday Times with Emily Wilson, the classicist whose translation nous and many others were so keen on (I haven’t got it yet). Apart from much else, she agrees with Mary Beard about the unfortunate and un-Homeric lack of sex in the film:
What The Odyssey gets right and wrong: the scholar’s verdict
Professor Emily Wilson has dedicated decades (and tattoo space) to Homer. This is what she thinks of the film her translation inspired
Madeleine Spence
Saturday July 25 2026, 4.00pm, The Sunday Times
When Emily Wilson emerged from her local cinema in Philadelphia this month she felt oddly flat. Having first read The Odyssey aged eight, she knew well the emotional heft of the moment when its protagonist Odysseus returns home after 20 years and is reunited with his wife Penelope and son Telemachus. It is the same moment Christopher Nolan has chosen to make the climax of his cinematic retelling of Homer’s poem.
“But it didn’t land emotionally for me at all,” says Wilson, 54 and chair of the classics department at Pennsylvania University. “Which I think is partly about the fact that, unlike Homer, it’s not very well written.”
An acclaimed classicist, Wilson is behind the 2017 translation of The Odyssey that was cited by Nolan as part of the inspiration for his eponymous film, which has received five-star reviews and earned £169 million on its opening weekend. She has dedicated decades of her life to Homer’s epic works. Her arms, tattooed with imagery inspired by the ancient Greek myths including a spear and bow, an octopus and the horses of Achilles, are a testament to that. But she is less than convinced by Nolan’s rendering.
“The characters don’t have the kind of depth the Homeric characters have,” she says. “I felt, ‘Do I really care if this guy gets back to his wife?’ You haven’t given me any reason to.”
For many, Nolan’s Odyssey will be their introduction to the story of the war hero who sacks the city of Troy and spends two decades journeying back to his homeland of Ithaca. On the way he is distracted by beautiful sirens, a giant cyclops, deviant goddesses and a hungry whirlpool monster named Charybdis. Whilst Nolan’s film (which Wilson describes as a “very clever piece of cinematic storytelling”) might be the blockbuster of the summer, speaking to Wilson is a true education in why The Odyssey has endured since around the 7th century BC.
“It’s a very simple human story of, how does a person get back to their home, and what does it mean to get there? How is it intertwined with identity and relationships? How do we relate to strangers and friends?” Wilson says.
A word repeatedly used in the beginning of the epic poem is nostos, which refers to a journey home from war, for which there is no direct translation in modern English. What truly elevates this story of homecoming is the richness of its characters; “Everyone, even the gods, have their own histories, motivations, desires,” Wilson says. Unfortunately, this is exactly where she felt the film was lacking: “The Trojans are faceless robots with masks”, Robert Pattinson as Antinous (who tries to seduce Penelope and kill Telemachus) was “fantastic, but a cartoon villain”, and Polyphemus the cyclops is “a puppet”.
Wilson says: “They’re all so thinly characterised, which contributes to a sense of, ‘Do I really care’?”
Homer’s Odysseus is famously layered. The first epithet used to describe him is polytropos, meaning “much turning”, Wilson explains. He constantly reinvents himself, using disguise and deception, and is also hungry for recognition and glory. “He’s cunning, crafty, devising and is excellent at solving problems.”
In one passage, Odysseus’s men must fight the cyclops Polyphemus to escape from his cave, which they’ve inadvertently wandered into. In the poem, Odysseus contrives a cunning plan to trick his adversary by telling him his name is “noman”. When Odysseus’s men attack, Polyphemus shouts for help from his neighbours, saying “no man is hurting me”. Naturally, they shrug and get on with their day. An approximately 2,600-year-old joke; but one that’s left out of the film. “It’s really funny,” says Wilson, “and speaks to the fact that Odysseus is constantly in disguise, or wearing some other name.”
Nolan’s Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, “is not clever, he’s not funny, he’s just wracked by guilt and anxiety”. He is constructed around his shame over what he has done to the people of Troy.
In the poem, one of the diversions Odysseus encounters on his long journey home is the goddess Calypso, who falls in love with him and refuses to let him leave her island for seven years. Played by Charlize Theron, Nolan’s Calypso feeds Odysseus lotus flowers to help him forget his psychological pain.
