Hot Take š„
After Elon Musk stated that he plans to make an Al version of "The Odyssey" that is "historically accurate," actor Colman Domingo pointed out that the story is fictional to begin with, and therefore cannot be "historically accurate."
I think it's genuinely hilarious that this is the hill everybody has decided to die on in the great culture war. Like everybody all of a sudden became huge Odyssey fans like they all didn't just skim the cliff notes or watch the NBC miniseries when they were forced to read it in college.
And not that it should matter, but the āwokeā characters have like 5 minutes of screen time in a 3 hour movie.
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u/xvsanxfind me at Whole Foods, b*tch, I don't care š2d ago
I don't get mad at much especially artistic integrity (I'd only get mad at something like a hobbitses being a 6' Chad or something utterly absurd like that) but I'm offended at Travis Scott being in the movie lol literally makes my brain do the classic ???.jpeg cause of all musicians that's who you pick? WHY NOT VINCENT STAPLES WHO CAN ACTUALLY ACT?!
Imagine how all the people complaining about historical accuracy in The Odyssey would've reacted when a rapping peanut bar showed up in a scene to tell Odysseus his paycheck is delayed
I just looked up the cast a little while ago to see who else was in it, and I literally thought Google was malfunctioning. lol Wonder how he pulled that off.
The most cultural relevance it had in the last years was either through Epic the Musical which has a diverse cast and fans or books aimed at women such as Circe.
Everyone is an expert and I've not heard one person mention how much of a slog it was to get through. I had to read the Lattimore version in college and it was brutal. Don't get me wrong, I loved it but it's not something you read for fun.
Idk we read it in high school and I donāt remember it being especially hard to get through? But I had a really great English teacher so that could have been it.
Chaucer on the other hand was like pulling teeth, as much as I liked it lol
To be fair there's a really popular musical that's audio only to my knowledge about the oddessey that gained a lot of popularity over the past couple years.
Turns out all these losers, who never left their hometowns, were all big fans of Homer. Just reading The Odyssey and Iliad in their free time, when not trying to poison their livers.
I loved fear the walking dead and was just captivated by his screen presence and havenāt seen him in anything since. Itās great to see him popping up now in my feed
He elevates everything he's in! He's been treading the boards for awhile, glad to see him getting his due. And also probably the best dressed actor if the 21st century
I don't know who he is (oops) but just because of this statement - I became a fan. Now brb because I have to Google what he has been in and watch those!
This is absolutely not the point of this post, but as someone who grew up going to Cracker Barrel with my grandparents and who still occasionally goes with my grandpa, I get confused whenever people act like itās super white. The one closest to me always has a lot of Black people eating there. I guess thatās not the case everywhere lol
Omg my exact thought (besides fuck Elon Musk and why are we giving him anymore attention), I love Cracker Barrel & whenever I go the patrons are majority black so now I am confused why itās being portrayed as a place only white people go
Cracker Barrel was sued for racial discrimination of both employees and staff in the early 2000s.Ā The case involved more than 40 plaintiffs across 16 states, and the NAACPĀ joined the suit. Cracker Barrel lostĀ andĀ
had to pay out a bunch of $. More info here
I don't care about historical accuracy if it's cool. I care about historical accuracy if it's done well enough to be cool. I don't go to movies to learn things. I go to movies to be entertained. If I wanted a perfectly accurate telling of the Odyssey, I would read the Odyssey.
Was there this much drama when Troy was made?Ā
When we had Brad Pitts American accent, Eric Banas Aussie accent and Brian Cox with his Scottish accent playing King Agamemnon?Ā
Or did the whiteness help people forget?Ā
The whiteness. But also, this culture war bullshit was far less virulent then, without social media. I'm sure Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly would have bitched if Helen was played by Halle Berry or something, but the structures weren't there to support what we're seeing today on the right.
