This is such astute synthesis of the cultural conversation, as always. On a base level, I find myself getting exhausted and annoyed by the latest outrage cycle more and more as I'm getting older; I tend to like lots of movies, and I often enjoy many different adaptations of the same thing, and part of that is that I don't really see any movie or adaptation or sequel as the "end-all-be-all" or anything more than it is. In my eyes, even a terrible adaptation or terrible sequel is completely incapable of "ruining my childhood" or "ruining the series"—I will always be able to treasure and revisit whatever the original work was, and any new media inspired by it can only ever add, never subtract. Of course, I understand the fear with adaptations of extremely iconic stories like The Odyssey (or The Bible, for that matter) that one poorly-adapted take has the danger of being "the one" that sticks in everyone's minds forever. But even then, don't these things ultimately always encourage people to go back and read or watch the original text anyway? I know so many people reading The Odyssey for the first time right now, myself included. Why can't we treat adaptations like this as an open door, an invitation, a celebratory cultural moment to uplift the source material rather than just performing anger and vitriol? This is part of why I've stopped even freaking out about terrible live-action remakes anymore; it seems to me that they pretty much universally inspire people to appreciate and re-appraise the original animated versions, and then they basically disappear from cultural memory unless they were particularly terrible or surprisingly good.
When it comes to the casting of The Odyssey, I guess I've been thinking of it a little bit like Lin Manuel Miranda described Hamilton: "the story of America then as told by America now." Lupita Nyong'o is truly, I think, one of our greatest talents working today, and I have zero issue with her being included. I think there's also another dimension here, which is that Nolan is casting our generational acting archetypes for these mythic roles that would've been the archetypes of their own time. Matt Damon is not who I probably would've chosen for Odysseus on my own, but I can see why he works; there is a fundamental familiarity and trustworthiness that American viewers tend to feel towards him after having watched his work for so long. Tom Holland, likewise, is a good face of the new generation of heroes—and kinda perfect for a character just between that verge of manhood and boyishness. Of course, no one criticizing someone like Lupita's casting really cares all that much about any of that logic; as you pointed out, any white blonde, blue-eyed actress would've been perfectly fine with them. Their arguments about "accuracy" are, to employ a timely image, a Trojan Horse for abject racism.
As you eluded to here, personally I tend to view all adaptations as fundamentally about taking the heart and soul of a given story and reimagining it through the unique language of a completely different storytelling medium. The best book-to-film adaptations are not those that follow the source material exactly to the letter, but that factor the unique strengths of cinema as a medium and communicate the story well using them. In the case of The Odyssey, there are already *so many* completely different cultural assumptions today than existed in the time that story was originally told; Emily Wilson's introduction does a good job of exploring these, particularly those around chivalry and heroism and deception and women and slaves. I think the heart of the story is still highly universal and timeless—but when you think about telling it in a way that the viewers of today will be able to grasp and connect with, certain changes feel necessary to allow the characters to feel sympathetic and comprehensible to them. There's an interesting conversation to be had about adaptations like The Chosen here too, which often have vast historical inaccuracies (the disciples pass out written invitations to the sermon on the mount despite the fact that the audience almost certainly would've been illiterate) but still nail the heart of the story in strong ways. I'm sympathetic to these nuances, and toward the hurdle that any filmmaker faces when adapting ancient literature or scripture. And I think anyone who holds one adaptation as a peak of quality (say, 300 or Troy) is willfully ignoring its own historical inaccuracies because they either don't care or they enjoy the other aspects enough to outweigh it. That seems perfectly fair to me. And I don't think taking out our anger on the artists tasked with making these adaptations does much beyond turn what should be an exciting conversation into yet another divisive culture war skirmish.
I agree -- the outrage cycle gets so exhausting. I write these things in hopes of providing a more balanced perspective... in hopes that maybe some viewer will read and say, 'hey, this is a better way to think about things.'
Was just talking with folks yesterday after a conference about how comic book communities kind of get it right with all the different versions of Superman, Batman, Spiderman, and whatever else... Everyone can enjoy the ones they like best without discrediting the other adaptations/depictions. I like Corenswet, Cavill, and Reeve as Superman. And am now looking forward to seeing Tyler Hoechlin's version if I ever make the time.
