Well, in my view, it's not right-wing to care about historical accuracy and cultural sensitivity, and raising these concerns is not "throwing a tantrum." These performative and unnecessarily divisive approaches to "diversity" in Hollywood are also subtly racist - simultaneously implying that only by shameless race-swapping can people of color expect to be represented and suggesting that stories deriving from non-Western sources simply aren't worth producing.
As usual it's the liberals who are demonstrating their racist attitudes while shaking their fingers at the "bad people" who object to their passive-aggressive attempts at the culture war.
The argument is asinine on its face: The Greeks wouldn’t have recognized the ethnic divisions we use and if you want to be “historically accurate” and object to a black woman playing a Greek role, you should feel the same about all the roles played by people of Northern European descent, who were just as alien to the Ancient Greeks as black Africans. But they registered no such objection. Why? Because they are demanding this ancient story be told I compliance with very modern thinking, not “historical accuracy.”
To give credit where it’s due, you’re raising a fair point about consistency. If historical accuracy is to be the standard, then it should be applied consistently, including to portrayals that make ancient Greeks look like modern Northern Europeans.
That said, I think your argument generally overstates the comparison. Northern Europeans and ancient Greeks were certainly different populations, but they were not just as alien to one another as Greeks and sub-Saharan Africans were. Ancient Greeks recognized and depicted different peoples, including Ethiopians, as distinct populations.
More importantly, I don’t think you’ve really addressed Nathaniel’s main argument. His point isn’t simply about historical accuracy, it’s that race-swapping established European stories is a poor substitute for investing in adaptations of stories that originate from other cultures. Whether one agrees with that or not, it’s a different argument from the one you’ve responded to.
I repeat, you’ve identified a legitimate consistency issue, but you’ve also reframed the discussion into one that’s narrower than the original criticism.
The subhead starts "Race-swapping is a form of cultural appropriation ...".
That's, let us say, an unusually phrased complaint from the right-wing perspective.
Hmm ... "Therefore, this casting choice is widely seen as little more than a gratuitous, unnecessary and polarizing attempt at virtue signalling and gaslighting — simultaneously elevating people of color and suppressing the visibility of white people on the silver screen, while also forcing audiences to accept a new normal and embrace the ideology of wokism whether we like it or not."
Well, the article contains what it says on the tin, as the phrase goes.
Well, "As usual it's the liberals who are demonstrating their racist attitudes ..." seems to be saying it rather clearly. Do you object to the phrase, and if so, how so? It seemed to me a simple description, expressing the, err, appropriation, taking place in the phrasing.
It's really ... something ... to see a complaint about "suppressing the visibility of white people on the silver screen".
Your ignorance is stunning. The Greeks have in fact vociferously objected to this gratuitous and culturally insensitive attempt at woke virtue signaling. You must not be paying much attention.
I was speaking of the Ancient Greeks, as the context ("the Greeks wouldn't have...") makes clear. And I would gladly have clarified if you had simply asked instead of going straight for an insult. (Here's a satire I wrote which explains the Greek way of seeing themselves and other peoples: https://dgardner.substack.com/p/an-outrage-against-the-people-of )
Well you called my argument asinine before I insulted you, so maybe don't dish it out if you can't take it? And when it comes to the ancient Greeks, there is a zero percent chance that an exotic beauty from faraway Kenya would have ascended to the heights of royalty and if she somehow had done so, this highly unusual occurrence would have been clearly indicated in Homer's poem. Instead, the source material describes Helen's physical attributes as those of a fair-skinned Greek beauty.
"The argument." I was referring to was the Musk-et-al argument that launched the debate. Sorry I didn't make that clear. But maybe ask before firing with both barrels?