“The Odysseus of the poem doesn’t need to take psychiatric drugs to get over his PTSD or have Charlize Theron as his therapist,” Wilson jokes. It’s not antithetical to think that Odysseus is struggling with a legacy of “multiple pains”, she argues, but there is nothing explicit about trauma or guilt in Homer’s verse, which pays much more attention to notions of glory.
What Nolan gets right, says Wilson, is The Odyssey’s exploration of space, time and memory: “Homer is interested in time and memory, and how one story is embedded inside another. Nolan is picking up on the narrative sophistication of the original.” In that regard, it is tailor made for the director whose most acclaimed films, such as Memento and Inception, play on these themes, often messing with the chronology of the plot. She was similarly impressed by his ability to plait the Trojan horse sequence from Virgil’s Aeneid into The Odyssey.
Nolan provides battles aplenty but has spared viewers some of the other violence depicted by Homer. An episode where Telemachus (played by a gentle Tom Holland) hangs 12 enslaved women and dismembers an enslaved man for betraying his father doesn’t feature. Including it would have required some “moral courage” says Wilson, whose own translation of it partly reads: “their heads all in a row, / were strung up with the noose around their necks”.
“It’s also weird there’s no sex and none of the food looks very nice. The Odyssey is all about eating and it’s all about a man getting back to his marriage bed to have sex with his wife,” she says.
Wilson is daughter to the late Katherine Duncan-Jones, a professor of English literature at Oxford, and the writer and critic AN Wilson. She discovered The Odyssey after being cast as Athena in her primary school play. When she moved to Oxford High School for girls and took up ancient Greek and Latin she fell in love. “In French we learnt how to ask where the bus stop is; in Greek we learnt how it feels when your children are slaughtered in front of your eyes.” After reading Classics at Oxford she did an MPhil in early modern English literature, a PhD at Yale and started teaching in 2002.
Wilson’s translation, which took five years to complete, made waves with traditionalists for ditching the “ornate” and elevated language typical of Homeric translations. Others, she says, “make it sound more difficult than the original is”. Her first line is a perfect example: “Tell me about a complicated man.” The word “complicated”, in this context, uses all its modern subtext to illustrate a possibly problematic and multifaceted man. It is quick and punchy compared to, for instance, Richmond Lattimore’s 1965 version: “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel.”
Writing in iambic pentameter to try to replicate the rhythmic nature of the original poem makes Wilson’s translation ripe for being read aloud — her dramatic readings in both English and ancient Greek have made her something of a superstar in her field. Hers is also the first full translation in English by a woman. When I raise this, however, she is diplomatically dismissive, saying that is irrelevant to the work: “Nobody says to men, ‘You really understood that male character so well because you are a man’.”
She does, however, have views on the women of The Odyssey. “By Nolan standards this was great for women characters. By Homer standards it was a bit disappointing.”
Homer’s Calypso, argues Wilson, is “much more interesting” than Theron’s; she possesses “her own fury” and divine power which allows her to detain Odysseus on her island. In one speech left out of the film, she laments how male gods, in Wilson’s words, “get to rape and kidnap people all the time and female gods don’t get to”.
Helen of Troy, played by Lupita Nyong’o, is far more versatile and capable than her limited screen time allows, Wilson says. Nolan’s Athena, played by Zendaya, serves as little more than “Matt Damon’s conscience”, whereas she is actually a war goddess constantly tussling with Poseidon over Odysseus’s future.
Anne Hathaway does a formidable job of playing Odysseus’s wife, says Wilson, but Nolan’s script fails to reach the depths of Homer’s Penelope. With considerable grit she presides over her missing husband’s house, keeping a brigade of rowdy suitors baying for her hand in marriage at bay for 20 years. It is ripe material for a tearjerking reunion which Nolan includes in the final half hour of the film, centred around Penelope’s unfailing loyalty. However, in the poem this moment is more bittersweet: “In mythical ancient Greece, when a woman is between the house of her father and of her husband it is a moment of relative power.” In this moment a woman has choices, but once she’s made the choice she loses that power. Penelope is “frozen in that moment” and when Odysseus returns, in Homer’s telling, she is also losing something and grieving this loss. “In Homer, she gets to be a character that has all of this emotional complexity.”
