Misunderstanding the Odyssey
Nolan’s Odyssey is neither Homer’s material nor a modern morality play.
No character study of Odysseus comes closer to perfection than Tennyson’s:
And tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
The Ulysses of Tennyson—and for that matter, of Alexander Pope—is a cunning and amoral man in rebellion against fate and time. Cleverest and wittiest of all heroes, he surpasses even the Olympians in arrogance and ego, and in consequence is disfavored and punished by them all (excepting only gray-eyed Athena).
The Odysseus of Homer, when recognized by his dying, feeble dog, stifles his tears and walks away. The Odysseus of Homer avenges the disloyalty of his maids by executing them all without mercy. The archetype of a flawed, spiritually pagan hero, resigned to the machinations of fate and cruel gods, he would be instantly recognizable in Sergio Corbucci’s Django or Gregory Peck’s Captain Mallory in The Guns of Navarone.
Christopher Nolan’s Odysseus, however, is a latently Christian patrician and soldier. He is concerned about the end of civilization resulting from both normative and structural factors, such as a breakdown of civility and propriety, open thuggery from temporary migrants who in the absence of order abuse hospitality, and wars over “trade routes.” His instincts are conservative. He suffers from the trauma of a brutal war and the guilt of middle age, from two decades of destroying castles in the sand and decapitating women next to godforsaken ruins.
Nolan’s Circe is a frumpy peasant witch who looks like a British TERF and quite literally turns dumb, innocent men into pigs in a heavy-handed #MeToo metaphor; she is calmed only by the presence of Odysseus, who carries on his shoulders the emotional burden of all errant men. Nolan’s sirens are barely visible in the fog. His Calypso is a statuesque compassionate blonde who knows when to “let go.” His Penelope is a Bulwark-reading Hillary Clinton voter from Northern Virginia, who derides power-hungry men and is tired of holding the throne without acknowledgement.
Like many in our times, Nolan is obsessed with the enemies of civilization; in his Batman trilogy, he shows us the full range, from terrorists (Al-Ghul) to anarchists (Joker) to communists (Bane). The obsession continued with Oppenheimer (technology and the promethean spirit) and now The Odyssey.
The pre-screening backlash over an African Helen or a transgender Sinon is not entirely undeserved. While there is historical evidence of intermixing between civilized cultures in antiquity, from Indo-Scythian-Greeks intermarriage to mentions of the matchless Aethiopeans, a sense of proportion is a virtue almost entirely absent in contemporary art. Not everything needs to look like the cantina of Mos Eisley, especially when it is chronicled that Helen of Troy had “fair arms.” But it is also the most pedestrian of all concerns. No one cared about Denzel Washington in Macbeth, or Tom Baker in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. The concept of racial purity as we know it is a product of scientific modernity. And if today’s theatergoers are reluctant to explore the inclinations towards transgenderism or hebephilia among ancients, then I am afraid the discipline of classics has failed us moderns.
Far more serious are the thematic divergences from the original poem. Nolan’s Odysseus is linguistically limited, no doubt to draw a younger audience that would find complex puns (Οὔτις, for example) and magniloquent vocabulary incomprehensible. And the Odysseus of the film is not so conceited as to incur the wrath of Poseidon by naming himself in front of the Cyclops, nor do Nolan’s viewers get to witness his hero’s penitence, wisdom, and caution on display later with the gift of Aeolus, as both incidents were left on the cutting room floor.
In one memorable scene, Odysseus tells his crew that “the gods help those who help themselves”—a line that, while somewhat similar to Virgil’s audentes Fortuna iuvat (“fortune favors the bold”), is by its modern connotations rather alien to the mind of antiquity. The pagan gods are cruel, unforgiving, and whimsical. That’s why they are gods. The concept of a complex, hierarchical set of relationships between gods, demigods, immortals, heroes, priests, virgins, nobles, peasants, and all the rest is entrenched in the pagan worldview, finding expression in works of literature from the Mahabharata to the Iliad. Laesa majestas is a greater sin than a simple sacrilege. One can be saved from the latter by the intervention of another god, or by cunning, wisdom, or penitence: the retribution for the former is inglorious death.
It is understandable why the Augustans and the Romantics of the 18th and 19th centuries had such a feel for the original text. Both Enlightenment liberalism and the concomitant Philhellenist movement were, in important respects, sympathetic to the pagan ethos. The Odyssey is a text of pagan morality. The idea that Odysseus would be “tormented” by anything is comical. Nolan cannot afford to be faithful to the original material and show what Odysseus did and enjoyed, because it would destroy him and his audience with guilt. It would require a different, more elevated, and amoral emotional register to appreciate the classics on their own terms; that register is now lost, perhaps to be rediscovered by future generations.
What is ironic, then, is the outcry from the online commentariat about Nolan’s reinterpretation. Many of the commentators most livid with Nolan seem to have a simplistic view of Western civilization as a single, monolithic, and continuous tradition, unchanged by two millennia of history or constant contact with other parts of the world. This is a view which sees no fundamental differences between, say, the era of the Crusades and the Renaissance, or between the cultures of the Mediterranean and those of the Germanic north. It results in a reflexive aversion to any reimagination of a classic, which has the ultimate effect of limiting its holders’ ability to appreciate or influence culture and the arts.
But one assumes that if they were to reimagine the Odyssey from a modern civilizational lens, they would end up with Nolan’s manichaean vision—which confuses their philosophy and rhetoric and infuriates them, like Caliban seeing his own face in the mirror.
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