Double click the start arrow to prep the video, then click it again to play.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey moved me. Partly it was Nolan who produced that effect, much more so it was Homer, and more even than “Homer,” it was the archetypal narrative that several centuries’ of Homeric aoidoi had extracted with their song from the whole human odyssey on the planet to that point:
Long journeys far from home. Longing for the home we journeyed from. Obstacles. Overcoming obstacles. Ourselves as obstacles. Thirst for adventure. Nostalgic attachment. Absent fathers. Search for the father. Remembering. Forgetting, Pride. Punishment. Waiting loves and the threats to them. Rescuing them. Reclaiming what belongs to us.
All of it together in a single epic tale. I don’t know about you, but that taps a lot of streams in my psyche. (Yes, you can put me on the couch if you feel so suddenly inclined, but you will have to pay me. I’ve already been through therapy.) So with fine acting and Nolan’s command over epic-scale storytelling and film technology, I was moved.
Will I return to the film as I turn repeatedly to Homer’s poetry? Not likely.
To begin, Homer’s Odyssey is almost sui generis. We use the word “epic” in colloquial contexts as we do the word “tragedy,” differently from their literary application. An epic film comes to us grand in scale in any number of ways. Epic! And in literature, an epic — epic poetry — is grand in that way, too, yes. But historically, the epic poem is fundamentally about cultural formation, the origins of a distinct civilization or the development of its defining mythos: Ancient Greece, Rome, the Christian world, the Hindu world, many more. There are the greater, earlier epics of human time and some later, mostly lesser ones in influence, but the epic is no longer a living genre. Epics aren’t written anymore because that phase of human civilization is over, as is the primacy of poetry in it.
The greatness of Homer’s Odyssey lies in the greatness of its literary quality and its historical occurrence in time. That cannot be replicated. Who would even try? Well, a translator, for one. If we cannot read ancient Greek, we are dependent on and grateful to translators who can convey the poetry in all its unique vigor and beauty, which we can only partly judge by our responses to it, while withholding judgment on the “accuracy” of the translation. Only those who know the Greek can offer informed opinion on that. The translator will rightly think it her job literally to translate Homer, not interpret him through an artistic vision of her own, though anyone who understands the process of translation will say that selecting among the smaller and greater choices with which translation confronts one entails a level of interpretation.
In contrast, anytime an artist in one medium seeks to “adapt” a work of art to a different form, interpretation not only is but should be the motivation. A creative artist is not a translator. Christopher Nolan is moved by The Odyssey. I am moved by The Odyssey. No two people are likely moved in just the same way, and it is any artist's being moved in a particular way that will move him differently to an act of adaptation. In those movements, there will coexist respect for the work one admires as well as one’s own inspiration to give it different form in the new medium, to recreate it through one’s own vision. To anticipate otherwise presents a fundamental misunderstanding of the creative act. Arguments over just this issue are nonetheless as perennial as adaptations themselves and always as misguided. It is also a curious confusion for the literary minded to commit. From whence this fantasy that any literary text — Homer, Bronte, Fitzgerald — will magically assume replicated cinematic life in order to — what? Give us The Great Gatsby, but even better — visually on screen instead of only in our minds? And what about the language? Among all the various disappointing Gatsby adaptations, Baz Luhrman, of course, made no pretenses. You go to a Baz Luhrman film to see Baz Luhrman, not F. Scott Fitzgerald. One of the most successful film adaptations I’ve ever seen, a perfect amalgam of the original and adapting artist was made by Baz Luhrman’s cinematic ancestor, Ken Russell, under a control he later lost, from D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. But that novel is literate and modern, so the film could be literate and modern in the same way while visually thoroughly the Russell who felt deeply Lawrence’s “blood consciousness.”