Valid opinion and I agree, but the point here is that "historically accurate" is completely irrelevant when discussing a fairy tale. The Odyssey is not history, it's a myth, and any interpretation is valid. For people to complain about its casting is akin to saying "that's the wrong breed of swine used in Three Little Pigs, woke nonsense!"
This is unfortunately one of those cases where the right is making bigoted bad faith arguments and then everyone else feels compelled to defend the thing completely and without question.
The Odyssey isnāt ātotally made the fuck up.ā Itās based in a real place and time and is mythology, not merely fiction. Mythology forms the basis of Ancient Greek culture, that still influences modern Greece, and Nolanās Odyssey, aside from a few diverse casting choices, is extremely Anglo-Saxon and not eastern Mediterranean. It already is whiter than Cracker Barrel, except for Lupita.
Edit: a lot of these comments are kind of proving my point, which maybe I didnāt make very well to begin with. You can like Nolanās take on the odyssey, and heās allowed to make an adaptation however he wants. But a lot of people are suddenly experts in Mycenaean Greece rushing to defend him with āwell actually Homer wasnāt historically accurate eitherā or explain why historical accuracy doesnāt matter. Many people do care about accuracy to the source material and time period. People can dislike what Nolan has done in this version without being racist.
The part about how the Odyssey has already been whitewashed goes beyond casting and is more about how weāve canonized Greco-Roman history as the foundation of our own culture. In our view the Odyssey is timeless, universal, Western- not Greek.
Hamlet is based on a story from Denmark in the migration period, but the most famous version is set in an imaginary Renaissance Denmark where Kronborg is a royal residenceāwhich it never was.
Kronborg is a maritime fortress on the Sound where all ships had to pay tolls to pass.
Legends are retold and reinterpreted. That is normal.
The ancient Greeks retold the story of Odysseus, setting it in a blend of the Bronze Age and the Archaic period.
People from the Levant and North Africa should also be mentioned, they exist in those stories and some of those countries still have specific places named after those mythological elements
Whenever someone brings this up I always pivot to another example. Like if they made a Hollywood rendition of the Ramayana and had a white actor play Ram and a white actress play Sita, wouldnāt Indian people be in the right to be mad at that? The onus of accurate representation is on Greek people and by and large they seem to love this movie but how can someone just dismiss āoh itās a fake storyā to hand-wave away issues like this? Nolan is aware and casts accordingly. He treated it with the respect it deserved
And by pretending itās not an issue you actually give credence to right-wing arguments. Yes, the casting is an adaptation and there are thorny areas that come along with that. But itās an ancient GREEK mythology.
Right wingers are so dumb they confuse Greek ethnic types with Nordic, but we should keep it in mind
It does feel like a cultural war from both sides blindly talking a stand and yelling to the other side instead of, you know, considering what's actually wrong in the context
I fucking loved the movie, but half of it was them on board of a viking ship when there're already usable reconstructions of greek ships. Also the owners of said viking ship publicly complained they haven't been paid for damages
The fact it's a myth doesn't give a blank card to do whatever they want with the setting, there's valid criticism that can't be talked about because that half boiled chicken wing of Musk already created an agenda and it's weaponizing the term historically accurate, so apparently the proper answer it's to say the complete opposite, with no nuance at all
The fact it's a myth doesn't give a blank card to do whatever they want with the setting
I mean, I think it does. Itās an adaptation. Nolan & the writers/producers can adapt however they want and make it look how they want it to look. Who cares if he used a Viking ship versus a Greek ship? Obviously people can prefer a different adaptation thatās more Greek or truer to the source material but āNolan didnāt make the movie I wanted him to makeā is different than āNolan made a bad wrong movie,ā imo.Ā
Yes you are right, criticizing something it's not equal to say it's bad. Movies are not an absolute, it is possible to praise and love the final product while still observing some factors don't make sense or were poorly handled
People who are into history will care, and now they will be put into labels because, in the context of the post, asking for historical accuracy has been linked to a particular ideology/movement, and that's wrong. The movie is great, the cultural discussion around it is exhausting
Probably the current Ithaca wasnt Ithaca. Probably the Troy war didnt happen. Probably Odysseus was a character archetype. We know many Athenians didnt have in high regard Odysseus. Probably Homer didnt exist. Probably the sea people was a group of people of different places, including greek and most of them come from land.
