When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
— John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
I haven’t seen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, but I can accept that it’s a good movie. Critics I respect have praised the film, such as the brilliant classical scholar Spencer Klavan (How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises) in the Washington Post. What I can’t accept is Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. Not because Nolan swapped a black woman for a legendary white one — which is pathetic enough — but because he swapped an average looking one for the ultimate beauty. And the Left is less interested in elevating diversity than in diminishing beauty, and for the feminist Left, specifically female beauty.
First, let’s get the inescapable racist screeding out of the way. Most conservatives have little problem with black inclusion in a film, even when forced on them. Few would object to Odysseus having a black crewman for a lot longer than Helen’s eight minutes of screen time.
“Consensus is that virtually 100 percent of the gatekeepers who greenlight projects and move talent and money through the pipelines are retarded, tasteless, and woke.”
They’d even tolerate Nyong’o as one of the other female characters, including Penelope. Homer never mentioned her skin color, unlike “the white-armed” Helen in The Odyssey. Except Odysseus’ besieged wife is a major role, and Ann Hathaway, who plays her, is a bigger movie star that Nyong’o — plus sexy enough to have been Nolan’s Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises. So, Nolan would’ve had to put his money where his virtue signaling is. But like Elliot Page as the great Greek warrior Sinon in The Odyssey, he didn’t have the balls.
Which left three other significant female roles for Lupita to play. But two of them, Circe and Calypso, are villainesses, politically unacceptable for a black actress. And the third, the goddess Athena, was already race-swapped, also by a bigger star, Zendaya.
Thus, Nolan chose the feminist solution. Uglify the most famous beauty in all of literature, over whom two great armies fought for 10 years, prodded by the Male Gaze (“Is this the face that launch’d a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Ilium?”) Despite the sacrosanct Ancient Greek tradition of hospitality which Paris violated by stealing away Helen from the King of Crete, Nyongo’s physical appearance wouldn’t have launched a single rowboat. And it has nothing to do with her skin color. Halle Berry would have made a convincing Helen of Troy, ditto Beyoncé, Sanaa Lathan, Tessa Thompson.
I worked in Hollywood for 12 years. I sat in casting sessions for movies based on scripts I wrote that depended on the Male Gaze (case in point, Electra starring Shannon Tweed). Any of the black starlets that auditioned for those films could have launched several yachts. Yet Nolan had no interest in this eternal aspect of Helen. For him and all of Hollywoke, beauty is not truth, it’s sexist. We know where he stands ideologically when he refers to the tragic Elliot Page as “he.”
It’s no coincidence that the feminist erasure of feminine pulchritude from the movies has accelerated their failure. Two popular genres vanished completely over the last two decades, the romantic comedy and the male-driven sex comedy (The Hangover, Wedding Crashers, Superbad). The former because women have more important things to do than doll up for men — like show them up or beat them up. The latter because the Male Gaze must be repelled along with male humor.
But this madness deprives not only men of entertainment but women. One of the most popular female-oriented literary series of all time, turned even more successful 70s-80s TV series, just got a Netflix reboot. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical Little House on the Prairie books have been a girl readers favorite since the 1930s So, what does Netflix do with such a valuable property? The usual option — give it to an unattractive male-bashing feminist showrunner, Rebecca Sonnenshine.
“I think a lot of our pop culture portrays the West as men riding around with guns and solving problems with violence and posturing,” Sonnenshine said. “This is not how communities were formed. It was women, they were the backbone of the country … so I really wanted to explore that.”
Unsaid by Sonnenshine, women did help win the West by attracting and marrying brave strong men, and bearing children under rough circumstances. Sonnenshine’s show deemphasizes the romantic arc of Laura’s pretty older sister Mary and the grown-up Laura herself that enchanted older girl readers. Something tells me her version of the series will never feature the female-beloved ending to the Little House saga.
“Almanzo was coming. Laura’s heart beat fast when she saw the brown horses and the brown buggy coming up the road. She had on her best dress, the pink lawn with the little sprigs of flowers, and her hair was brushed until it shone. He helped her into the buggy, and they drove away together. The wind was soft and the sun was warm, and the prairie was all in bloom. Laura thought she had never been so happy.” It’s a happiness that will be ever denied to girls — and boys — by Hollywoke.
Conservative commentator Peachy Keenan agrees. Keenan posted on X that she’s working on a big cover story about how it’s panicking time in Hollywood. “Consensus is that virtually 100 percent of the gatekeepers who greenlight projects and move talent and money through the pipelines are retarded, tasteless, and woke, and everyone around them who isn’t is too scared of losing their job to point out that the emperor has no clothes.”
Keenan’s solution has been my solution for the past eight years — “Calling Elon Musk.” She posted, “New tastemakers. A new pipeline. And watch the culture bloom. This could literally happen tomorrow. XStudios awaits.”
READ MORE from Lou Aguilar:
Another Nail in the Hollywood Coffin: George Washington Beats ‘Supergirl’
