As it turns out, all the internet rumors that had been swirling for months about Christopher Nolan’s stupid, anachronistic, immersion-compromising, and virtue-signaling decision to cast an African lady to portray Helen of Troy in his newest film, The Odyssey, turned out to be true.

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There is obviously nothing in the classical literary record, which prominently includes The Odyssey, suggesting that Helen of Troy is actually an African woman.  But, hey, Nolan made a creative choice.  It’s arguably a dumb and unnecessarily distracting choice, as many have argued, but casting a pretty black actress to play Helen of Troy doesn’t diminish the character or her role in the greater narrative of this particular story.

But, as it turns out, Nolan makes different creative decisions that effectively diminish not only Helen’s character in the story, but also the narrative purpose of two other women who are vital to the central story of The Odyssey. 

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Nolan, you see, expects us to believe that there were two prominent African ladies in ancient Homeric Greece, who married two of the most prominent sibling kings in ancient Greece.  Not only is actress Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy, married to the Spartan king named Menalaus, but she’s also playing her sister, Clytemnestra, who is the wife of the legendary Greek King of Mycenae who led the siege of Troy, Agamemnon.

Helen and Clytemnestra are not twins in The Odyssey or in any classical Greek tradition.  They are sisters, in the sense that they had the same mother.  Helen’s mother, Leda, was seduced by Zeus.  Clytemnestra was not similarly semi-divine, as she was a product of her mother and her mortal father.

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This is a storytelling detail so big that once it’s ignored, the characters cease to be those of the original story. 

Helen’s most defining characteristic is her incomparable beauty.  She is astonishingly beautiful, so much so that the Trojan elders remark in The Iliad, “Small wonder that the Trojans and Achaeans should endure so much and so long, for the sake of a woman so marvelously and divinely lovely.”

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This is the superpower of her character, if you will. 

Homer, in fact, does treat her sympathetically.  She is presented as kind, intelligent, cultured, and self-aware.  She is a strikingly complex, somewhat tragic figure whose name is paradoxically associated with both immense beauty and the horrors of war. 

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And she is cemented as such in Western history.  Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, upon making his arrangement with the devil and meeting historical figures, remarks not only about her appearance, but about the significance of how her beauty shaped history:

Is this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Helen has endured as such for thousands of years in Western culture. 

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And what has Christopher Nolan decided to do with her?  He gave her an identical twin sister who’s just as pretty as she is.

Homer, inversely, never discusses Clytemnestra’s appearance.  Not because Homer is a hack storyteller, obviously, but he chooses to focus on other aspects of Clytemnestra’s character that are far more important to this particular story.

That the film will dig into the character history of Clytemnestra seems to be backed up by Lupita Nyong’o interviews.  Taking the Rachel Zegler approach to marketing the film, she showed full-on disrespect to the source material by chastising Homer for not “spending much time” with the women of the story.  Nolan’s film, she says, “takes time to really consider things from the female perspective.”  In speaking of her role in playing both characters, she says that she thinks “this movie is about the cost of war ... and, so, for these two women, they have experienced this time very differently.  And their anger is a product of their unique experiences.”

“The cost of war” is not a central theme of The Odyssey.  And though Homer’s Helen could be described in many ways, she is certainly not an angry character. 

Clytemnestra presents different problems, though. 

The first is that she dies well before the events of The Odyssey, so the interest in Clytemnestra’s backstory in telling the story of The Odyssey would be confusing if we weren’t already very aware that Christopher Nolan is infusing the story with modern feminism.

This brings up something that no one has discussed, as I’ve seen.  

There was an interesting choice made in the final trailer for the film, which, as of this writing, has a dislike-to-like ratio of over 9-to-1, with over 611,000 dislikes to 68,000 likes.  This represents an incredible public rebuke, particularly for a Christopher Nolan film.

Much has been made of a brief scene in which Lupita Nyong’o is shown, screaming and distraught, as soldiers appear to be holding her back as she struggles to get by.  Many viewers know that she is playing Helen of Troy, so they are left to wonder why she is not being shown as beautiful, and why is she being shown in such an unflattering manner?

I do not know this for certain, having not seen it, but it is very likely that this scene involves Clytemnestra.  Given the context, I believe it is likely that this will be a flashback scene in which Clytemnestra is desperately trying to save her daughter.

In Greek tradition, when King Agamemnon and the Greeks were preparing to sail their fleet to Troy, the winds were uncooperative.  Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, to appease the gods and allow his fleet to go to war against the Trojans.  Clytemnestra, seeking vengeance, plots with her lover, Aegisthus, to murder Agamemnon upon his return home from Troy ten years later.

Now, here’s the second problem.  Homer doesn’t tell his readers anything about Iphigenia.  It was later poets like Aeschylus who delve into this history and her character in greater detail.  All Homer tells the audience is that Clytemnestra plotted with her lover to murder Agamemnon when he returned home, and that she and her lover were later killed by Agamemnon’s son, Orestes.

It is safe to say that Homer focuses on only the details about Clytemnestra that were important to the story, which are that she betrayed her husband and destroyed Agamemnon’s house. 

Again, Homer is not a hack storyteller, and Clytemnestra being understood this way serves a vital purpose in the story.  Nolan doesn’t seem to like that purpose, and he seems instead to be inviting audiences to feel sympathy for Clytemnestra, or perhaps to have an understanding for what she did.  Not only does that completely miss the thematic point of Homer’s story, but it does a great disservice to the central female character of the story — and that is Odysseus’ strong, intelligent, cunning, patient, and loyal wife, Penelope.

In The Odyssey, Clytemnestra serves as Penelope’s foil.  Penelope patiently awaits her husband, whereas Clytemnestra took a new lover.  Penelope uses intelligence and cunning to protect her son’s inheritance, whereas Clytemnestra uses hers to destroy her family’s future.  Where Penelope receives her husband, Clytemnestra kills hers.

Penelope’s admirable qualities as a character are all the more accentuated by this direct contrast to Clytemnestra.  In lessening the contrast by making Clytemnestra more sympathetic, there is less audience admiration of Penelope's greatest qualities as a wife, a mother, and a queen.

The Odyssey is the greatest adventure story of all time, and among the most influential fictional works in the history of the Western world.  That is precisely because the central themes of the story are about the appropriate moral, social, and political order between husbands and wives, fathers and sons, hosts and guests, kings and subjects, mortals and gods. 

When you frame it that way, it is easy to understand why the modern left is on a quest to tarnish it by forcibly inserting woke feminism.

Image: Lupita Nyong’o.  Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.