And I agree about a present-day adaptation sending people back to the source material, to dive deeper, to find out more. My interest in Spider-man and Batman both started with a film adaptation and then progressed to reading the comics. And it happens vice versa as well: I wanted to see Wildcat because I'd read Flannery O'Connor's stories.
This absolutist, all-or-nothing POV is just not realistic/sustainable. And I think the culture is good at declaring, 'hey this adaptation is terrible and we're gonna make it persona non grata'. (Ahem, Ben Affleck's Daredevil and Ryan Reynolds' Green Lantern.)
(I agree with you on Matt Damon's casting lol. Would not have been my pick, either. But here we are!)
This is an interesting take. I think that many people kick back against adaptions not because they're unfaithful or not identical to their imagination, but because everyone has different takes on what's important in a text. For example for some the social setting, history and cultural undertones of wuthering heights is really important to them, whereas to others it's more the love story. Then I think also some feel like there's an undertone from Hollywood that they find frustrating - for example the rehashing/revamping of old stories to make franchises. Essentially stripping a story to make it as palatable to as many people as possible without giving it the love and care people feel strongly they deserve. Especially as Hollywood tends to position itself as ‘canon’. If it were a small invidicual studio I think people would be more flexible.
Thanks for reading! I agree with you about different things being important to different readers. (For example, I want an epic Charn battle flashback sequence in Gerwig's Magician's Nephew movie. Makes sense to me. I'd rather see it than hear Jadis tell it. But I have a feeling some of my fellow Narnia fans wouldn't care for it much.)
I also agree about movies getting positioned as "canon." (Comes up a lot when superhero fans get to talking -- some have only seen the movies; others have read the comics for decades.) I get frustrated when searching for a title on Google and, by default, if a movie adaptation exists, Google will deliver movie-related results 95% of the time over book-related results. I do think it speaks to the shift from a primarily literary culture to a primarily visual one.
Ditto on tiring of rehashing/revamping old stories for content and small arthouse studio adaptations being more accepted than big studio ones!
To start off in a positive note, I agree with your point that “the book and the film are different and should be judged on their own merits.” Books and films/television are entirely different mediums; they each have their own storytelling conventions and rules, and thus they each require a different method of telling a story. Those who complain that “the book was better than the movie” were probably not big fans of movies in the first place.
But then the discussion goes downhill when you smear Jonathan Pageau as “disingenuous”:
“Those crying the loudest about it don’t seem to be inspired by intellectual, educational, or literary fidelity. Rather, they appear more infuriated that a Kenyan-Mexican actress is playing the demigod, Helen of Troy. That dismay, often masked by careful measured arguments, has led to silly commentary, including Pageau that, because the Hellenes derived their moniker from Helen of Troy, Nolan casting a black woman in this role is him “trying to go to the very core, the very home, the very seed, the very beginning [of Western civilization] and... replace it with something else.” I would have likely taken the nomenclature declaration at face value if it were not so easily debunkable with a Google search”
Except you were not the only person to alert this to Jonathan, which he clarified in a subsequent pinned comment to the aforementioned video. This kind of “easily debunkable” public smearing is where I started to realize that your objection to the (right wing) backlash to Nolan’s casting choices is ideological rather than genuine.
“The fact is: we’d have heard nary a peep from these pro-Western Civ furiosas if a white European or American actress were cast as Helen. [It’s funny how some critics like to argue on behalf of the diversity of white ethnic cultures, but when it comes to Nolan allegedly going “woke” and casting a person of color in a role they see as only for a white person, all white ethnicities are suddenly interchangeable.]”
Yes, because an ethnically Germanic actress can such as well play the blond-haired Helen of Troy as an ethnically Greek one. The point here is that the actor needs to at least ethnically look like the character. Ginnifer Goodwin and Lilly Collins both have Jewish ancestry, but they both look like and embody the character of Snow White, certainly more than Rachel Zegler. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with Daniel that Greeks should have been involved in the film’s production, but I also don’t think we should entirely bar non-Greek but Mediterranean-looking actors from being cast, otherwise we’d set unnecessarily strict casting standards.
