The Odyssey as a Chud Cognitive Extinction Event
Christopher Nolan's latest film drives culture warriors without culture insane.
Thanks for reading Contra. Become a subscriber today if you aren’t already.
Philip K. Dick wrote that if “you can float enough disinformation into circulation you will totally abolish everyone’s contact with reality, probably your own included.” And I can’t imagine a better way to describe the collective cognitive state of the right, as evidenced by the response from chuds to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Don’t worry, you don’t need to have seen it because this isn’t a review. The positively psychotic reaction playing out online is probably a more entertaining movie anyway.
First, here are some facts about the film. As of this writing, The Odyssey has generated more than $264 million globally, putting it ahead of Nolan’s opening numbers for Oppenheimer. On Rotten Tomatoes, audiences rate it 97% fresh. Its “A” grade on CinemaScore is even more impressive because that figure is derived from in-person polling of opening-night moviegoers at randomly selected theaters. Put plainly, it’s already a massive success with the majority of viewers, not just professional critics, although it has unsurprisingly received high marks from those as well. None of this should come as a surprise, considering the director and the subject matter: not just a foundational text of the West, but an essential cornerstone of human storytelling that has fired imaginations for thousands of years. And now Nolan has done his part to keep the flame burning. According to data from Circana BookScan, print unit sales across all editions of The Odyssey are up 76%. On the Amazon Best Seller list, editions translated by Emily Wilson and Robert Fagles have climbed into third and ninth place, respectively.
So an acclaimed director produced another successful film based on a timeless epic, inspiring a whole new generation of people to either revisit or acquaint themselves with Homer for the first time. That is an unqualified triumph at a time when people are fretting about “the end of reading.”
However, you wouldn’t know any of the above if all your news and information came from Twitter, where MAGA seems to have suffered a collective psychotic break, unable to cope with the popularity of a film that they’ve been rooting against since before it was ever released.
Writing in Jacobin, Matt McManus sets it up nicely:
For almost a year now, the Right has been raging against Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey, with the pitch getting ever shriller as trailers and promos showed off the film’s shockingly multiethnic cast. Back in May, Elon Musk insinuated that Nolan “desecrated the Odyssey so that he would be eligible for an Academy Award,” referring to the academy’s new rules mandating diversity in film productions in order to qualify for Oscars. Days ago, legendary keyboard warrior Michael Knowles breathlessly agreed, speculating that the epic was reworked to adapt to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s “DEI requirements.” Musk described Nolan’s opus as “pissing on Homer’s grave” and “anti-white.” No less than the greatest model of performative masculinity in ours or any other age, the Matt Walsh, accused Nolan of “emasculating” Homer. Months before the film was even released, Walsh speculated the movie might be “the worst film adaptation ever made” and complained about casting “sub-Saharan African” actress Lupita Nyong’O as Helen—the most beautiful woman in the world. Walsh, one of the artists responsible for the conservative comedy film Lady Ballers, called Nolan a coward who could never be a great artist because he is pandering to the decayed spirit of our woke age.
There was also a lot of outrage when the news broke of Elliot Page being cast as Achilles.
Only that was never true.
Page plays Sinon—a Greek warrior mentioned in Virgil’s Aeneid—who convinces the Trojans to accept the gift of “a horse of mountainous size.” I think Nolan’s inclusion of Sinon was clever, and could not care less that he cast Page in the role.
Though it was always a lie, the rumor about Page playing Achilles was promoted by grifters and garbage outlets like Breitbart. Then Musk, naturally, joined the dogpile and seemed to make it his personal mission to sink the movie before it ever hit theaters. The world’s richest man appears to value, above all, being perceived as the king of the online dumpster fire he lit when he took over Twitter, presumably because money can’t buy respect or the love of his estranged children.
In the shadow world inhabited by right-wing culture warriors such as Musk, these and other creative choices by Nolan reflected some grand conspiracy against the white race, heterosexuality, and the West itself. The average person is not particularly affected by someone like Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy. They don’t care that the cast was multiethnic and, by the way, the Greeks don’t care either. The Odyssey smashed the pre-sale record previously held by Avengers: Endgame in Greece, the country whose culture Nolan supposedly disrespected.
If the Greeks can live with Nolan’s direction, why can’t MAGA? Because Nolan’s epic had to fail in their minds, for its success would violate the strongly held delusions of the worst people in America. Misery loves company, and there is no more miserable group than MAGA chuds who believe that 2024 represented some national cultural shift in their favor, a death blow to everything they deem “woke.” That is why the predictable success of The Odyssey hit their brains like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.
It turns out that the average person does not bristle at the sight of a minority on screen or become incensed at Anne Hathaway’s portrayal of a strong Queen Penelope. This is not a surprise if you are normal, though it has come again as a shock to MAGA—too strong a shock, apparently. Instead of admitting defeat, the right has spiraled into new extremes of cope. It has latched onto one conspiracy theory after another, from claiming that there is a vast plot afoot to rig reviews in favor of The Odyssey on every website to insisting that the box office numbers are only good because Nolan is buying the tickets in bulk. The Venn diagram of people who believe the 2020 election was stolen and people who believe booked-out theaters across America are actually empty is a perfect circle.
It was bad enough when the brain spores emitted by Donald Trump only directed the infected to engage in the conspiratorial nonsense related to politics. All this is truly, without an ounce of exaggeration, downstream of Trump, who battered the brains of his supporters until they became convinced that they cannot lose, only be cheated, thus precluding the possibility of good faith discussion. My time in the world of right-wing media and politics exposed me to the most dishonest, cynical, shockingly self-interested individuals I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting, and who publicly portray themselves as paragons of patriotism and virtue—the living, breathing pillars upholding a beleaguered “Western Civilization.” In reality, they’re the cancer eating away at it from within, and the sum of their political contributions over the last decade has been to cast vice as virtue, moral profligacy as piety.
But now this malignancy has spread well beyond politics, seeping into virtually every aspect of American life it touches. It has just become a feature of current events now that MAGA will become enraged at the dumbest, smallest things imaginable, attempt to ruin whatever it is that brings others joy, then move on to the next object of their ire, like cultural locusts. It is actually difficult to tell the difference between cynical grifters who are just ragebaiting to make a buck—Musk’s contribution to the public discourse was incentivizing the equivalent of shitting in your hand and pitching the load into a crowd—and true believers who are sincerely convinced that Nolan is the latest James Bond villain masterminding some grand conspiracy with no greater purpose than humiliating the chuds, when nobody does that better than chuds themselves.
PKD would have laughed, or wept, at the sight of these people proudly smashing reality to bits to get a leg up over their enemies, only to realize that they don’t know how to fit the broken pieces back together. They don’t even remember breaking them.