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Josh vs the News: How The Odyssey Broke the Internet · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, and I wouldn't have thought the ideas in The Odyssey were particularly dangerous, but the casting certainly seems to have been. You are probably across now the online hoo-ha about a black actress being cast as Helen of Troy, and a transgender actor being cast in a role that wasn't originally in The Odyssey, but everybody is getting their tits and a tangle about anyway. This is not
• 0:31
  to rehash those squabbles, which are very one week ago. This is more an attempt to look at the way that online squabbles unfold, what they tell us about how we're talking to each other, and how the evidence of the collapse of conversation is rippling out in other ways, far beyond the Odyssey, far beyond the box office, indeed to the ballot box and to the rise of far-right populism. If you're
• 0:58
  I wrote a column about this in the Australian Financial Review this weekend, and I'd like to read it for you. And I'd like to read you some excerpts from an excellent piece in the New York Times by David French, who's an anti-Trump conservative and a small C conservative and a Christian.
• 1:20
  who has some really interesting ideas about the lesson of the Odyssey for modern politics, for norms, for morality, for all of us. You don't have to have seen the movie to appreciate any of this. This is more of a forensic analysis about the collapse of how we talk to each other about sensitive issues. And the Odyssey is kind of like a perfect petri dish. This is like a case study of how things can go wrong. If you're sufficiently offline that you don't know about these controversies, oh, I envy you.
• 1:50
  Oh, sweet, sweet summer child. What a blissful place to live. But I can assure you that many, many, many, many, many, many, many millions of people have been subtly deranged by the arguments about the Odyssey. And as I point out in my piece, which I'm about to read, you don't need to be very deranged, and you don't need very many people to be a little bit deranged to swing things for the rest of us.
• 2:17
  So my piece was entitled Culture War Ideologues Have Hijacked Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. It was subtitled As Go the Arguments About the Blockbuster Movie. So go our conversations about fairness, gender, race and immigration. And so go our elections. Elon Musk, I write, has opinions about Homer now.
• 2:41
  When Christopher Nolan cast a black actress as Helen of Troy and a trans man as a Greek soldier, Musk branded him an anti-white racist who desecrated the Odyssey.
• 2:55
  Donald Trump Jr. piled on. X went berserk. I actually wrote Twitter went berserk because I don't like calling it X. But, you know, it's like, would you call it Myanmar or I just call it Burma still? Why do you get to just come in and change the name of something just because you've got a lot of guns or a lot of money? Twitter went berserk. I overrule the editor of the newspaper in this case.
• 3:20
  Uh, nothing less than the fate of Western civilization, I write, hinged on getting your knickers in a knot about what late Bronze Age Greeks really looked like. More than half a million people reportedly bombarded the film's trailer with down votes on YouTube. This was before anyone had seen a single frame. Tough crowd.
• 3:44
  At the same time, a reverse furor erupted on the opposite side of the Internet's hall of mirrors. In left-wing crazy town, Nolan is guilty of Western civilization's greatest sins, colonialism, occupation, and genocide, for shooting scenes in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara.
• 4:07
  Javier Bardem, Pedro Almodovar and Greta Thunberg joined the official campaign to get the offending footage cut from the film. The movie's London premiere was protested by activists chanting, Shame! And Free Sahara! What's more, the Odyssey cast is not too diverse, but not diverse enough. Progressive critics complained that a story about Greeks contains not a single Greek actor.
• 4:38
  Where is Con the Frutera when you need him? It's easy to make too much of internet flare-ups. Few genres of journalism are more tiresome than The internet is blowing up about X, in which a reporter cherry-picks a dozen tweets and declares a global trend.
• 4:58
  But the campaigns against the Odyssey were so premature, so self-certain, and so sealed inside their own bubbles, that collectively they are a fine example of how online polarisation works. That matters at the ballot box as much as at the box office.