I'm still not clear on how you demarcate your view from that of Musk etc. But as to your comment, yes, Homer was referring to a Greek. But the whole point of the three-part taxonomy of Aristotle -- which faithfully reflected the Greek perspective of the era -- was that Northern Europeans were as alien as the peoples from the hot south and east. Our modern conception is radically different so we find that hard to fathom. But Aristotle couldn't be clearer. So if you find the casting of a black women as Helen of Troy ludicrous on the grounds that the Ancient Greeks would have found it ludicrous, you must feel the same about the casting of all those Northern Europeans as Greeks. Yet, far as I can tell, none did. Why? The talk of "historical accuracy" is nonsense springing from an anachronistic imposition of modern race conceptions.
I asserted an argument and you replied directly to my comment calling the argument asinine. If there was a misunderstanding, it was entirely your fault.
The top tier gods are shown to live only in people’s perception in Nolan’s Odyssey. It is ambiguous if Calypso has any power and Circe seems only to be a witch. There is a strangeness to the story where it is a well known story about gods, where the gods aren’t real, but monsters are.
I don’t feel confident that Calypso was physically intimate with Odysseus.
If Athena was a hallucination and the greeks are the sea people. Are all the super natural beings hallucinations/false memories and in reality Odysseus men pillaged and raped their way across the sea?
Really enjoyed your article. I can’t help feeling that Wilson is so close to the material that she’s missing the point. As a poem, the Odyssey submerges you in an ancient world that in some ways anticipates our own but which is palpably alien. Gods walk the Earth, fate is binding, and heroes don’t need to be admirable to be honored. “Wily Odysseus” is celebrated for his trickery, falsehood, and dishonesty — and readers know that he should be admired because he is best beloved by wise Athena.
But the film is about taking the bones of the story and making it meaningful to an audience that doesn’t believe in workaday divine intervention or in prophecy, and that knows better (maybe?) than to admire cunning without mercy. If Nolan had been completely faithful, the movie would have been offputting, maybe cheesy, maybe infuriating.
Of course, anybody is free to dislike the movie for any reason they want, including Wilson. But it’s worth pointing out that it seems to be inspiring thousands of people to read the poem. And if they end up preferring it to the movie, good for them.
I'm starting to think it would be a great idea to have a longstanding campaign to keep taunting Elon Musk to make that AI "Homerically Accurate" _Odyssey_. It wouldn't be Nolan's film, but it might be interesting on its own if it ever happened. Musk is going to forget about it as soon as the outrage cycle moves on, but his failure here might just resonate in the public mind.
If an artist were to create a work and honor you by acknowledging that your work inspired them and then the success of that work led to greater interest in your work, you ought not deride that artist's work.
In Homeric society when someone publicly honors your work, they show you aidōs. Publicly tearing down their work in return is a severe breach of that trust. Instead of achieving positive acclaim or in Homeric culture, kleos, your reputation would become tied to spite, a legacy of dishonor.
No sex? No depiction of gods? It’s like it’s designed to be used in schools! I’m so excited to see it! Edit: I’m a literature teacher - I hate the adaptations I can’t show in class.
The very first scene between Odysseus and Penelope is brimming with sexual tension, despite showing nothing elicit, and there are scenes (like Circe's transforming of the men into pigs) that would give younger children nightmares.
But for the older kids, I'd think it'll be excellent!
I am just about old enough to remember when the LRB used to publish more good articles than bad. Now you're lucky if you get one good article every three issues.
There’s something genuinely amusing about this entire exchange.
You dismiss Matt Walsh out of hand yet you treat people with a fraction of his reach as if their opinions carry vastly greater weight. Walsh’s audience dwarfs almost everyone else in this conversation, but his perspective gets thrown out entirely.
Now, that’s your choice, of course. But if you’re going to curate whose voices count at least be honest about the criteria. It’s hard to look at this and not conclude that ideological alignment,not reach, not influence, and certainly not the strength of the argument,is the real filter here. Unless someone is praising figures or causes that fit neatly into your comfort zone, you act as though they don't even warrant a response.