As the film approached, Wilson found herself swept up in the torrent of an argument stoked by people arguing Nolan was too progressive with his approach, particularly with the blind casting of characters. People grasped at Wilson’s 2017 work as more evidence the film was “woke”. Last week Elon Musk said he would use his Grok AI to create an “anti-woke Odyssey”.
Wilson thinks one of the reasons it has become such a lightning rod is because some “modern ideologies” associate the ancient Greeks with ideals of masculinity and a past greatness when “women shut up and it was just about the guys”. As publicity for the film grew she was receiving so much abuse that she installed a button on her website that reads “contact form: misogynistic trolling”. (People have used it.) It was her partner’s idea — “his name is noman”, she winks, preferring to keep his identity private.
It hasn’t put Wilson off her next project, which is another translation of The Odyssey that will also be in iambic pentameter, but this time she’s not going to limit herself to the same number of lines as the original, meaning she will have “more syllables to play with”. It follows her 2023 translation of The Iliad, which followed a similar form and comes after her most recent book: Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys through Ancient Literature, a collection of essays about ancient literature and translation.
Something the film has served to do is to drive a renewed interest in what Wilson calls the “original IP”, or intellectual property, of Homer. This, according to her, can only be a good thing. She saw it with her three teenage daughters who finally admitted, says Wilson, that what she does is “kind of cool”. “I’ve been trying to get them to let me read it out loud to them since they were little,” she jokes. Maybe now they’ll finally let her.
I think that there is an unfortunate flattening when Wilson’s translation is cited as Nolan’s inspiration. Nolan was initially going to do Troy, and his whole career has been connected telling non-linear stories (Inception, Tenet) so I imagine the Homeric in medias res was something that attracted him. Daniel Mendelsohn noted that classicists are either Iliad people or Odyssey people. I’m with Mendelsohn in the former category while Wilson is pretty clearly in the latter and I suspect that Nolan is an Iliad person, but there was no way he could do an Iliad.
The thing about the Iliad, the characters themselves are locked into their own fates and how they follow that fate is the attraction, at least to me. The Odyssey is about Odysseus trying to eke out a happy ending despite the best efforts of gods and men. I’m also, given the mechanics of shooting with an Imax camera, wondering how one would shoot those sex scenes.
I don’t know enough to have an informed opinion about a lot of this. But I do know enough to feel utter contempt for anyone whose concern is the melanin content of the skin of the actress playing Helen and Clytemnestra.
All these people upset over how poorly Nolan’s adaptation followed the original, but he stuck to the script a lot more faithfully than that hack Virgil did.
Lol, yes. And truly, it’s hard to see how even a long movie could incorporate all the cultural and psychological nuance Wilson talks about (eg her really interesting point about Penelope’s ambiguous feelings about her status on O’s return). Let alone this is a woman who has been obsessed with this story since childhood – it’s impossible to see how she could have been satisfied by a film. I still think her translation (of both) sounds great, but i don’t want to read them on the kindle, so at the moment I’m trying to decide whether to spring for them when I’m already buried in books (once I had them, I wouldn’t want to give them to a charity shop like I do most of my new books when I’ve read them), or whether to rejoin my local library.
but he stuck to the script a lot more faithfully than that hack Virgil did
Never liked the Aeneid. He is also a major step in the direction of turning the gods from amoral to immoral (the Flavians then took the logical final step to make them outright evil and anti-moral). Closely reading it, one has to come to the conclusion that the nominal main villain and antagonist – Iuno – is the only deity showing genuine empathy and has very good reasons for her actions, she also does not try to shift blame to others. Aeneas’ mother Venus on the other hand sees her son as a mere tool to be discarded once he has done his job.
