Troy trans

Before it has premiered, everyone is already talking about it… I'm thinking about the version of theOdyssey that Christopher Nolan has filmed, which will be seen on the big screens next July. We already know that before this director, one of the most in-form cinematic artists of recent decades, had signed the story ofOppenheimer and before the adventures of Batman. The controversy is being generated by all those on social media who oppose certain roles being played by certain actors. Thus, the rumor – which seems to have been confirmed – that Helen of Troy will be played by a Black actress, Lupita Nyong'o, and that Elliot Page (formerly Ellen Page), a transgender man, might end up playing, no less than, the warrior Achilles. Recently, a new version of Mozart's life has premiered on television –Amadeus, on Skyshowtime – and I saw that the Salzburg genius was (magnificently) played by Will Sharpe, who is half Japanese, and that the Jewish and Italian librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte and the Austrian musician Süssmayr, who finished the Requiem, were played by Black actors. All of this might have been laughable a few years ago; right now it is motivating parodies on X, in which, however, a supposed injustice is highlighted: that we would never allow a historical Black character to be played by a white actor, like for example an Obama biopic embodied by Simón Andreu. If skin color doesn't matter, how can we defend ourselves if we are anti-racist, why is it concerning that Helen of Troy is played by a Black woman (even if she's very beautiful)? And it is evident that behind this there is a lot of guilty conscience and that from the cultural industries there is a desire to bet not only on diversity in jobs – and to give everyone a role in global productions: to satisfy quotas – but to compensate for the invisibility of race in past films. Even though this leads us to show a Mozart's Vienna with more racial diversity than today's New York, distorting the historical narrative, just as Clint Eastwood distorted it when he didn't include any black soldiers in the films he shot almost twenty years ago about World War II, it is also not well regarded that there are no women in the plot, even though a war or gangster film might force us to (think of Scorsese's filmography). It is no longer about representing 'reality', but about making a mirror that projects not what we are, but what we would like to be, and that no matter how much it questions our weaknesses as a species, it does so at least without forgetting that we are different, plural and supposedly fair in castings, no matter how much this form of justice now leads us to falsify a past that yes, for art has always been an excuse. As Hitchcock said: “Cinema is four hundred empty seats”, that is to say, more than an art, it is an audience above all else, and it will be this audience that decides whether or not to accept these liberties. And I think that not only does it accept them, but it asks for them, or celebrates that the work also obliges it to take a stance even before buying the ticket and enjoying it.