Opinion
By Panagiotis Christias
What particularly angered the ultra-conservative American online sphere, led by Elon Musk, and prompted the wave of criticism directed at Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey on X and other social media platforms was his choice of actress to play Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world according to myth. The actress also plays her sister, Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon. Lupita Nyong’o, the Mexican-American actress and director of Kenyan descent who won an Oscar in 2014 for 12 Years a Slave, herself became the target of criticism from figures on the American right because of the role. Elon Musk, the American businessman who owns SpaceX and Tesla, accused Nolan of “desecrating” The Odyssey in pursuit of an Oscar, referring to the diversity rules adopted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in 2020. But how groundbreaking was Christopher Nolan, really?
In June 1950, Orson Welles chose the then 22-year-old African American singer and actress Eartha Kitt to play Helen of Troy in his groundbreaking theatrical production Time Runs in Paris, an ambitious adaptation of the Faust myth. Welles, who had described Kitt as “the most exciting woman in the world,” gave the future star her first major role. Welles had already made his monumental film Citizen Kane and was living in Europe, partly to escape the political climate created by McCarthyism in Hollywood. He discovered Kitt singing at the Carroll, a nightclub near the Champs-Élysées in Paris, where she was performing as part of the city’s postwar cabaret scene. He immediately hired her for Time Runs, which was staged at the Théâtre Édouard VII. The production was a creative fusion of Marlowe, Milton and Dante, with music by Duke Ellington. Orson Welles himself played Faust, while Kitt played Helen of Troy, “the face that launched a thousand ships.” Contemporary critics felt that the young actress “stole the show,” without resorting to the unnecessary and misplaced claims that the face of the mythical Helen had somehow been desecrated.
The boldest attempt to bring the Homeric and Mycenaean world into dialogue with the African continent, however, came from Pier Paolo Pasolini in Notes Towards a Film on the African Orestes (Appunti per un’Orestiade africana), which was first screened in cinemas in 1970. In 1969, the Italian director traveled to Tanzania and Uganda, shooting footage for a feature film that would never be made. His aim was to transpose Aeschylus’ Greek tragedy Oresteia into contemporary Africa. Pasolini draws a parallel between Aeschylus’ text, the end of the Mycenaean age, the double act of revenge, first by Clytemnestra, who murdered Agamemnon, and then by Orestes, who killed his mother to avenge his father’s death, and the birth of the democratic court, on one side, and Africa’s political independence movements and transition to democracy during the 1960s, on the other. The archaic deities, the Erinyes, are transformed into benevolent deities, the Eumenides, symbolizing the transition from an archaic tribal civilization to a modern democratic state governed by the rule of law.
Pasolini then presented his footage and political theories to a group of African students at the University of Rome, inviting them to discuss how relevant his Western perspective was to events taking place on the African continent. The film records both the presentation and the discussion that followed, while also showing the footage Pasolini shot during his journey through Africa. The soundtrack features extraordinary jazz improvisations led by the Argentine saxophonist Gato Barbieri.
Pasolini’s equation of the European political process of modernization with the African experience is not the only thing that connects the Italian director to Nolan’s Odyssey. The American director has also been influenced by the Pasolinian vision of a timeless story, a story of archetypes that replaces the linearity of Western historical thought. By moving beyond the boundaries of the epic, Nolan gives the myth a tragic dimension and a sense of futility that appears in the faces of his actors and in the way they inhabit their roles.
At its core, this is a performance in which fate takes the leading role, and Odysseus is stripped of his heroic stature through the barren landscapes of his wanderings and the ruins of Troy he has left behind. He is not the proud king of Ithaca who destroys the suitors, but a demythologized and exhausted warrior tormented by his futile attempt to forget himself and what he has done.
What is certain is that Nolan’s film would have been received very differently during the decades of cultural revolution than it is today, at a time when the cultural clichés and racist stereotypes of a “white” civilization are returning. This is a civilization that separates itself from the common fate of humanity in order to construct the Western course of historical development. In the vision shared by Nolan and Pasolini, Odysseus embodies the Western colonizer and the guilt over the destruction he inflicted on the countries he subjugated, as well as on his own homeland.
Panagiotis Christias is associate professor of political and social philosophy at the University of Cyprus.
