ON LAUNCHING 1000 SHIPS AND BURNING TOPLESS TOWERS      PART 2 

YESTERDAY WE BEGAN EXAMINING THE BROUHAHA of casting Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Today in Part 2, Odyssey authority Daniel Mendelsohn continues his analyses. In time, we hear as well from Orson Welles, Eartha Kitt, and Greek classical poet Sappho.

A Guest Essay. Mendelsohn continues “Does Matt Damon Look Greek? No. Then Stop Complaining about Lupita Nyong’o” The New York Times, July 10, 2026:  “In the buildup to the release of Christopher Nolan’s $250 million, all-IMAX retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, the director revealed that he had chosen the Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o to play Helen. A firestorm of controversy followed, fueled largely by self-appointed guardians of the Homeric epics who consider the casting of a Black woman as Helen to be a grotesque violation—a ‘woke’ gesture designed to ‘destroy Western civilization and everything that helped create it,’ as one voice on X put it.”

You know X, “formerly known as Twitter” before transforming into vulpine leanings.

Guess Who’s Carping? Mendelsohn observes, “X’s owner, Elon Musk, used the platform to accuse Mr. Nolan of ‘pissing on Homer’s grave,’ referring to the director as an ‘anti-White racist,’ and suggesting that he chose Ms. Nyong’o in a cynical bid to win over Oscar voters. (‘He wants the awards.’) Donald Trump Jr. has also complained about the casting of Mr. Nolan’s movie, wishing that Hollywood would ‘stop pushing this crap on us.’ ”

Ha. It seems that Jr. has inherited his addled father’s habit of ascribing to others his own shortcomings.

In Defense of Rationality. Mendelsohn describes, “Some of Mr. Nolan’s equally vocal defenders have argued that it’s silly to complain about ‘authenticity’ when speaking of mythological figures; Helen, after all, was hatched from a swan’s egg, so how literal can we really be? A few classicists reason that Mr. Nolan’s colorblindness is in fact authentic, since the Greeks didn’t have a concept of race in the way that we do. (If they had, they surely would object to the choice to cast the open-faced, all-American Matt Damon as the wily Mediterranean Odysseus.)”

And a Woman’s View. “It seems only right,” Mendelsohn says, “to leave the last word in this debate to a woman. A lyric by Sappho (circa 630-570 B.C.E.), considered by the Greeks to be the ‘10th Muse,’ wonderingly recounts how Helen of Troy, ‘considered the most beautiful by far of all human beings, abandoned her most excellent husband and sailed off to Troy with nary a thought for her child or her beloved parents.’ ” 

“Why ever would she do so?,” Mendelsohn asks. “Because there’s no rhyme or reason when it comes to what we yearn for, no absolute standard for beauty. ‘The most beautiful thing on this black earth,’ Sappho writes, ‘is whatever you happen to desire.’ Whatever else the debate over Christopher Nolan’s casting has proved, it certainly shows that, by forcing people to confront—or reveal—their own often irrational notions of what is beautiful and ugly, true and false, Helen of Troy still has something to tell us.”

And So Did Orson Welles and Eartha Kitt. In 1950, Orson Welles cast a young Eartha Kitt as Helen of Troy in his Paris stage production of Time Runs (a loose, avant-garde adaptation of the Faust legend). See “An Evening With Orson Welles (and Eartha Kitt),” Wellesnet, August 6, 2020.

Wellesnet reports on this mixture of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Dante’s Divine Comedy—with music of Duke Ellington: “The August 12 performance in Frankfurt was reviewed by the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes and—according to writer Win Fanning—Kitt stole the show as Helen of Troy. Fanning wrote: “Eartha Kitt, whose haunting rendition of Duke Ellington’s ‘Hungry Little Trouble’ blends beautifully with the poetry of Faust, quite literally steals the show. The petite 22-year-old South Carolinian invariably draws applause by her singing of ‘Yo Creo Yo Tengo un Amor’ (‘I Think I Have a Love”), a song she wrote herself. Her brief recital between the dramatic portions of the production is certainly worth the price of admission.”

Apparently neither Sappho nor Welles, nor Stars and Stripes carped about “woke.” ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2026