The Gay Cowboy Did It First

I've been writing about Christopher Nolan since 2009. After The Dark Knight I considered him the best director alive. I haven't changed my mind since. Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Oppenheimer. The man doesn't miss.

Even Tenet, if you want something resembling failure, grossed over $365 million world wide on a $200 million budget.  This, in spite of COVID tanking theater traffic in 2020. That's not great but it is not a stinker either. Digital media and streaming sales of the film remain strong.

I wasn't following the casting news for The Odyssey, Nolan's latest. I stumbled into it through YouTube, which is where I end up most evenings. Video after video, universally, freaking out about exactly the same things: a Black Helen and Elliot Page. Not the material. Not whether anyone can compress Homer into something worth watching. The same two targets, everywhere, identical. The outrage machine had named its enemies and distributed the assignments.

Ah. We've been here before. Exactly here, actually.

But I should be honest about something first. My first reaction to hearing Nolan was making The Odyssey — and this was shortly after Oppenheimer — was skepticism. Not about Nolan. About the material. The Odyssey struck me as a potential giant yawner. Homer is foundational and also ancient, episodic, notoriously resistant to cinematic compression. This could be a miscalculation. The casting controversy arrived later. It's the second complication, not the first. Keep that in mind.

Heath Ledger. Once, the gay cowboy guy. The Brokeback Mountain guy. That was the tag hanging around his neck when Nolan cast him as the Joker. Could that guy be dangerous? Could that guy be terrifying? Could that guy embody chaos and masculine menace and the pure grinning face of violence?

The mockery was loud. The internet had opinions. And then the movie came out.

Nolan didn't argue his way to winning that one. He didn't give interviews defending the casting. He made the movie. The performance ate the label alive. Nobody argues Ledger was the wrong choice now. Nobody. The original objection ceased to exist as a serious position. Not suppressed. Not answered. Dissolved. That is what a great performance does to a premature verdict.

That is the success template. But this is tricky. There are epic fails.

Ridley Scott is one of my favorite directors. Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down — the man’s resume is in a league of its own. Joaquin Phoenix is one of my favorite actors. And I cannot watch Scott's Napoleon all the way through, despite both of those things being true, because the film is stupid. Not flawed. Not overreaching. Stupid. Napoleon never put his sword through British soldiers at Waterloo. Or anywhere else. That scene isn't creative license. It isn't myth-making. It's slop. The resources were immense. The talent was real. The slop won anyway. Grandeur mixed with utter slop is still slop. What a disaster of a film!

Peter Jackson proved with The Lord of the Rings exactly what to do with Tolkien. Then came The Hobbit — one slim children's book stretched into three bloated films. I have tried to watch The Battle of Five Armies several times. I cannot finish it. Amazon spent a billion dollars on Tolkien’s Rings of Power, and got a 39% audience score. All this precious, marvelous material ruined by excess, mostly.

Both outcomes are on the table for The Odyssey. The casting controversy is real. So is the simpler risk: the film, underneath all the cultural noise, might just not be very good. The difference — the only meaningful one — is that Nolan has never made slop. Not once. He has set the bar very high for himself by choosing this. He knows that. He chose it anyway.

Lupita Nyong'o is confirmed as Helen of Troy — and, it turns out, as Clytemnestra as well. Not just the face that launched the ships but also the woman who killed Agamemnon when the ships came home. Elliot Page is in the cast — his specific role hasn't been confirmed publicly, but a wild early rumor was that it would be Achilles. That was the source of much outrage in the ecosystem. Travis Scott is confirmed as a bard, which Nolan has defended on the grounds that The Odyssey was oral poetry handed down through generations, and he sees that tradition as analogous to rap. It's the one moment Nolan has actually explained himself publicly, and the explanation is a genuine argument, not an apology. 

It is also a risk. Could fall flat, misaligned contexts.

A Black Helen. A rumored transgender Achilles. A rap bard. And probably other choices we don't know about yet.

The reaction isn't saying "I don't like this actor." It's saying the film is an institutional attempt to rewrite inherited culture. Whether that reading is fair or paranoid or some combination of both, it is the emotional engine of everything you're going to hear between now and release day.

