The Real Lesson of Elon Musk’s Outrage at Christopher Nolan

A beautiful movie star is cast in a beloved story. The character is fictional—she isn’t even fully human. Nonetheless, activists and purists insist that the actor is the wrong race.I’m speaking of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, the 2017 film adaptation of a popular Japanese manga series. Critics accused the movie’s creators of “whitewashing” the heroine, a cyborg whose physical form is entirely prosthetic and whose race and gender are, in fact, mutable. She’s implanted with the consciousness of a Japanese woman, but her memories have been suppressed and edited. The story is an examination of how unstable identity is, and how untethered it can be from the body. Yet for detractors, the politics of representation—the simple fact that Johansson isn’t Asian—overrode the power of the film’s philosophical inquiry.Audiences are willing to suspend all manner of disbelief in service of a good story—except, apparently, when it comes to race. Hence the controversy surrounding this year’s most anticipated movie, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. The director cast the Kenyan Mexican actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman of the ancient world. The resulting fury says much more about today’s myopic understanding of identity than it does about classical antiquity.[Read: Christopher Nolan on the promise and peril of technology]Elon Musk used to be a fan of Nolan’s, but he quickly reconsidered when rumors began circulating that the director had cast Nyong’o. “Chris Nolan has lost his integrity,” Musk said on X in January. Then, earlier this month, the right-wing provocateur Matt Walsh rekindled the debate. “Christopher Nolan knows that he would be called racist if he gave ‘the most beautiful woman’ role to a white woman,” he said on X.Musk has been posting about it ever since. “Chris Nolan is pissing on Homer’s grave,” he wrote. “Chris Nolan has shown total contempt for the Greek People.” These complaints have garnered tens of thousands