Nolan’s Feminist Odyssey Diminishes Women

Self-destructive feminism strikes the Western canon yet again.

William Sullivan | July 12, 2026

As it turns out, all the internet rumors that had been swirling for months about Christopher Nolan’s stupid, anachronistic, immersion-compromising, and virtue-signaling decision to cast an African lady to portray Helen of Troy in his newest film, The Odyssey, turned out to be true.

There is obviously nothing in the classical literary record, which prominently includes The Odyssey, suggesting that Helen of Troy is actually an African woman.  But, hey, Nolan made a creative choice.  It’s arguably a dumb and unnecessarily distracting choice, as many have argued, but casting a pretty black actress to play Helen of Troy doesn’t diminish the character or her role in the greater narrative of this particular story.

But, as it turns out, Nolan makes different creative decisions that effectively diminish not only Helen’s character in the story, but also the narrative purpose of two other women who are vital to the central story of The Odyssey. 

Nolan, you see, expects us to believe that there were two prominent African ladies in ancient Homeric Greece, who married two of the most prominent sibling kings in ancient Greece.  Not only is actress Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy, married to the Spartan king named Menalaus, but she’s also playing her sister, Clytemnestra, who is the wife of the legendary Greek King of Mycenae who led the siege of Troy, Agamemnon.

Helen and Clytemnestra are not twins in The Odyssey or in any classical Greek tradition.  They are sisters, in the sense that they had the same mother.  Helen’s mother, Leda, was seduced by Zeus.  Clytemnestra was not similarly semi-divine, as she was a product of her mother and her mortal father.

This is a storytelling detail so big that once it’s ignored, the characters cease to be those of the original story. 

Helen’s most defining characteristic is her incomparable beauty.  She is astonishingly beautiful, so much so that the Trojan elders remark in The Iliad, “Small wonder that the Trojans and........

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