“But The Odyssey wasn’t written yesterday. The idea that one group of people can own a story that originated in oral tradition somewhere around the eighth century before Christ, a story that has transcended its originating time and place many times over, is ludicrous. We don’t own these stories. These stories own us.”
This is what I like to call the “intertextuality excuse”: “This text is an adaptation of a different text, and since people from a different time now have access to it, that means that they own it and can do whatever they want with it.” That’s not how it works. We don’t own The Odyssey anymore than we own the Anansi stories or Journey to the West, yet it is only okay when old European stories are “reimagined.” The point remains that if old African and Asian stories are given the same treatment there would be universal cries of “Whitewashing” and “Cultural Appropriation”—something that Jonathan pointed out in the video you dismissed as “silly” and “reactionary.” The reason why the backlash erupted in the first place is that people are getting increasingly tired of this double standard treatment from Hollywood and other mainstream establishments.
“The why of adaptation is to extend the audience, the conversation, the experience of the source text. And there will be “faithful” adaptations. But the natural shift of mediums opens the aperture of a great work, allowing for new participants, new emphases, and new light to be let inside.”
Then reimagine The Odyssey in a modern-day American setting that reflects this “new” audience. In fact, it has been done before in O Brother, Where Art Thou? When you keep the setting of the source material but give it an artificial veneer of “modernity,” it’s just going to come across as forced and disingenuous. Audiences want authentic representation, and this is not that.
“The writer or filmmaker doing the adapting does not cast their spell alone. This sub-sub-creator embodies aspects of the spirit of their time, making their take on the originating work relevant to the broader population. (What is Homer saying? What is Emily Wilson saying about Homer? What is Nolan saying about Wilson and Homer and us?) That is not a flaw in the system. That is the habit of translation.”
Here Daniel is conflating adaptation with translation, which are two entirely different things. A translation is meant to be a rendering of the text from its original language to a new one; in other words, it’s the original text but in another language. An adaptation makes significant changes from the source material, crucial or not. The reason why Emily Wilson’s “translation” has been critics is because it is not, in fact, a translation but a retelling based on the original text. And while yes, an adapter will inevitably imprint their fingerprints on their adaptation, casting people whose race or ethnicity are not accurate to period and setting of the film is not an artistic choice so much as an ideological one.
“Looking at an adaptation is supposed to allow us to see the source text and the society in which it appeared alongside aspects of one’s own society and oneself.”
If I get this correctly, on the one hand, an adaptation is supposed to offer a different way to viewing the original source material. On the other hand, it should be a window into a different time and place. Kind of a contradictory statement there. Achieving both can be possible, and in fact often happens in adaptations, but there are times where the adapter has to make one decision over the other, a decision that can have a domino effect.
“[Cinzia] Dubois argues that Emerald Fennell’s film was never meant to be a realistic adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel. Instead, its highly symbolic and visually rich reinterpretation were crafted to provoke the same emotional discomfort and moral unease as the original text. The work is unambiguously layered and, in Dubois’ assessment, preserves the audience’s distaste for Cathy and Heathcliff.”
This is a dumb and baseless excuse that is the result of an overly pedantic analysis that desperately tries to present an objectively bad adaptation as good for ideological reasons. and the fact that you’re presenting Dubois, an ideologically-motivated pseudo-intellectual snob, as a “reasonable” voice, and Pageau as a “silly” and “reactionary” one for having a different set of ideological beliefs shows that you’re not actually arguing from an objective, good-faith place but from an ideologically-motivated one. As a side note, the fact that progressives decried the race-swap of Heathcliff from a dark-skinned Romani to white, but called others racist fro calling out the race-swaps in Nolan’s The Odyssey proves my point about double standards.
“Mamoru Oshii, director of the 1995 anime on which it is based, said:
""If this is to be a remake of the anime, I don’t think it’s necessary to remain faithful to the way things were expressed in the anime. The director should exercise his directorial freedom as much as possible. If he doesn’t do so, there would be no point in remaking it."
"(Oshii also defended Scarlett Johansson’s casting in that film against critics who claimed the role of a cyborg with an “entirely assumed” physical form should have been given to an Asian actress. “I can only sense a political motive from the people opposing it,” he said.”
