TOM EATON | Note to Christopher Nolan: Make America Greek Again

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Elon Musk has thoughts. Limited thoughts, obviously, but still, as he and his fellow pearl-clutchers whip the white right into a froth about a film it hasn’t seen, based on a book it hasn’t read, it’s worth glancing at one particularly wretched sideshow for a brief moment.

Our story starts in Hollywood, where director Christopher Nolan is about to release his latest Imax epic based on one of humanity’s oldest and most inspiring stories: Matt Damon trying to get home.

Having got home from D-Day and then from Mars, our Matt is now trying to get home from Troy, playing Ulysses in Nolan’s upcoming take on Homer’s Odyssey, or at least those highlights you cobble together from the back cover for your essay in first year Classics.

It goes without saying that Nolan’s film will be grand to look at, and we might even hear seven or eight memorable words of dialogue through the relentless foghorn that is the modern film score. It will feature monsters, gods and Charlize Theron.

But what it won’t feature is history, because, of course, the Odyssey is myth, which is what stories in the fantasy section of the bookshop start being called if they stay in print long enough.

This is not to say that Nolan is going to be making things up, or at least not more than any of the many, many artists who have adapted the story over the last almost 3,000 years.

If the trailer tells us anything it’s that Nolan is playing this fairly straight, resisting the modern urge to reimagine the cyclops as a misunderstood outsider driven into homicidal rages by the nonexistence in the Bronze Age of eye drops.

But this hasn’t been enough to spare Nolan from the wrath of Musk and his legion of the triggered, who are enraged by a particular piece of casting which, they say, is a gross violation of the “historical accuracy” of a story featuring women with birds’ bodies and men turned into pigs.

To be fair, I can see their point: casting an Afrikaner from Benoni as Circe, the daughter of the sun god Helios, is wildly inaccurate and — oh, wait, sorry, no, they’re totally fine with that one.

No, the thing Musk and the broflakes are terribly upset about is that the character of Helen — fathered by a god disguised as a swan, and subsequently hatched from an egg — is being played by a brown-skinned woman from Kenya and not an historically accurate pink woman from Los Angeles.

All across X furious men who learned their history by watching Xena Warrior Princess are denouncing Nolan for betraying and vandalising “white culture” and “white history” by casting Lupita Nyong’o as the woman whose beauty and a lack of adequate divorce lawyers launched a thousand ships. Helen, they insist, was Greek and therefore white.

Of course, this would have been fairly startling news to many of their great-grandparents, who were so alarmed by the arrival of Greek and Italian immigrants in the early 20^th century that they persuaded the US government to institute strict immigration quotas from southern Europe, far stricter than those on northern Europeans.

Indeed, if you’d asked any of the old Wasp families during the Gilded Age — the America Donald Trump and MAGA seem to yearn for most strongly — if Greeks were part of “white culture” they’d have choked on their New England clam chowder.

It’s all rather silly. But noteworthy perhaps about this week’s rancour is that it’s a sequel; a repeat of an identical tantrum Musk first threw about Nyong’o back in February when he tweeted that Nolan had “lost his integrity”, a very strange choice of words by a man who had begged Jeffrey Epstein to tell him when his “wildest party” would happen.

So why has it come back? It’s possible that Musk is simply sad and bored. But I find it interesting that he is serving up a reheated culture war on X just as public sentiment turns against the AI oligarchy, and even Trump’s cult begins to wonder if it really is Jesus’s will that they give all their savings to oil companies and their jobs to robots while their president rakes in a reported $4bn in personal income in his first year in office.

Culture wars have worked for the Epstein class for the last decade, and perhaps it’s worth one more try; getting the little people to quarrel over flickering images of fairytales as you rob them blind.

• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.