A few days ago I speculated as to what might make This Week in Schadenfreude, and it turned out I was wrong. The winner was much more deserving.
It would not be summer without right-wing culture warriors soiling themselves over at least one of the blockbuster films of the season. It happened last year with Sinners, it happened in 2024 with Wicked, it happened in 2023 with Barbie, it happened in 2022 with Avatar: The Way of Water and… well, you get the point. The current film that is in the right-wing crosshairs, and has been since well before it was released, is The Odyssey.
The culture warriors’ gripes with the newest from director Christopher Nolan largely boil down to three things, in this order:
- Several of the characters are played by non-white actors. Most notably, and causing far and away the most discontent, Helen of Troy and her twin sister are played by Lupita Nyong’o. Nyong’o is Kenyan and Mexican, so that’s two sh**hole countries for the price of one.
- Nolan cast trans actor Elliot Page in a major role, as Sinon. Right-wingers who know the original work (and not too many of them do) are annoyed not only by the trans casting, but by the fact that the movie Sinon is much more noble than the epic poem Sinon.
- The entire movie is a critique of the sort of masculinity and rah-rah approach to war that is embodied by people like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. “The main struggle for Nolan and his producer wife is that they can’t make the ancient Greeks too heroic, masculine, iconic because that would uphold the Euro-supremacist roots of all Western Civilization,” wrote one Twitterer, “so you cast a woke manlet as the King.” Note, in particular, the gratuitous reference to Nolan’s producing-partner wife, Emma Thomas, implying that he makes the films he makes because he’s been emasculated by her.
I’m not going to reprint the whole thing, because I want to highlight another item also, even though I’m well aware that folks tend not to click on links. I hope you’ll make an exception this time. It concerns Elon Musk among other right wingers.
This Week in Schadenfreude: Nolan’s Heroes Fight the Trojan War AND the Culture Wars
The other piece I want to highlight is the yang to its yin. To wit, This Week Freudenfreude.
I have been very critical of Barack Obama, but he did do some things worth praising, and this is one of them.
This is a nice little story. Back when he was president, Barack Obama got an average of 40,000 letters a day. He would have his staff pick 10 per day for him to answer personally, and would spend time each day taking care of that task. Among the many letters he got, and responded to, was one from a 7-year-old named Emily Smith, who wrote to the then-president to tell him that her mother, who had supported him, had recently died of cancer. Obama responded with this handwritten note:
Once again I’m going to direct you to click on the link, as it’s a story well worth your time:
This Week in Freudenfreude: A Witness to History, in a Small Way