![HayzardSolum's tweet photo. Call of My Life & The Boy Who Gave: One More Word on Story Mechanics
If you had been too far gone to catch it, this one line by Uzoamaka Power's character, Soluchi, makes it plain: “I feel like I'm in a movie.” And just like that, your mind is alert to the contrivances and coincidences Call of My Life piles up on screen.
Eli and Soluchi connect on a phone call at her job as a customer care agent. Her colleague, Eze, happens to be his longtime classmate (1). Eli runs into Soluchi and her friend, Zim, at a restaurant (2). Eli and Soluchi run into each other again at an escalator in town (3), whereupon that line is uttered. It’s at point three that they finally decide to go out on a date.
Now, if at this point you thought Eli had, in fact, tracked down the girl with the sonorous voice from the phone call, the date tells us that this is not the case. As far as Eli is concerned, the girl from the phone call and the girl he meets at the restaurant are two different girls entirely. When Soluchi inadvertently reveals that she is one and the same girl, Eli looks sufficiently gobsmacked. The script knows enough to be aware of its array of coincidences. But what does it do with it?
At that date scene, I turned to my Padi and said, “in a [different] script, this is where things take a turn for the weird.” How weird could things get?
Well, we could go full-blown meta and lean into the full import of that line. That may have created a story which analyzes the inner workings of rom-coms and how story universes just swing into alignment to give the heroine the perfect man of her dreams, whether she wants him right now or not. The 2019 Rebel Wilson feature, Isn’t It Romantic, does something of this sort.
Or, perhaps, not meta. From fairy godmothers to time machines, romcoms have whipped up fantastical elements to get their lovers together. Rowan Atkinson in Love Actually, for instance, plays a knowing agent of fate.
If fantasy seems too far beyond the purview of Call of My Life, we already have a rather strong and grounded version of these elements in the form of a wingman. Why else does the film conjure Eze up as both a colleague of Sol’s and an old friend of Eli’s? Why else do we have that scene with Eli discovering him when he goes searching for Soul [sic] online?
Plug Eze in as the link, and all of those convenient meetings make sense. Most lovers have, at some point, managed an accidental run-in, with the accidental in quotes, bold, and italicized. Feminist critiques of romance and romcom tropes have highlighted the toxicity of many of these antics. That scroll through your crush’s social media feed is actually the boundary violation of a stalker. Is that why the fairly worn route of the wingman’s assistance is written out of the script? Was it the intent to make Eli less manipulative, more sincere, and thus sharing in our astonishment? The problem is with Eli, we are already very much in creep territory.
He hears her voice one time on that phone call, and we are supposed to believe that a man with that face, those airs, and that much public exposure is so starved of attention and kindness that he disregards the fact of customer service being her job and proceeds to call her again and again, even when she is unavailable and he is transferred to other agents on the team. Is that, perhaps, why he doesn’t have a girlfriend? No other sexual partners? Not even the world-wise ex-girlfriend who tries to undermine his relationship with the quirky call center girl? The only other woman in existence near him is his mother.
Here’s an image to reconsider: Eli, with that face and that dress sense, finishes from his job as a news broadcaster, heads over to the archery range, unrolls a picture of Sol’s most recent lover he culled off the internet, and uses it for target practice. Those are serial killer vibes.
With different characterization, some of these things become justifiable. No women in orbit? Romcoms are chock-full of average Joes finding love with beautiful women. Nor are they strangers to the alpha male possessive competitive executive type. Think Pretty Woman. What we have with Call of My Life, however, is a story which commits to outcomes without processes, and when asked for a mechanism, tacks on “this is a movie” as a band-aid.
It’s for these reasons of skirting around danger and a passionate engagement with romance that, regardless of how much we swoon, Eli arrives on our screen as little more than fluff. Safe. The film insists he is Sol’s true love, and we hear it, but as the reviews show, we don’t know him, and so we don’t believe him.
It’s no surprise that we feel more at home with Kalu, Sol’s other lover. There’s a whole world around him, an ecosystem. We see how he relates with customers, with his workers. We hear him complain about the messiness of the dating pool after his initial break with Sol. That’s why, once we are assured of his sincerity, his flaws are almost all too easy to forgive.
