I think we should all be a little more pretentious.
Published about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hi friend.
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be "pretentious."
A few months ago, in my quest to find a social platform that isn't evil, I dragged myself to Bluesky, the heralded Twitter replacement. My time on Bluesky ended up not being super long because I very quickly remembered why I hated Twitter even before Musk took it over, but it lasted long enough for me to post a rant about something that makes me want to tear my skin off: historical inaccuracies.
Please stick with me.
I was annoyed because that new shitty Gladiator movie was in the news, and I was seeing a lot of wildly incorrect conversations about ancient Rome, something that—as someone who studied classical archaeology—really grinds my gears.
Don't go follow me on Bluesky, I don't use it anymore.
I think what triggered this particular rant was someone in a TikTok comment saying something about how there weren't Black people in the Roman Empire—something that is so categorically wrong that I couldn't handle it.
But as you can see, I was really apologetic about this rant. I was embarrassed to be so worked up, scared of being labelled an elitist or—horror of all horrors—as pretentious.
Fast forward to this past week, where a still for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey was released. Surprising absolutely no one, this picture pisses me the hell off. That helmet is laughably bad (we could have had boar tusks!), something vaguely Roman instead of early Greek, and it says a lot about the care and dedication to the source material that's going into this movie (ie, probably not a lot).
I didn't say much to anyone (other than Mike) about how much this annoyed me, and in protest I started listening to the audiobook version of Emily Wilson's incredible translation of The Odyssey. But then, totally by chance, I stumbled on in defense of pretension. by Ayan Artan. This excellent article includes this section:
"a little while ago, i posted a note on here urging us to start shaming the stupid. i had someone quote me, essentially arguing that i was perpetuating some form of class divide for assuming that a film critic and culture journalist should not have to depend on an AI summary to tell him what the odyssey was.
homer ain’t all that lol the note ended.
beloved reader, i had to actively stop myself from walking into traffic. for better or worse, this man birthed an entire literary form, his writing responsible in many ways for the way that stories are being told and structured in the West to this day. our model of the tragic ‘hero’ in modern narratives was birthed by the Greek writer, the odyssey one of the most accomplished (and fascinatingly flawed) pieces of work we have ever seen. if we cannot expect a film critic- an arbiter of taste- to be able to recognize it even faintly, what can we expect of them?"
And you know what? I'm sick of being apologetic about how much I care about this shit. These things matter!!! When we water down the complexities of a text—when we turn the Odyssey into a digestible film for the masses with Odysseus wearing a Roman helmet because that just means "ancient" in our cultural lexicon—we're stripping context and meaning from what is maybe the foundational narrative text of Western literature. We're turning a complicated, often off-putting, highly contextual subject into yet another swords and sandals epic.
My concerns, obviously, are greater than a single movie. They're about how we break things down to their lowest common denominator to make them easily digestible; how we strip them of nuance and complexity in the name of mass consumption; how the demand for cheap entertainment leaves nothing sacred. Some things are hard to engage with, and that's okay: the labouring to understand is what makes the text rich.
This doesn't mean that we can't make epic movies based off texts like The Odyssey, but when we do, it should come with some responsibility. A refusal, for example, to lump an archaic Greek story in with visual cues from the Roman era, ripping the story from its context. This is done, obviously, in deference to an audience that doesn't give a shit about the difference between archaic Greece and the Romans; but Homer had a huge impact on how the Romans viewed themselves in later centuries, and treating them as one and the same removes the possibility for that conversation.
Why should we give a shit? The classical world has been the blueprint for our literature, political systems, education, morals, philosophy, and modes of thinking in the West for centuries. Understanding the foundational myths that Greece and Rome based themselves on helps us identify the same mythical themes in our own foundation tales (like how the Founding Fathers are untouchable near-deities in America). Knowing our history and where we come from helps us avoid the mistakes of our ancestors—but knowing history nowadays is pretentious and elitist, so we gleefully allow the powers that be to shape history into whatever narrative best serves their purposes. It's been done countless times before and will happen countless times again, truth and nuance removed to make way for a simpler story.
The Odyssey isn't simple. And neither is its impact on how we view narrative, and heroism, and what it means to tell a story. It demands that we seek a deeper understanding.
And Matt Damon in a helmet ain't all that.
This also so perfectly encapsulates the lack of care we give to accuracy, the almost joyful anti-intellectualism we indulge in as a society, because who cares about truth when we can just have fun at the movie theatre? It scares me when we dumb things down like this. When we erase the context. When we prioritise ease over nuance. If we want to share such a foundational text with the world, we need to teach the world to engage with it critically. But we're not going to do that, because that's pretentious. That's elitist. That's boring.
And that attitude should scare us. Like I said on Bluesky, we're in a reality now where truth is incredibly hard to come by. It has never been more important to be critical about what you're consuming—and if that means being pretentious about ancient history, then goddamn it, I'll continue being super fucking pretentious.
Truth matters. Even when it's difficult.
Until next time,
Amelia 🤍
PS. If you do want to understand The Odyssey a little more so you too can be pissed off at Christopher Nolan, read Emily Wilson's translation. The introduction alone is super meaty and a great survey of the different themes in the text.
