In recent years, the online right has contested adaptations of epic in order to make an argument about masculinity. The Odyssey is their latest target.<\/p>\n
As the credits rolled at the end of The Odyssey, the Long Island cinema burst into applause. This struck me as strange: The hero had just confessed his guilt for the trick at Troy, disguising a weapon as a gift to the gods\u2014a transgression that would lead to the collapse of his world. There seemed little cause for celebration. Was the audience cheering the hero\u2019s victory over the bad guys, or were they taking a side in an ongoing culture war?<\/p>\n
When Christopher Nolan adapted Homer\u2019s epic to speak to a world where American power is being challenged in new ways, it was inevitable that it would provoke the right. Even before the film came out, the casting of Lupita Nyong\u2019o as Helen launched a thousand tweets, and Elon Musk threatened to use Grok to make another version with ethnically Greek (though AI-generated) actors. But it\u2019s not only the casting that made Nolan\u2019s film controversial. It\u2019s also, I think, a more general debate over the genre of epic.<\/p>\n
Epics are long narrative poems telling of the most consequential acts by the most powerful people. Different ancient epics treat their protagonists in different ways, and they\u2019re not always straightforwardly heroic. The Iliad tells of Greece\u2019s victory in the semi-historical Trojan War; The Odyssey follows one of the victors, Odysseus, in his meandering return home. The great Latin epic, Virgil\u2019s Aeneid, follows another Greek soldier, Aeneas, who later became the founder of Roman civilization; by contrast, Lucan\u2019s epic, The Pharsalia, describes Caesar\u2019s triumph in the Roman Civil War only to grotesquely ironize him.<\/p>\n
In recent years, the online right has contested adaptations of epic in order to make an argument about masculinity. This was visible in the 2024 campaign against Emily Wilson\u2019s translation of the Odyssey\u2014which Nolan relied on at least in part for his writing of this film\u2014which refers to its hero as \u201ca complicated man.\u201d This choice of words was contested by right-wing commentator Maxwell Meyer, who admitted to having had only one semester of Ancient Greek. Likewise, the podcaster Matt Walsh criticized Nolan\u2019s Odysseus (Matt Damon) as \u201can anachronistic whiney solemn shell of a man.\u201d Apparently abandoning his earlier plan, Elon Musk offered to fund another adaptation directed by Mel Gibson.<\/p>\n
There are many valid criticisms to be made of Nolan\u2019s film (as in the excellent review by Christian Lorentzen), but the decision to make the hero relatively unheroic has precedent in a long line of epics: Dante put Odysseus among the pagan heroes in the first circle of Hell. Shakespeare, who never wrote an epic poem, gave his tragic heroes an unrivalled psychological complexity. Milton\u2019s Paradise Lost casts Satan as a figure of Odysseus-like cunning, and heroizes Adam and Eve\u2019s struggle to accomplish the quieter virtues of humility, forgiveness, and love. Wordsworth\u2019s The Prelude strays even further from martial valor, describing the development of an individual mind in moments of solitude and joy.<\/p>\n
In America, epic has had a complicated history. Some years ago, I was teaching a class in a New Jersey prison and found that none of my students knew what \u201cepic\u201d meant. As I tried to define it, I thought of a huge flag I had seen towering over a highway in Washington, DC, taller than Satan\u2019s spear in Paradise Lost, which Milton compares to the tallest Norwegian pine. One difficulty in explaining the genre was that so much about American culture is epic\u2014the love of bigness, the deep respect for the military, the obsession with superhero movies\u2014yet there wasn\u2019t a single famous American epic poem to point to.<\/p>\n
Since epic was considered a jewel in the crown of empire, numerous American poets tried and failed to write a good one. In 1787, after a French critic said the USA hadn\u2019t produced a good poet, an insulted Thomas Jefferson said this would be a valid reproach only when the new nation had \u201cexisted as a people as long as the Greeks did before they produced a Homer, the Romans a Virgil, the French a Racine and Voltaire, the English a Shakespeare and Milton.\u201d In short, after about 500\u20131,000 years. Jefferson wasn\u2019t wrong: Over 400 years since the Mayflower, there have been many good American poets but not a single great epic.<\/p>\n
