To paraphrase Patrick Buchanan, the country’s been broken in two pieces and the very much larger piece doesn’t really mind if a black woman plays a white woman. Good! The ongoing success of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey has left the anti-wokers muttering uselessly. They don’t argue that the movie’s box office is a sign of how dire things have become; that a change in outlook’s being worked upon us, one attitude at a time, one cherished (or vaguely familiar) great classic at a time, and now look how everybody’s been corrupted. Libertarians talk that way about Social Security and the public, and at least it’s an argument. But from what I’ve seen, the alarmists are saying the Nolan Odyssey will fade from memory in a decade or so. This is mere hope. First, they said it would flop. Now they’re saying just wait, it’s flopping in a way that’s very gradual and hard to perceive.
Despite many outraged predictions, Lupita Nyong’o isn’t onscreen much and Elliot Page doesn’t play Achilles. But the film’s a downer, especially regarding Odysseus and moral law, and that rankles with its opponents. The movie says Odysseus was a transgressor, but what did he ever do? He tricked and killed people and now that’s supposed to be bad. Translators of Homer’s Odyssey have made this same point about Nolan’s version, that a guilty Odysseus isn’t Homer’s Odysseus. But the translators don’t seem that worked up, whereas the anti-wokes remain steaming.
My view is that anti-wokes cherish a special preoccupation with being made to feel guilty. They have inflamed skin on the topic because it’s been 80 years now and bigots keep getting crap for being bigots. The crap intensified into a flying shitstorm when social media brought us the woke mania. Now social media’s brought us a counter-mania, and a lot of it is bugginess about being put in the wrong. The Nolan Odyssey’s all about being in the wrong, about needing to get square with rules that were dropped atop your head and pronounced sacred. This outlook’s very compatible with Christianity, and many of the anti-wokes are Christian, but that doesn’t matter. They’re fed up with guilt unless it’s somebody else’s, and a white man who kills and conquers doesn’t seem like somebody else.
Most of Homer’s online defenders haven’t read him, of course; if they had time for that they wouldn’t be reading so many tweets. Steelmanning their position, I’d guess they feel about The Odyssey the way I feel about the East Wing. Never gave it much thought, but I always assumed it would be there; now I have to wonder what other previously sacrosanct entity is going to get trampled on. A difference, of course, is that the White House doesn’t have a long record of getting worked over, whereas getting worked over’s a big part of being an eternal story. The Odyssey has been through many retellings in books, comic books, and film. Now here’s another. If you don’t like it, you can wait for the next. The alarmists might answer that the next version won’t be a giant release from Hollywood, that Hollywood movies decide what impression the public will have of a given subject, and that a change in outlook is being… but that’s where we came in. They’re not saying all that. They’re keeping up team spirit and getting mad about the next thing.