As much as we are led to believe otherwise, this is Kalu’s film. The world belongs to him. He feels more grounded in it. Eli feels like a bleed-over from a different story world. Perhaps, that of a two-hander. Two lovers locked in with no outside intervention, no aspirations to speak of. One where we experience the poetry of love in its simple subsistence. And yet, whether here or there, action always functions like sonar, as it affords the audience the best reading of characters.
Curiously, The Boy Who Gave, another film I saw the same day as Call of My Life, forgets this as well in the case of yet another romantic interest. Both films reveal the same narrative discomfort with motivation.
Does it really strike no one odd that, in a class or socio-economically conscious country like Nigeria, the daughter of a seemingly well-to-do family, just returned from boarding school, falls for Broda, the neighbourhood’s so-called ‘dirty boy’?
I am well aware that Nollywood has a long-standing tradition with such tropes. Still, this is cinema which wishes to be taken seriously. When a character behaves differently from what we would ordinarily expect, there has to be a reason. It is not enough to say that these things happen in real life. In real life, the reasons would be merely inscrutable, not inexistent. So, why does this young woman behave the way she does in The Boy Who Gave?
One cynical reading, given her worldliness, casts her as merely bored: a privileged girl seizing upon the one boy allowed within ten feet of her home to satisfy her curiosity and desires. A kinder reading suggests some prior history between them, one rooted in mutual admiration and a greater parity of standing. The film gestures vaguely in this direction. But Broda’s strained attempts at flirtation leave us with little worthy of the weight carried by her question: “Do you remember me?” Thus, like the rest of the neighbourhood, we are left wondering exactly what she sees in him.
For all this, we cannot ignore the achievement of these two films. Together, they provide mainstream Nollywood’s most engaging, artful, and entertaining fares in recent times, and to extreme effect. TBWG had audience members bawling and cursing when we saw it. COML had us all yearning, screaming, and applauding when that delayed kiss finally happened.
Anita Ashiru’s production design for COML has been a mainstay of recent discussions, and for good reason. Do I want a golden ticket to transport me into this world of her creation? Yes, I do. Dammy Twitch delivers a full display of his mastery of cinematic direction. If ever a Nollywood film made you feel as if you were right there with the characters with a camera all but invisible, this is it. There is an argument to be made that Uzoamaka Power is in two different modes and thus plays two characters in this film. There is the soft, pliable version of her with Kalu and Sol’s parents, and the other character made of much sterner stuff; a capable player in the game of romance. For her ability to feel right at home in both capacities, and for her roles in MamiWata and With Difficulty Comes Ease, perhaps we can ring the bell and say that New Nollywood has finally given us an actor for the ages.
With tearjerkers, Nollywood often tends toward drawn out displays of foolishness or ineptitude in the guise of creating supposedly good and long-suffering characters. In The Boy Who Gave, Allison Emmanuel gives us characters who are human enough to be disgruntled and curse under the weight of responsibility that’s their unyielding lot, as well as characters who fight back against the contrasting burden of indebtedness to the self-sacrificial. It recognizes that regardless of one’s position on the ladder in an economy of lack, everyone loses something of themselves.
What more is there to say to these brilliant members of our industry as they continue to show us what Nollywood is capable of? Thank you, and well done. We can’t wait to see what further wonders you have in store.
In other news, I am still your story and script consultant. Bring your manuscript over, and we can argue about the inner workings of your story universe. All for a small token.
Peace!](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HJQZhMPWsAAovjK.jpg)
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Sybil Fekurumoh | Saving my spirit water| Culture writer on some days, editor on others.
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“Ghostroots undulates across its twelve-story collection; some stories are startling and rolling as soon as they begin, and others slow-burning to the end.”
@toqueensaber reviews Pemi Aguda’s “Ghostroots” ⬇️
https://t.co/8oluMyzAzp
https://t.co/6GwVNAA0mN
So... this doesn't come across as a toxic relationship to you? Okay.
I heard someone say, “Sometimes God allows the storm so you realize He’s your only shelter.” That was heavy.
