Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Do Epics Need Heroes?

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.

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—a transgression that would lead to the collapse of his world. There seemed little cause for celebration. Was the audience cheering the hero’s victory over the bad guys, or were they taking a side in an ongoing culture war?

When Christopher Nolan adapted Homer’s 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’o 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’s not only the casting that made Nolan’s film controversial. It’s also, I think, a more general debate over the genre of epic.

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’re not always straightforwardly heroic. The Iliad tells of Greece’s 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’s Aeneid, follows another Greek soldier, Aeneas, who later became the founder of Roman civilization; by contrast, Lucan’s epic, The Pharsalia, describes Caesar’s triumph in the Roman Civil War only to grotesquely ironize him.

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’s translation of the Odyssey—which Nolan relied on at least in part for his writing of this film—which refers to its hero as “a complicated man.” 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’s Odysseus (Matt Damon) as “an anachronistic whiney solemn shell of a man.” Apparently abandoning his earlier plan, Elon Musk offered to fund another adaptation directed by Mel Gibson.

There are many valid criticisms to be made of Nolan’s 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........

© The Nation