• 5:21
  The first shoe to drop was Lupita Nyong'o's casting as the most beautiful woman in the world. In May, the right-wing commentator Matt Walsh declared to his millions of Twitter followers, Christopher Nolan knows that he would be called racist if he gave the most beautiful woman role to a white woman. This salvo, I write, may be patient zero of the Odyssey is Woke pandemic.
• 5:50
  Now, Walsh may be right. Someone somewhere on some lefty forum probably would have called Nolan a racist if he'd cast Margot Robbie. So what? Do we really believe that one of the world's most obsessive filmmakers cares more about internet trolls than about whether a Kenyan-American... Sorry, a Kenyan-Mexican Academy Award winner will make Helen cooler, weirder, deeper?
• 6:19
  That nuance doesn't matter to Walsh's fans. He's tapping into a deep vein of irritation many of us feel towards holier-than-thou social activism. If a white queen is played by a black actress, thou shalt applaud. But if Martin Luther King were to be played by Eddie Redmayne, thou shalt raise the village and catapult Redmayne into the sun. Walsh denounces this inconsistency as, quote, pathetic.
• 6:51
  Yes, Matt, it is pathetic, but not as pathetic as devoting your life to bloviating about it. Now, in my original, and this is me talking now, not my article, in my original piece, I included a paragraph just to sort of bolster my bona fides as, you know, not being a woke partisan here, not someone who's carrying water for the people who are saying, oh, the rioter is being so nasty and silly.
• 7:18
  by saying that there are occasions on which I have joined in the Woke as Crazy bandwagon. But this is because on those occasions, there was an obvious and overt political interference in culture, in a piece of cultural output, to the detriment of that piece of culture. Exhibit A, ladies and gentlemen, let me submit to you the jury that,
• 7:44
  An episode that I did in April of last year, April 2025, entitled, and I quote Just Josh, it was entitled, you can go and look it up, you can go and listen to it. In fact, I exhort you to go and listen to it because I loved it. I loved doing it. I was so passionate and I was so furious. It was called Just Josh, The Woke Catastrophe of Snow White.
• 8:07
  This is a little movie review that I did about the Disney remake of Snow White last year. I don't know whether you remember this motion picture. It was one of the most expensive box office disasters in the history of the Disney Corporation. It was a Snow White, and as you may remember from the original book and the original film, Snow White is called Snow White because her skin is white as snow.
• 8:35
  Her skin is white as snow. Hence the name Snow White. Well, that wasn't going to be good enough in 2015. So they cast a Latina as Snow White, and they changed the backstory, and they said she's called Snow White because she was born during a blizzard. And you know what color blizzards are? They're white. See how easy it is to, I mean...
• 8:58
  Don't get Matt Walsh started on desecration, ladies and gents, because we're just starting with the whole title has been revised. So the Latina actress does a great job. She's there as her Snow White, but you don't want to have her as like someone who's pining after a prince because that's not very girl power. So one of the original film's most popular songs was a song entitled Someday My Prince Will Come.
• 9:23
  So they scrap that, and they don't use it in the movie at all. In fact, they don't just scrap the song, Someday My Prince Will Come, for being insufficiently feminist. They also scrap the prince. Because if you want to get married, if you want a prince to come along, then that's not only not very feminist, but it's kind of a bit patriarchal, isn't it? And a bit sort of imperial, a bit regal.
• 9:42
  So we don't have a prince. The prince gets replaced with a kind of Robin Hood-esque, merry woodsman thief. He's a woodsman thief, and he has a band of helpers who are going around with it, and she falls in love with the woodsman thief instead of with the prince. Okay, so far, so good. But then...
• 10:04
  Peter Dinklage, brilliant actor, who's a little person from Game of Thrones, gives an interview in which he's saying, well, it's a little bit retrograde, isn't it, to be doing Snow White and the Seven Dwarves? Like, I mean, I've worked my whole life to try to prove that people with dwarfism are not just like little, you know, kind of munchkins who live in a cave or something. Do they have to be reviving this thing? Well, no.