Anytime Aeneas acts like a decent and normal human being (although a rather dim one) he gets chastised and humiliated by the gods who refuse to give him clear instructions. And – constructed as an anti-Odysseus – he always seeks the fault in himself. Also, he has to have the most incompetent navigator in history (Palinurus) and reaches Italy only after they guy becomes either a human sacrifice (official reading) or simply sleeps on the job and drops overboard. Odysseus only traveled for 2 years (1 year he was with Kirke and 7 with Kalypso) and covered a far larger area than Aeneas who at minimum took 8 years pure travel time from Troy to the mouth of the Tiber (the intermezzi in Crete and Carthage together are less than 2 years).
From our modern POV Odysseus is quite a nasty guy but still we can follow him and somehow be on his side. He keeps the initiative and thinks for himself and never gets more miserable than when he is marooned and can’t DO anything.
The 1968 miniseries interestingly strongly implies that he is torn between ‘go home’ and ‘go on’ (and his companions are not happy about that).
Not in the Aeneid but in the lost sequels: Aeneas’ son (ancestor of Caesar) tries to murder his stepmother and half-brother (the ancestor of Romulus) after he realizes that the gods intend to bypass him. Odysseus – in the lost sequel – gets killed by his bastard son with Kirke – Telegonos – due to a misunderstanding. Telemachos marries Kirke and iirc Telegonos Penelope. Neither story ever made it to Hollywood afaik.
I wanted to read more than the first sentence of Wilson’s Odyssey, and going down the rabbit hole took me to this:
https://poemshape.wordpress.com/2018/03/12/emily-wilsons-odyssey/
I found the comparisons of the opening lines between the various translations fascinating, and (since I don’t recall ever reading “Chapman’s Homer”) I was really moved to find that centuries had not lessened its power, nor made Keats’s reaction seem overblown.
Never meet your heroes. Or watch them extensively on Youtube, I guess. I’m kind of going off the Wilson translation (which I loved when I first read it) because of all the interviews with her expounding on her theory of translation and I’m becoming much more sympathetic to Daniel Mendelson, speaking here
https://youtu.be/ER92zBZ6BZY?si=LZqI2L5mpbF6ciJJ
In one interview, she lauds the fact that she used “complicated” because it had the same number of syllables as the greek polytropon. That’s nice, but then she busts Mendelson for using “roundabout ways” Same number of syllables as complicated and polytropon, and also gives this echo of the English word tropes.
This New Yorker article has Mendelson comparing passages in the Iliad
https://archive.is/20250605073113/https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/englishing-the-iliad-grading-four-rival-translations
I did wonder how long it would be before people hitherto keen went off Emily Wilson.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jul/27/odyssey-translator-emily-wilson-attacks-nolan-blockbuster
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n14/emily-wilson/an-uncomplicated-man
Though that’s Wilson hating on Nolan’s film.
Aside from the anti woke nonsense, the complaints about Wilson’s Odyssey were
-she tries to make it too modern. She’s been quoted as saying that ‘Homer didn’t sound archaic to the Greeks’, but I think she is wrong about that, Homeric Greek was not spoken by anyone. In that sense, it is even more different than the English of the King James Bible is to spoken English. Somewhere, I read that her use of the terms mavericks and canapes were unfortunate. I didn’t notice them until it was pointed out, but after you are told, you can’t unsee it.
-she tries and makes Odysseus to be worse. Mandelson’s talk points that out, where the explanation that Odysseus’ crew eats the Sun God’s cattle, she makes it all Odysseus when the Greek explains that it was his crew that screwed up. I’m been using AI to go thru 2 lines a day, and this is what it said about that
Thematic Weight of Atasthalia (ἀτασθαλία): This word absolves Odysseus of guilt for his men’s deaths right from the start. They didn’t die because of his leadership; they died because of their own moral blindness and self-destructive recklessness.
–in making Odysseus out to be bad, it then lifts up traditional bad guys like the suitors or the Cyclops Polymepheus into innocent bystanders
-her retranslation of the various words for women/servants/handmaidens is totally defensible, and I found that really interesting, but others have pointed out that Wilson flattens all the social dimensions of that, which makes a different kind of distortion.
I have no quarrel with Wilson’s choices. The text is there for anyone to consult if they have questions.
