Sometimes We Just Can’t Have Nice Things — Including Zendaya’s Earrings

As if we haven’t had enough Odyssey controversies over the past week, the latest cultural faux pas comes courtesy of “The Odyssey” actress Zendaya, who wore a 3000-year-old pair of earrings to a photocall in London earlier this month.

And as usual, the Left is losing it.

A reporter for Buzzfeed called her fashion statement “American audacity at its best,” while writers at Hyperallergic observed that the earrings reveal a “controversy within a longer pattern of Western indifference to the ethics of trading.” Commenters on X were quick to point out that Zendaya’s earrings come from “a white jeweler based in london who loots countries in africa and the middle east of ancient artifacts,” which, as @themeulemeester sneers, is “typical of the british but extremely low for two black ppl to support.”

While it is tempting to roll our eyes at our leftist friends and their ongoing obsession with colonialism, they may have a point.

I don’t agree with the Left’s characterization of Zendaya as some sort of unethical desecrator of ancient culture, nor do I buy the framing of her fashion choices as a manifestation of Western imperialism. I do, however, believe that there is a broader conversation to be had about our society’s fundamental inability to respect traditional institutions and the valuable artifacts that define our cultural heritage.

According to Barron London, Zendaya’s earrings are “a pair of Ziwiye gold medallion plaques, circa 1st millennium BC Iran.” Hyperallergic reports that the earrings were looted from an archaeological site home to “gold, silver, and ivory objects reputedly discovered by local villagers in northwestern Iran.” These circumstances have led many commentators to conclude that the earrings would have likely made their way to a museum had a proper excavation taken place — at the very least, they might have been treated with more care before being immediately fashioned into an accessory for consumption by Hollywood celebrities.

In other words, our culture has a fundamental lack of respect for the traditions of antiquity — and this attitude extends well beyond archaeological artifacts. The same impulse to refashion the past according to contemporary tastes has also shaped one of this year’s biggest cultural phenomena — Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” — and explains the broader debate surrounding the film.

It’s true that many reviewers on the Right came away from the film with glowing reviews. Daily Wire’s own Ben Shapiro called the film a “masterpiece,” and Dave Rubin echoed these same words on X. But Christopher Rufo’s mixed review calls attention to a greater issue within the world of the film that reveals our culture’s general defiance of tradition: Rufo acknowledges that the film was “engaging” but laments the departure from the source material. And therein lies the heart of the controversy about Nolan’s most recent hit: as a culture, we approach the past as editors rather than as heirs, compulsively updating ancient traditions to adhere to our contemporary values. In this case, we refashioned Homer to reflect our own moral and psychological assumptions rather than asking what Homer intended to teach us about his own world.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with artistic adaptation on its own. Every generation has staged Shakespeare and painted biblical scenes in styles that resonate with the changing times. But there’s a difference between reimagining an ancient story and reshaping its moral universe — and Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” veers toward the latter.

Anyone who has read “The Odyssey” knows that much of Greek culture is bound up with pride and glory; the Greeks repeatedly explored the idea of hubris — pride taken to a dangerous extreme — in their many mythological creations. The myth of Icarus, for instance, depicts a young man who dares to fly too close to the sun and is shot down by the gods; in the Arachne story, Arachne believes that she can beat Athena in a weaving contest and is consequently transformed into a spider. It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, that a Greek hero from Homer’s time would have wrestled with the distinction between pride and hubris, and the great translations of Homer’s “Odyssey” into English — from Chapman’s 17th-century translation to Fagles’ more contemporary interpretation from the 1990s — echo this heroic sensibility.

The Odysseus we see in Nolan’s adaptation, however, lacks the heroism that defines Homer’s great warrior. In the poem, Odysseus repeatedly revels in his victory at Troy — perhaps even to a fault. In the film, on the other hand, Odysseus regrets his actions at war and suffers from a PTSD-like trauma that seems more appropriate for a Vietnam War vet than a Hellenic hero. At one point in the film, Odysseus is even referred to as a “veteran,” a term that better suits the ethos of a contemporary audience rather than the world of Homeric Greece. Throughout the film, Zendaya’s Athena haunts him in the form of a young girl his men behead during the sack of Troy, and by the time he reaches home, Odysseus breaks down in tears before his wife Penelope. Filled with sorrow and regret, he suggests that the Trojan War was ultimately fought for nothing.

The overall result is a softer, more traumatized Odysseus — but certainly not a characterization that stays true to the legacy of the Ancient Greek world.

Nolan’s film is a fantastic standalone piece of cinema, but one can’t help but feel disappointed at his sharp departure from the source material. Instead of portraying Odysseus as the glory-seeking hero we’ve known for centuries, Nolan updates his character to become more palatable to a modern audience, tailoring his film for contemporary consumption — but only at the cost of doing a great disservice to the heritage of Ancient Greece.

Taken in tandem with the broader debate about “The Odyssey,” the Zendaya controversy becomes especially revealing of our constant urge to repurpose the past according to the priorities of the present. Perhaps that’s why so many people instinctively felt uncomfortable seeing a 3,000-year-old artifact dangling from a celebrity’s ears — some things are simply too valuable to become vehicles for exploring our own modern sensibilities. Because at the end of the day, inheritance requires both stewardship and cultural understanding.

The Greeks understood that they were custodians of a civilization larger than themselves. We would do well to recover that same reverence.

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Liza Libes is a writer and the founder of Pens and Poison. She holds degrees in English from Columbia University and writes about literature and culture at pensandpoison.org. Follow her on X @pensandpoison.