Posted on 07/21/2026 5:10:00 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Turning beloved stories woke or repurposing destroyed monuments is the beginning of a process that ends with real violence.
t was difficult to peruse social media last week without seeing a steady stream of reactions and reviews of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey — a film that had already prompted, weeks before its premiere, mountains of derisive commentary for its purportedly woke casting choices, strangely modern costumes, American accents, and flat color palette.
But now that the film is out, reviews have been largely positive. Fears of a wokeified epic mocking the heroic age of the West turned out to have been overblown, we’re told. The DEI casting is just a blip in an otherwise stunning film. Yes, there’s some deviations from Homer, some inventions and rewriting by Nolan, but nothing that really offends.
And yet, even reading the positive reviews, one senses that Nolan’s film is not primarily an act of cultural transmission, of re-telling an ancient epic for a modern audience, but of cultural destruction. Spencer Klavan, a classicist and very smart guy, raved about the film for The Washington Post, calling it “a gorgeous rendition of a story that never gets old.” But even Klavan notices that some of Nolan’s thematic changes depart dramatically from Homer. Nolan’s Odysseus, writes Klavan, “is racked with remorse over his role in the Trojan War, whereas Homer’s story is more about the savage but righteous fury of the warrior who must tame that anger and reintegrate himself into domestic life.”
Other, less enthusiastic reviewers have more deeply analyzed these deviations from Nolan’s source material and exposed them for what they are. Writing for Compact Magazine, John Byron Kuhner concedes that the material is Homeric, but “the connective tissue and the overall shading suggests guilt, and in particular an imperial, tonally British version of white guilt. Think of it as the ghost of Kipling’s White Man’s Burden taking up his abode in the conscience of a Bronze Age Greek.”
This is not to say that giving Odysseus survivor’s guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder isn’t a plausible, if hopelessly modern, interpretation of Homer’s poem, and Kuhner concedes as much. But it’s not how Homer told the story. Writes Kuhner: “Homer carefully begins Odysseus’s journey on Calypso’s island, where he lives with a beautiful goddess and has no responsibilities yet is still unhappy, and ends it on Ithaca, where everything is a struggle and a responsibility: but that is where true satisfaction resides. Nolan has come to a different conclusion, however: It was a mistake to go to Troy. It was a mistake to win that war. And being king of Ithaca is not worth the responsibility. So Nolan ends the film with Odysseus and Penelope leaving.”
So yeah, maybe casting black actress Lupita Nyong’o as the legendary “white-armed” beauty Helen of Troy or Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page as one of the Greek heroes are relatively minor blips of wokeness in a sprawling epic. But the larger problem is Nolan’s reinterpretation of major themes in The Odyssey, which doesn’t just change the visual presentation of the material, but its meaning. What it amounts to isn’t just artistic license, but deliberate deconstruction.
Today, we see this everywhere. Consider the recently released Netflix adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved Little House on the Prairie. As my colleague Elle Purnell writes in these pages, the “reimagined” series is a betrayal of the source material. In the series, “the Ingalls have become a convenient vehicle on which showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine has piled high her own characters, plot, and political agenda.”
That agenda, no surprise, is to replace the themes of the original books. Instead of depicting Pa Ingalls as a model of self-reliance and masculine virtue, he is reduced to making land acknowledgements, paying reparations, and apologizing for infringing on Indian lands. Instead of a model of feminine poise and civilization in an untamed land, Ma Ingalls is a feminist scold. People like Sonnenshine do this because they hate these characters and they hate this story.
Their aim is to dissect and then repurpose the tale to serve a liberal, and ultimately revolutionary, agenda. Indeed, as Purnell notes, the basic betrayal at the heart of the show is that it repurposes the story “to explain that families like the Ingalls were bad for going west and stealing the Indians’ land.” Sonnenshine herself has admitted that the goal here is to “reckon with some of the things that are in the books that have been problematic for people.”
There is of course nothing problematic in the books and nothing to reckon with. People use language like that when they want to destroy a work of literature and wear it like a skinsuit. Everyone who consumes pop culture in the 21st century recognizes this for what it is. Nearly every beloved myth or story from western culture has been “reimagined” and foisted on us as a piece of liberal propaganda. What it amounts to is a sustained campaign of cultural destruction — a war not just on the past, but on everyone in the present who venerates our cultural patrimony.
The theater of conflict in this war is not limited to the arts but includes nearly every aspect of public life. Consider the left’s never-ending war on Confederate monuments and symbols. Earlier this month the Washington Post reported that a Boston firm has been selected to create a monument to racial diversity in Charlottesville using bronze from the melted-down statue of Robert E. Lee.
This is the iconic Lee statue that was removed from the city’s Market Street Park in 2021. It had stood in the park for more than a century before Charlottesville’s city council voted to remove it in early 2017. Controversy surrounding the statue’s planned removal led to the Unite the Right rally later that year, at which opposing camps clashed and a woman, Heather Heyer, was killed when a car driven by a protester plowed into the crowd.
