Have I seen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey ? No, not yet, though I expect that I’ll end up seeing it. But I’m in no rush.
So much of what I’ve seen of the movie is a matter of special effects and spectacle. But almost everything of the supernatural wonderland of Odysseus’s wanderings — monsters and goddesses and ghosts, killers and seducers and the war dead — is present in the poem only in a long night of storytelling (books nine through twelve), as Odysseus performs for his Phaeacian hosts in his role as a man of constant sorrow. Monsters and goddesses and ghosts are, really, the least typical elements in the poem.
The Odyssey is much more about, in a phrase that I’ll borrow out of context from the poet Kenneth Koch, “the pleasures of peace”: storytelling, hospitality, food and drink, baths, a family reunion, lovemaking, and taking what Homer calls “the gift of sleep” in one‘s own bed. Henry Fielding aptly called the Odyssey “that eating poem,” and the eating poem is barely underway before Telemachus welcomes the incognito Athena into his oikos with food and wine.
Food and wine and the forms of hospitality: those are the poem’s real special effects. So I can wait.
See also “My dad is coming home.”
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Spoiler alert: In The Guardian , Chris Tryhorn details ways in which the movie differs from Homer: “Sex, beds and grisly executions: what Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey changed, invented – and left out.”
No Phaeacians?! No test of the bed? Maybe I don’t need to see this movie after all.
Related reading
All OCA Odyssey posts (Pinboard)
[I don’t want to sentimentalize the poem: the pleasures of peace are fully attained only after Odysseus, Telemachus, and two loyal herdsmen slaughter the suitors in a frenzy of comic violence. (Pow! Oof!) And then Telemachus presides over the execution of the household’s disloyal maids.]
Monday, July 20, 2026
Nolan’s Odyssey
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From Sapiens (I read the French graphic book version) I learned that "shared fictions" are what helped Sapiens to thrive better than other hominids. The eating parts reflect the fiction of "hospitality to strangers" that allowed trade. (in contrasts to 'stranger' almost meaning 'enemy') I suspect such a fiction preceded the Bronze Age because at Stonehenge archeologists found trade goods from Germany.
ReplyDeleteIn the movie they reference this by often saying "law of Zeus."
I saw the movie during a matinee, not at night, not at my age. It was a good show; the time flew. I think you will like it.
I kept being surprised by what a good actor Helmstead, the Marvel Thor guy, was, until at last I clued in it was Matt Damon. Yes, Damon is not just a pretty face.
I didn't mind the constant tiny plot differences from the original, (my fault for comparing) and how nobody, since Homer, has been even-handed about the two sides in the war. To make the Trojans "the bad guys" their faces are entirely hidden by their helmets.
I suspect that since this is not science fiction viewers will not think to start off their evaluations by mentioning the special effects.
“The law of Zeus”: that’s xenia, the forms of host-guest relations.
ReplyDeleteI’m surprised about the Trojans, but that’s a modern way of seeing an enemy, as less than, as other. I suspect that in the ancient world, audiences wept at the end of Iliad 6 (Hector and Andromache) and at the death of Hector, just as Priam and Achilles weep together over their losses.