• 10:27
  The shit hits the fan at Disney as soon as the world's best and most beloved little person says this in an interview. It was, you know, he was just, he wasn't, it's not like he released a statement or something. I think he was on Marc Maron's podcast. They were just shooting the shit. Anyway.
• 10:43
  Disney loses its you-know-what. And so they say, all right, we're not going to do... There aren't any dwarves in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Who said dwarves? We didn't say dwarves. You said dwarves. I know you are. You said you are, Peter. I mean, but what am I? But we don't have any dwarves here. Instead, we have Snow White and the Seven Magical Creatures of the Forest...
• 11:06
  So they create these CGI abominations, which are seven magical creatures of the forest in play. And they have the same names as the seven dwarves, of course, but they're definitely not dwarves. They're short and they're in Snow White and the seven dwarves. But as we've already established, Snow White isn't even Snow White because their skin's not as white as snow. And the dwarves certainly aren't dwarves because they're magical creatures of the forest. So Flipsy and Dopsy and Dipsy and Prancer and Blitz and whatever the fuck they are, they're all just CGI. They're magical creatures of the forest.
• 11:35
  and they're CGI. So then another little person actor goes, what gives? You could have cast seven actors with dwarfism, and now there's zero parts for actors with dwarfism. You know how few parts there are for actors with dwarfism? And now there are going to be seven parts in a big movie, and we don't even get a single part? So Disney goes back into crisis mode, permanent crisis mode during the woke wars.
• 12:04
  And they go, all right, we've got the CGI seven magical creatures of the, you know, terrified studio executives, the seven magical creatures of paranoid white men trying to avoid an internet pylon. And those seven creatures aren't going to be little people. But you know what we'll do?
• 12:21
  We're going to invent an entirely new character, a random character who has nothing to do with anything, and we'll make that just a person with dwarfism. And that person will be one of, I don't know, the prince's merry band of, oh, hang on, there's not a prince. The woodland thief's merry band of helpers
• 12:39
  That can just be a random person with dwarfism. So now we've got an actor with dwarfism. We've got no dwarves. We've got CGI magical creatures of the Embarrassed Studio Executive Forest. And we're all good to go. So I found this... By the way, the result is the most appalling. It's like what...
• 12:58
  What kind of movie that you would get if there was a Maoist Stalinist DEI dictatorship and they were producing state propaganda, then you would get Snow White and the seven magical creatures of the embarrassed studio executive, Forrest. So I did a whole thing about this.
• 13:18
  So I was originally going to have a paragraph aside about this, but they still print op-eds in newspapers on very thin pieces of tree, and so there's not enough room on the thin piece of tree. So I cut that bit. But just to say, this is not me going, oh, it's always mistaken for people to be critical of wokeness. The problem is when it's a studio that is obviously overriding the creative process in order to inject a political dimension.
• 13:46
  So back to my article. I go on to say, after saying that Matt Walsh is pathetic for devoting his life to bloviating about, you know, I don't know whether or not people are inconsistent for applauding a white queen who's played by a black actress, but not a black character who'd be played by a white person. I say, how literal do we want art to be anyway? Anyway.
• 14:09
  If the Odyssey were true to its 2,700-year-old source material, Odysseus should not look like Matt Damon, Helen shouldn't be black, Sinon shouldn't be trans, the Cyclops should be played by a real monster, no one should speak modern English, and whoever plays Helen of Troy must literally, as in the story, have been hatched from a swan's egg. The casting call would be slim.
• 14:37
  But the signature move of online discourse is to say something true about how crazy the other side is, then use it to justify an equal and opposite craziness. Anti-racist scolds would lose their minds if Nolan didn't cast a person of colour, therefore I must lose my mind because he did.
• 15:02
  Both sides do this. In fact, today's right-wing blowback is in part a reaction to the left's overzealous policing of social justice transgressions. If the internet is on fire because a trans man is playing a soldier, it's partly because progressives laid the kindling.