This points to a recurring issue in progressive commentary on the right, a total failure in theory of mind. There’s a constant tendency not just to disagree with conservative arguments, but to completely misunderstand what those arguments actually are. Instead of engaging the strongest version of the opposing position, the left construct a convenient straw man that’s much easier to tear down.
And that is precisely what’s happening here.
People on the right aren't "siding with Emily." They aren't suddenly claiming her translation was brilliant, nor are they taking back their original criticisms. In their view, that translation remains just as flawed today as it was when it first dropped. None of that has changed.
The irony being pointed out is something else entirely.
The point is that Nolan,like so many liberal men engaged in a constant display of ideological loyalty,participated in an exercise of performative activism that was always doomed to fall short. Despite adopting all the approved rhetoric, despite playing to the moral framework of his own political camp, and despite drawing on sources that camp broadly endorses,he still found himself publicly called out by someone whose very work helped shape his adaptation.
That is the observation. Emily’s critique isn't a vindication of her translation. It’s just another textbook example of a broader cultural pattern, the endless cycle of ideological purity, where today’s ally becomes tomorrow’s offender. From a conservative viewpoint, it looks like a humiliation ritual,a process where increasingly extreme displays of conformity are offered up for approval that never actually arrives. The standard keeps moving, because the goal isn't consensus,it’s continuous re-affirmation of moral virtue.
That is the irony conservatives are highlighting. It has almost nothing to do with defending Emily.
As for the film’s broader reception? The right’s pushback shouldn't surprise anyone. Their objection flows directly from the core philosophical differences that have defined modern politics for years. The exact same worldview that leads conservatives to reject progressive stances on immigration, gender, or elections informs their skepticism toward media they see as ideologically revisionist or culturally disruptive.
Whether you agree with that assessment isn't the point. The point is that the reaction is entirely predictable based on core assumptions. A film made by a director who approaches the material from a progressive angle, leaning on equally progressive sources, was never going to land well with an audience that fundamentally rejects those premises. Expecting otherwise is just analytically naive.
I dismissed Walsh because this essay is about Wilson. It was not ideological curation! I have written about Walsh elsewhere and will do so again.
Of course, if I wrote about Walsh, I suspect you would again call that ideological!
I think it's a mistake to see everything through an ideological lens. Saying Nolan "engaged in a constant display of ideological loyalty,participated in an exercise of performative activism" misses the actual film that he made, which has many conservative themes (as some conservatives have pointed out).
Seeing everyone as being in an ideological straitjacket is its own ideological straitjacket.
I think the thing with the "sea people" thing is that, though Wilson kind of sniffs at the twist at the end as well,
SPOILERS
It ties into the whole revelation that Odysseus and his men essentially became (or at least were the trigger for) the "sea people" that everyone ended up terrified of through the chaos they caused on their way home. It's not Nolan saying that the sea people were definitely 100% real actually; he's using them to make the point that Odysseus and his men and everyone who participated in the whole Trojan War sowed the seeds of the turmoil their civilisation is now going through. It's a 'violence begets violence', 'war rebounds on the warmonger' point.
In other words, Wilson is treating it as a history lecture when it's a case of artistic license.
One of the things I looked forward to most about watching the movie today was getting to finally read this, and I'm so glad to see someone make the same point that I had loaded up in my clipboard ready to make so that I don't have to articulate it!
Just a note on the right-wing reaction: This isn't my view, but I don't think it would be inconsistent or unreasonable for a right-winger to say something like that Nolan's _Odyssey_ is so bad that even the wokie wokester woman with the woozy woke work hates it.
It’s a miserable little exchange: the translation survives intact, but the pleasure of thinking well of its translator doesn’t. Whenever her name comes up, there it is: credible Homer translation; also, huge asshole. She did that to herself.
I have three translations sitting on my shelf, and hers is the least attended. I’m not saying this to pile on. It is just that hers is the most artless of the three. Notably, it’s easy to be overconfident when Homer is 2,700 years away from being able to put his thumb on the scale.
