“White-armed”? I haven’t read Homer, but an expert says that’s how Homer describes Helen of Troy. The expert also announces, “It’s worth noting that we actually have no idea what Helen looked like.” Aaron Sorkin asked me if he could step in and provide a rebuttal, so here it is: We have some idea. She had white arms, which means she was white and therefore not black. Not that casting Lupita Nyong’o, a black woman, in the upcoming film of The Odyssey is really such an awful thing. First, she’s a knockout, which is the character’s most important trait. Second, John Wayne played Genghis Khan and no lives were lost, so we can endure a Helen who is somehow 20 shades darker than everyone else in view. A bigger problem is the bigoted outrage, simultaneously pompous and hysterical, of Elon Musk and likeminded cretins online. But their brand of rabid stupidity has been denounced by plenty of people. My point is smaller and quieter. Casting a black woman as Helen doesn’t really make sense and we should be allowed to notice that.
The expert quoted above is Daniel Mendelsohn, a translator of The Odyssey. He discusses the Helen flap in a New York Times op-ed, but the article focuses more on Helen the character than it does the rights and wrongs of casting. The Times, unable to restrain itself, still swooped in with this headline: “Does Matt Damon Look Greek? No. So Stop Complaining About Lupita Nyong’o.” That command is echoed just once in Mendelsohn’s piece, where it’s voiced rather demurely. He uses parentheses to slip in the idea that the ancient Greeks, if they had the same idea of race that we do, “surely would object to the choice to cast the open-faced, all-American Matt Damon as the wily Mediterranean Odysseus.”
It’s just as well that he moves on to other themes. Being open-faced isn’t a racial attribute or a sign that a person can’t be cunning. Damon has light hair, but was that unknown in ancient Greece? Apollo, Jason, and Aphrodite were outright blonds. Given the thousands of years of various peoples washing across the Hellenic peninsula, Greeks today and Greeks then probably wouldn’t be a match. So Damon could be all right, but Nyong’o’s a stretch—a big one. Blacks weren’t a feature of ancient Greece and that’s the way it goes.
When not hyperventilating about Homer’s pissed-on grave and the death of Western civ, Nyong’o’s critics sometimes use the phrase: “takes me out of the story.” Her supporters fire back that The Odyssey has a giant with one eye, and men turning into pigs, and divine beings who toy with humanity, so who cares if a black character mysteriously crops up among whites? The answer is that the one-eyed giant and the divine beings and the rest are the story. We believe them because the resulting wonder and fun make their presence worthwhile; without them, without the wonder and fun, we just have a man who has trouble getting home. We’re supposed to notice that Cyclops is a giant with one eye. We’re not supposed to notice that black Helen is black, and that’s a big ask. It’s work that’s taxed from us so the film can be high-minded.
I’m happy to say that I’m going to see The Odyssey (second night because all the good seats were gone for the first). The hysterical right-wingers put the movie on my radar and after that curiosity took hold. I loved the story as a small boy and I want to see if its marvels survive in movie form. And by now I’ve developed a rooting interest, since I suspect the box office will pass a billion and make monkeys of the “woke, go broke” gang. Black Helen is nowhere near a deal breaker, as far as I’m concerned. But she’s a glitch, no more, no less, and I wish our society was racially sane enough to understand that.
