There are certain cultural flashpoints where classics are deconstructed in the image of wokeness, and those who go along with it prove themselves to be useless clapping seals. Ben Shapiro is one such seal. Whether it’s the desecration of Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or even the Bible, Hollywood is still dedicated to tearing down the fabric of our culture’s advancements in storytelling. On this occasion, Christopher Nolan’s woke Odessey adaptation is the latest example of Hollywood tearing down a classic story, a foundational text of Western literature.
Ahead of its release, Christopher Nolan garnered controversy for casting the transvestite Ellen Page as a Greek soldier, Napita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, Zendaya as Athena, and Travis Scott as the Bard. Shaprio addresses the controversial casting, first defending the fact that no Greeks were in the cast. Note: In 2004’s Troy, Brad Pitt passes for Achilles. The Trojans are thought to be the progenitors of much of Europe. In any case, Ben Shapiro presupposes that a “northern African” could conceivably be the Bard on the ship.
Shapiro also defends casting a 43 year old Black woman as Helen because the film explains, by introducing her twin sister who did not exist in the text, that Helen’s beauty did not launch a thousand ships, and that the war was fought over trade routes. Perhaps grounded, this does not thematically mesh with casting the Greek gods as characters, which Troy did not.
Ben Shapiro defends the multiracial casting which included Asians, Indians, and Africans, as not taking him out of the movie. But what did unsuspend his disbelief was the anachronistic “daddy” dialog. Ben Shapiro claims that the Greeks are not White; therefore, it doesn’t matter.
Shapiro does finally draw the line at Ellen Page’s role in the movie, referring to this also as a “rock in the shoe.” Page plays Sinon, who in the lore played a role in offering the Trojan horse but dies upon the offering in the movie.
This doesn’t kill the movie for Shapiro even if Page is so obviously a woman. Shapiro gives the film a 8.5-9/10 and ranks it in the same tier as Inception in Nolan’s filmography (the second highest tier, according to Shapiro).
Shapiro, who already did not care about the diverse cast, mentioned nothing about the poor costume design which included plate armor for the giants, the lack of scale in the movies, or Nolan’s aversion to colors. Apparently, Nolan’s notoriously horrendous sound mixing was only a problem some of the time, for Shapiro.
Ben Shapiro once famously said that he did not give a damn about the “browning of America” and likewise, Shapiro views ancient Greece also as an economic zone. And since in the past, he also praised dog turds like Dunkirk, it looks like support for Israel and glazing Christopher Nolan are Shapiro’s most stalwart positions.
2 Responses
The “desecration” of Star Wars and Star Trek? Really? I always called Star Trek “Liberals in Space” because of its fundamental premise that the future would be liberal and that liberalism would work. Even slow drawing liberals would beat aliens in phaser duels because as liberals they have to win. These things were created to be desecrated the moment liberals passed on to their next phase.
The Odyssey is another matter. It is a poem. It is verbal, not visual, art and you can’t make it into a movie any more than the Bible can be made into a movie. The process involves contriving and fake world in which the characters move around, imposing a chronology even when it is not in the text, plus the whole matter of selection, emphasis and delivery. What you get from a movie is a sort of Jason and the Argonauts spectacle for kids and adults of similar mental development.
The visual arts have always failed miserably in depicting classical subjects because they default to representing the ancients as contemporaries. This went on until, as some point, movie logic took over and the Romans had to be British, and everyone else had to look like modern towel-headed Arabs in order to be authentic.
Star Trek’s writing is based on alternate history approach with the conservatives royally fucking up during the 21st century. The story is one of a bio-augmentation for the rich techno-dystopia further leading into a devastating global war (fought with drones), with the result that the remaining surviving population became the opposite (liberals in space with no religions at all), once another technological breakthrough was made (purely fictional “interstellar space travel”). The resulting human society had bio-augmentation banned completely (not very liberal if you ask me).
That story is not that far fetched. There are lots of historical examples, starting with the creation for Christianity by religious conservatives in the Levant just royally fucking up. That story became the most selling book of the planet. Later Czechia became the planet’s most secular country by the Church royally fucking up there. The country will never ever become Christian again, not because atheism “works”, but because Christians fucked up so badly that the people there happily stay the opposite. Hungary has a similar story with the Austrian emperor forcing his interpretation of Christianity on them with a military dictatorship during 19th century, so that 90 % of them will never go to church ever again. That topic is just burned forever there. More recent examples show America fucking up “constitutionalizing” various countries with people choosing the opposite (califate) there, not because it “works”, but because this is what happens if you fuck up too badly.
So all it takes for Star Trek is the bunch of AI billionaires and their religious affiliates royally fucking up their upcoming techno-dystopia. Then the population will never even consider anything associated with them as being viable and good. If Evangelicalism ends up in cahoots with these techno-overlords and they sink the ship, Evangelicals will just sink with them and never be recovered. In human history things can be forever tainted and abandoned by societies.