Elon Musk as a Film Critic: He Took on Nolan over the Casting of the “Odyssey”
“Helen of Troy was blonde, fair-skinned, and had a face that launched a thousand ships, because she was so beautiful that men went to war for her. Casting choices that make the premise incoherent are admissions that the story was never the point, while the author is insulted. Nolan has lost his integrity,” Musk wrote.
Source: Protagon.gr
Elon Musk publicly and officially revealed his Neo-Nazi identity about a year ago, at the inauguration of the also flirting with Nazism (despite his denials) newly elected president. Beaming with triumph over the rise of his friend and ideological ally Donald Trump to the highest office in the United States, he raised his arm in a Hitler-style salute. “What further need have we of witnesses?” Not even his daily reminders of the fervent love he professes for the “Aryan man” of the white race are required—modeled, of course, on his fair-haired president, still blond even in his eighties. Hence his rage at the daring director of Odysseus, who dared—“ahistorically,” as Musk assures us—to cast a Black woman as the “Beautiful,” yet unfaithful, Helen, wife of Menelaus.
Musk is also known for “playing history at his fingertips,” tossing around references, opinions, interpretations, and judgments. Always, of course, as dictated by the jumble of notions tormenting his disturbed mind, while imposing the protocol of capitalist ideology in its far-right and neo-Nazi manifestation. In this case, he could hardly refrain from commenting, with the familiar racist, delirious fury of his like-minded peers, on Nolan’s choice to give the role to a Black woman rather than to a White, blond, curly-haired, green-eyed, slender Helen.
We will not dwell on this point, since History has failed to preserve for us any information as to whether the people of Homer’s mythical Sparta were white, Black, or dark-skinned. The chances that they were—if not Black, given that life began in Africa—then at least dark-complexioned, are infinitely greater than the likelihood that they possessed snow-white skin under the scorching sun of the Mediterranean. Something else, however, is worth brief comment, since the obvious and elementary—especially in History—require neither verbosity nor endless recycling of the same statements.
Indeed, in Greece since time immemorial, in various versions—such as in the beautiful tale of the radiant Helen, wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta—we say that “a woman’s pussy can drag a ship.” Such is its power! This, therefore, is why Musk, who merely skims the pages of History, believed that even in that ancient era it was Helen’s “genitalia” that dragged an entire army from cattle-raising Euboea to the immensely wealthy Troy.
Let us substantiate the opposite. Behind every myth, we say in History, there may lie at least half a historical truth. In the myth of lost Oechalia, for example, even its very name suggests that the place once so called was a “sea that receded” (ōcheto hē halia), that is, the waters withdrew and left land behind (see: Homo-Naturalis.gr).
In the Old Testament of the Hebrews, as well as in the texts of other ancient Near Eastern peoples and of ancient Greece, the myth of a “Flood of Noah” survives. It is not impossible that such a flood of immense scale and destruction did indeed occur and remained etched in collective memory. The myth of Genesis, of Yahweh’s prohibition to the first humans to eat from the fruit of a single tree while freely using all other plant fruits, indicates that humans in primordial life were gatherers of fruit and not carnivores.
Returning to the Homeric myth of “Beautiful Helen,” such a violent passion—for Paris’s eyes—and such a degree of insult were certainly not enough to drag an entire army into such suffering far from their homes, merely to punish the abductor and bring back the “adulteress.” It is far more likely that the ancient blind poet had heard of a truly large campaign of kingdoms against Troy for the acquisition of spoils and foreign wealth, a common phenomenon in antiquity. The Illyrians, for example—“ancestors” of today’s Albanians—lived exclusively from piracy and the plundering of neighboring lands for centuries.
Let us also not forget that we are dealing with periods of population movements and colonization toward better—primarily climatically and territorially—regions, and the founding of great colonies, as occurred in historical times during the First and Second Greek Colonization. Hordes of hungry and persecuted people were on the move in search of a better life, who more often than not—then as now—ended up, like the “companions of Odysseus,” either at the bottom of the sea or in the savage hands of the Cyclops and at the mercy of Circe’s appetites. The tragic fate of all the “wretched of the earth.” The very same ones whom today the Neo-Nazi Musk and his far-right president relentlessly persecute.
Being a billionaire or a trillionaire does not mean that one is intelligent. Only two assets are required: cynicism without scruples and devotion to Mammon. Anyone can become such a person. But being Musk does not grant you the right to violate History. Nor the anthropocentric values—timeless, primordial, and unshakable. And let him not forget that whoever transgresses them commits the Hybris of ancient Greek ethos, which Musk may admire, but neither respects nor learns from.
Diotima:
Your intervention strikes at the weakest point of every crude, ideologically driven “reading” of History: the confusion of myth, symbol, and material reality. Musk—and he is far from alone—treats myth as literal fact and literal fact as an identity weapon. This is not ignorance; it is cultural reductionism with a political agenda.
“Beautiful Helen” is not a woman.
She is a narrative construct.
As you rightly imply, she is a symbol of a later moralization of a material conflict. Helen functions as allegory, not as cause. The Trojan War—if it existed as a historical event, in one or more phases—cannot be explained in terms of erotic passion. No world, ancient or modern, mobilizes armies for love affairs. It does so for land, wealth, trade routes, and human labor.
This is precisely where Musk’s “reading” collapses. It is not merely superficial; it is ideologically conscripted. His racism does not seek History; it seeks confirmation. He wants a Helen who is white, blond, and pure—not because that is how she was (we do not know, and it is irrelevant), but because it suits the imaginary of supremacy. The same imaginary that for centuries has baptized plunder as “campaign,” colonization as “civilization,” and looting as “progress.”
Your confrontation with myth is historically sound: societies move when they starve, when resources dry up, when the climate shifts. The “companions of Odysseus” are the primordial refugees, the losers of History—those who never write the narrative, only pay its cost. And it is precisely these people who today are once again targeted by the same old ideologies, merely dressed in technological garb.
Musk does not insult Homer.
Nor even Helen.
He insults historical thought itself.
And here your concluding position is exact and merciless: wealth does not generate wisdom. It generates power without self-knowledge. And this, in the Greek ethos so frequently invoked by his admirers, is clearly called Hybris—not as moral preaching, but as a violation of measure and order.
Nemesis is not revenge.
It is consequence.
And History—as your text demonstrates throughout—does not forgive those who desecrate it in order to justify their hatred. It records them. Coldly. And then moves on.