Wilson missed a good opportunity to shut up. When she's commenting on the text of the Odyssey she's full of interesting insights. Here she's long-winded with a bunch of opinions that are nothing more than that.
Ok so it sounds like Emily is just mad that this thing she wanted to cater to white women and their white women fantasies…. does not? Like I don’t know what race she is but it sounds like white woman victimhood to me. She is completely disregarding that Nolan has a time tested perspective and that perspective is going to be attached to his film no matter what HER perspective of the work is. She’s basically saying why didn’t you make MY version.
I am maybe alone in this but I love that she hated it. She’s an Odyssey superfan. Most of the LOTR superfans I know hate the Peter Jackson films and they’re indisputably amazing. Some of her criticisms are a little mean or out there but mostly it just reads like what happens when an expert on a text watches the Hollywood version.
She obviously has a vested interest in her own translation. But so much of this comes off as petty jealousy, because now when people talk about Homer's Odyssey, Nolan's film is what they envision, and no longer her text. She's been in the spotlight for so long for having THE translation to read but now she has to take a back seat and doesn't seem happy about it
Well, in my view, it's not right-wing to care about historical accuracy and cultural sensitivity, and raising these concerns is not "throwing a tantrum." These performative and unnecessarily divisive approaches to "diversity" in Hollywood are also subtly racist - simultaneously implying that only by shameless race-swapping can people of color expect to be represented and suggesting that stories deriving from non-Western sources simply aren't worth producing.
As usual it's the liberals who are demonstrating their racist attitudes while shaking their fingers at the "bad people" who object to their passive-aggressive attempts at the culture war.
I explore these themes in my recent article here: https://natparry.substack.com/p/odyssey-controversy-is-wokisms-latest
I wrote about color-blind casting a while back. https://historyboomer.substack.com/p/imagine-no-color?r=6u5gj&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
The argument is asinine on its face: The Greeks wouldn’t have recognized the ethnic divisions we use and if you want to be “historically accurate” and object to a black woman playing a Greek role, you should feel the same about all the roles played by people of Northern European descent, who were just as alien to the Ancient Greeks as black Africans. But they registered no such objection. Why? Because they are demanding this ancient story be told I compliance with very modern thinking, not “historical accuracy.”
To give credit where it’s due, you’re raising a fair point about consistency. If historical accuracy is to be the standard, then it should be applied consistently, including to portrayals that make ancient Greeks look like modern Northern Europeans.
That said, I think your argument generally overstates the comparison. Northern Europeans and ancient Greeks were certainly different populations, but they were not just as alien to one another as Greeks and sub-Saharan Africans were. Ancient Greeks recognized and depicted different peoples, including Ethiopians, as distinct populations.
More importantly, I don’t think you’ve really addressed Nathaniel’s main argument. His point isn’t simply about historical accuracy, it’s that race-swapping established European stories is a poor substitute for investing in adaptations of stories that originate from other cultures. Whether one agrees with that or not, it’s a different argument from the one you’ve responded to.
I repeat, you’ve identified a legitimate consistency issue, but you’ve also reframed the discussion into one that’s narrower than the original criticism.
The subhead starts "Race-swapping is a form of cultural appropriation ...".
That's, let us say, an unusually phrased complaint from the right-wing perspective.
Hmm ... "Therefore, this casting choice is widely seen as little more than a gratuitous, unnecessary and polarizing attempt at virtue signalling and gaslighting — simultaneously elevating people of color and suppressing the visibility of white people on the silver screen, while also forcing audiences to accept a new normal and embrace the ideology of wokism whether we like it or not."
Well, the article contains what it says on the tin, as the phrase goes.
Who says I'm right-wing? Why do you have to pigeonhole every viewpoint like that? Can't you think for yourself?
