Elon Musk's Meltdown Targets Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy in Nolan's Odyssey.
In doing so, he shows himself to be the white supremacist, racist bigot he is--and flunks mythology at the same time.
Mythology professor here! Ph.D. in mythology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2017. Wrote my dissertation on the archetypal magic within Guillermo del Toro’s three Spanish-language films. So, I feel quite certain I have a right to speak on this matter.
To be honest, though, Thomas Chatterton Williams nailed it this morning in his article “The Absurd Misunderstanding Fueling the Debate Over The Odyssey” for The Atlantic.
When he starts off, you think he’s talking about Nyong’o as Helen, but he’s not. He’s talking about the hissy fit people pitched when Scarlett Johansson was cast in Ghost in the Shell (2017), the film adaptation of a Japanese manga story.
“Whitewashing!” they howled. But Johansson’s character wasn’t even human: she was a cyborg whose “whose race and gender” Williams notes, “are, in fact, mutable.” Is that a Japanese cyborg or an American cyborg? The answer to this question is neither: it’s just a race-less cyborg!
This wasn’t the only one. Rage erupted when Anglo Naomi Watts portrayed Spanish physician Maria Alvarez Belón. Belón’s story of (barely) surviving the Boxing Day Tsunmni at the Orchid Resort Hotel in Khao Lak, Thailand, became the movie The Impossible. Belón was vacationing with her husband Enrique Alvárez and sons Lucas, Tomás and Simón. Watts was white; Watts was blonde; Watts didn’t have a Spanish accent or speak Spanish; Watts wasn’t Hispanic. To hell with Watts.
Alvarez Belón adamantly defended the movie’s portrayal of her character as a white woman and the featuring of a white star as immaterial to the human portrayal of an event that killed a quarter of a million people. [BTW, Alvarez Belón is still a practicing physical and medical school professor. Her son Lucas, played in the film by Tom Holland, first saved his mother and then went to medical school and became a doctor himself, doing coronavirus research in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic.]
Now, of course, we’ve got Elon Musk vilifying both Lupita Nyong’o and director Christopher Nolan for the director’s choice to cast a Black woman as Helen of Troy. Musk and fellow conservative racist ranter Matt Walsh whined:
"Not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is 'the most beautiful woman in the world.' But Christopher Nolan knows that he would be called racist if he gave 'the most beautiful woman' role to a white woman. Nolan is technically talented but a coward. Too afraid to do anything that even slightly challenges the spirit of the age."
Musk jumped in and agreed and then added:
"True.”
Then he went on, in the following days, to rant:
“Chris Nolan has lost his integrity,”
And …
And, apparently unable to hold back, he added:
“Chris Nolan is pissing on Homer’s grave. Disgraceful.”
And what every bit of this reveals is:
Elon Musk gets an F- on The Odyssey.
As well as being an irredeemable white supremacist, misogynist, and racist, Elon Musk is so ignorant and poorly educated it’s difficult to know even where to begin.
Homer never tells us what Helen looks like.
No, not a word in the whole of The Odyssey about what Helen looks like. No description of hair color or eye color or skin color.
Helen is not fully human.
Helen is the daughter of Leda, wife of a king of Sparta, and Zeus. Now, if Elon wants to take up an issue, do take up the staggering number of rapes committed by the Greek gods. Zeus is always raping someone. Here’s an abridged list of the victims, raped by Zeus or another god, the rape often accomplished by possessing a mortal man or shape-shifting into an animal: Atalanta, Alcippe, Alcmene, Apomosyne, Auge, Callisto, Cassandra, Chione, Cassiopeia, Cyrene, Demeter, Dryope, Europa, Halie, Harpalce, Io, Liriope, Metis, Nemesis, Nicaea, Persephone, Procris, Philomena, Rhea and Tyro. Why don’t you correct this travesty, Elon!!! How about you, Matt???
And then there’s the rape of Leda, wife of a King of Sparta, by Zeus, in the famous myth Leda and the Swan. This is how we’re going to get Helen of Troy. Most of the art around this is very dodgy! Michelangelo’s is downright pornographic. This one, by François-Édouard Picot, painted around 1832, is as sanitized as it gets.
Now, it’s said that Leda made love to her husband Tyndareus on the same day she was raped by Zeus. So when she turns up pregnant, she’s pregnant by both of them and will have twins for both of them. But these two sets of twins—Helen and Pollux, fathered by Zeus and demi-gods themselves—and Clytemnestra and Castor, fathered by Tyndareus.
Helen wasn’t born, she was hatched.
When it’s time they are born, however, Leda doesn’t give birth as a human, she lays two eggs! So, Helen isn’t born: she’s hatched, along with her twin brother Pollux. Helen marries King Menalaus. But she’s going to fall in love with Paris, son of King Priam of Troy.
And Homer, who’s blind, is never going to say a word about what she looks like, just that she is of surpassing beauty.0
Elon Musk then proceeds to flunk Mythology.
We’d like to believe that when someone becomes as craven as Elon Musk, it’s really not true—that somewhere deep down he “gets” what it is to be human, but he does not. He is so shallow he can’t see the archetypal depth that makes myths (1) last for millennia and (2) be relatable to ever person on earth. The Odyssey has been continuously “in print” for 2,600 years.
Other biggies are:
The Mahabharata, from India, especially the story of Krishna and Arjuna, which was made into the film The Legend of Bagger Vance with Matt Damon and Charlize Theron (and nobody complained those two are white).
The Prose Edda, from early Norse areas of Northern Europe. Nobody’s yelling that Thor is played by an Australian.
The Arthurian Legends, from England, Spain and France.
The Popol Vuh, the Mayan creation story from Belize / Guatemala / Honduras.