Call of My Life & The Boy Who Gave: One More Word on Story Mechanics
If you had been too far gone to catch it, this one line by Uzoamaka Power's character, Soluchi, makes it plain: “I feel like I'm in a movie.” And just like that, your mind is alert to the contrivances and coincidences Call of My Life piles up on screen.
Eli and Soluchi connect on a phone call at her job as a customer care agent. Her colleague, Eze, happens to be his longtime classmate (1). Eli runs into Soluchi and her friend, Zim, at a restaurant (2). Eli and Soluchi run into each other again at an escalator in town (3), whereupon that line is uttered. It’s at point three that they finally decide to go out on a date.
Now, if at this point you thought Eli had, in fact, tracked down the girl with the sonorous voice from the phone call, the date tells us that this is not the case. As far as Eli is concerned, the girl from the phone call and the girl he meets at the restaurant are two different girls entirely. When Soluchi inadvertently reveals that she is one and the same girl, Eli looks sufficiently gobsmacked. The script knows enough to be aware of its array of coincidences. But what does it do with it?
At that date scene, I turned to my Padi and said, “in a [different] script, this is where things take a turn for the weird.” How weird could things get?
Well, we could go full-blown meta and lean into the full import of that line. That may have created a story which analyzes the inner workings of rom-coms and how story universes just swing into alignment to give the heroine the perfect man of her dreams, whether she wants him right now or not. The 2019 Rebel Wilson feature, Isn’t It Romantic, does something of this sort.
Or, perhaps, not meta. From fairy godmothers to time machines, romcoms have whipped up fantastical elements to get their lovers together. Rowan Atkinson in Love Actually, for instance, plays a knowing agent of fate.
If fantasy seems too far beyond the purview of Call of My Life, we already have a rather strong and grounded version of these elements in the form of a wingman. Why else does the film conjure Eze up as both a colleague of Sol’s and an old friend of Eli’s? Why else do we have that scene with Eli discovering him when he goes searching for Soul [sic] online?
Plug Eze in as the link, and all of those convenient meetings make sense. Most lovers have, at some point, managed an accidental run-in, with the accidental in quotes, bold, and italicized. Feminist critiques of romance and romcom tropes have highlighted the toxicity of many of these antics. That scroll through your crush’s social media feed is actually the boundary violation of a stalker. Is that why the fairly worn route of the wingman’s assistance is written out of the script? Was it the intent to make Eli less manipulative, more sincere, and thus sharing in our astonishment? The problem is with Eli, we are already very much in creep territory.
He hears her voice one time on that phone call, and we are supposed to believe that a man with that face, those airs, and that much public exposure is so starved of attention and kindness that he disregards the fact of customer service being her job and proceeds to call her again and again, even when she is unavailable and he is transferred to other agents on the team. Is that, perhaps, why he doesn’t have a girlfriend? No other sexual partners? Not even the world-wise ex-girlfriend who tries to undermine his relationship with the quirky call center girl? The only other woman in existence near him is his mother.
Here’s an image to reconsider: Eli, with that face and that dress sense, finishes from his job as a news broadcaster, heads over to the archery range, unrolls a picture of Sol’s most recent lover he culled off the internet, and uses it for target practice. Those are serial killer vibes.
With different characterization, some of these things become justifiable. No women in orbit? Romcoms are chock-full of average Joes finding love with beautiful women. Nor are they strangers to the alpha male possessive competitive executive type. Think Pretty Woman. What we have with Call of My Life, however, is a story which commits to outcomes without processes, and when asked for a mechanism, tacks on “this is a movie” as a band-aid.
It’s for these reasons of skirting around danger and a passionate engagement with romance that, regardless of how much we swoon, Eli arrives on our screen as little more than fluff. Safe. The film insists he is Sol’s true love, and we hear it, but as the reviews show, we don’t know him, and so we don’t believe him.
It’s no surprise that we feel more at home with Kalu, Sol’s other lover. There’s a whole world around him, an ecosystem. We see how he relates with customers, with his workers. We hear him complain about the messiness of the dating pool after his initial break with Sol. That’s why, once we are assured of his sincerity, his flaws are almost all too easy to forgive.