This is very much an example of conformation bias. “See, this director agrees with my artistic decision, so you’re wrong to oppose it!” Nevermind that directors are people as well, with flawed understandings of how art (and in this case adaptations) should function. And it’s not like there haven’t been cases where creators of the original works weren’t willing to sell their artistic integrity for personal gain. (Looking at you, Eoin Colfer.) Ghost in the Shell is complicated terrain because anime characters can technically be categorized as both white and Japanese. Therefore Motoko Kusanagi can be easily be called white (she does have blue eyes after all) as well as East asian. And it’s not as if those in support of race-swaps aren’t politically motivated as well.
“Like Cinzia, I get excited by how people play with a source text. If I wanted the old story, I’d just go get it. And I still think it’s fun to compare the similarities and differences between mediums. But we must admit any adaptation is a different animal than the source text.”
Then neither you nor Cinzia actually cared for the old story in the first place. If you did, you’d respect the original work’s themes and, yes, setting. You just see it as something to be toyed with endlessly, to be infinitely subverted, a vessel to inject your own personal biases on a text that wasn’t made with your ideological bias in mind. This is the ultimate end-goal of an ideologically postmodernist mindset: to disrespect the original creator’s intent, makes dozens of excuse for why, and show interest on how it has been subverted, not on how well it captures the spirit of the source material.
Thank you for reading so thoroughly, thoughtfully, and in depth. A rare habit these days it seems.
I disagree that folks who complain about books being better than movies "were probably not big fans of movies in the first place." In the span of my life, my love of books far outstrips my love of movies. My enthusiasim for the cinema scene is a late-stage development. I love both books and movies and wish to see great adaptations of literature to film. When films get it right, I rejoice.
However, I did not call Pageau "disingenuous." If you have followed any of my writing, you would know that I have praised and recommended Pageau's work on more than one occasion. I have also bought swag from his organization for myself and others and wear it proudly. I don't agree with Pageau on everything, however, none of those disagreements were relevant to any of my writing until this particular topic.
I'm glad that Pageau acknowledged the mistake in his argument -- that acknowledgement was not posted to the video when I watched it in the process of drafting this. I should have ensured that my comment was not meant as a "smear," as you call it, of Pageau himself -- but of the kind of thinking that leads to such mistakes. I apologize for that. I have edited that section appropriately.
(I stand by my "pro-Western Civ furiosas" moniker because it's funny. To me.)
How do you define being "genuine" vs "ideological"? Please rewrite my essay so that it's more genuine. (You seem to approach your own work here from an ideological starting point -- that some people are trying to "ruin" European folk and fairy tales "in the name of social progress.")
Perhaps you should read my essay again.... I do not believe we, the people of today, "own" the stories of any culture that existed millenia before we came on the scene. These stories, among hundreds of others, shaped us and our world. The reason why we, Americans and Western Europeans, fight over the Odyssey more than we fight over, say, Anansi is because the Odyssey means something more to our culture at large than Anansi does. That's just true.
Anansi's tales simply don't have the cultural cachet for us that Homer's tales do. Certainly, many in particular pockets of culture would love for that to be the case. But we can't undo history.
Since it appears you actually care, I think folks like you and Pageau would help your argument if you got just as upset when white actors are cast in historically or contextually non-Western/non-white stories.
Like you: I'm getting tired of writing/talking here. I think there is a much deeper conversation that can take place about race and casting when it comes to mythic stories which should be parsed separately from actual strictly historical stories.
I don't know why you're upset with Oshii defending Johansson's casting against "whitewashing" claims either. Isn't that what you want -- less ideologically-pure conversation around these kinds of things? Oshii bucks the blind progressive outrage and has good reasons to do so.
I also don't know where you get off calling someone "an ideologically-motivated pseudo-intellectual snob." You accused me of calling Pageau "disingenuous" -- reread my essay; I did not -- and I would assume you dislike and are above personal attacks and name-calling. Name-calling implies that one is not equipped to engage in significant and considered conversation about the multi-valent layers of adaptation.
Finally, I find it hilarious that you, of all people, purport to know Homer's intent in writing down the Odyssey any more than anyone else. The only bias I have about Nolan's Odyssey adaptation is bias toward good filmmaking. And I genuinely can't wait for July 17th. I'm here for the stories. That's why I wrote this essay. It seems you only care about ideology.
