Entertainment
Outrage Over Helen Of Troy Casting In The Odyssey, Accusations Of Screenwashing
By Jennifer Asencio
| Published
Christopher Nolan’s extravaganza version of The Odyssey has already met with some derision over some of the choices made by production. The costumes have been compared to bad Batman villains, and the dark aesthetic of the scenes that have been released to the public has been criticized for not reflecting the colorful style of classic Greek culture. The ships, an important part of a story about a sea voyage, look awful.
The casting has also caused a lot of controversy, especially now that there is a rumor going around that Lupita Nyong’O, known for Black Panther and Twelve Years a Slave, has been cast as Helen of Troy. The outcry over her is, of course, about her race, and defenders of a more classical Helen are being attacked as “racist” for supposedly not finding Nyong’O attractive.
The defense of Nyong’O’s alleged casting has been varied. One tactic has been to point out that nobody in the rest of the cast is Greek. That’s true, but it’s not like there weren’t complaints about, for example, Jon Berenthal being cast as Menelaus, King of Sparta and husband of Helen of Troy, or even Matt Damon in the lead as Odysseus. Just about every aspect of the ensemble casting of this movie has been complained about, from John Leguizamo to Anne Hathaway, not just Lupita Nyong’O.
Another angle of defense has been that it’s just fiction, so why should anyone care? Sure, it might be a fictionalized story, but there is a lot of history backing it up. Troy existed and was the site of many wars with various Greek city-states, most of which, including Helen’s hometown of Sparta, survive today. Homer wrote The Odyssey alongside The Iliad, which was the story of one such war. The mythic elements of the story, like interference from the gods and the various monsters Odysseus encounters, overlay specific historical, cultural, political, and even geographical narratives.
How Helen Of Troy Is Described In The Illiad And Why It Matters
Helen of Troy was one of those narratives. There is no evidence that she existed, but her beauty and supposedly divine origins were so highly prized that a war uniting much of Greece was said to have been waged over her. There were also political ramifications for kidnapping the Queen of Sparta that were deeply embedded in Greek notions of honor and lineage. Abducting Menelaus’s wife and mother of his child was a major humiliation that if left unanswered would have subjected Sparta to derision and attack. Greeks would not have gone to war over her if she wasn’t one of their own.
But Helen was also prized because she was the epitome of the Greek standards of beauty. Homer describes her carefully as fair, glowing skin, honey-colored hair, and deep blue eyes. This was so important to Greek culture that Homer noted it, as well as fellow classical Greek poets Euripides and Sappho. Greek art and sculpture depict her with classic Greek features based on these descriptions. We know what George Washington looks like, and paintings of him have only been around for 250 years. Physical depictions of Helen of Troy have been around for thousands of years and established an image of what her beauty represented to the Greeks.
Arguments that decry objections to Nyong’O’s casting thus fall flat when racism is invoked. The problem isn’t that Nyong’O isn’t attractive; it’s that she isn’t what the Greeks considered attractive. It imposes today’s standards of beauty not on an arbitrary work of narrative fiction, but on an epic that represented a cultural identity. Helen of Troy was more than just a character in a story, she was something like a national symbol. To this day, Greece is also called “Hellas.”
Another Example Of Screenwashing?
That, of course, has not stopped Nyong’O’s defenders from accusing detractors of racism; if anything, it’s supported the notion because who else likes blonde-haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed people?
It’s not that black people didn’t exist in Greece. They called them “Ethiopians” and treated them very fairly, because they didn’t have the notions of race that have developed over the past two decades. However, they also considered them an exotic curiosity. They were very aware black people existed, even accepted them as beautiful, and still didn’t depict Helen of Troy as one. That was a matter of cultural values, not racism. If inclusivity was the goal, there were plenty of other characters from Homer’s epicthey could have chosen.
Finally, there is the argument that “Helen of Troy was hatched from an egg. Why does it matter what race she is?” This is a little different from the “it’s fictional” argument because it questions the very roots of Greek culture, the gods. Helen’s parents were supposedly Leda, Queen of Sparta, and Zeus, King of Olympus and the Greek pantheon. If she was a real person, her real father would have been King Tyndareus, and a mythic layer of folklore (the egg) was added to her story to represent why she was blessed with such ethereal beauty.
But let’s go with the idea that she was hatched from an egg and Zeus is her father: either Sparta was ruled by an Ethiopian queen, which is very against Spartan and Greek character (and Homer’s era), or people handwaving the egg story are ignoring that it implies that the entire Greek culture is actually black. In Greek mythology, Zeus was the template Prometheus used when creating the Greek people. That Zendaya, another black actress, was cast as Athena, who is also Zeus’s offspring, makes you wonder what it’s really trying to say.
Maybe I’m defensive because half my heritage is not only Greek, but Spartan in particular. Maybe it’s the literature major in me that is annoyed that Christopher Nolan is treating a classic text of Greek literature like it’s nothing more than a Michael Bay action blockbuster.
But I can’t help but feeling that the oddly specific casting of Helen of Troy, which has yet to be debunked, is yet another attempt at subversion of Western culture and values through screenwashing. Nolan and his backers are trying to redefine concepts of beauty that have existed for thousands of years. And this time, rather than attacking through modern popular culture like video games and Star Trek, they’re “making a statement” by going after its honey-haired, fair-skinned roots.
screenwashed (adjective) — When something seen on a screen completely changes how someone thinks or feels, as if their old beliefs were erased and replaced by what they just saw.
I’m sure The Odyssey will have an audience who will pay for the fancy $250 million spectacle of effects or to see their favorites in some roles. Homer’s classic work will be absorbed into the blob of pop culture, while the Greek people it truly represented will barely merit a second glance because it was part of the foundation of a way of life many people think should cease to exist. I hope I’m not catastrophizing, but I expect that even if it’s bad, its failure will be blamed on “internet Nazis” and not on justified complaints about the vandalism of a staple of Western civilization.
We’ll find out this summer on July 17, 2026, when The Odyssey is released in theaters.