I want to briefly (finally) talk about why some Greeks are upset about the Nolan Odyssey casting, because I think the actual reasons are getting buried under the racist and transphobic backlash that doesn't deserve the time of day. There's some crucial historical context that a lot of people are missing, and I want to lay it out.
The core of the grievance is that Greek antiquity has been narrated on screen overwhelmingly by British and American actors for the better part of a century, for stories that belong to a culture that is very much still here. The Odyssey production, funded in part by several million euros in Greek government subsidies, produced a cast that is, to my knowledge, entirely non-Greek.
Why does this matter, though? Greek epics are part of the Western canon and taught everywhere. Doesn't that make them fair game, free to be reinterpreted by anyone without a second thought? To answer that, it helps to look at how they got folded into that canon in the first place.
Firstly, this is not a new phenomenon so much as the latest iteration of a much older one, traceable at least back to the eighteenth century, when parts of Europe began constructing ancient Greece as their own intellectual inheritance. The claim, in essence, was that the intellectual and aesthetic achievements of classical Athens flowed forward not into the Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian, Ottoman-ruled population actually living on that land, but into contemporary Western Europe.
That claim required a certain amount of erasure to hold together. The people constructing "Greece" as a philosophical and aesthetic category in Weimar, Paris, and London were doing so entirely without reference to, or need for, actual Greek input. Fortunately for them, at that exact moment, Greece was under Ottoman rule, and had no institutional voice in how its own antiquity was being interpreted by people who had never set foot there.
The consequences of that arrangement outlasted that moment. Modern Greeks have been forced to inherit both the prestige of their ancient ancestry and the burden of never quite living up to a version of themselves invented for them by outsiders -- a mismatch so pronounced that foreign visitors to Greece were frequently disappointed to discover that the Greeks they encountered bore little resemblance to the imagined version of Greeks dreamed up by the West.
This is the deeper structural issue underneath something as seemingly trivial as film casting. Greek antiquity has functioned, for two and a half centuries, as cultural material seemingly available to the West precisely because Greece's own claim to authority over it was never taken seriously to begin with.
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