In the ensuing years, statues and monuments all over the country would be removed or torn down by mobs — and not just statues of Confederates but also our Founding Fathers, Catholic saints, and nearly every conceivable figure from our nation’s past. It wasn’t enough to destroy these images, though, because the point was not simply to remove them from public spaces but to show complete cultural dominance over those who wished to preserve them — and to forecast what would be done to anyone who resisted.
Hence some of the more prominent statues were melted down, and the process of destruction was filmed and broadcast for all to see. Notably, images of the Lee statue’s face, bright orange and melting, were widely disseminated. The purpose wasn’t just to demoralize anyone who objected to the destruction, but to suggest that resistance is futile, that this history is being wiped out, that there is no future in America for those who aren’t on board.
In some cases, it wasn’t enough to remove or even melt down a statute. Instead, a mockery had to be made of the thing. In Los Angeles, a bronze equestrian statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson was cut up and welded back together in a grotesque, inhuman form — a deliberate act of defacement and mockery and perversion. It was part of an entire exhibition of removed or defaced Confederate statues put on by the Museum of Contemporary Art last year.
The melted down Lee statue in Charlottesville takes this one step further. Instead of removing or defacing or chopping up the monument, Charlottesville is going to use the melted down bronze from the Lee statue to create a new work called “Rooted,” with a design centered on the baobab tree, a pan-African symbol of wisdom, longevity, and connection. The message here is that the disfavored past and its cultural symbols and figures will not just be destroyed but replaced, figuratively and literally, by the new order. It is the equivalent of disinterring and scattering the bones of your enemies simply to desecrate their graves.
All of this comes with a not-so-subtle threat of violence. Indeed, real-world violence is the final object of the cultural destruction. The left first whipped up violent mobs that tore down statues. Then they rioted in the cities. Now they’re chopping up the statues to make trophies out of them, broadcasting what they plan to do to their enemies once they amass enough power. Any student of history knows this. What begins with book-burning and statue-smashing always leads to real violence. As my friend Christopher Bedford once wrote about mobs targeting a society’s icons, “The symbols of a people never satisfy: People themselves must always come next.”
That’s the key thing to understand about the era of cultural destruction we’re living through. The revolutionaries of the left might start by censoring books or authors they dislike, but eventually they appropriate those stories and transform those authors’ works into something useful for their revolution. Likewise, they might start with vandalism or defacement of statues and monuments, but eventually it’s not enough and they melt the statues down and recast them into something that demonstrates their cultural and political power. The ancient Romans called this damnatio memoriae, the condemnation of memory, and it was a political tool employed when there was a change of emperor: the previous order is destroyed, it will not be remembered.
But it never stops with books or monuments. Eventually the revolutionaries get around to their real target — people. Like stories and statues, the people themselves must be transformed, and if they refuse then they must be destroyed and replaced. That process is playing out right now, all around us, and it won’t stop until all those who want to preserve their culture and heritage stand up and refuse to let the destruction continue.
I agree with the general thrust of John Daniel Davidson’s article. BUT ....
He begins with an extended riff on The Odyssey, shifts into a shorter riff on the Little House on the Prairie remake, and then starts shotgunning what the left is doing.
That’s all fine and dandy ... except the he doesn’t seem to have actually watched either of the projects he is dissecting.
Scan some reviews. Cherrypick a couple that fit a fixed preselected narrative. Never check the projects being criticized. Rely instead on “I read it on the internet so it must be true.” Package the predetermined conclusion as red meat to be tossed into an online echo chamber.
This is how we end up with an internet driven culture of people trapped in echo chambers talking past each other.
We’re going to see The Odyssey on Thursday. I wasn’t particularly motivated to see it. I would probably have watched it at some point just to see what the fuss was about, on the theory that pretending to be a critic is a fraud if you don’t engage with the work being criticized. But the added incentive here is that Nolan made a fuss about shooting The Odyssey in 70mm film for true IMAX screens. That accounts for some of the high cost. Sure, it could have been shot a lot cheaper — and if you buy into that, be aware that the endpoint will be AI slop, which the studios will love because it will be cheap. Provided that viewers can be dumbed down and numbed down enough not to care.
Anyhow, given that Nolan jumped through hoops to provide the best possible cinematic experience — and that’s independent of whether or not I like his thematic treatment — I wanted to see it in the best theater available. Unfortunately, true IMAX theaters are rare, so we have to settle on a second best option, which here would be the IMAX theaters at the Air and Space Museum. But even the Smithsonian switched from true IMAX to laser projection, so basically digital 4k on a really big screen. I don’t know where the nearest true IMAX theater is, still using 70mm film projection, but if I had access to one, I would seek it out just for that.
I remember the first IMAX films, beginning with To Fly, as being the most stunning things I’ve seen onscreen. But that was back before the Smithsonian, during a remodelling, downgraded the quality of its projection. Because downgrading was cheaper.
