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On Wednesday, the much-maligned-by-conservative-culture-whingers movie The Odyssey surpassed Deadpool & Wolverine as the highest-grossing R-rated movie in history.
The Odyssey crossed the milestone after earning over $1.34 billion globally, beating the previous record set by Deadpool & Wolverine in 2024.
Elon Musk led his angry band of incels into decrying Christopher Nolan’s cinematic adaptation of The Odyssey over its diverse casting, which they claimed upset them because it wasn’t “historically accurate”.
Musk repeatedly attacked director Christopher Nolan for casting Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy and trans actor Elliot Page as the Greek soldier Sinon, arguing that the castings compromised narrative integrity in classical literature.
It’s probably informative to add an example of Musk’s issues, like the time his estranged trans daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson labeled his September 2024 post offering to impregnate Taylor Swift "[h]einous incel nonsense".
Yes, he “offered” to impregnate a woman who wants nothing to do with him because he didn’t like her political endorsement. This is the psychology of the man criticizing a film for being “woke.” This is the man to whom The Don gave the keys to the kingdom, ostensibly including our data.
The Odyssey is an ancient Greek poem based on Greek mythology. It is not fact based. There is nothing to get “wrong” because it is art. It does, however, have a theme that has obviously gone over Elon and Don's heads: the value of intelligence over sheer force.
Oh, well. Homer tried.
Elon Musk has shown himself to be wholly incapable of grasping even the most obvious messages from books, films, video games, music and art. Musk oversimplifies them and completely misses their core anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, and/or satirical themes. He never gets that he is the joke, he is the problem, he is the villain in the works of art he grabs onto in his relentless effort to be cool.
He is reliably wrong in his Spark Notes takes.
The Musk boys spent so much energy screaming “Go Woke, Go Broke!” all over the Internet that Wednesday was spent mocking them for getting it wrong, again. Oh, they wailed. They pretended they never said it would fail, they’re just so concerned about literature… The literature they are banning around the country.
Musk frequently aligns himself with The Matrix, a sci-fi allegory deeply rooted in trans themes and critiques of systemic capitalist exploitation, because he wrongly believes it’s criticizing "the woke mind virus."
Musk, who suffers from the worst case of grandiose epistemic trespassing currently known to man, has threatened to make a “historically accurate” version of The Odyssey with his AI platform, Grok Imagine, by the end of 2026.
Given the history of his rockets and his inability to grasp even the most basic points of works of art, expect a “rapid unscheduled disassembly" of literature.