Well, "As usual it's the liberals who are demonstrating their racist attitudes ..." seems to be saying it rather clearly. Do you object to the phrase, and if so, how so? It seemed to me a simple description, expressing the, err, appropriation, taking place in the phrasing.
It's really ... something ... to see a complaint about "suppressing the visibility of white people on the silver screen".
Well if it's the self-identifying liberals who are demonstrating their racism, maybe they should be considered right-wing.
Your ignorance is stunning. The Greeks have in fact vociferously objected to this gratuitous and culturally insensitive attempt at woke virtue signaling. You must not be paying much attention.
I was speaking of the Ancient Greeks, as the context ("the Greeks wouldn't have...") makes clear. And I would gladly have clarified if you had simply asked instead of going straight for an insult. (Here's a satire I wrote which explains the Greek way of seeing themselves and other peoples: https://dgardner.substack.com/p/an-outrage-against-the-people-of )
Well you called my argument asinine before I insulted you, so maybe don't dish it out if you can't take it? And when it comes to the ancient Greeks, there is a zero percent chance that an exotic beauty from faraway Kenya would have ascended to the heights of royalty and if she somehow had done so, this highly unusual occurrence would have been clearly indicated in Homer's poem. Instead, the source material describes Helen's physical attributes as those of a fair-skinned Greek beauty.
"The argument." I was referring to was the Musk-et-al argument that launched the debate. Sorry I didn't make that clear. But maybe ask before firing with both barrels?
I'm still not clear on how you demarcate your view from that of Musk etc. But as to your comment, yes, Homer was referring to a Greek. But the whole point of the three-part taxonomy of Aristotle -- which faithfully reflected the Greek perspective of the era -- was that Northern Europeans were as alien as the peoples from the hot south and east. Our modern conception is radically different so we find that hard to fathom. But Aristotle couldn't be clearer. So if you find the casting of a black women as Helen of Troy ludicrous on the grounds that the Ancient Greeks would have found it ludicrous, you must feel the same about the casting of all those Northern Europeans as Greeks. Yet, far as I can tell, none did. Why? The talk of "historical accuracy" is nonsense springing from an anachronistic imposition of modern race conceptions.
I asserted an argument and you replied directly to my comment calling the argument asinine. If there was a misunderstanding, it was entirely your fault.
The top tier gods are shown to live only in people’s perception in Nolan’s Odyssey. It is ambiguous if Calypso has any power and Circe seems only to be a witch. There is a strangeness to the story where it is a well known story about gods, where the gods aren’t real, but monsters are.
I don’t feel confident that Calypso was physically intimate with Odysseus.
If Athena was a hallucination and the greeks are the sea people. Are all the super natural beings hallucinations/false memories and in reality Odysseus men pillaged and raped their way across the sea?
Really enjoyed your article. I can’t help feeling that Wilson is so close to the material that she’s missing the point. As a poem, the Odyssey submerges you in an ancient world that in some ways anticipates our own but which is palpably alien. Gods walk the Earth, fate is binding, and heroes don’t need to be admirable to be honored. “Wily Odysseus” is celebrated for his trickery, falsehood, and dishonesty — and readers know that he should be admired because he is best beloved by wise Athena.
But the film is about taking the bones of the story and making it meaningful to an audience that doesn’t believe in workaday divine intervention or in prophecy, and that knows better (maybe?) than to admire cunning without mercy. If Nolan had been completely faithful, the movie would have been offputting, maybe cheesy, maybe infuriating.
Of course, anybody is free to dislike the movie for any reason they want, including Wilson. But it’s worth pointing out that it seems to be inspiring thousands of people to read the poem. And if they end up preferring it to the movie, good for them.
Glad you enjoyed! I think the film succeeds in creating a kind of magic, even if it’s not what she wanted.
I'm starting to think it would be a great idea to have a longstanding campaign to keep taunting Elon Musk to make that AI "Homerically Accurate" _Odyssey_. It wouldn't be Nolan's film, but it might be interesting on its own if it ever happened. Musk is going to forget about it as soon as the outrage cycle moves on, but his failure here might just resonate in the public mind.
> Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war...
Lol, while you're at it, might as well argue "Titanic has nothing convincing to say about the unsinkability of boats."
If an artist were to create a work and honor you by acknowledging that your work inspired them and then the success of that work led to greater interest in your work, you ought not deride that artist's work.
In Homeric society when someone publicly honors your work, they show you aidōs. Publicly tearing down their work in return is a severe breach of that trust. Instead of achieving positive acclaim or in Homeric culture, kleos, your reputation would become tied to spite, a legacy of dishonor.
And then Matt Damon would come home and you would be in big trouble
No sex? No depiction of gods? It’s like it’s designed to be used in schools! I’m so excited to see it! Edit: I’m a literature teacher - I hate the adaptations I can’t show in class.
The very first scene between Odysseus and Penelope is brimming with sexual tension, despite showing nothing elicit, and there are scenes (like Circe's transforming of the men into pigs) that would give younger children nightmares.
But for the older kids, I'd think it'll be excellent!
I am just about old enough to remember when the LRB used to publish more good articles than bad. Now you're lucky if you get one good article every three issues.
There’s something genuinely amusing about this entire exchange.
You dismiss Matt Walsh out of hand yet you treat people with a fraction of his reach as if their opinions carry vastly greater weight. Walsh’s audience dwarfs almost everyone else in this conversation, but his perspective gets thrown out entirely.
Now, that’s your choice, of course. But if you’re going to curate whose voices count at least be honest about the criteria. It’s hard to look at this and not conclude that ideological alignment,not reach, not influence, and certainly not the strength of the argument,is the real filter here. Unless someone is praising figures or causes that fit neatly into your comfort zone, you act as though they don't even warrant a response.
This points to a recurring issue in progressive commentary on the right, a total failure in theory of mind. There’s a constant tendency not just to disagree with conservative arguments, but to completely misunderstand what those arguments actually are. Instead of engaging the strongest version of the opposing position, the left construct a convenient straw man that’s much easier to tear down.
And that is precisely what’s happening here.
People on the right aren't "siding with Emily." They aren't suddenly claiming her translation was brilliant, nor are they taking back their original criticisms. In their view, that translation remains just as flawed today as it was when it first dropped. None of that has changed.
The irony being pointed out is something else entirely.
The point is that Nolan,like so many liberal men engaged in a constant display of ideological loyalty,participated in an exercise of performative activism that was always doomed to fall short. Despite adopting all the approved rhetoric, despite playing to the moral framework of his own political camp, and despite drawing on sources that camp broadly endorses,he still found himself publicly called out by someone whose very work helped shape his adaptation.
That is the observation. Emily’s critique isn't a vindication of her translation. It’s just another textbook example of a broader cultural pattern, the endless cycle of ideological purity, where today’s ally becomes tomorrow’s offender. From a conservative viewpoint, it looks like a humiliation ritual,a process where increasingly extreme displays of conformity are offered up for approval that never actually arrives. The standard keeps moving, because the goal isn't consensus,it’s continuous re-affirmation of moral virtue.
That is the irony conservatives are highlighting. It has almost nothing to do with defending Emily.
As for the film’s broader reception? The right’s pushback shouldn't surprise anyone. Their objection flows directly from the core philosophical differences that have defined modern politics for years. The exact same worldview that leads conservatives to reject progressive stances on immigration, gender, or elections informs their skepticism toward media they see as ideologically revisionist or culturally disruptive.
Whether you agree with that assessment isn't the point. The point is that the reaction is entirely predictable based on core assumptions. A film made by a director who approaches the material from a progressive angle, leaning on equally progressive sources, was never going to land well with an audience that fundamentally rejects those premises. Expecting otherwise is just analytically naive.
I dismissed Walsh because this essay is about Wilson. It was not ideological curation! I have written about Walsh elsewhere and will do so again.
