Thoughts on the Controversies Surrounding the Nolan Odyssey

 

I have been looking forward to Nolan’s Odyssey but as a punishment for using YouTube have been drawn into the casting talk surrounding the film. As a teacher of informal logic, I find the quality of thought poor. My frustration is directed less at any particular casting decision than at the framework of discussion that accompanies such decisions. I also dislike casting decisions being semi-ideological marketing decisions (identity stuff). And I find it frustrating that one is forced into the familiar boxes of the mind-numbing, spirit-degrading "culture wars" whatever one thinks. 

    If I go to a movie based on a book like the Odyssey or Lord of the Rings or Pride and Prejudice or A Christmas Carol, casting practices like race-swapping drag me back into this "discourse" which I do not wish to be a part of because it is, frankly, stupid. This has nothing to do with my political or moral attitudes one way or the other (these views are expressed in my journal). But to express such an opinion even in the family would put me in the same box as people like Musk I truly do not want to be associated with or the kind of people South Park caricatures with it PC Principle. Intolerable. I would go to a movie based on The Odyssey, Lord of the Rings, Pride and Prejudice, or A Christmas Carol because I love the books. I love the books not because I think the world of the books is inhumanly free of flaws – they are generally at least as flawed as the one I am stuck with – but because in my imagination I can inhabit a different and interesting world, the minds of different and interesting characters, explore different aspects of the human question that are ignore in my interpreted world, and indeed hold up a mirror to my interpreted world that uncovers things we who live in it like to keep under lock. When movie makers film these books and are almost forced by the culture at large to drag me back into the most suffocating part of my world by the casting decision alone, they thus defeat the only reason for see such a movie. 

. . . 

   From a logical perspective, the quality of much of the debate is just poor. Questions that could be discussed separately get collapsed into a single polarized issue. Is this a good actor? Is this a good interpretation of the character? Is this faithful to the source material? Is this a commercially motivated decision? Is this an ideologically motivated decision? Is this artistically justified? What social effects might it have? Etc. These are distinct questions but the public discussion I have had the misfortune of overhearing treats them as if they all have the same answer. Whether one prefers adaptations based on the appearance of the characters in the work’s setting or a race-swapped casting choice, an entire ideology is assumed. Indeed, it factors into the casting decisions for the purpose of attracting the widest audience. The problem is that contemporary culture often reasons by what logicians might call guilt by association. If position A is sometimes held by group X, then anyone expressing A is presumed to belong to X. That is a textbook informal fallacy. As as man who tries to think logically, I regard such controversies as object lessons. They are a living laboratory of false dilemmas, guilt by association, tribal reasoning, mind-reading, straw men, and hasty generalizations. It is not a very enjoyable lesson. 

  I want to encounter Homer, Austen, Dickens, or Tolkien as works of imagination, not as occasions for contemporary political signaling. Whether the signaling comes from the political left, the political right, or from marketing departments is secondary. The irritation is that the work becomes difficult to experience on its own terms because discussion is constantly redirected toward current ideological disputes. To think this way does not make one a racist, does not make one an ally of Musk, any more than disliking a modernized Shakespeare production makes one an enemy of modernity.  Before movie makers ask what this casting choice symbolizes politically, I wish they first would ask, could ask whether it serves the drama, the character, and the work itself.

    There is also a deeper issue here. The culture-war framework tends to force every disagreement into a moralized binary. Once that happens, aesthetic judgments become suspect. To say "this choice distracted me from the story" is heard as a moral accusation; to say "I liked this reinterpretation" is heard as a political declaration. The space for ordinary artistic disagreement shrinks. This is toxic for art. But why should movies be separate from the culture at large? 

  I was once given tickets to a performance of King Lear here in Potsdam. Now that play means a lot to me and I had looked forward to seeing it. That it was in German didn’t matter that much as there is an excellent translation. It was a very disappointing experience because – the short version – the play itself was used merely as a pretext for contemporary ideology promotion and virtue signaling. (That is a judgment I am very confident of.) By approving the performance, one was participating in signaling one’s approval of the ideology. By criticizing the performance, one was participating in the opposition to the ideology. (That is typical for German theater as I have experienced it, the exceptions confirming the rule.) That is where we are with filming important cultural works. 

   Given that The Odyssey matters to me, I will probably not allow the stupidity of the surrounding debate to deprive me of the chance to see what a filmmaker of Nolan's ambition does with one of the great stories of the Western tradition. I hope I can block out the surrounding noise. 

. . . 

  In logic a strict distinction is made between an argument and the person making the argument. To discount an argument based on the character or perceived lack of competence of the person making the argument is a fallacy (ad hominem, attack against the person). You have to look at the argument itself. Are the terms clear? Are the premises true? Does the conclusion follow? Logic is not the final word. But I want to do logic now.

