The Odyssey Boycott Failed. The Grift Didn’t.

Three thousand years ago, Homer gave us the face that launched a thousand ships. This weekend, Christopher Nolan gave us the film that launched a million grifts, and he buried them.

His Odyssey opened to $124 million domestically and a whopping $264 million worldwide. The haul does not prove the film is good. It does prove that the seven-month social-media campaign against it face-planted the moment real people bought tickets.

Their indictment ran on three charges. Nolan cast Lupita Nyong’o, a black actress, as Helen of Troy, the legendary beauty of the ancient world. Elliot Page, the transgender star, was said to be playing Achilles, mightiest of the Greek warriors. And Nolan, it was whispered, had built the whole production on a “woke” adaptation of the classic. On these grounds a faction of the online right spent seven months urging America to stay home.

This was not merely the work of anonymous cranks. Elon Musk declared that Nolan had “lost his integrity”. Matt Walsh, a man whose idea of valour is exhuming Rosa Parks’ corpse for a beating, called him “a coward”. Lauren Chen, of all people, demanded to know what diversity money lay behind the production. Around them gathered the usual ecosystem of influencers and anonymous accounts, each promising that Western civilisation would render its verdict at the box office.

Much of the noise may not even be organic. Politico reported this week that part of the influencer campaign against the film appears to be financially sponsored.

Americans went anyway, and the charges collapsed on contact with the movie. Nyong’o plays Helen and her sister Clytemnestra for a few minutes of a three-hour epic. Page was never cast as Achilles; the rumor was invented. The “feminist” adaptation amounted to Nolan noting that Emily Wilson’s translation was one of three he read before production. The accusers, it turned out, knew almost nothing about the film, or the tradition they claim to defend.

Honestly grappling with the material was never the point. These personalities and accounts exist to farm grievances and keep conservatives in a permanent crouch, cut off from a shared cultural inheritance and, with it, from our fellow citizens.

That estrangement is enabled by information silos. The followers these operators court left Hollywood two generations ago and are understandably wary of an industry with very different politics. They also attend less to begin with. According to Pew, 58 percent of Democrats saw a movie in cinemas last year against 50 percent of Republicans, with other studies showing even more pronounced sorting. Every fresh accusation that the multiplex is hostile territory widens that gap, and a claim no one can check is one you can repeat forever.

Take the Academy’s diversity rules, invoked as the hidden hand behind the casting. The standards are largely symbolic, as anyone within earshot of a soundstage knows; Variety analysed them and found that every Best Picture winner in Oscar history would qualify today, and Nolan’s would qualify with both performers removed. Whether such rules should exist is a fair question. That they forced Nolan’s hand is a lie, and one the siloed audience has no easy way to check.

Their business model runs on an asymmetry that removes any risk of being wrong. If the film flops, the boycott takes the credit; if it succeeds, the triumph only proves the conspiracy was real, an enemy powerful enough to rig the whole industry. When the box office makes even that hard to sustain, the goalposts move. Robby Starbuck, one of the campaign’s promoters, watched the movie post one of the year’s biggest openings and pivoted to claiming the controversy they generated had cost it millions anyway — an unfalsifiable victory. Sure, it made a fortune, the logic runs, but think how much more it would have made without us!

When moving the goalposts fails, there is always plain deception. The influencer Byl Holte informed his 167,000 followers that The Odyssey had flopped overseas, citing as evidence foreign markets where it had, in every case, debuted at number one. The lies are brazen, but the machinery is well-worn. The anti-woke right is learning what its left-wing counterparts have discovered: that a genuine cause can quickly curdle into an insatiable industry.

Every such racket needs a proof of concept it can sell, and theirs is a scalp they never took. This crowd is convinced it killed Disney’s live-action Snow White, which is sort of like bragging you once dunked on a Fisher-Price hoop. That film was failing on its own, dragged down by a troubled production and a studio so short on confidence that it shrank the premiere to a screening for photographers and its own staff.

The hustle’s cultural impotence went on full display months later, when it came for Superman after James Gunn described his movie as the story of “an immigrant who came from other places”. Jesse Watters warned his Fox News viewers that the Man of Steel now wore MS-13 on his cape; Outkick’s Clay Travis announced he would skip the film and called the director “a moron”. Metropolis did not get the message, and the movie soared to $615 million worldwide.

