'The Odyssey' Is Inspiring Unprecedented Levels of Cope

Elon Musk and the online right convinced themselves that Christopher Nolan's "woke" epic would go down in flames. For months, Elon Musk and the right-wing cranks he caters to on X have whipped themselves into a raging froth over the supposed desecration of an ancient Greek poem by one of the most successful movie directors alive. Now that their manufactured backlash has bombed, they're searching for ways to cope with the reality that they are increasingly divorced from popular opinion. Christopher Nolan's artistic crimes in bringing to the screen, according to Musk and others in a furor, were instances of what they called "historical inaccuracy" in a lavish fantasy teeming with monsters, witches, and undead spirits--mainly the casting of Lupita Nyong'o, who is Black, as Helen of Troy, and Elliot Page, who is trans, as Sinon. The grand total of approximately 10 minutes of screen time between these actors in a three-hour saga, combined with the general hysteria over "wokeness" in Hollywood, a rejection of Americanized dialog, and lingering misogyny regarding scholar Emily Wilson's 2017 translation of Homer's epic (the first by a woman), resulted in countless teeth-gnashing posts and calls for a boycott that never materialized.