The richest man in the world spent this week tweeting about a Black woman’s face.

He owns the platform on which he did it—X, which is in large part a hall of mirrors of cruelty, racism, and other forms of degradation.

Elon Musk has roughly 240 million followers on X. And over the course of about seventy-two hours, he posted, reposted, and amplified several angry posts on the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film of The Odyssey.

…when the news of Nyong’o’s casting first broke. Musk posted, “Chris Nolan has lost his integrity.” An oddly extreme reaction to a director’s casting choice.

Then, last week, the topic exploded on X and elsewhere, in large part because Musk became downright obsessive about it. He retweeted—with the one-word endorsement, “True”—this post, from right-wing commentator and self-described “theocratic fascist” Matt Walsh:

Beauty is surely in the eye of the beholder, but that’s insane. More on Matt Walsh in a minute.

Musk went on a rampage about Lupita Nyong’o. He accused Nolan—one of the greatest and most honored directors of our time, maker of such films as Oppenheimer, Interstellar, Inception and more—of desecrating Homer simply to make himself eligible for an Academy Award.

And Musk kept going.

A man with that much money and that much power has, on any given afternoon, the world’s options open to him. And he chose this.

He chose to direct a horde of racists at one woman, day after day, with the ease and blithe recklessness of someone for whom there will be no consequences.

Lupita Nyong’o is now, thanks to Musk, the target of some of the most vile, mentally broken, raging losers on the planet. Millions of posts about her have been written and shared, the majority of them proudly, defiantly, ecstatically racist. She will likely feel the need for enhanced security for years after this.

And Musk will move on to his next act of civic vandalism.

We live in a time of impunity, and Musk knows it. His money buys impunity, and impunity licenses indecency, and the indecency keeps spreading because nothing seems able to stop it. There is a darkness in that. A real one. A new one, I think, even after all these years of civic decline.

Lupita Nyong’o is supremely beautiful. She has been on just about every one of those fashion magazine/website lists of the “Most Beautiful Women in the World” at one time or another, and not because of politics or “wokeness” or anything else. It’s because she’s beautiful. Duh.

But Matt Walsh goes beyond disagreeing with that widely shared appreciation of Nyong’o. He says “not one person on the planet” finds her supremely beautiful. Notice what is happening here. Walsh is not telling us what he finds beautiful. He is issuing a ruling about what every other human being on earth is permitted to find beautiful. The move is from taste to power, from preference to decree.

Beauty, in his hands, and in the powerful machinery of Elon Musk’s social media platform, becomes a contested public good—and the contest is over who gets to set the standard, and who is allowed inside it. Musk supplies the enforcement. Walsh writes the rule. Musk swings the hammer. And two hundred and forty million followers…follow.

The great myths and stories have always known that a beautiful woman claims her own space; Helen does not need to argue her case. The men go to war for her; they get it.

Homer understood this power. He never describes Helen's face. Never the color of her hair—or skin. In the third book of the Iliad, he brings her up onto the wall of Troy, where the old men of the city watch her pass:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedSuch then were the leaders of Troy sitting upon the tower.And they, as they saw Helen approaching the tower,in undertones spoke winged words to one another:"No blame that the Trojans and strong-greaved Achaeans (Greeks)have suffered so long on account of such a woman;terribly does she seem like the immortal goddesses to look on."

That is all. Helen’s beauty is established by what it does to the people who see it. Nyong'o, saying nothing this week, is being Homeric in exactly that way. Her dignity is doing the describing.

Whatever Christopher Nolan is doing with his casting of his Odyssey—and I suspect he knows exactly what he is doing—he has placed a woman of extraordinary dignity into the role of the female figure against whom every Western standard of beauty has, for three thousand years, been measured.

The trolls—including Elon Musk and Matt Walsh—they are reading Nolan’s thesis correctly. They are simply losing the argument.

And Lupita Nyong’o, by saying nothing, is winning it without raising her voice.

Beauty, in the end, is older and stranger than the men who would rule it. The Greeks knew that.

So did George Gordon, Lord Byron, the great English Romantic poet of the early 19th Century. Let us read his marvelous poem on a beautiful woman (his cousin by marriage, actually; Byron was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” it was famously said). See how dark and light are so naturally intertwined in his reverie.

—Terry

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedShe walks in beauty, like the nightOf cloudless climes and starry skies;And all that’s best of dark and brightMeet in her aspect and her eyes;Thus mellowed to that tender lightWhich heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,Had half impaired the nameless graceWhich waves in every raven tress,Or softly lightens o’er her face;Where thoughts serenely sweet express,How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,The smiles that win, the tints that glow,But tell of days in goodness spent,A mind at peace with all below,A heart whose love is innocent!