The Divine Comedy, from Italy. Structurally and functionally, the Commedia is the inverse mirror image of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, from Tibet.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Sumerian myth of the quest for immortality, from which the story of Noah and the Flood are likely taken.
Ponce de León’s Quest for the Fountain of Youth, from Spain and legends learned in the New World.
Hercules: The Twelve Labors as a Quest for Redemption, Greece.
The Iliad and The Odyssey, by Homer, Greece. Note: there were more than 400 versions of The Odyssey when it arrived at compilation, and the myth had been around in the Peloponnesus for hundreds of years, being told by hundreds of bards, each with their own expression.
Dine Bahane’, the Navajo Creation Story, Southwestern North America.
The Myth of Isis and Osiris, ancient Egypt.
The Tales of Anansi the Spider, Africa.
Maui the Trickster Hero, Polynesia.
The Collected Tales of he Tuatha Dé Danann, the supernatural race that precedes present-day humans in Irish mythology, here depicted in John Duncan‘s Riders of the Sidhe (1911).
Now, Elon, I’m trying to be patient with the slower learners, but you are out of your depth and need to shut up.
The point, Elon, is that all the myths above are archetypal, meaning they transcend the cultures in which they were originally written and thus belong to everyone on earth (as Lupita Nyong-o implied). They are the gifts of the collective unconscious to all of us and cannot be possessed by any single culture, race, or ethnicity.
And now, Elon, there are a RAFT of white people who have played people of color, the most shocking of which was probably Sir Lawrence Olivier as Othello. But a broader list is here: Charlton Heston as Genghis Khan and Luise Rainer as a main Chinese character in The Good Earth. Not to mention the piece de resistance: Linda Hunt played the male Billy Kwan, a Chinese Australian photojournalist who mentors a foreign correspondent in Jakarta during political unrest: Hunt won a supporting Oscar for this film, The Year of Living Dangerously.
There was no outcry, giving lie to Musk and Walsh’s rant that if a white played a non-White character woke folk would have fit. No, they don’t.
https://fictionhorizon.com/white-actors-who-played-people-of-color-in-movies/
But still, if Louise Rainer plays a Chinese woman from a book, it’s OK. Actors portray people they are not.
Besides, Elon, there’s something else to consider …
The Whitewashing of The Odyssey
Elon, if the image above doesn’t bother you, why? ALL these people are Anglos or blonde, blue-eyed Germans. Why doesn’t this whitewashing bother you? Does it bother you?
Well, it is NOT bother me. The archetypal story of The Odyssey can be told in the tongue, with the ideosyncratic touches, with the ethnic actors of any and every culture, race and color stepping in for Achilles, Helen, Priam, Paris, and Odysseus.
And Zendaya as Athena?
It also does not bother me that Zendaya is going to play Athena, Odysseus’s patron goddess.
Zendaya’s been lucky to escape Elon’s wrath, but then Zendaya, though also a beautiful Black woman, is not the spectacularly beautiful deep, rich black that Lupita Nyong-o gifts us. Elon? Matt? Does she “pass”?
And then there’s another deity to talk about.
The Whitewashing of Jesus Christ
Here’s the whitewashing done by the whole white world on the savior they hold most dear. A typical image of Jesus. This is what we’re used to seeing.
Looks right, doesn’t it? White, Western European Jesus with light brown hair and white hands and face.
But it’s not right—at all. Writes BBC.com:
In 2001 forensic anthropologist Richard Neave created a model of a Galilean man for a BBC documentary, Son of God, working on the basis of an actual skull found in the region. He did not claim it was Jesus's face. It was simply meant to prompt people to consider Jesus as being a man of his time and place, since we are never told he looked distinctive.
If you met the One who was One with God and he looked like this, would you listen to him? If you were Elon Musk, almost certainly not.
Appropriating the World
The problem here is that there are two things, one natural and one unnatural.
Naturally, we tend to see everything good as being like us: kindness, beauty like Helen’s, goodness, and rights of all kinds. Every culture has some tendency to do this. Ever person does this. And we want to push away—project outward—the things about ourselves we don’t like and pretend those belong to an external person, race, ethnicity, or culture. Even if projection is a fault for all of us, we must resist it, expose ourselves to the truth, and help others not to do the same thing. Otherwise, we just slaughter other people.
But unnaturally, some cultures—like Nazi Germany—see in their whiteness all that is holy, elevated, imbued with authority and rights higher than those of others. This great evil and fatal error has been going on in Western Culture since the Doctrine of Discovery, signed in the 15th century, allowed white Western Europe to appropriate and destroy 56,000,000 people in the New World and transport and work to death 12,000,000 Africans deemed not even human by people who wanted to use them.
We all owe Christopher Nolan for this conversation and for his immense courage in casting Lupita Nyong-o as Helen of Troy—Zendaya as the Goddess Athena—and Elliot Page as Achilles. He would have known the profound controversy he would unleash, and it’s a very, very necessary upheaval with which we reckon.
And as for Nyong-0—the Yale alumna who won an Academy Award for her role in Twelve Years a Slave, as well as a Screen Actors’ Guild Award, a Daytime Emmy Award, nominations for two British Academy Film Awards, a Golden Globe Award and a Tony Award—she would have known, too. All of these, their incredibly supportive acting mates and the entire crew would have known.
This culture owes these people a great debt, especially when White Supremacy viciously punishes every person who stands up and fights for a place in this world for everyone.
Thank you, Christopher, Lupita, Elliot, Zendaya, Tom, Robert, John, Anne, Matt and the hundreds of others who would not stay silent and would create great art.
I will see you there.
P.S. to Alec Baldwin: Way to go!!!! Nice move, buddy!!!!