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, dance, music, poetry, 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.”
*
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
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
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.
I read the guardian link. Unless one makes a mini-series like a televised War and Peace one just can't do justice to the gods in the poem. Nolan was correct to mostly leave them out, and leave out how O. offends Poseidon. A movie is true to itself, not a fancied series or epic.
ReplyDeleteI guess it was an in-joke for those few who will have read the epic that Telemachus keeps referring to his wise helper as having "eyes like Athena." Readers know that Athena had no hangups about secretly appearing using a male body.
As for audiences weeping, yes, in Canada we have the phrase "Yankee B.S." for how Hollywood exaggerates the worth of the US armed forces.
The very slimmest text book I ever bought was Simone Weil's The Poem of Force where she points out that you cannot tell which side wrote the Iliad. Her piece was written during the Nazi occupation of her native France, to explore how force doesn't work. Her translations of Latin passages were checked by US writer Mary McCarthy. I really recommend it.
It may be a "good movie" as these things go but I have zero interest in watching it. I did watch the trailer, which reminded me too much of the LOTR movies (which I enjoyed). For me, the Odyssey is the best of all stories, but it's also a specific literary text composed in a certain form. (Since I don't read Greek, it's actually a poem written by Robert Fitzgerald.) I have no interest in seeing or reading it in another form — although I did read and enjoy Madeline Miller's Circe.
ReplyDeleteI think of the gods of the poem as scriptwriters of a sort. Zeus and his daughter are watching THC (The Human Channel) as the poem begins and figure out where the story should go. And they do a quick fix at the end when Ithaca is on the verge of a mini-war between Odysseus and company and the families of the dead suitors.
ReplyDeleteOne reason that ancient audiences would have wept: they would have known what was ahead for Hector’s wife and infant son: Andromache is enslaved, and Astyanax is thrown to his death from the wall around Troy. It’s only the Phaeacians on their island of pleasure who respond to stories of loss and sorrow without sympathy. (For them, Odysseus’s woes are just an awesome story.)
I’ve cited Weil’s book several times <a href="https://mleddy.blogspot.com/search?q=weil%20iliad”>in posts about the <i>Iliad</i> and about current events</a>.
Chris, you’re stronger than I am. If the movie is around, I suspect I’ll end up watching it, just as I watched <i>Troy</i> (“He killed my cousin!”) and the dreadful TV movie of the <i>Odyssey</i>.
Now I’m wondering why Blogger didn’t render italics and the link as it should have.
DeleteCoincidentally I'm in the middle of Tom Jones and just came across the remark about "that eating poem."
ReplyDeleteThat’s the one. I could swear that there’s another one from someone — “Homer’s wonderful poem about eating and drinking," but I think I must be misremembering something. Anyway, I’ve been unable to track that one down.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of weeping and being even-handed, I was privileged to see the play Trojan Women at the local university. This when young students still had long hair, with all the bias that implies.
ReplyDeleteThe last lines are by the Trojan queen, weighed down by grief, raising herself up on two hands to say, "Who shall I blame, then? The Greeks? Helen?... All of us... all of us."