As much as we are led to believe otherwise, this is Kalu’s film. The world belongs to him. He feels more grounded in it. Eli feels like a bleed-over from a different story world. Perhaps, that of a two-hander. Two lovers locked in with no outside intervention, no aspirations to speak of. One where we experience the poetry of love in its simple subsistence. And yet, whether here or there, action always functions like sonar, as it affords the audience the best reading of characters.
Curiously, The Boy Who Gave, another film I saw the same day as Call of My Life, forgets this as well in the case of yet another romantic interest. Both films reveal the same narrative discomfort with motivation.
Does it really strike no one odd that, in a class or socio-economically conscious country like Nigeria, the daughter of a seemingly well-to-do family, just returned from boarding school, falls for Broda, the neighbourhood’s so-called ‘dirty boy’?
I am well aware that Nollywood has a long-standing tradition with such tropes. Still, this is cinema which wishes to be taken seriously. When a character behaves differently from what we would ordinarily expect, there has to be a reason. It is not enough to say that these things happen in real life. In real life, the reasons would be merely inscrutable, not inexistent. So, why does this young woman behave the way she does in The Boy Who Gave?
One cynical reading, given her worldliness, casts her as merely bored: a privileged girl seizing upon the one boy allowed within ten feet of her home to satisfy her curiosity and desires. A kinder reading suggests some prior history between them, one rooted in mutual admiration and a greater parity of standing. The film gestures vaguely in this direction. But Broda’s strained attempts at flirtation leave us with little worthy of the weight carried by her question: “Do you remember me?” Thus, like the rest of the neighbourhood, we are left wondering exactly what she sees in him.
For all this, we cannot ignore the achievement of these two films. Together, they provide mainstream Nollywood’s most engaging, artful, and entertaining fares in recent times, and to extreme effect. TBWG had audience members bawling and cursing when we saw it. COML had us all yearning, screaming, and applauding when that delayed kiss finally happened.
Anita Ashiru’s production design for COML has been a mainstay of recent discussions, and for good reason. Do I want a golden ticket to transport me into this world of her creation? Yes, I do. Dammy Twitch delivers a full display of his mastery of cinematic direction. If ever a Nollywood film made you feel as if you were right there with the characters with a camera all but invisible, this is it. There is an argument to be made that Uzoamaka Power is in two different modes and thus plays two characters in this film. There is the soft, pliable version of her with Kalu and Sol’s parents, and the other character made of much sterner stuff; a capable player in the game of romance. For her ability to feel right at home in both capacities, and for her roles in MamiWata and With Difficulty Comes Ease, perhaps we can ring the bell and say that New Nollywood has finally given us an actor for the ages.
With tearjerkers, Nollywood often tends toward drawn out displays of foolishness or ineptitude in the guise of creating supposedly good and long-suffering characters. In The Boy Who Gave, Allison Emmanuel gives us characters who are human enough to be disgruntled and curse under the weight of responsibility that’s their unyielding lot, as well as characters who fight back against the contrasting burden of indebtedness to the self-sacrificial. It recognizes that regardless of one’s position on the ladder in an economy of lack, everyone loses something of themselves.
What more is there to say to these brilliant members of our industry as they continue to show us what Nollywood is capable of? Thank you, and well done. We can’t wait to see what further wonders you have in store.
In other news, I am still your story and script consultant. Bring your manuscript over, and we can argue about the inner workings of your story universe. All for a small token.
Peace!
![HayzardSolum's tweet photo. Call of My Life & The Boy Who Gave: One More Word on Story Mechanics
If you had been too far gone to catch it, this one line by Uzoamaka Power's character, Soluchi, makes it plain: “I feel like I'm in a movie.” And just like that, your mind is alert to the contrivances and coincidences Call of My Life piles up on screen.
Eli and Soluchi connect on a phone call at her job as a customer care agent. Her colleague, Eze, happens to be his longtime classmate (1). Eli runs into Soluchi and her friend, Zim, at a restaurant (2). Eli and Soluchi run into each other again at an escalator in town (3), whereupon that line is uttered. It’s at point three that they finally decide to go out on a date.
