Insecure Right Wingers Want Conan The Barbarian To Be Real

First, the right tried to “cancel” The Odyssey (film) for the sins of allowing a black woman (Lupita Nyong'o) to portray Helen of Troy, and casting a trans man (Elliot Page) in any role whatsoever.

These reactionaries, led by Elon Musk, did not come out and say “we find these people disgusting,” but what else could they have meant? The movie hadn’t even been released yet!

When their boycott method failed, and The Odyssey began setting box-office records, they retreated to more literary-sounding critiques. If they couldn’t cause the movie to flop, perhaps they could upend the critical consensus that the movie is good. They began complaining about the many ways director Christopher Nolan departed from the text of The Odyssey (book), as though it’s per se wrong to re-interpret old art.

This rhetorical concession has brought us endless Odyssey Discourse™️, as mainline writers (most of whom have watched the right-wing freakout unfold on X) take questionable sparring partners up on a revised critique. With the bigotry now thinly concealed, good-faith debate may resume.

A little pontificating is hard to resist from time to time, but this is a mistake. By treating instrumental ideas as if they’re analytically sincere (if a bit crude), they’re allowing improvisers to sniff out the sweet spot, where their exhausting crusade against modernity will get a fair hearing.

So let’s go meta instead. A worthier task is to examine what this whole deranged discourse says about them. What kind of person experiences an allergic reaction to any art that doesn’t serve as a trick mirror, reflecting back to them whatever they believe they and the world should look like?

To make the claims they’ve fallen back on, and stick to them, you’d have to believe very childish things about human nature. At some level, you’d have to believe there is no human nature at all, apart from what culture forces upon people. You have to believe that frailty is a choice; that He-Man would be possible, if only the right people were in charge.

Different haters have different nits to pick, but they’re all now upset about liberties Nolan took with story (rather than with the gender and racial identities of his actors). Some of them characterize this as a preoccupation with “historical accuracy” (a stipulation that conveniently allows them to smuggle the black-Helen freakout back into their critique) while others quibble more carefully with the liberties Nolan took with the story and its moral lessons.

“This isn’t something like having Denzel Washington play Macbeth,” complained one writer who’d absolutely lose his shit if someone cast Denzel Washington as Macbeth. “‘Macbeth’ is not specifically about Scottish culture the way ‘The Odyssey’ is about ancient Hellenics.”

To back up the notion that this is really just about the insult to long-dead “ancient Hellencis,” these critics bemoan that “Odysseus, as portrayed by a crusty Matt Damon… is torn and tormented about pretty much everything, often in contradictory ways, but certainly about his cunning plan to win the war against Troy. OK, there are a lot of things to say about the ancient Greeks, but being sad about winning a war is not one of them.”

"The main struggle for Nolan and his producer wife is that they can't make the ancient Greeks too heroic, masculine, iconic because that would uphold the Euro-supremacist roots of all Western Civilization. So you cast a woke manlet as the King."

That’s from the fanatical right-wing commentator Peachy Keenan, who may or may not have clacked out the words “Euro-supremacist roots of all Western Civilization” letter by letter, with two fingers marching across her keyboard in goosestep.

They’re right about this much: Nolan does not portray Odysseus as a remorseless conqueror, but rather an exhausted, regretful, traumatized elder, who bears little resemblance to Homer’s protagonist.

Ergo, something something, the movie does not deserve acclaim.

Sharper critics were quick to point out that The Odyssey isn’t a work of non-fiction. The Mediterranean has never been a funhouse of monsters or a gateway to the underworld. Homer wasn’t Herodotus. Poetry isn’t history. Odysseus wasn’t a real person. Helen probably wasn’t either, and the mythology isn’t even consistent on the question of whether she went to Troy.

But there were kings and elites and warriors and wars in Ancient Greece. It is thus practically certain that real people witnessed and committed real acts of heroism and brutality. Faithful recreations of these incidents are lost to time, but they form the basis of an oral tradition. They’re myths not just because they invoke supernatural beings and forces, but because they’re meant to impart lessons so that descendants would have archetypes to emulate, temptations to resist, sins to hate.

And if that is the case then, as a modern and mature person, you should believe that someone like Odysseus—perhaps a composite of real-but-forgotten warriors—would fare in “real life” more like Nolan’s Odysseus than like Homer’s. Not only that, but (no one post this to X.com, and certainly don’t @ Elon) some ancient fighters and adventurers probably had vaginas, even if they didn’t really seem like it outwardly!