Have you seen The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Iron Age blockbuster? I haven’t. Have you read it in the Greek original? Me neither. Petty details like that shouldn’t stop us from joining the culture-war combat about the movie. This is a democracy, not Odysseus’s Greece. Not that Odysseus called it Greece. But enough with the nitpicking.Even before the film’s release, conservatives were picking Nolan’s nits. They complained about the “woke casting” of non-whites, especially Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. They complained about the historical accuracy of Odysseus’s boat. They complained about Nolan’s fealty to Homer’s original script. They complained that Matt Damon plays Odysseus with a Boston accent: “Have you come faah?” After the movie’s launch on July 17, conservatives shifted from attacking Hollywood to attacking each other.The grift is as strong as the wind that, when Odysseus and his band of Bronze Age thugs are within sight of Ithaca, sends them back for a decadelong tour of the Eastern Med. The movie cost a quarter of a billion dollars to make. It’s a popular entertainment. It’s got people talking about literature and translation, myth and manhood, the origins of the West and the future of America. It’s even got them buying new translations and studying Homeric Greek. Conservatives are so used to being in opposition that they’ve forgotten what winning looks like. Most of their objections don’t stand up.