History is often altered not just by erasure but also by revision. Imagine that nearly three millennia from now—a distance that separates us from Homer—a filmmaker produces a holographic epic in which, say, Indira Gandhi is portrayed with Chinese features. Would we applaud artistic freedom, or object that a historical person has been rewritten into someone she never was?
Recently, Netflix docu-series Queen Cleopatra depicted her as dark-skinned, prompting objections from Egyptian scholars and officials. Critics argued that the portrayal conflated modern identity politics with inconclusive evidence: Cleopatra VII belonged to the Ptolemaic dynasty, generally considered to be of Macedonian Greek descent, and surviving portraits and coinage suggest Hellenistic features. Opponents said the series blurred the line between historical probability and creative invention.
Supporters countered that ancient Egypt was cosmopolitan and that ethnic appearance cannot be determined definitively from limited material evidence. The dispute showed how reimagining a historical figure can inflame questions about evidence, intent and who gets to tell the past. Well, who gets to tell it? Mostly whites. And that is precisely why the argument cannot be reduced to casting alone: representation matters, but so does the right to distinguish between evidence and projection.
In Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, Helen is black. Many in Greece have objected. One could argue that Helen is not a historical character. But myths are a part of our consciousness. And so their depiction must be plausible. If not, why not depict Odysseus as an Arab Bedouin? If a retelling keeps the names—Penelope, Calypso, Circe, Troy—and the Bronze-Age Greek setting while rewiring the poem’s moral imagination to suit contemporary assumptions, why retain the ancient setting at all? At some point, the work stops being a retelling of Homer and becomes a political argument wearing Homeric costumes.
When does artistic licence become historical revision?
Every generation rewrites the classics, but a retelling succeeds only when it grows naturally from the original. When modern assumptions are grafted onto an ancient text while retaining its prestige and trappings, the result risks being less a conversation with Homer than a platform for a spectacle that soothes Western colonial guilt—what is often labelled political correctness.
Nolan’s protracted act of self-expiation has made him millions richer; in that sense, the exploitation continues at the expense of the less privileged. Nolan is the system even when he appears to oppose it. The language of correction, in other words, can become another form of domination when used to overwrite rather than interpret.
Reinvention keeps literature alive, but there is a difference between retelling and replacement. V S Khandekar’s Yayati, for example, begins with a fragment from the Mahabharata and expands what the original merely suggests—probing desire in old age, choice and consequence.
James Joyce in Ulysses never pretended Leopold Bloom was literally Odysseus (in his Latin name); he transplanted the epic’s themes—identity, survival and homecoming—into modern Dublin. Bloom’s alcoholic binges and scurrilous adventures are the essence of his human condition; his rise can be effected only through his fall. Joyce’s achievement lies in the openness of the transplant: he relocates the epic without pretending otherwise. These works grow from the originals’ spirit rather than grafting modern dogma onto ancient myths.
If fidelity matters for geography, chronology and mythology, why should it not also matter for character and moral vision? Conversely, if fidelity is unnecessary, why not relocate the story entirely? The honest alternative, then, is adaptation without agendas of an overt political nature.
Consider Odysseus’s character. If he were not cunning and morally ambiguous, his role in the Trojan war would be next to nil. In Homer’s telling, his survival often comes at the cost of others; that ‘toxicity’ is his character. At the same time, when Odysseus confronts Penelope’s suitors, he relapses into violence with vengeance rather than relying on guile. Penelope, who earlier says, “It’s a man’s world and I am doing what I can,” accepts this. How deep, then, was Nolan’s transformation of character? If the hero’s intelligence, ruthlessness and irony all turn to regret, the myth loses its charm.
Or Circe. Nolan recasts her as a contemporary ideological figure; Homer’s Circe is more mythic and ambivalent. She turns men into swine not to prosecute masculinity (Nolan’s Circe says that a man is a pig in disguise), but because enchantment is her nature. She is a compulsive and practising witch. When Odysseus resists her spell with Hermes’s help, she restores his companions and becomes his guide—dangerous, compassionate, seductive and wise. But her complexity comes from myth, not manifesto. She is not a slogan in human form but a being of power, ambiguity and enchantment.
Nolan’s Odyssey, four years in the making and costing roughly $250 million, reads less as a tribute to Homer than as its woke critique. It is prescriptive. It is long on political intention and short on dramatic complexity. Syncopy, the company he co-owns, spent $125 million—to build the woke illusion. The winner is Nolan, not Homer. And so, at the end of it all, Nolan—a privileged British white male—sails into the sunset in his private yacht, just like his Ulysses. A pleasure trip to the West, where the death of the East began and continues. Like his hero, Nolan gets to kill, mourn and to holiday. The white man wins again.
C P Surendran | Author whose latest volume of poetry is Window with a Train Attached
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)
