Right-wing culture warriors may have spent months complaining about the unconventional casting decisions for The Odyssey. But the movie’s biggest blow to their worldview has nothing to do with Elliot Page or Lupita Nyong’o.
In the film’s final act, Odysseus (Matt Damon) tearfully reveals to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) his guilt over his sacking of Troy. The sequence paints Odysseus’ trick with the Trojan horse not as a clever bit of bravery but as an unforgivable war crime, one that has damned his soul as much as the atomic bomb damned J. Robert Oppenheimer’s.
It’s not the most flattering portrayal of Odysseus, who right-wing fans of The Odyssey would apparently prefer to be portrayed in as heroic a light as possible. For Elon Musk, who claimed in 2023 to “love Odysseus most” of all the Greek mythological figures, it must particularly sting to see Odysseus’s pride stripped away from him, for his most clever moment to be portrayed as his greatest sin.
Musk has so far stayed silent on The Odyssey after its theatrical release—the movie’s overwhelming financial and critical success might have something to do with that—but his fans on X certainly haven’t. Those who have actually seen it, along with many who still probably haven’t, ripped into the movie for turning Odysseus into a “woke manlet” who feels bad about his war crimes, mocking the idea of him struggling with PTSD.
Even beyond Odysseus’ guilt, so much of the film feels like a rejection of right-wing narratives. There’s a recurring thread of characters fretting over rumors of ominous Sea People invading civilized lands, only for Odysseus to reveal that the rumors of those Sea People were inspired by the behavior of his own supposedly civilized men.
It’s hard not to view the Sea People, a term never mentioned in Homer’s poem, as a biting critique of modern xenophobic panic.
Director and writer Christopher Nolan also alters Odysseus’ interactions with the witch Circe (Samantha Morton) to place more emphasis on her righteous rage against men who feel entitled to women’s bodies. Nolan gives Penelope a scene in which she rails against societal norms that deny her the chance to rule Ithaca herself. The director even changes Odysseus’ conversation with Achilles’ ghost so that he’s talking to Elliot Page’s Sinon instead. Sinon calls him out for betraying him, and Odysseus has no real defense.
These decisions make for a compelling narrative, but they also seem almost designed to anger the viewers who wanted a righteous masculine power fantasy. Odysseus has never been a clear-cut hero, but that hasn’t stopped some people from viewing him as the ultimate Chad archetype.
Although most translations of The Odyssey have given the readers room to interpret Odysseus negatively if they want to, depictions of the character have become a particularly hot-button issue in light of Emily Wilson’s modernized 2017 translation. Odysseus is just as complicated as ever in Wilson’s text, but his characterization skews more negative than usual, and for that, the online reactionaries will never forgive her.
Wilson’s translation, as well as the hit 2011 novel The Song of Achilles that depicts its titular character as explicitly gay, have often been cited as proof that society’s “virtues of masculinity” are under attack. Although unflattering depictions of Odysseus have been around for millennia and interpretations of Achilles as gay span back as far as Socrates’ time, MAGA pundits must nevertheless depict the two characters as clear-cut heroes who perfectly adhere to their own limited version of ideal masculinity.
The critics are correct that The Odyssey‘s depiction of its lead character’s morality is written with a fairly 21st-century lens. While Odysseus’ battle trauma is a major element in the source material, he cries mostly for the fallen soldiers on his own side, not for the Trojan civilians caught up in the crossfire.
Women and children were largely an afterthought in The Iliad, but in Nolan’s recounting of the Trojan War, it is the killing of a nameless Trojan woman (played by Zendaya, who also appears as the main character’s vision of the goddess Athena) who haunts Odysseus most of all.
So while MAGA critics may be right that Nolan has altered the story for a modern audience, they have struggled to explain why this is such a bad thing.
Every new adaptation of The Odyssey, regardless of medium, is a reflection of the time and place it was made in. This latest adaptation reflects a multicultural America where Odysseus’s sacrifice of so many lives in his horse scheme comes across as more ghoulish than heroic. Nolan’s Odyssey argues that the needs of the many outweigh the wants of an elite few.
For someone like Elon Musk, this is the cruelest message Nolan could’ve written.
Making the themes of The Odyssey sting more for MAGA is that they once claimed Nolan as one of their own.
“Nolan is awesome,” Musk posted on X in 2024, responding to a post about Nolan’s 2020 film Tenet.
Nolan’s pre-Oppenheimer films were rarely overtly political, but they often lent themselves well to conservative readings. It’s easy to see why someone like Musk might have loved Interstellar, a movie about a lone brilliant man saving a tech-skeptical humanity by going off into space. Musk appeared to reference the film positively online in 2019.
Perhaps The Odyssey has frustrated Musk and MAGA supporters so much because it shows their hold on American culture is not as strong as they thought. The once conservative-seeming Nolan has proven himself completely unswayed by their years of complaints about DEI.
Nolan appears to have not cared at all about what Musk fans wanted from an Odyssey adaptation, and the film’s massive box office haul has only rewarded him for that dismissal.