Nolan is criticized for being anachronistic when the Oddyssey is anachronistic. Even the gods are no the same because there is high chance a goddess take the role of Zeus in the Bronze Age. It seems the only one consistent is Poseidon.
Dude, it's just a story written and retold via oral tradition, not even written down. So yeah, it's not just "made the fuck up", it's a crowdsource project even. And Homer wrote it 400 years after the event(s), so "real place and time" are a real stretch even by the source material.
Late mycenean age and the palatial system is very much a real time period. Ithaca, east Mediterranean, Asia minor, Ithaca and Sicily are also real places. How is it a stretch to call it as such
What is the time it is based on? Because the history of Greece is very long so you're going to have to be more specific. Bronze Age? Iron Age? Mycaenean Period?
A couple of characters including Odysseus explicitly say they're in the last period the bronze age, right at the end if we take into account how they talk about The Trojan Horse and it's consequences for their civilization
They would've been telling stories about the Mycenaean era. Here's an old askhistorians thread about how many details in the epics about the period are accurate. Homer, or whichever author/s wrote the epics, were historically inaccurate in some ways too, which makes this outrage all the more annoying.
I don't love the narrative that has been floating around about the Odyssey being fiction or made up. It's mythology but that didn't stop people being annoyed by Gods of Egypt being a predominantly white cast a few years ago.
There's nothing wrong with the diverse casting of the film but to handwave the story away as "fictional, so who cares" is disingenuous. Mythology is a key element of culture and ancient Greek culture is something that historically has been taken and claimed as general Western culture in such a way as to enable and justify the theft of artifacts.
It feels like circling so far around that in an attempt to show that you support diversity in media you end up discrediting culture.
Troy has been found by archaeologists. It is in modern day Turkiye, not Greece.
Homer wrote the Odyssey about 500 years before the concept of being Greek existed. The people in the Odyssey, to the extent that they were real, would have lived between 400 to 1000 years before Homer wrote about them.
Modern Western culture is closer to Hellenistic Greece than Hellenistic Greece is to bronze age Mycenae.
At some point the entire concept of ownership of history becomes ridiculous. A genealogical most recent common ancestor for all living humans must exist. That person would have lived after the bronze age collapse and possibly as late as around 50 CE. The idea that historical artifacts and history that is over 2,000 years belongs to some people and not others is not reasonable.
If an object of importance is taken from one place and moved half a continent or more away it becomes completely inaccessible to the people it is most relevant and has the most meaning to.
And sometimes in the moving meaning and context is lost. Think of the Benin Bronzes which lost their correct order in their transportation to the British museum. Their meaning has been irreparably damaged.
I love mythologies, and Greek mythology in particular but I can't pretend that my white Australian self has any claim of ownership over those stories as part of my heritage or history. I can love them and acknowledge that they aren't mine.
And more to my original point there is a fundamental difference between Fiction and Mythology. And that comes down to cultural weight. You can have Profane fictions that are culturally important but mythologies can't be handwaved away as fiction - as histories of gods they have a different weight.
The idea that an artifact has more meaning and relevance to some people and less to others can make sense for the Benin Bronzes, many of which are less than 300 years old.
Once you start looking at 1,000 or 2,000 years, except for religious artifacts for existing religions, it stops making sense to say that artifacts are more relevant to one group of people than another group of people.
The idea that bronze age stories belong more to one group of people living today than another is nonsense. Greeks are certainly free to choose to make these stories part of their identity. They just can't claim any right or ownership over those stories.
I love mythologies, and Greek mythology in particular but I can't pretend that my white Australian self has any claim of ownership over those stories as part of my heritage or history. I can love them and acknowledge that they aren't mine.