I mean… what would John Ronald Tolkien have made of Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation of Beowulf?
https://reactormag.com/read-an-except-from-maria-dahvana-headleys-translation-of-beowulf/
The problem I am having is that I’m listening to Wilson putting down the choices of other translators. Perhaps that is inherent in the enterprise, the male-centric version is problematic, but the interviews tend to lead with ‘the first female translator of the Odyssey’, and she has to spend a lot of time defending her choices in that regard. But when it expands to choices like Mendelson’s ’roundabout ways’ or suggests that Fagles translation of the hanging scene of the 12 maidservants/slaves reduces them party girls because he uses ‘hung in a line’, which she claims is like a chorus line, that’s going too far imho.
Is there a lolcat translation already? 😉
Though that’s Wilson hating on Nolan’s film.
Yes of course – the reason I included it was because I assumed that a lot of the new Wilson-haters (obviously not you lj) would be die-hard Nolan fans furious that she wasn’t grateful for his mention, not to mention biting the hand that feeds her (I believe it has been a runaway best-seller after the movie came out).
The thing about translating such literature is the need to make it readable for a modern audience, without losing the spirit of it. Of course people can argue that she has over-emphasised modern concerns (guilt etc), but I have no issue with examining underlying psychological aspects through a modern lens. I haven’t read either the Iliad or the Odyssey for decades, and I can’t even remember (if I ever paid attention) which translation I read. But one thing is certain, I would not want to read them again now in those kinds of translations, as some of the compared translations in that link made clear. Even including Chapman – its grandeur and beauty could not sustain me for the entire book. As an example, a description of Odysseus as having “roundabout ways”, no matter how much more faithful to the original, strikes me as alienating in its non-idiomatic sound. “Complicated” is so short-cut as to be incomplete, but I believe she varies it according to context, which makes sense to me.
I do agree that the “chorus line” reference is a bit absurd, but quite a lot of modern critical analysis strikes me that way, and
in making Odysseus out to be bad, it then lifts up traditional bad guys like the suitors or the Cyclops Polymepheus into innocent bystanders
just made me laugh.
The great thing about this kind of stuff, it seems to me, is that everybody’s MMV, and that’s how it ought to be.
A colleague of mine and I were discussing Odyssey translations for teaching on social media and we agreed that if we were teaching the text, we would not require a single translation for the class, but rather offer a few annotations on a select group of translations, and let the students pick which one they wanted to purchase. For my part, I’d list Lattimore, Fagles, and Wilson for linguistic precision, and for differing approaches to the poetic dimension respectively. I think picking just one for a class does a disservice to both text and students – unless the class text is the Homeric Greek text itself and everyone is their own translator. The latter is well beyond my own capabilities, let alone those of my undergrads, hence the plan for translations.
What I find annoying about the public critiques in the popular press is how they are framed as conversations of translational fidelity to textual/contextual nuances, and how that buries the disciplinary subtexts and long-raging debates that prompt the translational choices, and the critiques of those choices, creating the illusion of there being better choices that come without their own tradeoffs and effects.
Sorry…style IS content, and content is style.
Wilson’s translation fills a gap in the archive. It does not fill that gap without creating its own set of obfuscations, but it does reveal things that were obfuscated in the translations that preceded it. Fantastic. So her work flattens some social distinctions in ancient Greek households. That is a historical concern, not a literary concern. Attention to those details don’t serve a large role in the literary import of the poem. Hooray for Wilson! Her choices just gave some poor Assistant Professor of History an excuse to create a syllabus, and write a journal article. What it has not done, though, is reveal the need for said historian to create their own translation of the poem with special attention given to the nuances of social status in ruling class households in ancient Greece.
So again, hooray for Wilson, and for Fagles, and for Lattimore. And even for Fitzgerald, annoying as I find many of his choices. They all show us important things that none of the other translators revealed in their own choices.
As for everyone having their own takes, as I tell my students, just because there is no single “right” opinion doesn’t mean that there are no wrong, or less productive, readings. Being able to tell which is which is a process of care and experience, and being able to communicate that is the secret sauce of expertise.
>Is there a lolcat translation already?