Now, if at this point you thought Eli had, in fact, tracked down the girl with the sonorous voice from the phone call, the date tells us that this is not the case. As far as Eli is concerned, the girl from the phone call and the girl he meets at the restaurant are two different girls entirely. When Soluchi inadvertently reveals that she is one and the same girl, Eli looks sufficiently gobsmacked. The script knows enough to be aware of its array of coincidences. But what does it do with it?
At that date scene, I turned to my Padi and said, “in a [different] script, this is where things take a turn for the weird.” How weird could things get?
Well, we could go full-blown meta and lean into the full import of that line. That may have created a story which analyzes the inner workings of rom-coms and how story universes just swing into alignment to give the heroine the perfect man of her dreams, whether she wants him right now or not. The 2019 Rebel Wilson feature, Isn’t It Romantic, does something of this sort.
Or, perhaps, not meta. From fairy godmothers to time machines, romcoms have whipped up fantastical elements to get their lovers together. Rowan Atkinson in Love Actually, for instance, plays a knowing agent of fate.
If fantasy seems too far beyond the purview of Call of My Life, we already have a rather strong and grounded version of these elements in the form of a wingman. Why else does the film conjure Eze up as both a colleague of Sol’s and an old friend of Eli’s? Why else do we have that scene with Eli discovering him when he goes searching for Soul [sic] online?
Plug Eze in as the link, and all of those convenient meetings make sense. Most lovers have, at some point, managed an accidental run-in, with the accidental in quotes, bold, and italicized. Feminist critiques of romance and romcom tropes have highlighted the toxicity of many of these antics. That scroll through your crush’s social media feed is actually the boundary violation of a stalker. Is that why the fairly worn route of the wingman’s assistance is written out of the script? Was it the intent to make Eli less manipulative, more sincere, and thus sharing in our astonishment? The problem is with Eli, we are already very much in creep territory.
He hears her voice one time on that phone call, and we are supposed to believe that a man with that face, those airs, and that much public exposure is so starved of attention and kindness that he disregards the fact of customer service being her job and proceeds to call her again and again, even when she is unavailable and he is transferred to other agents on the team. Is that, perhaps, why he doesn’t have a girlfriend? No other sexual partners? Not even the world-wise ex-girlfriend who tries to undermine his relationship with the quirky call center girl? The only other woman in existence near him is his mother.
Here’s an image to reconsider: Eli, with that face and that dress sense, finishes from his job as a news broadcaster, heads over to the archery range, unrolls a picture of Sol’s most recent lover he culled off the internet, and uses it for target practice. Those are serial killer vibes.
With different characterization, some of these things become justifiable. No women in orbit? Romcoms are chock-full of average Joes finding love with beautiful women. Nor are they strangers to the alpha male possessive competitive executive type. Think Pretty Woman. What we have with Call of My Life, however, is a story which commits to outcomes without processes, and when asked for a mechanism, tacks on “this is a movie” as a band-aid.
It’s for these reasons of skirting around danger and a passionate engagement with romance that, regardless of how much we swoon, Eli arrives on our screen as little more than fluff. Safe. The film insists he is Sol’s true love, and we hear it, but as the reviews show, we don’t know him, and so we don’t believe him.
It’s no surprise that we feel more at home with Kalu, Sol’s other lover. There’s a whole world around him, an ecosystem. We see how he relates with customers, with his workers. We hear him complain about the messiness of the dating pool after his initial break with Sol. That’s why, once we are assured of his sincerity, his flaws are almost all too easy to forgive.
As much as we are led to believe otherwise, this is Kalu’s film. The world belongs to him. He feels more grounded in it. Eli feels like a bleed-over from a different story world. Perhaps, that of a two-hander. Two lovers locked in with no outside intervention, no aspirations to speak of. One where we experience the poetry of love in its simple subsistence. And yet, whether here or there, action always functions like sonar, as it affords the audience the best reading of characters.
Curiously, The Boy Who Gave, another film I saw the same day as Call of My Life, forgets this as well in the case of yet another romantic interest. Both films reveal the same narrative discomfort with motivation.
