Max Rivera: Clara, hey — did you actually watch it this week or did you just read about it like I did for the first two days?
Clara Bennett: I watched it. Twice, actually. Which tells you something about where my head's been.
Max Rivera: Here's what's been driving me — wait, no, I want to just say it flat: the Odyssey controversy is over. Like, I think it's done. Three hundred million dollars opening weekend, Nolan wins, case closed.
Clara Bennett: That's the take you're leading with? Because I think that's exactly wrong — and I want to hear you say why before I push back.
Max Rivera: Because Ben Shapiro — the guy, the one who called Elliot Page's casting 'stupid' and an 'absolute puzzler' — he gave the film an 8.5 out of 9. And then said his own side was missing, quote, 'the Biblical forest for the woke trees.' The guy leading the charge walked it back.
Clara Bennett: Wait — he said that? The Biblical forest line?
Max Rivera: Verbatim. And Whoopi Goldberg was on The View on July 21st basically saying the same thing from the other direction — the movie's number one at the box office and critics are still trashing it. Elon Musk had been spreading this claim that Page was cast as Achilles, which was just — it was false, Page plays Sinon, a minor character Nolan invented. And yet the machinery kept running even after the correction landed.
Clara Bennett: Right — and that's the part you're calling 'case closed' that I'd push on. The box office won. The argument didn't stop.
Max Rivera: But here's what I keep getting stuck on — Musk and Shapiro were spreading the wrong character. Like, not a slightly wrong read, wrong character. Page plays Sinon, and Sinon isn't even in Homer. Nolan made him up. So how does the 'fidelity to Homer' argument survive that?
Clara Bennett: It doesn't. That's the whole thing. Imagine you complain that a renovation destroyed the original character of a house — and then someone checks and the room you're upset about was added by this owner. It didn't exist before. That's the Sinon situation, exactly.
Max Rivera: Wait — so critics invoking Homer were literally arguing for fidelity to a character Homer never wrote.
Clara Bennett: Correct. Nolan invented Sinon. The historical accuracy argument collapses the moment you check the source text. Which means that was never the real complaint. The real complaint was about Elliot Page being transgender, and 'fidelity to Homer' was the available-sounding reason.
Max Rivera: And Musk amplified it as an Achilles casting — which is a prominent warrior role, not a minor invented one. So the lie made it sound worse than what actually happened.
Clara Bennett: Right, and the correction — Page plays Sinon, not Achilles — was available. It was out there. And organized opposition ran for seven months anyway. Now, that's the tell. A factual error that gets corrected and still doesn't change the behavior isn't actually driving the behavior.
Max Rivera: So the lie was — I mean, it wasn't the fuel. It was just the match somebody handed people who already wanted to start a fire.
Clara Bennett: That's it, exactly. And it's worth naming that Lupita Nyong'o caught completely separate backlash for playing Helen of Troy — racialized, not transphobic. Two different attacks, same film. Which tells you the opposition wasn't one coherent complaint about Homer. It was multiple objections looking for cover.
Max Rivera: And that's exactly the fracture point — because Shapiro's 8.5 out of 9 should've ended it. Like, if the criticism was principled — if it was genuinely about artistic integrity — his own positive review kills the movement. Instead, nothing stopped.
Clara Bennett: That's where you get your partial win. The Shapiro split is the structural tell. A principled critique cannot survive its own leader calling the film good.
Max Rivera: Right — and look at who didn't get attacked. Matt Damon as Odysseus. Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron. Zero organized campaigns. Nothing. But Page and Nyong'o —
Clara Bennett: Two targets, two distinct objections, same film. That's not a unified artistic argument. That's opportunism wearing a Homer costume.
Max Rivera: Okay but here's the — wait, actually this is what gets me. Picture a casting director. She's just read the opening weekend numbers. Her team is pitching an Iliad adaptation. She loves a specific actress for a major role. And she's not asking 'is this actress talented' — she's running the math on seven months of organized attacks, the think pieces, what that does to the actor before the film even opens.
Clara Bennett: And Nolan could absorb that cost. An independent or mid-budget director cannot.
Max Rivera: Exactly. So Shapiro's review proved the backlash wasn't principled — but it didn't make the machinery cheaper to survive.
Clara Bennett: Which is what the $300 million number actually tells us — and what it doesn't — and whether Goldberg's whole 'just don't go see it' answer was ever enough of a response. That's the part worth sitting with next.
Max Rivera: Yeah. Because winning the box office and winning the argument aren't the same thing. Nolan proved one of those.
Clara Bennett: Goldberg proved that point on The View — and she had real institutional weight behind it. EGOT, ABC daytime, the biggest mainstream platform you can get. She played the Shapiro clip calling Page's casting 'stupid,' then landed: 'You don't like Elliot Page? Don't go see the damn movie.' As a consumer-choice argument, that's actually clean. It's hard to argue with.
Max Rivera: That line hits. Like — it hits.
Clara Bennett: It does. But she never corrected the Achilles claim. Musk's version — Page as Achilles, not as Sinon — that misinformation went factually unchallenged on that show. So the most-watched daytime defense of the film didn't actually fix the record.
Max Rivera: Wait — she just skipped it? The whole Sinon thing?
Clara Bennett: Skipped it entirely. And separately — 'don't see it' doesn't address whether seven months of public attacks on Page and Nyong'o were harmful independent of the ticket sales. The box office doesn't retroactively absorb that.
Max Rivera: Yeah, that's — I mean, those are two different things, right? Like, whether the film succeeded and whether the people in it were put through something genuinely damaging. Those don't cancel each other out.
Clara Bennett: Exactly. And the critics who ran the campaign for seven months did not update their position when the $300 million number came in. That's the tell. Commercial success is a data point. It is not a resolution. The machinery runs on momentum, not on outcomes.
Max Rivera: So the calibrated version is — Nolan's brand was big enough that no boycott could dent it. That's what three hundred million proves. Not that inclusive casting works. Just that Nolan specifically works.
Clara Bennett: That's the defensible claim. The Odyssey survived because Christopher Nolan directed it. The next director does not get that margin. Commercial success settled the box office. It settled nothing else.
Max Rivera: I keep landing back on what I said at the top — like, I came in saying the controversy was over, three hundred million, case closed. And I was right that Nolan won. But the reason I was right is actually kind of worse than being wrong? The machinery didn't stop because the film was good. It stopped because Nolan is specifically Nolan. That's — I mean, that's a narrow door.
Clara Bennett: And the door doesn't get wider. That's the sharpest version of it. The Odyssey controversy ran seven months on a correction that was publicly available — Page plays Sinon, a character Nolan invented, not Achilles — and commercially defeated, and it still didn't stop. What stopped it was the final number. Not the argument. Which means the next filmmaker doesn't get to win the argument. They just have to decide whether they can afford the test.
Max Rivera: And most of them can't. That's where I'll actually leave it.
Clara Bennett: Good conversation. Genuinely.
Max Rivera: Yeah. You too.