This is such astute synthesis of the cultural conversation, as always. On a base level, I find myself getting exhausted and annoyed by the latest outrage cycle more and more as I'm getting older; I tend to like lots of movies, and I often enjoy many different adaptations of the same thing, and part of that is that I don't really see any movie or adaptation or sequel as the "end-all-be-all" or anything more than it is. In my eyes, even a terrible adaptation or terrible sequel is completely incapable of "ruining my childhood" or "ruining the series"—I will always be able to treasure and revisit whatever the original work was, and any new media inspired by it can only ever add, never subtract. Of course, I understand the fear with adaptations of extremely iconic stories like The Odyssey (or The Bible, for that matter) that one poorly-adapted take has the danger of being "the one" that sticks in everyone's minds forever. But even then, don't these things ultimately always encourage people to go back and read or watch the original text anyway? I know so many people reading The Odyssey for the first time right now, myself included. Why can't we treat adaptations like this as an open door, an invitation, a celebratory cultural moment to uplift the source material rather than just performing anger and vitriol? This is part of why I've stopped even freaking out about terrible live-action remakes anymore; it seems to me that they pretty much universally inspire people to appreciate and re-appraise the original animated versions, and then they basically disappear from cultural memory unless they were particularly terrible or surprisingly good.
When it comes to the casting of The Odyssey, I guess I've been thinking of it a little bit like Lin Manuel Miranda described Hamilton: "the story of America then as told by America now." Lupita Nyong'o is truly, I think, one of our greatest talents working today, and I have zero issue with her being included. I think there's also another dimension here, which is that Nolan is casting our generational acting archetypes for these mythic roles that would've been the archetypes of their own time. Matt Damon is not who I probably would've chosen for Odysseus on my own, but I can see why he works; there is a fundamental familiarity and trustworthiness that American viewers tend to feel towards him after having watched his work for so long. Tom Holland, likewise, is a good face of the new generation of heroes—and kinda perfect for a character just between that verge of manhood and boyishness. Of course, no one criticizing someone like Lupita's casting really cares all that much about any of that logic; as you pointed out, any white blonde, blue-eyed actress would've been perfectly fine with them. Their arguments about "accuracy" are, to employ a timely image, a Trojan Horse for abject racism.
As you eluded to here, personally I tend to view all adaptations as fundamentally about taking the heart and soul of a given story and reimagining it through the unique language of a completely different storytelling medium. The best book-to-film adaptations are not those that follow the source material exactly to the letter, but that factor the unique strengths of cinema as a medium and communicate the story well using them. In the case of The Odyssey, there are already *so many* completely different cultural assumptions today than existed in the time that story was originally told; Emily Wilson's introduction does a good job of exploring these, particularly those around chivalry and heroism and deception and women and slaves. I think the heart of the story is still highly universal and timeless—but when you think about telling it in a way that the viewers of today will be able to grasp and connect with, certain changes feel necessary to allow the characters to feel sympathetic and comprehensible to them. There's an interesting conversation to be had about adaptations like The Chosen here too, which often have vast historical inaccuracies (the disciples pass out written invitations to the sermon on the mount despite the fact that the audience almost certainly would've been illiterate) but still nail the heart of the story in strong ways. I'm sympathetic to these nuances, and toward the hurdle that any filmmaker faces when adapting ancient literature or scripture. And I think anyone who holds one adaptation as a peak of quality (say, 300 or Troy) is willfully ignoring its own historical inaccuracies because they either don't care or they enjoy the other aspects enough to outweigh it. That seems perfectly fair to me. And I don't think taking out our anger on the artists tasked with making these adaptations does much beyond turn what should be an exciting conversation into yet another divisive culture war skirmish.
I agree -- the outrage cycle gets so exhausting. I write these things in hopes of providing a more balanced perspective... in hopes that maybe some viewer will read and say, 'hey, this is a better way to think about things.'
Was just talking with folks yesterday after a conference about how comic book communities kind of get it right with all the different versions of Superman, Batman, Spiderman, and whatever else... Everyone can enjoy the ones they like best without discrediting the other adaptations/depictions. I like Corenswet, Cavill, and Reeve as Superman. And am now looking forward to seeing Tyler Hoechlin's version if I ever make the time.