The Odyssey, of course, is not modern, and it is very long. Nolan made the inevitable cuts moving between two media, and that itself is interpretation. He chose, as directors and adapters of Shakespeare, for instance, will often do, to reenvision the drama, the tale, with focus on the elements in it he felt most readily applicable to the current culture. The Odyssey is an aftermath story following on a historical event significant enough to generate legend — the destruction in war of city that came to be known as Troy. It really happened. Did it happen in any way at all resembling the myth it generated? Who can say? It did occur near the end of the Bronze Age, for reasons almost certainly related to that age’s coming to an end. One weakness I find in the film grows out of the very strength of this interpretation. Nolan delivers it with a heavy hand. Rather than allow viewers to reach this reading of the tale on their own, to draw that response to the film from their own reception of it, they are given it. They are given an understanding, and they are given it repeatedly, right to the film’s end. But the most profound experience of art enables audiences to achieve their own experience, not to receive it second hand on a didactic serving platter.
Since it became part of the cultural debate over the film, I’ll say that I am not what appears to exist — a Nolan “fanboy.” I haven’t seen all his films, some of which held no interest for me. I’ve strongly disliked at least one and thought Dunkirk a regrettable failure. (Joe Wright’s film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement delivers a far more momentous and moving recreation of the Dunkirk evacuation.) Like seemingly everyone else, I like Memento. I liked the Batman films as much as I can like a superhero film, which is so little that I’ve seen few others. I liked Oppenheimer very much, for reasons not unlike those I like The Odyssey. I am aware that the film (like almost any Nolan film) has great detractors. Mostly, it’s because they differ in their interpretations of the man, Oppenheimer, and the historical moment. Like Homer’s epic, people have strong, clear views on those topics.
My favorite Nolan film by far, the one that moves me immeasurably, is Interstellar, a science fiction film that is, you should know, an odyssey film. Intrepid journeying far from home. Longing for home and those left behind. The absent father. Search for the father. A “kingdom” under threat. Time and memory. I could go on. There’s even a variation on the Penelope character, with whom our Odysseus (Matthew McConaughey) reunites in the end to face the future alone and together — and she’s played by Anne Hathaway. The film is not about the science; it’s about the fiction, and the fiction, which is not an adaptation but instead an original screenplay by Nolan and his brother, is elementally backward and forward projecting in its imagination.
This leads me to observe another fundamental misunderstanding about adaptation, which is to imagine that any adaptation of so culturally original and profound a work of art as the The Odyssey can ever equal in achievement and impact the original work. For me, the effect of this filmic recreation of a literary work I have read multiple times already begins to fade, whereas I have watched Interstellar many times. I think the current film did some things well. I think it has weaknesses. Regardless, the great achievement, once and forever, is the epic poem.
Still, as many have said, there remains the “cultural moment” — the cultural “conversation” Nolan’s film has engendered, which is educational in itself and can only, one hopes, lead to more reading of Homer. That appears to be the case.
What about the cultural moment, though? How exactly do such phenomena arise? Maybe we should think about that. Why has a film by Christoper Nolan adapting Homer drawn such extraordinary attention? Do the answers seem obvious? Let’s consider anyway.
Homer certainly speaks for himself. Let’s leave it at that. Or let’s not. As we’ll see, Homer may have been necessary for this particular moment to arise, but he wasn’t sufficient.
Nolan is what he is at this time in film history, and while some, judging by their responses, clearly dislike him more than I realized, others speak of him as one kind of film savior at a fraught time in theatrical film distribution history. I think a lot of those people are confusing film with Hollywood and a certain kind of epic that became for many, definitive of Hollywood filmmaking. And in this regard, we confront a confusion — that between epic and spectacle, as in spectacular.
Nolan is viewed as a savior because of his large-scale storytelling vision and his embrace of film’s latest technology, IMAX and 70mm. While I’m as susceptible to a well told, grand scale narrative, spectacularly filmed, as the next moviegoer, that has never been the source of my love for cinema. I may have grown up on the Hollywood Golden Age and after, but my love of film as an art form was refined by the “new waves” of many nations of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. In those films and in other great filmic traditions, such as from Japan and India, the aesthetic merit of cinema developed not in spectacle but in the film miracle itself. The film miracle is the capture of four dimensionality in two dimensions. The fourth dimension, of course, is time, and the durer — the experiential persistence of time’s passage in stillness that arises between the frames and yet seems rather to emanate from the film stock itself. The third dimension comes to the viewer in physical positioning and movement, also a phenomenon of the frames that yet somehow is transferred to the miraculously motive world existing both in time and in the frames. The French called it mise en scène, with, too, what we all call camera movement.