   So I want to reconstruct two of the main arguments in this matter, one associated with Musk, the other with the actor Alec Baldwin. A simplified version of Musk's argument would be: 

1)   The Odyssey is set in a particular historical/mythic Greek world.

2)   Helen belongs to that world.

3)   Casting should broadly reflect that setting.

4)   Therefore casting Lupita Nyong'o as Helen is a mistake.

 Whether one agrees or disagrees, notice that beauty is not the disputed premise. Musk's argument can be accepted or rejected without making any judgment whatsoever about Nyong'o's beauty. (She definitely has been given the gift of beauty.)

     Baldwin's response, reconstructed: 

1)   Helen is symbolic for extraordinary beauty.

2)   Lupita Nyong'o is extraordinarily beautiful.

3)   Therefore, the casting is justified.

 Now this is an argument and could be offered in support of Nolan’s casting decision. But as a response to Musk, the problem is that this does not directly address the issue. It changes the criterion of evaluation. In informal logic, this resembles what is sometimes called a red herring or an irrelevant conclusion (ignoratio elenchi). The response proves something that was not actually in dispute. To see this more clearly, imagine a parallel case:

 Critic: "I don't think a 25-year-old actor should play King Lear." 

Response: "But he's an excellent actor!" 

That may be true. It simply doesn't answer the criticism. The issue was age, not talent.    

    What happens in contemporary social media talk is that people unconsciously substitute a harsher argument for the one actually being made. So the original claim: "This casting is inconsistent with the historical setting." But the under-the-surface claim: "This actor is unattractive or inferior because of race." Once the substitution occurs, the response practically writes itself: "How can you say that? She's beautiful!" But now the debate is no longer about the original issue. 

    The deeper problem is that discussions of casting have become moralized. Many people fear that a criticism of representational choices may conceal prejudice. Sometimes that suspicion is justified; sometimes it is not. But once that suspicion enters the conversation, participants often stop analyzing the argument and start inferring motives. As a teacher of critical thinking, I would say that the discussion shifts from whether the argument is sound to what kind of person would make that argument, with the second question quickly overwhelming the first.

      None of this means Musk's argument is sound. One could challenge it in several ways. For example: 

·      The Odyssey is myth rather than history.

· Ancient Mediterranean populations were more diverse than modern stereotypes suggest.

·      Adaptations routinely depart from source material in many respects.

·   Fidelity to character function may matter more than fidelity to physical description.

 Those would be direct replies. But "she is beautiful" is not really a reply to "the casting is inconsistent with the setting." It answers a different question.  What is interesting, logically, is less about the casting itself than about the way the discussion immediately collapses into accusations and identity markers. The logical structure becomes: 

1)   If you object, you must think she is unattractive.

2)   If you think she is unattractive, you must be racist.

3)   Therefore, objection implies racism.

 The fact that the predicate “racist” arguably fits Musk and many people who object makes the insinuation all the more potent.  That chain of reasoning contains several unstated premises, any one of which might be false. But once the debate is framed that way, it becomes difficult to discuss adaptation, interpretation, or artistic criteria at all. The conversation is no longer about Homer; it is about sorting people into moral and political categories. And that is the move I find logically and personally exhausting. 

. . . 

How to speak intelligently about such matters, which means how to disentangle it from all the ideological noise of the cultural matrix that makes it nearly impossible to actually debate the real issues? The strongest arguments for the "historical-context" or "source-fidelity" position come from scholars of adaptation, classicists, and literary critics rather than political commentators. I will list the main ones. 

1. The "historical particularity" argument claims that works of art emerge from particular times, places, and cultures. Part of understanding them is entering imaginatively into that world rather than remaking it in our own image. Someone like David Lowenthal, although not writing specifically about casting, argued that the past is valuable precisely because it is different from us. Excessive modernization risks erasing that difference. So applied to Homer, the Bronze Age Greek world is not modern Los Angeles. An adaptation should help viewers encounter that strangeness rather than dissolve it.

This is not a racial argument. It is an argument about historical imagination.

 

2. The "aesthetic coherence" argument claims that whatever casting choices are made, they should contribute to a coherent visual world. Many critics who are not politically conservative make this point about costumes, language, architecture, and casting alike. If a film aims at realism, audiences naturally expect visual elements to support the illusion. If it aims at theatricality or symbolism, different standards apply. For example, nobody complains that actors of many ethnicities play characters in Shakespeare's Globe productions because everyone understands that the production is operating by theatrical rather than historical conventions. Perhaps I would have adjusted my expectations of the Lear performance I saw had I known more about the company that put on the play, although I probably would not have attended. In any case, the question then becomes what conventions is Nolan's film asking the audience to accept. (I don’t know.)