Not that the playbook never works; it works on the right target. Cracker Barrel restored its old logo within days of a rebrand last year, but the roadside chain draws heavily on the red-state customers the backlash was built to reach. A $250 million Nolan spectacle with a vast, politically mixed following is a different kind of target. Universal was never going to shelve it, and the handful prepared to skip the blockbuster over a black actress in a small role were never enough to matter.

The blitz could not even unite the right. Conservative critics and writers as varied as Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, Rod Dreher, Spencer Klavan, and John Podhoretz praised The Odyssey to varying degrees. Nor could the campaign hold its own fringe with far-right agitator Nick Fuentes breaking ranks to mock it.

There may be a deeper reason the effort failed to consolidate the right. Most people have never formally studied aesthetics, but we can all intuit what our cinematic spectrophotometers neither know nor care to learn: a faithful adaptation keeps the shape of the story true, and does not audit a cast for melanin. “Tragedy,” Aristotle wrote in the Poetics, “is an imitation not of persons but of action and of life.” That is why, when the Greeks themselves put their myths on stage, every part, women included, was performed by men in painted prosopa.

If the case against the casting sounds familiar, it should. Leftist academics spent years insisting the classics were the property of dead white men, reducible to the identity of their authors and demoted accordingly. In 1988, Stanford scrapped its required Western Culture course after activists marched with Jesse Jackson chanting “Hey ho, hey ho, Western Culture’s got to go”. The revolt was resisted by thinkers ranging from William F. Buckley Jr. to Allan Bloom, on the principle that Sophocles and Shakespeare are civilisational patrimony, open to anyone. This principle does not change when the racial essentialism arrives with promo codes.

None of it coheres, and it is not meant to. Deploying identitarian arguments to attack Nolan’s film is only the latest contradiction of a political sect with few fixed commitments of its own. These are, at their core, not conservatives but reactionaries. The differences between them are easy to miss and impossible to unsee.

Conservatism begins in affection for the Permanent Things, for one’s hearth, for our inheritance, for the particular people, institutions, and places one owes everything to. Roger Scruton gave the sensibility a name, oikophilia, the love of home. Reaction has no answering name, because it is built from grievances rather than loves, and such a movement will soon lose a key faculty in politics: the ability to tell friend from foe.

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey and the Oldest Tradition in Art

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, shot entirely on IMAX cameras, is the newest chapter in an old story: technological innovation creating new forms of art.

This blindness has a cost. The arts, and cinema above all, would be enriched by a confident conservative presence. Yet of every possible target in Hollywood, the reactionaries chose one of the most acclaimed small-c conservative filmmakers working at scale in the West. A man the British left has branded “the last Tory”, and for good reason.

Nolan’s pictures often turn on themes that speak directly to the conservative imagination: a father’s duty to his daughter across the reaches of time in Interstellar, the defence of a civilization in Dunkirk, where a nation’s survival rests on little ships and Churchill’s promise to fight on the beaches, and in The Dark Knight Rises, a Burkean fable of a city surrendered to the Terror by the demagogue who promises to save it.

His Homeric epic is no different. The Odyssey runs on a conservative moral architecture, a cosmos in which men are answerable to an order above them, one whose claims bind whether or not they are believed. Nolan’s Odysseus feels the weight of his choices. Looking back on the burning of Troy, he confesses that “we violated all that’s sacred”.

On cue, the detractors have dismissed this as PTSD, as though wartime guilt were the private property of bleeding hearts. They have it backward. As Charles C.W. Cooke writes, Odysseus’s anguish is Dantean, a guilt that judges him “not by the standards of Bronze Age Greece, but by those of 14th-century Catholic Europe”. The guilt-stricken hero belongs to a long tradition of remaking Homer that runs from Virgil through Chaucer and Tennyson to Joyce, hardly the modern intrusion the critics imagine. They simply never read that far into the canon.

None of which obliges conservatives to love the film; there are fair criticisms to be made, and serious critics have made them. The Grift Industrial Complex is not among them. A cadre that treats an earnest adaptation of one of the West’s founding stories as a hostile act has made the culture war its business, where winning is incidental and the autogol inevitable, as Vanity Fair confirmed by filing the grifters’ defeat under the death of “go woke, go broke”.

Homer wrote this ending too. The surest way into a walled city is an offering that flatters its defenders, wheeled past the wall by those who know that a gift dressed as tribute will not be turned away. The grifters call themselves the garrison. They are the gift at the gate.

Conservatives would do well to leave that horse where it stands and go to the movies.