Does it really strike no one odd that, in a class or socio-economically conscious country like Nigeria, the daughter of a seemingly well-to-do family, just returned from boarding school, falls for Broda, the neighbourhood’s so-called ‘dirty boy’?
I am well aware that Nollywood has a long-standing tradition with such tropes. Still, this is cinema which wishes to be taken seriously. When a character behaves differently from what we would ordinarily expect, there has to be a reason. It is not enough to say that these things happen in real life. In real life, the reasons would be merely inscrutable, not inexistent. So, why does this young woman behave the way she does in The Boy Who Gave?
One cynical reading, given her worldliness, casts her as merely bored: a privileged girl seizing upon the one boy allowed within ten feet of her home to satisfy her curiosity and desires. A kinder reading suggests some prior history between them, one rooted in mutual admiration and a greater parity of standing. The film gestures vaguely in this direction. But Broda’s strained attempts at flirtation leave us with little worthy of the weight carried by her question: “Do you remember me?” Thus, like the rest of the neighbourhood, we are left wondering exactly what she sees in him.
For all this, we cannot ignore the achievement of these two films. Together, they provide mainstream Nollywood’s most engaging, artful, and entertaining fares in recent times, and to extreme effect. TBWG had audience members bawling and cursing when we saw it. COML had us all yearning, screaming, and applauding when that delayed kiss finally happened.
Anita Ashiru’s production design for COML has been a mainstay of recent discussions, and for good reason. Do I want a golden ticket to transport me into this world of her creation? Yes, I do. Dammy Twitch delivers a full display of his mastery of cinematic direction. If ever a Nollywood film made you feel as if you were right there with the characters with a camera all but invisible, this is it. There is an argument to be made that Uzoamaka Power is in two different modes and thus plays two characters in this film. There is the soft, pliable version of her with Kalu and Sol’s parents, and the other character made of much sterner stuff; a capable player in the game of romance. For her ability to feel right at home in both capacities, and for her roles in MamiWata and With Difficulty Comes Ease, perhaps we can ring the bell and say that New Nollywood has finally given us an actor for the ages.
With tearjerkers, Nollywood often tends toward drawn out displays of foolishness or ineptitude in the guise of creating supposedly good and long-suffering characters. In The Boy Who Gave, Allison Emmanuel gives us characters who are human enough to be disgruntled and curse under the weight of responsibility that’s their unyielding lot, as well as characters who fight back against the contrasting burden of indebtedness to the self-sacrificial. It recognizes that regardless of one’s position on the ladder in an economy of lack, everyone loses something of themselves.
What more is there to say to these brilliant members of our industry as they continue to show us what Nollywood is capable of? Thank you, and well done. We can’t wait to see what further wonders you have in store.
In other news, I am still your story and script consultant. Bring your manuscript over, and we can argue about the inner workings of your story universe. All for a small token.
Peace!](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HJQZhRBWgAAwZee.jpg)
‘Call Of My Life’ Review: Uzoamaka Power Dials into the Nigerian Romcom Canon with Heart and Familiarity.
Read our review. https://t.co/YDp7LF6q0r
You'd be right to point out that the argument isn't as simple as they've made it, and yet, the conclusion still does not follow.
Yemoja and Ifemelu are two different categories of characters. You've rightly pointed out Yemoja's mythological status. That makes her less of a person and more of a type. In this sense, it is conceivable to make Yemoja white. Rather than questions of strict historicity, assessments would have to shift in the direction of who the artist is and what their vision might be. What do they seek to highlight by making Yemoja or any of the Gods white? An easy example would be a signifier of their otherness. Of course, we might then have to probe further whether there were no other ways of achieving that. The point being made, however, is that while such a swap would need justification, it is not unjustifiable.
Ifemelu in Americanah is a different kettle of fish. She's raised in Nsukka, travels abroad, and has to navigate political realities specific to her Africanness. To swap her race would be to raise questions that were not in the purview of the story in the first place. What does it mean to be a white girl growing up in Nsukka? What does it mean for said white girl to travel abroad and meet people of a similar hue but different nationality? At this point, we're dealing with a thematically different story. And yet, even this is not impossible.