 

3. The "description matters" argument comes from literary criticism and claims that characters are partly constituted by the descriptions given in the text. If an adaptation changes enough of those descriptions, one eventually has a different character. This is often raised in discussions of Tolkien, Austen, Dickens, or Rowling as much as Homer. The argument is not that every physical detail must be reproduced, but that physical descriptions are part of characterization and therefore not entirely arbitrary. Well, concerning Helen all we know from Homer is that she was extraordinarily beautiful (thus Baldwin’s argument). I recall Nolan saying the description was otherwise “ambiguous.”

 

 4. The "asymmetry" argument is perhaps the most controversial but also one of the most discussed. Some critics argue that if changing the ethnicity of a historically African character would be regarded as significant, then changing the ethnicity of a historically Greek character should also be regarded as significant. So if we imagine a film being made about the war between the British Empire and the Zulu nation in 1879, it would be wrong to cast a Korean or a Norwegian as Cetshwayo, king of the Zulu nation during the Anglo-Zulu War. Or in a fictional setting, the frame story of the Arabian Nights is that King Shahryar, betrayed by his wife, marries a new woman each night and executes her the next morning. Scheherazade volunteers to marry him and saves herself by telling a story each night but leaving it unfinished at dawn. The king postpones her execution to hear the ending, and after 1,001 nights he abandons his plan. All things being equal, it would be wrong to cast these characters with Korean or Swedish actors. The force of the argument lies in consistency, in applying the same standards.

 I will reflect on these arguments as well as the opposing arguments I listed above after watching the film. 

. . . 

 For me the key is to keep bringing the discussion back to the work itself and away from the persons involved. The identity-politics framing always focuses on what kind of people support this casting choice, what kind of people oppose it, what social groups benefit, what political message is being sent, etc. The hermeneutic framing focuses on what kind of work The Odyssey is, what aspects of Homer's world are essential to its meaning, what is the director trying to interpret, whether this choice help or hinder that interpretation, etc. Very different conversations indeed.

    For example, suppose someone wants Helen to be cast in a way that visually evokes how Homer and his audience imagined her. That is a hermeneutic claim. It may be right or wrong, but it is about interpretation. If someone immediately responds by asking why this person is uncomfortable with a black actress, the discussion has shifted from interpretation to motives. Or if someone says believes that casting Lupita Nyong'o helps communicate Helen's exceptional beauty and legendary status, that is an aesthetic claim. If the response is that this person is only thinking that because they are politically “progressive” and virtue-signaling, again the discussion has shifted from the work to the person. 

   A useful test is whether the argument would be made exactly the same way if we knew nothing about the political beliefs of anyone involved? If yes, it is probably a hermeneutic or aesthetic argument. If one judges that the casting is visually coherent with the world of the film or the casting undermines the historical atmosphere; or the actor captures the character's essence or the adaptation is emphasizing myth over history . . . . all are meaningful even if we know nothing about Nolan, Musk, Baldwin, or contemporary politics. By contrast, "This is woke" or  "This is racist" or "This is DEI" or "This is reactionary," etc. tell us almost nothing about the artistic question. They classify people rather than illuminate the work. 

. . . 

   Every adaptation involves a fusion of horizons. No filmmaker can simply reproduce Homer. Nolan is not an eighth-century BCE Greek bard. He is a twenty-first-century filmmaker addressing a twenty-first-century audience. So the real question is never whether Nolan should reproduce Homer exactly, which is impossible. The question is rather which departures from Homer illuminate Homer, and which merely reflect ourselves. That is a difficult question. Filming the Cyclops with modern special effects is a departure from Homer, but one that arguably serves the story. Compressing episodes for narrative reasons may be unavoidable. Casting choices may bring out some aspect of the myth, or they may distract from it. Those are matters of judgment. The trouble is that identity-politics discourse often treats disagreement about those judgments as evidence of moral defect.

    One reason I find the whole discussion oppressive is that it creates a false dilemma: either you support the casting because you are enlightened, or you oppose it because you are reactionary. But there are many other possibilities.  I might come to think that the casting is artistically successful or unsuccessful; that the casting is historically implausible but dramatically effective or that the casting is historically plausible but dramatically ineffective. Perhaps the whole issue is relatively unimportant compared with acting, writing, cinematography, or interpretation. 

   The culture-war framing collapses a multidimensional aesthetic question into a binary moral one. Once that happens, almost all of the interesting questions disappear. And the best response is simply to return to Homer. The Odyssey has survived countless reinterpretations because its deepest concerns – homecoming, loyalty, temptation, aging, identity, fathers and sons – are not exhausted by any casting decision. The adaptation may succeed or fail, but the work itself remains larger than the categories into which contemporary debate tries to force it. Read it.