And I agree about a present-day adaptation sending people back to the source material, to dive deeper, to find out more. My interest in Spider-man and Batman both started with a film adaptation and then progressed to reading the comics. And it happens vice versa as well: I wanted to see Wildcat because I'd read Flannery O'Connor's stories.
This absolutist, all-or-nothing POV is just not realistic/sustainable. And I think the culture is good at declaring, 'hey this adaptation is terrible and we're gonna make it persona non grata'. (Ahem, Ben Affleck's Daredevil and Ryan Reynolds' Green Lantern.)
(I agree with you on Matt Damon's casting lol. Would not have been my pick, either. But here we are!)
This is an interesting take. I think that many people kick back against adaptions not because they're unfaithful or not identical to their imagination, but because everyone has different takes on what's important in a text. For example for some the social setting, history and cultural undertones of wuthering heights is really important to them, whereas to others it's more the love story. Then I think also some feel like there's an undertone from Hollywood that they find frustrating - for example the rehashing/revamping of old stories to make franchises. Essentially stripping a story to make it as palatable to as many people as possible without giving it the love and care people feel strongly they deserve. Especially as Hollywood tends to position itself as ‘canon’. If it were a small invidicual studio I think people would be more flexible.
Thanks for reading! I agree with you about different things being important to different readers. (For example, I want an epic Charn battle flashback sequence in Gerwig's Magician's Nephew movie. Makes sense to me. I'd rather see it than hear Jadis tell it. But I have a feeling some of my fellow Narnia fans wouldn't care for it much.)
I also agree about movies getting positioned as "canon." (Comes up a lot when superhero fans get to talking -- some have only seen the movies; others have read the comics for decades.) I get frustrated when searching for a title on Google and, by default, if a movie adaptation exists, Google will deliver movie-related results 95% of the time over book-related results. I do think it speaks to the shift from a primarily literary culture to a primarily visual one.
Ditto on tiring of rehashing/revamping old stories for content and small arthouse studio adaptations being more accepted than big studio ones!
To start off in a positive note, I agree with your point that “the book and the film are different and should be judged on their own merits.” Books and films/television are entirely different mediums; they each have their own storytelling conventions and rules, and thus they each require a different method of telling a story. Those who complain that “the book was better than the movie” were probably not big fans of movies in the first place.
But then the discussion goes downhill when you smear Jonathan Pageau as “disingenuous”:
“Those crying the loudest about it don’t seem to be inspired by intellectual, educational, or literary fidelity. Rather, they appear more infuriated that a Kenyan-Mexican actress is playing the demigod, Helen of Troy. That dismay, often masked by careful measured arguments, has led to silly commentary, including Pageau that, because the Hellenes derived their moniker from Helen of Troy, Nolan casting a black woman in this role is him “trying to go to the very core, the very home, the very seed, the very beginning [of Western civilization] and... replace it with something else.” I would have likely taken the nomenclature declaration at face value if it were not so easily debunkable with a Google search”
Except you were not the only person to alert this to Jonathan, which he clarified in a subsequent pinned comment to the aforementioned video. This kind of “easily debunkable” public smearing is where I started to realize that your objection to the (right wing) backlash to Nolan’s casting choices is ideological rather than genuine.
“The fact is: we’d have heard nary a peep from these pro-Western Civ furiosas if a white European or American actress were cast as Helen. [It’s funny how some critics like to argue on behalf of the diversity of white ethnic cultures, but when it comes to Nolan allegedly going “woke” and casting a person of color in a role they see as only for a white person, all white ethnicities are suddenly interchangeable.]”
Yes, because an ethnically Germanic actress can such as well play the blond-haired Helen of Troy as an ethnically Greek one. The point here is that the actor needs to at least ethnically look like the character. Ginnifer Goodwin and Lilly Collins both have Jewish ancestry, but they both look like and embody the character of Snow White, certainly more than Rachel Zegler. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with Daniel that Greeks should have been involved in the film’s production, but I also don’t think we should entirely bar non-Greek but Mediterranean-looking actors from being cast, otherwise we’d set unnecessarily strict casting standards.
