Helen of Troy is once again a lightning rod—this time over casting, not combat. In a New York Times opinion piece, critic Daniel Mendelsohn unpacks the uproar over Christopher Nolan's decision to cast Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o as Helen in his big-budget Odyssey adaptation that opens next week. The choice to put a Black woman in the role has drawn fury from Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr., and other conservatives decrying it as "woke" and "inauthentic." Defenders, Mendelsohn notes, have countered that Helen is a mythological figure, so how inauthentic could she be? And what about Matt Damon as the Mediterranean Odysseus? Nobody seems ticked about that.
"So what is Mr. Nolan up to?" asks Mendelsohn. "As it turns out, the auteur is using Helen just as the Greek authors did: to provoke, challenge and discomfit how we think about beauty and identity, about who we are and how we relate to our world." The ancients didn't much care what Helen looked like, he writes, and Homer gives us few details. What obsessed them was her speech—her persuasive, dangerous, reality-bending way with words. From Homer to Euripides to the rhetorician Gorgias, Helen became a vehicle for exploring the power of language, the slipperiness of truth, and the gap between appearance and reality. In that sense, Mendelsohn argues, today's social-media storm over beauty, race, and "authenticity" is exactly the kind of argument Helen was made for. Read his full essay.
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