Professor Bryant Kirkland writes about how a mishap at the cinema got him to thinking about adapting his expectations.
The chains on the seats confused me. I was also baffled by the water button and its “ON/OFF” setting. Why would I need to control water while watching Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey? Granted, living in a movie city, I’ve become accustomed to apparatus at the multiplex. Cocktails get delivered mid-film. I assumed the water button was a personalized drinking fountain. The chains didn’t make sense, but maybe people have taken to stealing cinema seats. Only when those seats started to move, lurching first downward then sideways, like a plane in turbulence—or, as I would soon understand, like an ancient ship riding the waves—did I realize why the ticket had been so expensive. In my witless hurry to see the Nolan rendition, I’d booked the 4DX “experience.” Mist sprinkled my face (my water was “ON”). My chained rowing-bench started to lunge and dive on the regular. Ten minutes in, I quit. “Oh, come on, man!” a guy said as I walked out. Like the figure I’d come to see flickering in 70mm, I wanted to go home.
I knew I should try relaxing expectations and let the film do its own thing. But my fuddy-duddy rejection of 4DX caused me to wonder about other forms of intransigence I’d brought with me that day. Which Homer had I taken along, after all? For a long time, my “original” Homer was predominantly Iliadic. This owes something inescapable to the Richmond Lattimore translation of the Iliad I was assigned in high school. Ambient ideas of God were challenged by “Zeus of the loud thunder” (Il. 1.353), a phrase I first read amid a crackling Florida thunderstorm. Homer was strange and solemn. “He in the thoughtlessness of his heart ran swiftly by them” (Il. 10.350). No one I knew said things like “the thoughtlessness of his heart.” I thought it was marvelous. So I was later quietly shocked to learn that this was Lattimore’s expansion of just one word (aphradiê, “folly”). Did I prefer Lattimore over Homer? (I experienced an echo of this when someone told me of their “disappointment” in Homer’s Circe, after first reading Madeline Miller.) But as time went on I learned how Homer could trounce translators with his own weirdness. Hector in Lattimore “moved his knees” (Il. 22.144), banal phrasing that conceals Homer’s strange “distributing” (nômaô) of limbs. The cross-circuit influence here—Lattimore giving me a Homer, Homer later “translating” Lattimore’s choices—is a reminder that whatever idea of Homer I might have taken to Nolan, it was never going to be some pristine control against which Nolan was the variable.
If my own experience of the Iliad had evolved, how fixed did I need my Odyssey to be? Its centripetality notwithstanding, the poem flirts with alternatives and transformations. Tiresias’s prophecy of Odysseus’s post-homecoming departure puts his own ending beyond the poem’s end (see my colleague Ella Haselswerdt’s post on this blog). As if on cue, the reception tradition lends a fabricating hand to the poem’s suppressed multiplicities. “[W]hy / do you treasure your voice / when to be one thing / is to be next to nothing?” wrote Louise Glück, in “Scilla.” Why should I insist that the film or its source be one thing? After all, two of my favorite turns in the Odyssey tradition—Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey—realize something of the proliferations that closure might squelch. In this sense, Nolan’s Odysseus’s interpretation of the Siren song—“And it told me I don’t really want to go home”—struck me as one of the film’s more spiritually true moments. That a “later” Odysseus added something new seemed to prolong epic inventiveness.
When I finally saw Nolan’s version in a motionless theater, what did I respond to? However rudimentary, it was to things specific to the filmic medium—sound design and camerawork. I felt my senses for the poem oddly freshened by this other realm. I’ll never know what it felt like to hear Homer sung at festivals thousands of years ago. Contemporary recitations in Greek are impressive, but they wash over me cold. My mind wanders. I hear the sound of Greek, but not the sound of things happening in the poem. By contrast, the film’s twinned twanging of the bow/lyre, the piercing moment of Siren reverb, the pounding of the staff—these sonic variations ranged on a medially different plane from the one I’ve encountered quietly on the page. If I’m supposed to experience (something of) Homer aurally, I finally felt that I had.
I also savored the camerawork. The elliptical cuts in especially the first hour, including the compressed flashback to the boar-hunt, conjured for me other sources altogether, including Nolan’s possible channeling of Terence Malick. In Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998), Malick’s fractured sequencing of image and sound portrays memory jarringly, if also, for me, brain-realistically—in random quavers of perspective that carry their own peculiar resonance. In these films we sometimes hear voices before we see their speakers. We “see” what they might see, but sometimes something more. In Nolan’s Odyssey, the boar-hunt flashback is notionally “seen” through those who remember Odysseus, but his appearance in the flashback interpolates a layer of untapped memory. The camera encompasses Odysseus, from whom we’ve yet to hear, and who will have had his own experience of this event, different in felt detail from its momentary narration by others. Cinematography’s non-verbal grammar invites us to attribute consciousness. Similarly, in reading, I’d not always visually collated Penelope behind a screen within earshot of the suitors’ remarks. The film re-staged for me the poem’s internal landscape of perspective.
Even some jauntier features enlivened my sense of the poem’s visual palette. Whatever Homer might tell me about Antinous, I’d never really thought about how to picture him. I’ve now been greatly aided in this effort by Robert Pattinson’s eyebrows. I’ll paste those back onto the poem the next time I read Homer.
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