“But The Odyssey wasn’t written yesterday. The idea that one group of people can own a story that originated in oral tradition somewhere around the eighth century before Christ, a story that has transcended its originating time and place many times over, is ludicrous. We don’t own these stories. These stories own us.”
This is what I like to call the “intertextuality excuse”: “This text is an adaptation of a different text, and since people from a different time now have access to it, that means that they own it and can do whatever they want with it.” That’s not how it works. We don’t own The Odyssey anymore than we own the Anansi stories or Journey to the West, yet it is only okay when old European stories are “reimagined.” The point remains that if old African and Asian stories are given the same treatment there would be universal cries of “Whitewashing” and “Cultural Appropriation”—something that Jonathan pointed out in the video you dismissed as “silly” and “reactionary.” The reason why the backlash erupted in the first place is that people are getting increasingly tired of this double standard treatment from Hollywood and other mainstream establishments.
“The why of adaptation is to extend the audience, the conversation, the experience of the source text. And there will be “faithful” adaptations. But the natural shift of mediums opens the aperture of a great work, allowing for new participants, new emphases, and new light to be let inside.”
Then reimagine The Odyssey in a modern-day American setting that reflects this “new” audience. In fact, it has been done before in O Brother, Where Art Thou? When you keep the setting of the source material but give it an artificial veneer of “modernity,” it’s just going to come across as forced and disingenuous. Audiences want authentic representation, and this is not that.
“The writer or filmmaker doing the adapting does not cast their spell alone. This sub-sub-creator embodies aspects of the spirit of their time, making their take on the originating work relevant to the broader population. (What is Homer saying? What is Emily Wilson saying about Homer? What is Nolan saying about Wilson and Homer and us?) That is not a flaw in the system. That is the habit of translation.”
Here Daniel is conflating adaptation with translation, which are two entirely different things. A translation is meant to be a rendering of the text from its original language to a new one; in other words, it’s the original text but in another language. An adaptation makes significant changes from the source material, crucial or not. The reason why Emily Wilson’s “translation” has been critics is because it is not, in fact, a translation but a retelling based on the original text. And while yes, an adapter will inevitably imprint their fingerprints on their adaptation, casting people whose race or ethnicity are not accurate to period and setting of the film is not an artistic choice so much as an ideological one.
“Looking at an adaptation is supposed to allow us to see the source text and the society in which it appeared alongside aspects of one’s own society and oneself.”
If I get this correctly, on the one hand, an adaptation is supposed to offer a different way to viewing the original source material. On the other hand, it should be a window into a different time and place. Kind of a contradictory statement there. Achieving both can be possible, and in fact often happens in adaptations, but there are times where the adapter has to make one decision over the other, a decision that can have a domino effect.
“[Cinzia] Dubois argues that Emerald Fennell’s film was never meant to be a realistic adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel. Instead, its highly symbolic and visually rich reinterpretation were crafted to provoke the same emotional discomfort and moral unease as the original text. The work is unambiguously layered and, in Dubois’ assessment, preserves the audience’s distaste for Cathy and Heathcliff.”
This is a dumb and baseless excuse that is the result of an overly pedantic analysis that desperately tries to present an objectively bad adaptation as good for ideological reasons. and the fact that you’re presenting Dubois, an ideologically-motivated pseudo-intellectual snob, as a “reasonable” voice, and Pageau as a “silly” and “reactionary” one for having a different set of ideological beliefs shows that you’re not actually arguing from an objective, good-faith place but from an ideologically-motivated one. As a side note, the fact that progressives decried the race-swap of Heathcliff from a dark-skinned Romani to white, but called others racist fro calling out the race-swaps in Nolan’s The Odyssey proves my point about double standards.
“Mamoru Oshii, director of the 1995 anime on which it is based, said:
""If this is to be a remake of the anime, I don’t think it’s necessary to remain faithful to the way things were expressed in the anime. The director should exercise his directorial freedom as much as possible. If he doesn’t do so, there would be no point in remaking it."
"(Oshii also defended Scarlett Johansson’s casting in that film against critics who claimed the role of a cyborg with an “entirely assumed” physical form should have been given to an Asian actress. “I can only sense a political motive from the people opposing it,” he said.”
