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Word has it that the latest trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is the most disliked on YouTube of his entire career, which is saying something for a filmmaker who has such a slavishly devoted fanbase. At issue is Nolan’s, shall we say, loose treatment of historical accuracy (while at the same time skiting about such things as not using an orchestral score, ‘because orchestras weren’t invented then’). Not to mention a surprisingly slavish devotion to modern Hollywood’s DEI and race-swapping fetishes, especially an uber-negroid Helen of Troy (lampooned as ‘the face that launched a thousand cross-Channel dinghies’).
But is it so surprising that Nolan’s film apparently embraces wokeism? It’s notable that he relied on Emily Wilson’s ‘feminist’ translation of the Odyssey that was widely praised by the chattering media, but panned by scholars who called it ‘distorting and misrepresenting’.
Even the 2004 version of the Iliad, Troy, which is now being contrasted favourably with Nolan’s trailers, softened the original considerably. Presumably because the Greeks straight up raping and child-murdering would be too ‘triggering’ for ‘the modern audience’.
The biggest problem for modern academia and entertainment, though, is that the classics are ‘problematic’, mostly, it appears, because those ‘dead white males’ are just so much better than any of the dogshit churned out by the Margaret Atwoods and Toni Morrisons of today.
A civilization confident in itself reads the Iliad. A civilization in decline denounces it. Guess which one we are.
A confident civilization does not quake at the sight of Homer. It does not avert its gaze from Pericles or issue trigger warnings before mentioning Caesar. It does not treat the Iliad like some toxic spill to be cordoned off by hazmat crews. Yet ours does.
The ancients are now treated as cultural contraband. Donna Zuckerberg solemnly warns that the “alt-right” is mainlining Plato as a gateway narcotic to fascism. Curtis Dozier and Patrice Rankine insist that admiring Achilles is a goose-step straight to Charlottesville. Even Mary Beard, once a formidable scholar, now spends her days rebuking anyone rash enough to suggest the West owes anything to Greece and Rome.
This isn’t scholarship. It’s desecration. Homer’s world, where men are men and fate is cruel, cannot be endured by the progressive catechism. Aristotle insists virtue is real. Cicero thunders against tyranny. Solon shows law-restraining chaos. These truths refuse to be domesticated, so the modern vandals in the academy smear them as toxic.
The ancients’ unforgivable sin is their greatness. They still tower over our cramped, bureaucratic age. They remind us that “dead white males” built a civilization whose achievements remain unmatched. Roger Scruton often observed that what makes them intolerable to progressives is precisely this sense of scale – they oblige us to see our lives as small, our slogans as petty, our bureaucracies as grotesque parodies of civilization.
As in literature, so too in music. Beethoven, Mozart and Wagner are rejected in favour of some obscure, preferably dusky or feminine non-entity who has previously been justifiably relegated to the dustbin of history simply by not being all that great. Notably, more of the great classical composers are played in Asia than in Europe today.
Greece and Rome are not museum curios. They are the source code of our civilization. The Chinese, who are not fools, read Homer because they know it is our source code. A people that deletes its code becomes prey to every passing fad.
The Americans at their founding understood this. Washington was hailed as Cincinnatus, the general who returned to his plow. Adams devoured Cicero. The Federalist Papers throb with Roman precedent. The founders knew liberty’s language was Greek, its framework Roman.
Today’s elites treat that inheritance as an ideological contaminant, a cultural bat virus to be locked down and quarantined. Their thuggish, knuckle-dragging footsoldiers tear down the Founding Fathers’ statues with all the blind, ignorant rage of Maoist Red Guards.
Nolan’s trailer backlash is merely the latest symptom. Hollywood can’t leave the past alone: it must race-swap, rebrand Achilles as a proto-feminist and turn the Trojan War into a sermon on equity. The same contempt that drives academia to issue trigger warnings before mentioning Caesar now infects blockbuster cinema. Greatness itself is the unforgivable sin.
The classics also risk showing the venality and corruption of our contemporary elite. The Gracchi brothers fought to defend Rome’s small farmers driven from their plots by vast slave estates. Replace slaves with low-wage migrants and the picture is identical: citizens displaced, the republic weakened and the elites enriched.
So the academy invents a phantom menace: the ‘Antiquity-to-Alt-Right Pipeline’. The real pipeline runs the other way, from once-great classics departments to the far-left pipeline.
The real danger is not a toga-clad Twitter troll quoting Homer between memes. It’s that the modern vandals are running the academy, toppling the statues and deleting our civilisational source code. Thus, when the storm comes, we will have tossed aside the sword and shield that once saved us.
Nolan’s trailer hate-bomb is just the latest skirmish. The classics remain dangerous: not to civilisation, but to those who would swap memory for ideology, history for dogma and liberty for surveillance. Once men remember Pericles and Solon, Scipio and the Gracchi, they may also remember that freedom is their inheritance – and that civilisations fall when they forget it.