Of course, if I wrote about Walsh, I suspect you would again call that ideological!
I think it's a mistake to see everything through an ideological lens. Saying Nolan "engaged in a constant display of ideological loyalty,participated in an exercise of performative activism" misses the actual film that he made, which has many conservative themes (as some conservatives have pointed out).
Seeing everyone as being in an ideological straitjacket is its own ideological straitjacket.
Walsh is just kind of morally toxic and depressing. I can’t imagine listening to him on purpose no matter how many fans he has.
I think the thing with the "sea people" thing is that, though Wilson kind of sniffs at the twist at the end as well,
SPOILERS
It ties into the whole revelation that Odysseus and his men essentially became (or at least were the trigger for) the "sea people" that everyone ended up terrified of through the chaos they caused on their way home. It's not Nolan saying that the sea people were definitely 100% real actually; he's using them to make the point that Odysseus and his men and everyone who participated in the whole Trojan War sowed the seeds of the turmoil their civilisation is now going through. It's a 'violence begets violence', 'war rebounds on the warmonger' point.
In other words, Wilson is treating it as a history lecture when it's a case of artistic license.
One of the things I looked forward to most about watching the movie today was getting to finally read this, and I'm so glad to see someone make the same point that I had loaded up in my clipboard ready to make so that I don't have to articulate it!
Wow, guess I'll stop defending Emily Wilson now. She sounds like an insufferable twat.
Just a note on the right-wing reaction: This isn't my view, but I don't think it would be inconsistent or unreasonable for a right-winger to say something like that Nolan's _Odyssey_ is so bad that even the wokie wokester woman with the woozy woke work hates it.
It’s a miserable little exchange: the translation survives intact, but the pleasure of thinking well of its translator doesn’t. Whenever her name comes up, there it is: credible Homer translation; also, huge asshole. She did that to herself.
It is not a credible Homer translation, as demonstrated at some length here. https://casa-kvsa.org.za/legacy/AC63-Whitaker-18DEC2019.pdf
A good modern translation is Daniel Mendelsohn, University of Chicago Press 2025.
I have three translations sitting on my shelf, and hers is the least attended. I’m not saying this to pile on. It is just that hers is the most artless of the three. Notably, it’s easy to be overconfident when Homer is 2,700 years away from being able to put his thumb on the scale.
I was being generous. I definitely have more detailed and severe thoughts on this topic.
Wilson missed a good opportunity to shut up. When she's commenting on the text of the Odyssey she's full of interesting insights. Here she's long-winded with a bunch of opinions that are nothing more than that.
Ok so it sounds like Emily is just mad that this thing she wanted to cater to white women and their white women fantasies…. does not? Like I don’t know what race she is but it sounds like white woman victimhood to me. She is completely disregarding that Nolan has a time tested perspective and that perspective is going to be attached to his film no matter what HER perspective of the work is. She’s basically saying why didn’t you make MY version.
I am maybe alone in this but I love that she hated it. She’s an Odyssey superfan. Most of the LOTR superfans I know hate the Peter Jackson films and they’re indisputably amazing. Some of her criticisms are a little mean or out there but mostly it just reads like what happens when an expert on a text watches the Hollywood version.
she was probably just incredibly sick of people asking her what she thought about it so went OK FUCKIN FINE HERE YOU GO
She obviously has a vested interest in her own translation. But so much of this comes off as petty jealousy, because now when people talk about Homer's Odyssey, Nolan's film is what they envision, and no longer her text. She's been in the spotlight for so long for having THE translation to read but now she has to take a back seat and doesn't seem happy about it
I don't see that. Wouldn't you think that sales of her translation are about to skyrocket? The Odyssey pie just got orders of magnitude bigger.
It's less about sales and more about status. HER version now has to take a back seat to HIS version.
eh, she just didn't like it. the tolkien/lotr comparison is solid, she's christopher tolkien in this scenario.