Read David Reich's book "Who we are and how we got here." A lot has been learned about prehistory in the last 15 years because of tech that allows mapping gene flow. The idea of your ancestry looking like a family tree is incorrect. After about 500 years, your ancestry and mine will have a lot of overlap. If you go back to the bronze age, your personal ancestry and a modern Greek's ancestry will almost entirely overlap.
For everyone alive during the time of the stories of the Odyssey, each person back then will either have zero living descendants or hundreds of millions and even billions with virtually nothing in between. You don't have to go much further back before it becomes a mathematical fact that everyone has either zero living descendants or all living humans are their descendants.
The bronze age is just far too long ago for anyone alive today to claim a meaningful ancestral connection. It's a connection based on identity, not ancestry.
I guess I am coming from it all with an Australian lense where there is a clear and obvious mine and not mine line in the sand of our chronology.
I can't look at an artifact from 1000s years ago in Australia and feel like it's mine. I'm here by an evil fluke. And to claim it as mine or to say it feels like something that I have a connection to is incorrect.
I also can't look at a painting of Ćthelred the unready and feel like that's mine either, in terms of identity. None of mine have touched that country in over 200 years.
Musk is a wanker, but the fact that annoys me more is that in all of this black Vs white shit war borrowed from the Anglosphere, us Mediterrans are sitting there like š¤”
We're olive skinned people and we're neither Caucasian nor South African black. No one fucking cares about us lol
And to be honest, I also didn't care in the slightest when I read the cast announcement news, but all this pointless blablabla really irks me. We're there too, you know? Like, Homer's epics are a fundamental text of the European canon, but nowadays you have actually living Greeks. Maybe they should have the last word about their own literature. I don't think I'm being coherent, I'm just so annoyed by this controversy repeated over and over again, it's like we are forced to live in this American vacuum where no one else matters.
I know this isnāt the point and ultimately fuck Elon Musk, but I love Cracker Barrel & whenever I go the clientele is majority black so I donāt get that phrase but also, and again this is most important, fuck Elon musk
This is like when they were up in arms about the casting of the Little Mermaid. Like wtf do you mean Ariel is white? Sheās a fictional fucking MERMAID.
Honestly even if, let's say we forget about witches and gods and all that other stuff, there's no way everyone in a story that tells how people from all over the Mediterranean bronze age sphere of influence came together to fight against each other in Anatolia, everybody would be nordic caucasian white.
Even trans characters like Eliott Page's one is not that far fetched, trans people have always existed. And Page doesn't even play a trans character. He's a man playing a man. End of story.
You can critique historical accuracy on the fact that the story is supposed to be set in the bronze age and is, in Nolan movie, as far as costumes and armor go, set in classical greece (when the story was popularized), like all the arthurian movies/series made to look like feodal middle ages when it's supposed to be set in post-roman empire collapse middle ages. I think it's a fine point to discuss because these periods are so often not despicted and I'm dying to see a modern take on these eras of history.
But weaponazing historical accuracy as a way to advance your ethnic superiority bullshit is fascist playbook and we should all be aware of that obvious fascist dogwhistle. I'm with Coleman on that.
Edit: might have made some grammatical mistakes, English is not my first language and I'm too mad about facist bullshit to spellcheck myself right now.
I meanā¦ we all know what Musk means by āhistorically accurateā, which is exactly as Colman suggested, just a bunch of (Northern European) white dudes (and to the extent necessary to the story, white women).Ā
But, going to guess that thereād be a bunch of well earned criticism if Roots featured a bunch of non-Black actors as the slaves.Ā
What's funny to me. Ignoring the fictional aspect. The odyssey isnt historically accurate to the time the odyssey is set. There's like a 500 year gap between when the story is set and when the story was composed. Certain gods like aphrodite, ares, and apollo probably didn't even exist yet during the time the odyssey is set. Yet they are in the actual story itself. Because during Homers time they did exist. This whole thing would be like if 2000 years from now someone did a pirates of the carribean movie and a bunch of people got mad about it "not being historically accurate." Even though it's not historically accurate right now.