This is very much an example of conformation bias. “See, this director agrees with my artistic decision, so you’re wrong to oppose it!” Nevermind that directors are people as well, with flawed understandings of how art (and in this case adaptations) should function. And it’s not like there haven’t been cases where creators of the original works weren’t willing to sell their artistic integrity for personal gain. (Looking at you, Eoin Colfer.) Ghost in the Shell is complicated terrain because anime characters can technically be categorized as both white and Japanese. Therefore Motoko Kusanagi can be easily be called white (she does have blue eyes after all) as well as East asian. And it’s not as if those in support of race-swaps aren’t politically motivated as well.
“Like Cinzia, I get excited by how people play with a source text. If I wanted the old story, I’d just go get it. And I still think it’s fun to compare the similarities and differences between mediums. But we must admit any adaptation is a different animal than the source text.”
Then neither you nor Cinzia actually cared for the old story in the first place. If you did, you’d respect the original work’s themes and, yes, setting. You just see it as something to be toyed with endlessly, to be infinitely subverted, a vessel to inject your own personal biases on a text that wasn’t made with your ideological bias in mind. This is the ultimate end-goal of an ideologically postmodernist mindset: to disrespect the original creator’s intent, makes dozens of excuse for why, and show interest on how it has been subverted, not on how well it captures the spirit of the source material.
Thank you for reading so thoroughly, thoughtfully, and in depth. A rare habit these days it seems.
I disagree that folks who complain about books being better than movies "were probably not big fans of movies in the first place." In the span of my life, my love of books far outstrips my love of movies. My enthusiasim for the cinema scene is a late-stage development. I love both books and movies and wish to see great adaptations of literature to film. When films get it right, I rejoice.
However, I did not call Pageau "disingenuous." If you have followed any of my writing, you would know that I have praised and recommended Pageau's work on more than one occasion. I have also bought swag from his organization for myself and others and wear it proudly. I don't agree with Pageau on everything, however, none of those disagreements were relevant to any of my writing until this particular topic.
I'm glad that Pageau acknowledged the mistake in his argument -- that acknowledgement was not posted to the video when I watched it in the process of drafting this. I should have ensured that my comment was not meant as a "smear," as you call it, of Pageau himself -- but of the kind of thinking that leads to such mistakes. I apologize for that. I have edited that section appropriately.
(I stand by my "pro-Western Civ furiosas" moniker because it's funny. To me.)
How do you define being "genuine" vs "ideological"? Please rewrite my essay so that it's more genuine. (You seem to approach your own work here from an ideological starting point -- that some people are trying to "ruin" European folk and fairy tales "in the name of social progress.")
Perhaps you should read my essay again.... I do not believe we, the people of today, "own" the stories of any culture that existed millenia before we came on the scene. These stories, among hundreds of others, shaped us and our world. The reason why we, Americans and Western Europeans, fight over the Odyssey more than we fight over, say, Anansi is because the Odyssey means something more to our culture at large than Anansi does. That's just true.
Anansi's tales simply don't have the cultural cachet for us that Homer's tales do. Certainly, many in particular pockets of culture would love for that to be the case. But we can't undo history.
Since it appears you actually care, I think folks like you and Pageau would help your argument if you got just as upset when white actors are cast in historically or contextually non-Western/non-white stories.
Like you: I'm getting tired of writing/talking here. I think there is a much deeper conversation that can take place about race and casting when it comes to mythic stories which should be parsed separately from actual strictly historical stories.
I don't know why you're upset with Oshii defending Johansson's casting against "whitewashing" claims either. Isn't that what you want -- less ideologically-pure conversation around these kinds of things? Oshii bucks the blind progressive outrage and has good reasons to do so.
I also don't know where you get off calling someone "an ideologically-motivated pseudo-intellectual snob." You accused me of calling Pageau "disingenuous" -- reread my essay; I did not -- and I would assume you dislike and are above personal attacks and name-calling. Name-calling implies that one is not equipped to engage in significant and considered conversation about the multi-valent layers of adaptation.
Finally, I find it hilarious that you, of all people, purport to know Homer's intent in writing down the Odyssey any more than anyone else. The only bias I have about Nolan's Odyssey adaptation is bias toward good filmmaking. And I genuinely can't wait for July 17th. I'm here for the stories. That's why I wrote this essay. It seems you only care about ideology.