The older my eyes get, the crankier I am getting about this. I thought I would never get another tv after we upgraded to a 4k OLED a few years ago. I may reconsider at some point. Color fidelity, brightness and upscaling have moved the bar enough for my eyes to notice. No one is making 6k or 8k content for commercial distribution, and no ISPs are streaming it. 4k is becoming the standard, but that’s still a work in progress. But tv’s upscaling native 4k content are impressive enough to notice. If my eyes were better, I might not care, but I make concessions to age where vision is concerned.
“topic got pulled for no link”
How does the software even allow that to happen?
I understand the sentiment of this article, but society is always - always - living in an era of cultural destruction. Ideas get challenged. Sometimes the challenges have merit. Sometimes they don’t. A lot of the “destruction” mentioned in this article is not really destruction. Its Woke remakes that crash and burn. Most of the cultural re-interpretations of the past five years have died a horrible death. People have gotten rich on YouTube and in other media platforms making fun of Woke remakes. The Odyssey is arguably one example of a deconstruction of a canon of Western literature that is successful. But I’m really not sure if most people who have gone to see it are picking up on that. They see the Cyclops and Circe as mini-horror movies and love the spectacle rather than railing against them being a total undermining of the original tale. They don’t care that Matt Damon plays Oysseus as a veteran with PTSD rather than a hero. We’ve survived this before. I was horrified by Gladiator when the dramatic ending implied that Rome was returning to a Republic. I was the guy in the theater standing up and shouting - “Don’t you know this was a low point in Roman history when they auctioned off the role of emperor to the highest bidder???” But everyone else loved the movie, even conservatives. So we’ll survive the Odyssey too.
But where to?
As Ronald Reagan famously said, “If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.”
It’s more an age of cultural exhaustion. There are no new ideas and no new energy so people who produce entertainment and art just keep repeating themselves.
My guess is, the software ignores “no link” if the little box “excerpt” isn’t checked, hence vanities exist. Your topic must have been manually booted.
“We are in the midst of this epic battle. Do we have the mettle to fight back?”
Doesn’t look like it so far. Most don’t even know there’s a battle going on.
We may be witnessing the crumbling of the secular humanist elite's ability to steer society. We may be in America and the West generally in a situation similar to the late Roman Empire or perhaps the last years of the Qing dynasty in China. The globalists are in a position similar to those of the Roman aristocracy or the Mandarin elite. We will see either a slow collapse or the ascendancy of Red China and its Russian, Iranian, North Korean, and other allies. Nature abhors vacuums, as does geopolitics.
“until we get the order....”
What order?
When was the last time a government executive called out the militia?
The People are the militia.
Always have been.
Always will be.
Bookmark
That occurred to me too when I read his comment.
What other country in the world could we Americans escape to?
I think I heard Reagan was paraphrasing some Cubans who came to America. They had escaped Castro’s regime. And the unanswered question is where could one escape to, if America were no longer free.
That occurred to me too when I read his comment.
What other country in the world could we Americans escape to?
I think I heard Reagan was paraphrasing some Cubans who came to America. They had escaped Castro’s regime. And the unanswered question is where could one escape to, if America were no longer free.
That occurred to me too when I read his comment.
What other country in the world could we Americans escape to?
I think I heard Reagan was paraphrasing some Cubans who came to America. They had escaped Castro’s regime. And the unanswered question is where could one escape to, if America were no longer free.
I, I, I, me, me, me, my, my, my...please learn how to write without abusing the personal pronoun, indirect personal pronoun or possessive adjective.
Unfortunately no one cares about you, you, you.
.
It would, IMHO, be extremely helpful to focus on hanging the proselytizing left by their own petards - as publicly as possible.
For example, tell the real stories of: leftist writers, producers, actors, etc. who express dogmatic and often radical instructions on how to live - but whose personal lives are a tragedy, leftist politicians like Pelosi - who made 100s of millions on insider stock trades via her husband - but whose life has apparently been so empty beyond DC such that she just couldn't find the door to leave, the Obamas with their sad marriage - along with his narcissistic need to ‘transform the most free society and greatest nation built by human beings into a cesspool of envy and hatred, etc.
I've always thought that working hard and doing a good job was a better path to success than manipulating those who can influence your success. I've also learned along the way that the manipulation pathway works for a lot of people, that life is often not a meritocracy, and that perception can often be more important than reality. That is why we need to weigh in on the perceptions of others and not allow the hateful left dictate societal perceptions.
Exactly. Related - in a world governed globally, where do you go for asylum?
This example was the one that came to mind as I read the title, glad the author covered it. It is probably the grossest perversion of the human form I've seen - something Linda Blair's character in the Exorcist would sculpt from feces if she weren't tied down. It demonstrates that there is no art in the Left, only destruction and mockery. The object created is an expression of hatred. Not intended to uplift or provide an idealized representation of anything good. In that sense, it is the perfect expression of the Left, demonic.
America is in a position to remain dominant for the next 100 years.
As long as we don't vote for the Democratic Party (a big IF).
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