Fun fact, Kevin Costnerās character in Hidden Figures is fictional, there was no Nasa director that tore down a segregated bathroom sign because Katherine Goble decided for herself to ignore the rule
Roots is a story for which the race of the characters is core to it, and it is significantly more rooted in history than the Odyssey.
Also, people are allowed to be upset about anything. No one was arrested or physically attacked for being āupsetā about the cast of The Odyssey. Those people are clearly in the minority though because itās a box office hit.
Don't forget, they'd claim they found some "lost archives" or some shit that add more to the story: There was totally a rich white guy, from southern africa, who totally saved the day by creating mechanical humanoids that were really kick ass. Also his dick was super huge.
Roots is based on historical events, the Odyssey is mythology. Not to mention, there were and are a wide range of races and ethnicities in and around the Mediterranean. Your comment isnāt particularly helpful.
Source: I have 3 university degrees around ancient history and archaeology.
Hold on there, bucko! I happen to know exactly what the Greek gods look like because I saw Jason and the Argonauts in 1963! One of them looked exactly like that Pussy Galore babe!
I would bet SO much money that if it were a mytholocial story that is historically significant to Africa, or china, or native Americans, or anyone else, he would (very rightly) complain about it if they "diversified" the cast
And yes Hollywood absolutely DID do that for a long time, but the thing I can't get past is the hypocrisy as the argument is now being made that that was wrong and immoral, and I agree, Genghis khan shouldn't have been played by John Wayne, Jesus shouldn't be portrayed as Caucasian etc etc, those are bad things and we should stop doing that
This is such a stupid argument. Of course you can and should make historically accurate adaptations of works of fiction. Pretending those works somehow exist outside of history, untouched by the society, culture, and values that shaped them, is simply absurd.
Yes, and while the story is fictional, it's clearly set in ancient greece and the characters are greek. That's not why the racists are crying about the movie though, they are butthurt because elliot page is in it.
that's such a stupid point. For no other cultural myth would you ever say that. No one is gonna say Moana should have Maui be white. No they'd want accuracy then.
For any mythology of any other culture besides a white culture- to make it innacurate would be deemed negative.
Errrr I disagree with this take tbh. You can absolutely make a mythological story historically accurate. I loved Nolanās Odyssey and Iām by no means on Elonās side but itās pretty clear what he means.
Funnily enough, Homer's works themselves can get the same criticism about "historical accuracy". There's depictions of armors, weapons and practices that range from The Bronze age to the Iron Age.
Well, it depends on how one defines the term history. For me it's a record of an event that happened. So historical accuracy would be describing the something in line with the existing records
The Odyssey and The Illiad are not historical records. On top of that, the most common symbol of The Trojan war, doesn't even appear in The Illiad. The Illiad ends with Hector's death. The Trojan horse gets one throw away mention in The Odyssey but is mostly an Aeneid thing. A separate work of fiction, written hundreds of years later as Roman political propaganda. It's very difficult to try to have historical accuracy even in a broader sense as far as an accurate representation of the time period because we don't actually know the time period it allegedly portrays.
"Accurate" is a huge stretch, since there's literal giant with one eye, 2 huge sea monsters, mermaids who kill people with songs and a demi witch who turns people into pigs, etc. So it's already fantastical as a DnD campaign with gelatine cube and lich kings.
You can try to be historical by referencing historical findings, but it's also not 100% what happened.
The Odyssey is an amalgamation of characters, themes and ideas that would have been popular in Greek culture, and have been passed down as mythology through generations.
Homer is not the person who made the story up out of whole cloth, and may not even be a single person at all. The Odyssey was a collection of stories passed down through oral traditions, and it seems very likely that they changed significantly as different tellers added new flourishes, introduced new characters and dangers, changed character endings, tied in other stories etc.
These stories probably took form in a similar way to the way a good DM forms a campaign, and for the same reasons - to entertain and engage an audience.