That isn\u2019t necessarily a bad thing. Walt Whitman\u2019s Leaves of Grass is an extended lyric poem that attempts to encompass the whole cosmos in its egalitarian, if presumptuous embrace. Whitman declared the American people were \u201cthe greatest poem,\u201d and one that didn\u2019t need the outdated grandiosity of epic. Other American epics have been written since then, though the most obviously Homeric one, Derek Walcott\u2019s Omeros, is from the Caribbean and celebrates a life of quiet survival.<\/p>\n
These humble virtues have found a home in the bourgeois novel, which 20th-century critics like Gy\u00f6rgy Luk\u00e1cs argued had superseded epic. From Don Quixote onward, the great literary novels have rarely been straightforward celebrations of heroism: Vanity Fair, subtitled \u201cA Novel Without A Hero,\u201d describes the barbarity of the Napoleonic Wars; Moby-Dick is a delusional revenge quest; Middlemarch follows a provincial woman who might have lived an \u201cepic life\u201d if she hadn\u2019t had to inhabit a domestic realm of \u201cunhistoric acts\u201d; James Joyce\u2019s own Ulysses is about a long night of drinking.<\/p>\n
As Joyce\u2019s use of a Homer title suggests, epic has retained its cultural importance. In the 20th century, so many Hollywood films, from Citizen Kane to Titanic, flooded America with the epic tales that poets hadn\u2019t been able to supply. This has not abated in our century, but the casting of heroes in video games, Marvel movies, and Disney franchises has increasingly been challenged by right-wing commentators. It was in this context that Jordan Peterson called Disney\u2019s Frozen \u201cdismal, wretched, and pure ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n
Right-wing commentators believe that fictional heroes should be admirable in order for men to imitate them, but films made along those lines are often kitsch, unrealistic, and unsatisfying. See, for example, John Aglialoro\u2019s wooden three-part adaptation of Ayn Rand\u2019s Atlas Shrugged, which failed to retain the same Aryan actors for each installment. Or war films like 12 Strong, which offer more idealized portraits of veterans than Homer, whose hero returns home and massacres the slave girls in a bloody frenzy.<\/p>\n
If it seems odd to want a protagonist to be less complex than one Homer invented 3,000 years ago, parts of the online right have been trying to revive a pre-Homeric worldview. Their Bible is Costin Alamariu\u2019s 2018 Bronze Age Mindset, a polemic that celebrates the prehistoric period (3300 BCE\u20131200 BCE) as one where Nietzschean supermen still roamed the shores of the Mediterranean. That time had already passed when Homer composed his poem, around the 8th century BCE. To revive the Bronze Age mindset, Alamariu advised making movies more heroic, declaring, \u201cWhat Mel Gibson does is worth a thousand books.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, a more communitarian section of the right values ancient epics because they see them as the symbol of a closed community with stable beliefs; the kind of place they want America to become. Whether Homer\u2019s Greece was that stable is debatable, to say the least, but it\u2019s an even more improbable ideal for a multicultural nation in a hyper-networked, multipolar world. Ironically, even as people like JD Vance propose to rebirth a more communitarian nation, his own government has undermined the Declaration of Independence\u2014the closest thing the US has to a collectively held, memorized epic text.<\/p>\n
When they cheered at the end of the film, the Long Island audience may have just been acknowledging the end of a blockbuster that had been more serious and edifying than the usual summer fare. As Emily Wilson pointed out in her review of The Odyssey, sales of Homer translations have soared in recent weeks. This is no bad thing in a nation where 40\u201350 percent of adults no longer read a single book per year.<\/p>\n