• 15:24
  Elliot Page, the trans actor in question, became famous as the pregnant teenage girl in the delightful 2007 comedy Juno. Ellen Page came out as a trans man in 2020 and medically transitioned. Good for him, I write. It's a free world. If Page had got the part...
• 15:49
  because a Universal Pictures compliance boffin ordered Christopher Nolan to hit a gender identity target, that would be political interference in the creative process. But Nolan cast Page in Inception 16 years ago. He's a fan. His Odyssey script includes a guileless young man whose innocence is shattered by war,
• 16:16
  It's hard to fault Nolan for casting Page in that role, and harder still to fault Page for taking the part. He's terrific in it. By the way, as an aside here, and I'm no longer reading again, a lot of people on the right were claiming that Elliot Page had been cast as a fearsome warrior. Here in Australia on Sky News After Dark, which is like our equivalent of Fox News, with the only exception being that nobody watches it,
• 16:44
  Rita Panahy, who's a conservative commentator who seems extremely agitated about a great many things. I do hope that these people are taking some kind of, you know, some medication for blood pressure, perhaps, some cortisol suppressant.
• 17:02
  so anyway she goes on she goes on the air and she says that this is also a quote that I included in my first draft but didn't make the cut she says that the whole thing is just a woke, a terrible woke movie, it didn't seem like she'd seen the film I'm not sure if she had, it's a terrible woke movie because Elliot Page has been cast as a fearsome warrior now tell me you haven't seen the film without telling me you haven't seen the film tell me you've only read right wing Twitter accounts
• 17:30
  The Elliot Page character, Sinon, which is, as I said, not in the original Odyssey, but is pilfered from another Greek myth. This is a person who enlists into the army when he's a boy, and it kind of embodies the
• 17:46
  innocence of youth, and it has to be corrupted and have that innocence brutalized by war. So it's completely consistent that this character would be young and androgynous and, you know, perhaps a little bit cowardly and disabused of their purity. It's not like Elliot Page is Odysseus. It's not like you need somebody who's eight feet tall and full of muscles.
• 18:10
  So it's perfect casting and Elliot Page, as always, whether Elliot was Elliot or Ellen, has been a great actor for a long time. So back to my article. And by the way, if you like hearing my articles, go to the Financial Review and go to the paywalled page of these articles and subscribe, because you know what that does? It keeps the data monkeys happy. And then the data or data of people, they go, oh, look, someone clicked through from Josh's page. That means people must like Josh's articles.
• 18:40
  Um, but you know, you might as well just subscribe to this podcast, uh, or both. So I say, uh, you know, no, no page didn't get the part because a universal features compliance boffin ordered Christopher Nolan to hire, to hit a gender identity target. The script is relevant. The part is relevant. It's hard to fault Nolan or page here. Uh, and I go on to write the outrage at page then is less about page or Nolan or the odyssey
• 19:10
  than about our collective failure to discuss tricky topics in ways that make sense to normal people. In left-wing trans activist logic, Ellen Page never existed. The actress in Juno was in fact a transgender male incorrectly assigned female at birth. To mention Ellen is to deadname Elliot.
• 19:39
  Thus, I write, Juno's IMDB page now lists the pregnant schoolgirl as Elliot Page. Wikipedia notes that he, quote-unquote, received a Best Actress nomination. He received a Best Actress nomination.
• 20:02
  Quietly erasing a female performer's name from a 20-year-old cast list is, it seems, a perfectly normal thing to do. If you find it jarring, then, according to the logic of social justice, you need to interrogate why you hate transgender people so much. Imagine if transgender rights had been won by persuasion instead of by witch hunts, and by conversations instead of by social media.
• 20:31
  Elliot Page could just be an actor in a movie. The point is not that any of these squabbles tell us much about the average person's outlook.
• 20:43
  The point is that in a polarised society, noisy extremists needn't be numerous to have an outsized effect. In an electorate that's split 52 to 48, online mobs don't need to nudge many more people to slightly more radical positions to swing the result for everyone.