With Ledger, Nolan overcame a cultural label attached to an actor. A prior role. An association with homosexuality. The audience couldn't see past Brokeback to imagine the Joker, and then they saw it and were stunned into acceptance.

The situation with Page is something different. Not a label attached to an actor's previous work. A cultural meaning attached to the body itself. That is a much higher test. Ledger had to prove that the gay cowboy guy could become the Joker. Page would have to prove that a transgender actor can become Achilles — not as a gesture, not as a headline, not as a political argument won or lost, but as myth. Fortunately, that rumor has been largely debunked as culture war clickbait.

Which raises the question: “why don’t we already know who is playing Achilles”? The greatest warrior in the world and we still don’t know who Nolan chose to portray him?! That’s an absurdity in and of itself. And it has to be because Nolan wants it that way. Feed the clickbait. Create the mystery. Ride the buzz to hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s the plan. Still, I can’t think of any previous film of this magnitude, with this much hype, where no one has a clue who plays one of the film’s major roles. It is laughable in a delightful Monty Python kind of way.

How is it possible to keep something this big secret in a world without privacy? Anything can become invisible in the name of hype, right? How does Nolan make the summer blockbuster movie of the year and still withhold the name of the actor playing the greatest warrior in his film? Like, the White House leaks more than Nolan.

It’s a remarkable fact. The only way I see him pulling this off is by shooting all of Achilles’s stuff with a minimal crew and cast—almost like a separate movie. Very few people know who plays Achilles. Fewer still know what Nolan does with him in the film.

Nyong'o as Helen and Clytemnestra adds a different dimension. Nobody serious is asking whether she can act. The question being weaponized is who owns the image of Helen? Who gets to stand at the origin of the ships? Nolan's answer, apparently, is that she also gets to stand at the end — as the woman who killed the man who started the whole thing. That fight is already happening at a frequency the film hasn't been able to respond to yet.

Nolan has exactly one tool against pre-judgment, and it's the same tool he's always had. The screen. He cannot argue the culture war into silence. He cannot footnote his way out of this. Nyong'o can say, correctly, that myth belongs to the world — and she's right — but that won't move a single person already committed to seeing the film as desecration. Elon Musk has already weighed in: Nolan has lost his integrity. The anti-woke reaction will try to make the body the story before anyone has seen a frame.

Nolan's only path is Epic Enchantment. Not persuasion. Epic Enchantment. Wow us. If Page achieves rightful status on screen, whatever the role turns out to be — the same silence that fell on the Ledger backlash can fall again. The argument loses its oxygen. The controversy becomes a footnote. You don't have to have agreed with the choice to feel the performance make the argument irrelevant.

But enchantment isn't enough on its own. Not for this material. The epic aspect must be felt. We have to feel what these characters feel. We have to feel what Helen feels — the weight of being the most desired and most destructive woman in the world. We have to feel what Page's character feels, whoever that character turns out to be. Audiences don’t admire the brave casting. They boo bad acting. And they must feel good acting from the inside. It has to be relatable. That is the only test that matters. Ledger passed it. The gay cowboy disappeared and the Joker's glee and nihilism and terrifying freedom got inside you whether you wanted them to or not. That's the standard. That's what Nolan has to do again, at a much higher voltage.

The defeat is Napoleon, The Hobbit Trilogy, and the Rings of Power. Bold choices, unconventional casting, a premise the audience hasn't fully agreed to yet — all acceptable. Necessary, even, for great art. But you have taken an already difficult job and made it tougher. If the performance is off, if warrior status is never achieved, the epic fails then the ambition becomes the indictment. Napoleon with his sword ridiculously slashing through the British lines.

More's the glory. But bitter is the defeat.

IMAX 70mm tickets — the full Nolan experience — went on sale a year before opening day and sold out for the film's premiere within the hour. Scalpers are asking four hundred dollars a seat. The outrage economy is loud. But people can still go to the theater, especially in summer. I'm going myself — not opening weekend, but within the first two weeks, IMAX, Wednesday matinee if that's all that's available. I have been skeptical of this project since before the culture war attached itself to it. I still have doubts. I'm going anyway.

Nolan has never known defeat. Come on, Chris. Amaze us all again.