As a story grows in reach and status, it can come to be adapted by and feature people different from those it originated with. Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now is inspired by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. But where Conrad's story is set in Congo, Coppola's version is set in the jungles of Vietnam. Adaptation, contrary to popular sentiment, is much less about a page by page adherence to the minutiae of the source material than it is about complementary artistic insights roused by the original. As such, it is also not inconceivable for another artist to rewrite Americanah and make Ifemelu white to address points such as the ones I raised earlier. How does "Oyibo" sound for a title? Or perhaps, Africanah for the rhymes.
The magical thing about art is you can do whatever you want with it. Your reasons would only be trivial or nontrivial with respect to the material in question, and your vision for it.
Helen of Troy belongs to the same category as Yemoja. Mythological, archetypal, not narratively bound to a specific racial identity the way Ifemelu is. The question to ask of Nolan's casting is therefore not whether it is permissible, but what artistic justification it serves. Lupita N'yongo in two roles. That is not a casual decision. Neither Helen nor her sister are Trojans, so the racial constituents of modern day Turkey is almost inconsequential. What’s far more consequential, for instance, is the fact of the sisters’ divine origins. Especially that of them having hatched from an egg. Is their colour in this film just another signifier of their otherness? I don’t know. However, considering the near narrative insignificance of those characters in The Odyssey, that casting is almost certainly doing conceptual work, and that work will only become legible once the film is released.
The question, "why co-opt these characters instead of creating more original ones for minorities?" would be more devastating if that process was not, in fact, ongoing, and if the two were mutually exclusive. Soyinka adapted Euripides. Nnedi Okoroafor writes X-Men comics. Artists can do this while committed to their own original mythological canon, because the creative economy is not zero-sum. There are more and more original characters being written, as well as adaptations of non-white works being commissioned. It is just telling that this refrain crops up strongly whenever white heroes get transformed, with minimal celebration of art as a universal communion, despite Hollywood's continued casting of white actors in roles of different racial origins. Scarlett Johansson as an Asian hero in Ghost in the Shell should have caused some pause during casting, no?
The issues which have led to this ongoing debate about Nolan's The Odyssey and the vehemence with which they have been pursued are less about what an artist can do as an artist, and more about a different kind of politics.
You start with Hollywood with its essentially white history. You link the automatic white casting choices in roles with viable racial alternatives with the existing paradigm of racial discrimination. You see its egregiousness with otherwise legendary actors resorting to blackface and caricature. You connect that with civil rights movements fighting for dignity and better representation of minorities. You link that with studio practices that begin first with tokenization and then formulas for representation which seem more about meeting quotas and less about art and meaning itself. And then you arrive at the message of the present situation.
Hollywood, as it currently exists, does deserve criticism for many of its practices. The problem is it's often difficult to separate the tenor of the criticism from bigotry. Any non-mocking appearance of members of the LGBTQ+ community onscreen is "Hollywood forcing it down our throats." The Falcon becoming Captain America in the MCU is tagged a DEI action, as though there were no comic book precedents of the event, or as though comic books have always had a decided conservative history without representation of characters from the minorities. It is the curse of the artist that their work might be co-opted and exalted by the sort of people they least intended. Examples of this would be The Matrix and American Psycho with their adulating fans of RedPillers and Chads. This is because art speaks to us all differently, and the artist's intent is often mere suggestion.
The Iliad and The Odyssey aren't the kind of works to demand strict non-interpretative adherence from their adaptations. Unlike the patient and faithful Penelope in Homer's poem, Molly Bloom cheats on her husband in James Joyce's Ulysses (the Latin name for Odysseus). The 2004 movie Troy, which has seen much praise this past week, is decidedly atheistic in nature, stripping the story of most of its supernatural elements, wraps up the ten-year war in ten days, and, quite interestingly, presents Achilles and Patroclus as cousins first and foremost, rather than the longstanding tradition of them as lovers.