• 21:09
  Social media incentivizes stupidity and irradiates the middle ground. As go the arguments about the odyssey, so go our conversations about fairness, gender, race, and immigration, and so go our elections.
• 21:29
  So there you go. The bow was drawn. That's me drawing the bow. I just drew it. I just drew it right in front of you. It's like a magic trick in real time. So that's my thoughts about the cultural fallout of the Odyssey. Now, what does the film actually mean in the framework of the culture wars and the political wars and the fight between populism and the establishment, between liberalism and whatever MAGA is? A great piece in the New York Times,
• 21:59
  by David French, who, as I mentioned now, David French is a war veteran. He's a Christian. He is a Republican, was a Republican. And Trump, you know, drove him out of the party, essentially. And I mean, he drove himself out of the party because he hated Trump so much and is now one of the most principled conservative voices against Donald Trump in the United States. He also has a great podcast and is well worth reading.
• 22:24
  So he wrote a piece in the New York Times called Defy the Gods, Pay the Price. And this gets us to the heart of the theme of the Odyssey and what it tells us about the fate of civilization in the 21st century. I'm going to read some chunks from David French because I could paraphrase it for you, but it's not going to be as good as his words. He writes, what really happens when you defy the gods? Or put another way, do you believe moral laws exist?
• 22:54
  By that, he writes, I don't mean that something's right or wrong. Instead, do you believe that the transgression of a moral law carries a consequence? We're familiar with the consequences of physical laws. If you step off the roof of a building, the law of gravity takes over. But what if you violate the golden rule? Is there a consequence for failing to love thy neighbor as thyself?
• 23:20
  At this moment in American history, French writes, it seems as if a substantial portion of America's ruling class is putting all its chips on the answer being no. Rules are for suckers. In fact, as far as they're concerned, morality causes problems. In American politics and commerce, complying with something as lame as norms, even uttering the word in a positive fashion, is like fighting with one hand tied behind your back.
• 23:50
  A president enriches himself at a scale never before seen in the United States. An Epstein class of abusive libertines always seems to evade accountability for its crimes. Government officials break the law with impunity, banking on presidential pardons to excuse their crimes, all while truth is buried under an avalanche of lies, lies that are shared with gusto by cadres of grifters and fools.
• 24:20
  Without saying a word about modern politics, David French writes, Christopher Nolan has rebuked the spirit of the age. His retelling of the Odyssey is an admonition. Moral transgressions always carry a consequence. His version of Odysseus is a haunted man. After ten years of war and ten long years of suffering on the journey home, he seems broken. He can be ruthless. He can be vicious.
• 24:51
  but he is also suffering from a profound moral injury. Only confession and penance provide pathways to peace. He goes on to write a few other things, and then he says that the movie centers on a moral code, specifically Zeus's law. This is not a, you know, you don't have to worry about these being spoilers. I'm not going to spoil anything. Zeus's law is the obligation to treat strangers with hospitality and kindness.
• 25:18
  The lore is rooted in the mythical idea that the gods sometimes travel among people while disguised as mortals. It's in this disguise that the gods can judge the true worth of a person. Or as Odysseus says in the film, the clearest view is from below.
• 25:34
  So French goes on to explain a bit more with a few spoilers about the film that I won't read. But he points out that by the end of the film, and this is the mildest of spoilers, the Trojan War is no longer seen as a great victory conducted in the service of a righteous cause. It's seen as a war fought for power under the pretext of fighting to bring Helen of Troy home.
• 26:00
  Redemption for Odysseus, writes David French, comes from confession and penance, not defiance. It's a reminder of how stupid and petty much of the right has become that anyone would think this movie is woke. This is where David French's piece dovetails with my own.
• 26:20
  Yes, he writes a black actor, Lupita Nyong'o plays Helen of Troy, and a trans actor, Elliot Page, plays Sinon, the Greek warrior, who unwittingly tricks the Trojans into accepting the Trojan horse as a gift. But to label a movie woke, simply because of the identity of the actors, is to indulge in a caricatured version of the same identity politics that the right claims to loathe.
