‘The Odyssey’ Backlash: A Journey Between Strangeness and Familiarity

The ‘culture war’ around the casting choices of Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of the Greek epic gets to the very themes Homer was writing about, writes Jake Arnott

Matt Damon stars as Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of the Greek epic Photo: Universal Pictures

Sometimes the story becomes the story.

My article in last month’s Byline Times examined The Iliad as a narrative template for the ‘forever wars’: the endless and unresolved military interventions of modern imperialism. This time, I intended to look at its fellow myth, The Odyssey, and perhaps explore how it might provide insight into the legacy of these conflicts.

There is so much to draw on here: themes of displacement, trauma, othering, and migration. Lots to discuss and debate in some reasonable fashion.

Then another kind of war broke out.