By Professor Sander Goldberg
How do I say this without sounding like a grouch? I didn’t like Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey all that much, but not for any of the reasons I expected. All those early complaints about fidelity to the text (which text?), the period (what period?), the ethnic mix (only making its statues white was truly anachronistic) proved to be silly and beside the point. These stories beg to be retold and revalued, and as Kathryn Morgan reminds us, the process of revaluation has a very long history. Athenian tragedians had a field day exploring the price paid at Troy by victors and vanquished alike. Vergil’s Aeneid, written with Roman culture’s quite different ideas of heroism and leadership in mind, turned Homeric values upside down. Two great operas, Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’ Ulisse in patria (1639) and Fauré’s Pénélope (1913), focus specifically and movingly on the tension and pathos as Odysseus, much the worse for his experiences, seeks reunion with a Penelope reluctant to abandon the doubt, the tenacity, and the loneliness that have for so long defined her existence.
So why fret over yet another retelling, this one with the power to draw new audiences to a fuller Odyssey by fusing Homeric material with Vergil—Nolan’s falling towers at Troy come straight from Aeneid 2—and a new ending stitched together from Tennyson and the Epic Cycle? Roman poets did that sort of thing all the time. (We Latinists call it contaminatio.) Change is in itself no problem. It’s the result that disappoints. The many reworkings of this story from Vergil to Joyce to Walcott and beyond all have some moral core, developing Homer’s familiar elements in new ways designed to tax our sensibilities and challenge our values. Nolan’s Odyssey substitutes cliché for complexity, reducing “the law of Zeus” to a catch phrase, lotus-eating to a plot device, the “sea-people” to off-screen bogeymen. That said, some great Homeric moments do produce great cinematic moments. I loved the truly terrifying Laestrygonians, the sudden swoop of Scylla, the basin overturned as Eurycleia touches the beggar’s scar, but all too many of my favorite moments are AWOL. Where is Athena listening straight-faced as Odysseus, on Ithaca at last, spins a yarn about a Cretan exile or Telemachus about to string his father’s bow? Other, truly difficult moments are also missing. Odysseus does not sack the Cicones’ city or taunt the Cyclops. Behavior alien to modern sensibilities has been softened or erased, as if hints of PTSD can explain (or explain away) the inner contradictions that make Odysseus so problematic a figure. This cinematic Odysseus, neither complicated (whatever that means) nor particularly cunning, is easier to understand but not nearly as interesting as the Homeric version.
And yet, arguing over this Odyssey—deciding what to praise, what to regret, what succeeds, what fails—remains richly rewarding. Homer’s reentry into popular culture, bringing with it a tacit invitation to set his talent as a story-teller against Christopher Nolan’s, offers talking-points galore: how disjointed the story becomes without gods to integrate its disparate elements; how difficult the story is to end, a satisfactory resolution being a source of discomfort and debate since at least the time of Aristarchus; the many ways Penelope is, might be, or should be her husband’s equal in cunning and strength of character; what is gained and what is lost by making any of these figures “relatable” and, by giving them familiar faces, joining them in popular discourse with Jason Bourne and Peter Parker. All this is fun to think about. What I miss is an awareness of difference, an acknowledgment of the many ways ancient Greeks (and Romans) were not like us and how alien their world would seem if we were suddenly plunged into it. As students of Greco-Roman antiquity, we are confronted every day with the strange as well as the familiar, with glimpses of other ways humans have behaved and other values they have held. The process of comparison and contrast is enlightening, humbling, and endlessly fascinating. This Odyssey, with its contradictory, potentially alienating elements removed, becomes rather less so. That said, the box office numbers cannot be denied: Homer’s story remains irrepressibly engaging. As Tennyson knew very well, “tho’ much is taken, much abides.”
Further reading:
Sander M. Goldberg, “From Homer’s Banquet to Fauchois’ Feast: The Odyssey’s Odyssey,” in Carlo Caballero and Stephen Rumph, eds. Fauré Studies (Cambridge 2021) 134-51.
Edith Hall, The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey (Baltimore, 2008).