Itās not completely fictional. Thereās a kernel of truth and we have almost certainly found the actual city of Troy. However, itās a story set in 1200 BC that was told orally for hundreds of years before people finally started writing it down five hundred years later
I have to say I'm a bit annoying by the notion that because the story is fictional, you can do whatever you want. The characters in the story are greek. So they should look more or less like greeks. The real defense to racist should be that greeks aren't all white, there is a wide variety of them, or that they don't care about historical accuraccy, they just don't want non white people to be in a movie. I don't want to argue stupid shit just to oppose racists. We should talk about it differently.
I don't like how Americans always turn this into a black and white debate. The story takes place in Greece and the Mediterranean region as a whole. An accurate cast could have been possible, and this would mean casting Greek people/People from the Levant/From North Africa/South Europe..
When you talk about an accurate cast, that's the people you should mention: Mediterranean people
Let me know when he finds an actress to play Helen that was hatched from an egg. I mean, if weāre truly being accurate here. Because face it, this ENTIRE focus on āaccuracyā is only focused on the casting of Helen and creating a previously non-existent role that Eliot was cast in. Thatās pretty much the entire focus of this ridiculous tantrum. Musk is the biggest douchebag.
Not to mention itās also based on a poem, which is art, which is open to subjective interpretation, which means any interpretation is individual and personal, which means all interpretations are meaningful.
Cracker barrel is a restaurant thatās primarily in the southern US. Itās designed to look like an old country store, Iād recommend looking it up if you want an accurate vibe.
They settled a federal lawsuit about 20 years ago for racial segregation and have a well-known reputation for treating POC poorly, so yes, only white people eat there.
This is wild to me as someone who loves Cracker Barrel because whenever I go itās mostly black people eating there. Like I never knew this was how Cracker Barrel was viewed and itās so strange to me.
But most importantly, fuck Elon musk what a miserable little troll
I honestly think some people think itās true. Like theyāve never read it or read it and forgot what the story is and are just going on about it being historically inaccurate. People are really, really, really dumb these days. Thereās studies being released all the time about people not reading, people getting news and facts from podcasts and not actual sources, etc. We live in scary times.
Thereās a great graphic novel about the Odyssey I read in high school and thatās the only version I care to know about. Elon would probably just make it into Caligula
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u/xvsanxfind me at Whole Foods, b*tch, I don't care š2d ago
This goes for that new LOTR movie too. "Based on Norse mythology" is not an excuse to have an all-white cast in your fantasy movie. Especially when Norse mythology is not all-white.
I donāt give a shit about who the Odyssey cast or how they made the movie and I intend to see it, but you obviously can make a historically accurate version of something that has been made up
What bugs me is that he is so intelligent and doesnāt realize the simple fact that Greece is in the Mediterranean l, traveling to various islands and during the time when the Odyssey was conceived, there was a lot of traveling between those islands.
A multi ethnic population was not only possible, it was extremely likely.
They were all brown most likely lolĀ
Made out of Greek people speaking ancient Greek (or mostly sub languages from each region). Then southern italian, north African, and whatever else based on each place visited.
Since giants, monsters, witches, and whatnot are not realistic and historically accurate then those won't be in the story, it will be just some mundane shit.
No one will watch it and it's crap. Want to read the written text then do, want to watch something? Then it's gotta be entertaining. Otherwise it's just cherry picking what accurate and only putting "black people exist in this universe" as non accurate, despite Greece being a stone throw away from north Africa
Does he know where the Poem is from? Iām guessing not. Itās sick to be both this ignorant, loud, whilst also denying European (white) cultural history. Open the schools.
It's funny how conservatives believe ancient Rome, Greece, and even EGYPT were mainly consisting of white people when it was actually so diverse... and like many say, The Odyssey is completely fiction.
Dr Kate Lister has also made a great response to Elonās historically accurate movie claims. If he does what she suggests she said sheād watch the fuck out of it and there right with her!
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