“TELL ME, MUSE, OV DAT MAN, SO READY AT NED, HOO WANDERD FAR AN WIDE, AFTR HE HAD SACKD TEH SACRD CITADEL OV TROY, AN LOTZ DA WUZ TEH DOODZ WHOSE TOWNS HE SAW AN WHOSE MIND HE LERNT, YEA, AN LOTZ DA TEH WOEZ HE SUFFERD IN HIS HART ON TEH DEEP, STRIVIN 2 WIN HIS OWN LIFE AN TEH RETURN OV HIS COMPANY.”
I’m listening to an interview with Emily Wilson on NPR. The first thing I thought was, “She sounds pretty damned English to me,” but that was based on lj’s discussion of Kristrún Frostadóttir’s mostly American-sounding accent.
Wrong person, wrong accent. Duh.
Just for fun, this is Caitlin Moran (columnist, writer and funny woman) in today’s Times, making points about Elon Musk (and also Grok’s Odyssey):
So, have you checked in with Elon Musk recently? Seen what old Space Karen’s latest wig-out is?
Obviously I’m using a casual, light-hearted tone here, as the reality — that the richest and arguably most powerful man in the world appears to be unhinged — makes me, to quote Harold Ramis in Ghostbusters, “terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought”.
We’ve all just got used to the fact that the man making our cars, launching our communications satellites, dictating the algorithm of one of the world’s biggest social media platforms and intending, on behalf of humanity, to populate space, is a dangerously unpleasant crank.
At some point in the future I dearly hope we all have some kind of “perception reset” and treat him like a 21st-century Henry Ford. (He was another successful carmaking dude with some “tasty” sociopolitical views, including the publication of The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, which was carried in every Ford dealership and, heartwarmingly, was quoted as a big inspiration by Hitler, who “blurbed” him in Mein Kampf as a “single great man”. In the end an outraged public boycott of Ford’s cars made him publish “an apology” and apparently, when he finally saw footage of Nazi concentration camps, “and was confronted with the atrocities… to which he contributed… he collapsed with a stroke. His last, and most serious.” Amazing what a public boycott can do for your morals. If not your arteries.)
But back to Musk. He’s had a busy week. First of all he conducted a televised interview with The Economist’s Zanny Minton Beddoes and then, peeved by her suggestion that he supported “far right” parties, took to X to address his fanbase of 240 million loons and bots: “She is a traitor to the West, pure and simple,” he wrote under a photo of, to make it clear, the editor of The Economist.
Given that in the last month the Tommy Robinson-supporting Musk has been very clear about how “traitors to the West” should be treated — in June he reposted a photo of a man wielding a gun, with the caption “First the traitors, then the invaders”, with the simple comment “Yes” — I would imagine Minton Beddoes is terrified.
There is only one real difference between some friendless 18-year-old in his bedroom posting this kind of incitement to violence and Musk posting it: Musk will not get a visit from a terrorism prevention agency because he is the richest man on Earth. Somehow this makes it unbad. One day, when humanity has a collective therapy session about capitalism and works out its weird daddy issues re men with lots of money, we might re-examine all this. Until then: fingers crossed Minton Beddoes is OK!
Incredibly, however, this wasn’t the weirdest thing Musk did this week. No, Musk’s primary weirdness is in regard to his almost demented fury about Christopher Nolan’s film of The Odyssey. Musk hates The Odyssey. Why? He believes it’s “woke”. “True,” he captioned a post that accused the movie of advancing a left-wing plan “to destroy Western Civilisation and everything that helped create it”.
How is an oiled-up Matt Damon killing a Cyclops destroying western civilisation? Well, it’s because the casting of the movie includes Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. “Not one person on the planet believes Lupita Nyong’o is the most beautiful woman in the world,” the right-wing commentator Matt Walsh posted on X. “But Christopher Nolan knows he would be called racist if he gave that role to a white woman.” “True,” Musk replied, again.
But, to give Musk his due, this wasn’t just a casual moment of bigotry. Musk is a man of action! “Before this year ends, Grok [Musk’s AI; previously best known for creating millions of pornographic images of women and children] will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate, and true to the art of Homer,” he announced grandly.
To say that I am excited about this is a wild understatement. Musk made this claim before audiences went crackers for what is generally regarded as Nolan’s greatest film, and Imax cinemas across the world recorded waiting lists for tickets. This means that there is going to be an immediate, straight-up fight between the Oscar-winning genius’s Odyssey, which took two years to create, and Musk’s uncanny, AI, all-white purity project, knocked out in between X posts calling people “traitors”.
