So what is Mr. Nolan up to? As it turns out, the auteur is using Helen just as the Greek authors did: to provoke, challenge and discomfit how we think about beauty and identity, about who we are and how we relate to our world.
It’s worth noting that we actually have no idea what Helen looked like. Homer confines his descriptions to generic banalities — “she looked awfully like the immortal gods” — while the two visual adjectives he gives her, “beautiful-haired” and “white-armed”, are conventional and used of other female characters as well. (She is also described as “shudder-inducing”; go try to cast that.) Later authors such as the playwright Euripides introduce new adjectives, for instance, “reddish-blonde”. But on the whole, the Greeks didn’t care much what she looked like.
What they did care about was how she talked. Already in Homer’s telling, Helen is an effective and indeed seductive speaker. In the “Iliad”, she eloquently rues her mad infatuation with Paris, delivers some nice jabs in an argument with no less a debate opponent than the goddess Aphrodite and effectively has the last word in the epic, pronouncing a powerful final eulogy for the fallen Trojan hero Hector. In the “Odyssey”, she beguiles a group of dinner guests with tales of her efforts to help the Greek cause from behind enemy lines in Troy. But her cuckolded husband, Menelaus, with whom she has long since been reunited, counters with a very different tale, one in which it’s clear that she was working to betray the Greeks.
