Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has just been released, but months before it was out, its casting had already acquired the texture of an internet morality play.
There is something deliciously ironic about watching audiences invoke the sanctity of historical accuracy to defend a woman who, according to legend, hatched from an egg.Casting Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy inspired the predictable chorus: she could not have been dark-skinned. Even Elliot Page’s casting provoked another cycle of outrage. Is he playing Achilles? How can a trans man play the golden boy of Greek mythology? Then, the internet found out he was playing a Greek warrior, Sinon, and yet the indignation remained. Page is, after all, a transperson.
But Zendaya as Athena has generated comparatively little resistance. A reminder that audiences are remarkably flexible about diversity when it is packaged within an already familiar ideal of beauty. Plus, she is biracial.All these long-drawn debates regarding the castings have been dressed up as fidelity to Homer. However, it is, in fact, a debate about beauty standards and about who has historically been allowed to embody them.What would Homer say?
This kerfuffle would have left Homer himself baffled. His Helen belongs to the porous territory where myth and poetry constantly trespass upon each other. His was a world where gods walk among mortals, prophecies determine kingdoms, and the most famous woman in literature is born through divine intervention. The modern insistence on forensic realism would have seemed alien to an epic that never aspired to document precision.The textual evidence is even thinner than many of Nolan’s critics appear to believe. Helen has just once been described as having “pale arms” — an epithet that classicists have long understood less as a racial category than as an aristocratic one. Pale skin in antiquity frequently signified a life away from agricultural labour, the complexion of privilege rather than ethnicity. Homer’s poetry offers metaphor and convention; it does not provide a casting call.Representation is one of art’s oldest promises that every generation should be able to find itself reflected in the stories it inherits. When children and adults alike see people who look like them occupying the centre of a story rather than its margins, it expands the ownership of that work.The confidence with which contemporary audiences visualise Helen owes far less to ancient Greece than to centuries of European art. Renaissance painters, Victorian illustrators, neoclassical sculpture and, eventually, Hollywood all settled upon a singular visual depiction of feminine perfection: fair skin, symmetrical features, European physiognomy. Repetition hardened convention into certainty until an artistic tradition came to masquerade as historical fact.