Christopher Nolan is an Oscar Award winning Director. Elliot Page and Lupita N'yongo are amazing actors, with a slew of awards between them. Apart from the fact of him working with constant collaborators, the Protagonist of his 2020 film, Tenet, was a black man.
So, which is more likely? That the man who made Memento, Inception, Dunkirk, and Tenet (movies for which one sometimes needs rulers and mathematical formulas to connect one plot arc to another) is pursuing yet another single-minded thematic vision with his casting choices in The Odyssey? Or that the man whose last movie won seven Academy Awards with an all-white cast is suddenly so desperate for another that he has submitted to uncharacteristic DEI demands?
We haven't yet seen the film. For those genuinely interested in the art rather than the politics, we'd better withhold judgment until we have.
Among the people humanity often turns to for wisdom, you'll find very different attitudes towards wisdom itself.
Philosophers will give you 300 pages roving around their singular idea, only to end up telling you they don't really know what they're talking about. The delight comes in the attempt, the pursuit of wisdom itself. But to say one has fully grasped it in totality is insanity. Socrates, allegedly, said the greatest knowledge he ever discovered was that he knew nothing.
Artists are the worst. One cool night out of the blue, with the moon casting its silver beams, they will invite you into a room and show you paintings and pages of their impressions of you and humanity, and you'll be captivated by the sheer beauty of it all, the depth, the unmistakable truth of things. You'll fall in love and have the most passionate time of your life. Then the next morning, you'll find them passed out drunk in a pool of their own piss, waking up stark raving mad, asking who the hell let you into their room.
It's the prophets and the pastors who know the full truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Don't you understand? They have it figured out because of Holy whispers, and all of life's wisdom is contained in a single book. Unlike the other two categories, they stand there day in, day out assuring you of the certainty of their wisdom, kabayaladosh! The problem, however, is that you have to already believe them first for anything that comes out of their mouths to make sense.
Once upon a time, it was everyone in their little churches, having their own imagined “thus saith the Lord” reinforced, and it felt like you had heard directly from God himself. But now we're getting live broadcasts out of those churches, and our internet signals aren't strong enough to carry the golden halos along with them. So for the first time, in real time, we're catching just how full of shit these pastors are, one after the other.
I mean, it should be just as easy for them to admit they know nothing, that they're really just figuring things out and making shit up as they go. But you won't let them.
We all need some kind of assurance that, if not us, then someone else out there has answers to as many problems as life flings at us, and whether we like it or not, these pastors are our sacrificial lambs. Accents, intonations, pauses perfected, they stand there performing with affectations of poise and humility until eventually they have nothing more to give, and the deluge of shit comes pouring out.
This, right here, is your fault as much as theirs. Tell your pastor to step off his high horse and drink small palmie. It's the very same covetousness that has him laying up treasures for castles in the sky instead of living contentedly on planet Earth. It just looks like piety.
I wonder what the female analogous of a stag is 🤔
A mare, perhaps? Fitting, I would say.
Two fantasies that spoilt my last relationship
The poems that will be written in your name will accompany the trail the splinters of your broken heart make, from common sense to oblivion.
Is it just me or does Bruno Mars' "Risk It All" a sound-alike of Frank Sinatra's "My Way?" 🤔
Florence + The Machine performing Sympathy Magic live at @FallonTonight
All day today since "Sympathy Magic" was released.
I’M CRYING
@MobilePunch Young man, this is a ridiculous pretext. Now tell us the real reason?
suddenly I am a religious woman
This guy go don load luggage for motor park before. Cos what?! 😂
Sustainable fashion 101:
Buy durable clothes ✍️
This is beautiful… women are super humans 🥹❤️🤰
"Born in the year of OxyContin"
_"The Path" by Lorde.
What’s the craziest opening line you’ve ever heard in a song? 👀
We’ll go first ⬇️
Finally!!
Thank you, thank you. ❤️
I wrote 14 letters from my heart to you 💌
My debut Album
October 10TH
XOXO
https://t.co/0uEoruJ7D7
We read every Independence Day speech since 1960. Year after year, leader after leader, promise after promise; what do 65 years of words reveal about Nigeria’s journey?
See what we found here.
https://t.co/qWqbALAniq
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