The problem I had with Nolan’s Odyssey had little to do with accuracy. Artists often take poetic license and say true things using deviations from facts, traditions and norms. But to me, it seemed that the license Nolan took was not poetic license, but rather the opposite — ideological license. He spoke phony truisms badly in a way that has become depressingly common.

Longwinded first draft of the above bit, if you care to bother with it:

My problem with “diversity casting” has little to do with historical inaccuracy.

For me, the problem concerns the apparent intent behind the casting, and the effect that apparent intent has on the experience of the art.

And the intent rarely seems to have much to do with the art, and my objection is that it undermines the art.

It is true that some iconoclastic casting choices are driven by insight into the character or dramatic possibilities that inspire the discarding of narrow superficialities of identity, Such choices can shock momentarily, before art overtakes the viewer and transforms the initial shock into inevitability.

But there is risk in such choices. The biggest risk is distracting the viewer so much that they can no longer enter the art, to lose themselves in it, and become immersed and involved in what is happening.

When the casting considerations seem exterior to the art itself, or even opposed to it, this deflects the viewer’s attention away from the film to those exterior considerations.

I have heard the term gewalt used to name the perception of an obtrusive presence of an explicit thought process in an experience of art. Whether the perception is accurate or not matters little. Gewalt mars artistic experience.

In the worst cases, conspicuous casting decisions come off as overbearingly didactic. The director seems to be teaching us a moral lesson about what we assume a category of person is like, and what they are and are not capable of being and doing. Whether this is the intention, the art is marred by the obtrusiveness of this impression.

And then the question arises: What qualifies you to instruct me on these matters? Now we have gewalt compounded by perception of condescension.

And if the viewer morally opposes the identitarianism apparently demonstrated in apparent identitarian casting, the condescension will come off as yet one more example of an all-too pervasive moral metacognitive incompetence from our sophomoric cultural class.