Excitingly, we already have an insight into what kind of AI Helen of Troy Musk will create: queasily, his timeline is full of AI women he fancies, all of whom look like pale, ethereal yet tattooed fairies with massive knockers and “floaty” hair. It will be fascinating to compare Musk’s dead-eyed anime fantasy with Nyong’o’s exhilarating performance.
I’m genuinely excited to weigh up Nolan’s masterpiece in contrast to whatever mawkish, ethnonationalist, sub-The Sims turd Musk eventually plops out. Because there’s every chance that, if it fails in the way that seems gloriously inevitable, it will be so terrible, it will kill all talk of AI movies for a decade, minimum.
Elon! Do all the woke, snowflake, anti-AI luvvies a favour and, once you’ve ruinously showcased how eldritch and bloodless AI movies are, announce your next project is to make an AI Beatles album! Go on, have a pop! And then do an AI Victoria Wood! With your love and deep knowledge of British culture, plus your strong humour, it will be just like having her in the room!
You know what, Elon Musk’s The Odyssey may turn out to be the best thing since Henry Ford’s stroke. I’m stoked.
Musk will use GrokAI to make a version of Odyssey that is “true to the art of Homer” Simpson.
D’oh.
I’m thinking that would be more of an aspiration than an achievable goal. He may get closer to that than to the Greek Homer. But even Homer Simpson is probably out of reach for him.
i’m glad Musk is South African. because that means the world can’t completely blame the US for him.
i’m glad Musk is South African., because his actions have earned him a special South African “necklace”.
As a special privilege one could make it a white one.
[Caveat, if we are meaning the same thing, this is borderline violating the posting rules, as opposed to simply wishing him an unpleasant natural departure]
Musk has been a US citizen since 2002. But he’s not eligible to be President, unless the Supreme Court extends Trump v Anderson to apply to all questions of eligibility, as it might well do if the far-right six thought it in the interests of the Republican party.
Joyce Carol Oates weighs in
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jul/30/maga-joyce-carol-oates-criticises-emily-wilson-for-criticising-nolans-odyssey
Rather than disagreeing with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner,” said Oates, “this person, who has benefited enormously from Nolan’s film, speaks in the crude language of Maga folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers.
“One would expect a translator, of all people, beholden to a text, in service to a text, to be just a wee bit more thoughtful and respectful of others who are acting in good faith just as (she would claim) she is.”
ouch…
I have to say, hearing Wilson on the various podcasts etc had me thinking she was going down this line and it seemed like the more she thought about it, the more she disliked Nolan’s idea. A lot of people have claimed that Nolan was inspired by Wilson’s translation, but as I said, I don’t think that is the case. He did like the notion of Odysseus as a ‘complicated man’, but in those interviews, he also said how he the seed of the idea was him being slated to direct Troy, something he turned down to do the Batman reboot.
I also wonder if Wilson is mad because Nolan’s version messes up her vision of the text. I can imagine getting possessive if you live with it for the time it takes the translate it (she has said it took her 5-6 years)
I think it’s entirely possible (likely, even) that Nolan was inspired by Wilson’s translation, and especially by the introductory material. Where that inspiration leads, however, is a complex and personal process. This is especially true when the textual inspiration crosses into new genres and media. All those new conventions, affordances, and contexts create new questions, choices, and rhetorical situations. Changing medium and genre constrains what the new text can mean, which is always transformational. (This is the core argument I made in my dissertation looking at how Spielberg adapted WWII texts to film, borrowing framing ideas from video games, and then analyzing what happened when video games borrowed those cinematic scenes back.)
I’m not surprised that Wilson is disappointed. The things about the text that she found most interesting and productive were the things most affected and constrained by Nolan’s other choices. I feel a lot like Wilson when it comes to Malick’s film adaptation of The Thin Red Line. I know many film critics who loved it and were deeply moved by it, and who hated Saving Private Ryan, but My own reception was the opposite because I hated Malick’s choices.