14 months ago The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit reported that Lupita Nyong’o had joined the cast of Chris Nolan‘s The Odyssey (Universal, 7.16).
We’ve all since read the rumor that Nyong’o will play Helen of Troy and perhaps even a double role as Helen and her half-sister Clytemnestra, who was the wife of Agamemnon**, king of Mycenae.
We’ve also read that Elon Musk disapproves.
If Nyong’o has indeed been cast as Helen, we all know what this is — i.e., Nolan playing the diversity-for-appearance’s-sake game, or otherwise indulging in woke presentism.
Since the late teens Hollywood’s progressive comintern has been dictating that all historical films have to adopt the practice of presentism, meaning that all casts have to reflect social values as they should be in terms of inclusion and representation rather than how they actually may have been during the time of the story.
But let’s bend over backwards and consider the Nyong’o casting on its own historical merits.
First, the 42-year-old Nyong’o is too old to play Helen, who was a nubile 20something hottie when she ran off with Paris, the Trojan prince.
Secondly, historians seem to agree that ancient Greek culture wasn’t exactly racially enlightened, much less wokey-woke. Cruel or dismissive racial attitudes were apparently evident within ancient Greek culture, as they have been in many other cultures over the centuries. It’s been written that the Greeks had a term for POCs — Aithiopes (“Ethiopians”), which in Greek meant “burnt-faced ones.” Does that sound like a term of respect or elevation?
AI sez that “ancient Greek and Roman authors, including Aristotle, Diodorus Siculus, Ovid and Martial, perpetuated anti-black, xenophobic, and proto-racist attitudes that essentialized non-Greeks/Romans, particularly Africans, as inferior, exotic, or servile.”
According to most sources, including Homer‘s Iliad and Odyssey, Helen was the daughter of Spartan king Tyndareus and his wife, Queen Leda.
Mythology says Helen’s actual father was Zeus, who apparently had sex with Leda while inhabiting the body of a swan. How was that physically possible?
If Nyong’o is, in Nolan’s mind, Helen and her half-sister Clytemnestra is also of African (or Kenyan) ancestry, it would naturally follow that Tyndareus and Leda were themselves African. Find me the respected historian or chronicler of ancient Greece who will support that notion.
An overwhelming majority of classic-minded film buffs subscribe to the idea that Helen of Troy resembled Rossana Podesta, who starred in Robert Wise‘s Helen of Troy (Warner Bros., 1.26.56). Brigitte Bardot played Andraste, Helen’s servant or handmaiden.
** You want oddball casting? Nolan’s Agememnon is played by, of all the actors in the whole wide world, effing Benny Safdie.