Let’s get to the point. These are the reasons why I was irritated by Chris Nolan’s Odyssey:

• It’s a cheap attempt at diversity. Hollywood has been giving me the impression that it’s not confident stories from other cultures would be “safe” (i.e., sell). So they decided to adapt a well-known, popular IP and throw in a diverse cast so they can tick off the diversity box.
• It’s cynical marketing. I’m 100% sure Nolan and the marketers know that by throwing Odyssey into the US culture wars, it would go viral, and thus people would watch it out of curiosity.
• How another country’s cultural product became cannon fodder for the exhausting US culture war. I’m so sick and tired of how almost every movie becomes a battleground for left- and right-wing politics. Can we just watch movies without being inflicted with this constantly?
• Both the right and left sides of the debate often use ignorant, ill-informed, and often bigoted reasons to defend their points of view.
• The US debates are very loud and numerous online, so Greek voices and other opinions outside the culture war dialogue are drowned out, and worse, dismissed. “It’s just a fantasy; authenticity shouldn’t matter.”

FFS I just want to go to the cinema, get some popcorn and enjoy a movie without having to see these battles played out on social media. But this is the world we live in now, sadly.

Anyway, I wanted to deeply explore why I was so disturbed by what Nolan did. However, I didn’t want to just consume all these YouTube videos from the US culture warriors. I went on a deep dive, and what I found was shocking:

There’s an insidious reason why Greek presence, heritage, culture and history have been removed from the movie.

It’s a symptom of a 200-year-old imperialistic, intellectual paradigm about Greece.

According to Farya Faraji, a Canadian-Iranian musicologist, Nolan’s creative decisions were unsurprising because he is just continuing the Northwestern European intellectual tradition, cultural imperialism, appropriation and ethnocentric view of Greek culture.

This intellectual tradition:

• “Westernises” ancient Greece by downplaying its Eastern Mediterranean and West Asian heritage and influences.
• Claims Greek culture as the foundation for Western culture.
• Has an almost unconscious desire to portray Greek culture as more “white” and “Western” so that this claim is more legitimate and narratively aligned.

This led me to discover a more shocking insight: the idea that modern Greeks are not considered white, and because of that are not considered inheritors of ancient Greece.

There’s this assumption that ancient Greeks were “purer” and more Nordic white (white, blonde, etc.) before they were “tainted” or “sullied” by the Ottomans.

As a result, modern Greek people are not considered inheritors of the ancient Greeks due to this “corruption.”

Condescendingly, some powers that be believe they (the Northwestern civilisations) are better caretakers of the Greek heritage than the Greeks themselves due to this.

Yiannis Baboulias also echoes Faraji’s thoughts, saying that “…classical Greek inheritance had migrated north and west and that the living Greeks were not its rightful custodians, contributed to a 19th-century German cultural framework in which that inheritance could be claimed by others entirely.” – On the Odyssey, because

From Greek City Times’ Nolan’s Odyssey Problem: Diversity Without Greeks Is Not Diversity:
“Greeks — like Italians, Armenians, Slavs and other Mediterranean or European ethnic groups — often occupy an awkward category within American racial politics. They are considered ‘white enough’ to be excluded from representation conversations, yet still ethnically and culturally distinct enough to be mined for mythology, history and aesthetics.

Hollywood wants the cultural prestige of Homer without feeling any obligation toward Greek cultural representation itself.”

Maria Stenos wrote a good piece about how this cultural appropriation became set in stone, so do read it: Diaspora Grief and the Hellenic Double Standard

“Greeks became marginalised within a Western academic landscape that preferred sanitised versions of Ancient Greek history over living Hellenic scholarship. The classics had been deemed shared inheritance, homogenised under the monolith of Western culture; modern Greeks were simply an inconvenience to that story.” – Maria Stenos

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My mind is blown by how terrible and unjust this is

This discovery has been challenging for me to process; I’m literally in disbelief as I wrote this in my journal:

So let me get this right. Some countries liked what they saw in Greece’s literary, cultural, and artistic traditions. They liked the prestige of having been formed by this thousands-of-years-old culture, so they appropriated it for themselves and said that their culture came from the Greeks. But then they discovered that the Greeks were not what they thought they were—meaning they were actually influenced by various cultures around the region, such as the Ottomans. You know, distinctly not like them. Not Western.

That becomes an inconvenient narrative because the heritage you claimed as yours actually came from a non-white, multiracial background. This is terribly inconvenient, so you decided to exclude this multiracial heritage. In fact, in the end, you excluded modern Greeks entirely because you believe they were influenced by and intermarried with peoples of other countries in the region, making them, in your eyes, not as “pure white” as you would like.

Over the years, you get comfortable with the belief that Western civilization has its foundation in Greek history, yet you refuse to acknowledge the Greeks, the originators of this culture.

Can we all say euw together?

I think most people aren’t even aware of this very long, centuries-old dynamic existing and playing out to this day because “Greek culture is the root of Western civilisation” is just taken as a fact when… well, it is probably not true?

I discussed this with a friend, and we were wondering – why won’t the French or the Germans claim Beowulf as the foundation of Western civilisation instead? Why Greek culture? Is it because it’s older and more prestigious?

Anyway, my mind is blown.

To the Greeks out there upset about what Nolan did: I hear you. I can’t imagine having the agency over my culture taken like this. I can’t imagine having my right as an inheritor of my own culture questioned due to some myth about the lack of my blood purity. Worse, to have my cultural products used like a football for someone else’s ideological battles…?

Despite being a Peranakan woman, my right to my Chinese heritage was never questioned, nor have I met any mainland Chinese who did not view me as a fellow Chinese and “child of the motherland.”

I remember having a conversation about this with a Chinese mainlander on Xiaohongshu. I told her how some people don’t consider me Chinese enough because of my lack of skill in Mandarin. The person expressed shock at such a thing. “What nonsense is this? There’s no question that you’re a child of China and a sister!” she exclaimed.

(Of course there are extreme nationalists, however, that would think otherwise, but they are a rarity.)

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Using another country’s cultural products to promote an ideology

So that’s why Nolan’s actions are adding salt to the wound, especially for the Greeks.

The Odyssey’s original meaning and themes have been replaced by an ideology that is not Homer’s. Instead of seeing the Odyssey from the worldview of the creator, Nolan chose to contort the Odyssey to suit his worldview, which is postmodern, nihilistic and devoid of spirituality.

I have no doubt that Nolan’s Odyssey will be entertaining because the man is a master entertainer and cinematographer.

It could even be a box office hit thanks to all that controversy and viral marketing.

However, those who are Greek and revere their Greek heritage, and those who love history, would probably not enjoy this movie, knowing what has been done in the name of entertainment.