• 26:44
  In reality, David French writes, Nolan's Odyssey is one of the most small-c conservative movies I've ever seen. I can easily imagine a natural law theorist watching the movie, nodding his head and saying, yes, there are universal moral laws, and this is exactly what happens when prideful men believe they know more than God.
• 27:13
  But the consequences of violating moral laws are different and more pernicious than, say, defying the laws of gravity. If I step off a roof, as I said earlier, the consequences are immediate and permanent, for me at least. But I can violate moral laws and prosper, if only for a time. The consequences often radiate out to others.
• 27:40
  That's why transgression is so seductive, writes French. Terrible men get to sack Troy, and some of them might even get to carry the gold away with them. They can live in a palace for a while, as the rest of the world turns to rubble and ruin.
• 27:59
  I'll skip over the rest of the article and just get to the end of David French's piece, where he says Americans are bitter, divided, and uncertain. We lack confidence in our future. We dislike one another. We distrust the government.
• 28:20
  I want to repair that damage, not accelerate our decline. And Nolan, Christopher Nolan, has given us an artistic answer. Defy the gods? Defy the dignity of your neighbour? You certainly can, if you so choose. And you may prosper. For a time.
• 28:45
  but the narrative arc of the movie tells us our destiny, or tells us our destiny if that's the path we choose. It turns out that there are rules for rule breakers, just as there are for everyone else, and those rules have persisted throughout human history. Here is one arguably central truth of the film. Heedless people, you will pay for what you destroy.
• 29:17
  I think that's a great take on the film. I think that is a way of taking all of the hoo-ha about the movie from what we might call the woke rights infatuation with identity politics, Matt Walsh's endless bloviating about the hypocrisy of us all and being okay with...
• 29:37
  colorblind casting when it comes to a story about Greeks in a way that we wouldn't if it was a story about Africans, for example. All of this stupid to-ing and fro-ing about whether or not trans people should be cast as fearsome warriors that they weren't in fact cast to play—
• 29:54
  All of this hand-wringing about whether or not Christopher Nolan, far from being a desecrator of Western civilization, is actually guilty of Western civilization's greatest sins because he chose a location which is currently occupied by another country and therefore the poor people of that. I mean, look, I don't want to get involved in all the Western Sahara debate. I believe people should be free. I believe people should have self-determination. But can we have some perspective?
• 30:24
  What David French is talking about is a shift away from a respect for the institutions that have established Western civilization, a common consensus that there are certain norms, certain principles of behavior, certain ways of treating one another, certain ways of doing business and doing politics and doing culture, that have, since the end of the Second World War, created the greatest prosperity and the greatest freedom that the world has ever seen.
• 30:54
  And that those norms are now regarded as being kind of stuffy, old-fashioned, pointless restrictions that are imposed by dead white males on all the rest of us, and are really only observed by whining losers.
• 31:12
  And that if you want to get ahead, you kick down those norms. Now, whether it's the kicking down of those norms by political ne'er-de-wells like Donald Trump and other far-right populists who just want to raise to the ground the things that are hamstringing them and unleash a potentially better new future of normless self-aggrandizement,
• 31:37
  or whether it's the cultural norms that were raised to the ground by the woke left over the past 10 or 15 years, and are now being seized upon by the woke right
• 31:46
  Either way, we're living in destabilizing times. And if the message that you take away from the Odyssey is that you need to get your knickers in a knot about what its casting was, or where Christopher Nolan was shooting it, or whether or not there are any Greek actors playing Greeks, rather than what it has to say about what happens to a society, to a civilization, to a culture, when it fails to honor the norms upon which it was built, then...
• 32:15
  then you're kind of missing the point. And you're kind of part of the problem. I hope that's useful. You should see the movie. It's a fabulous film. I want to go back and see it a second time. See it in a cinema with great sound, with Dolby Atmos. Don't just focus on your 70mm and your screen projection. You also want to be able to hear it. All right. Love you. See you next time. Take care.