The purest1 film art arises out of this miraculous essence, which is an artform-entire away from epic poetry or spectacle, though it needn’t be antithetical to the latter — and is a very different kind of filmmaking from that which is energized by technological innovations in film equipment, projection, and computer-generated imagery.
Then there was the damning review of the film by Emily Wilson, MacArthur Award winning classicist who produced a much-acclaimed 2017 translation of The Odyssey, a translation that Nolan publicly credited as an inspiration. Wilson choosing to review the film was big — spectacular. Her reviewing it in a premier journal of intellectual literary hauteur, The London Review of Books (LRB) was big. Her thoroughly mean-spirited review of a filmmaker she makes clear from the very start she does not admire is big and condescending:
As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem: ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.
LRB sought spectacle by soliciting or accepting Wilson, of all people, to review the film. Wilson sought spectacle in choosing to review the film and doing it as she did. Hollywood bigness, the current Mr. Hollyood bigness, apparently arrived as a challenge to a bastion of literary empire, and the literary world responded from those heights like Ilium’s warriors hurling heavy stones from the walls of Troy down on the Greek aggressors. Many more, expected reviews, from the professional film critics, followed, as did all kinds of voices with their own takes, including fellow classicists, Theo Nash, who has published on the textual history of Homer’s epic, and Daniel Mendelsohn, who published just this year an even more recent translation of The Odyssey. Both men are not without criticisms of the film but offer it far greater respect, and Nash particularly aims to point out the many ways he thinks Wilson is simply mistaken in her response.
Most critics, including Wilson acknowledge a vital fact, that The Odyssey has been adapted to film, or televised-film-series form, multiple times before. The prototype, so to speak, for these adaptations, was the 1954 Dino De Laurentis-Carlo Ponti Italian production that I first watched as a kid, starring Kirk Douglas and Silvana Mangano and directed by Mario Camerini. It established the problem facing all subsequent adaptations, and of a broader set of historical movies as well — that of, in the effort to capture on film an “original,” work of antiquity, simply reducing it to mere costume drama: scenes are reenacted without original artistic motive, while reproducing, without aesthetic transformation, the cultural archaism of the epic’s world, values, and language. (The same is true of the 1997 all-star production directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, with Armand Assante as Odysseus.) The archaism, especially, presents a translator’s challenge in the poetry, but as film dialog it’s simply untenable. Nolan’s undistinguished screenplay, which is clearly purposely plainspoken in service to the narrative and cinema, seems just as clearly influenced, despite her disdain for it, by Wilson’s own controversial, anglicized approach in her translation — an approach that Mendelsohn markedly departs from in his more recent effort.
Curiously, too, as far back as that 1954 production, we see the barest but still meaningful gesture toward what Wilson and others have objected to in Nolan — contemporizing of the values of the Homeric world. In the final minute of that film, after witnessing Odysseus ‘s murderous revenge on the suitors, Penelope retreats to her room and prays to the gods for her and her husband’s future, expressing distress at the fierce violence that twenty years of war and the hardship returning have wrought from Odysseus. She wants the return of the man she loved before. By 2024’s The Return, Uberto Pasolini’s abbreviated take on the tale starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche, we’ve reached the deep dive territory of Nolan’s similar view of Odysseus, a hero deeply scarred by the trauma that in our, real world such a twenty-year odyssey would almost certainly produce.
So here’s a question. Why didn’t The Return, the first significant adaptation in years, starring major international acting talent the equal of Nolan’s, also “controversial” in its take on the story — why did it not become this cultural moment? We all know the answer. It’s the bigness. The spectacle. And the spectacle became self-perpetuating. Wilson, for her part, while still affirming her critique, the next day on BlueSky seemed to think by the response to it that maybe she’d been a little mean. Within a week, though, she actually produced a second review of the film for The Atlantic, extending her attack in a still more comprehensive way. This is not common form. I won’t psychoanalyze. But does Wilson think herself actually Homer, required to take personal offense beyond a single withering review? Did Nolan steal her beautiful husband and whisk him off behind the gated walls of Bel Air?
Early in her LRB essay, Wilson allows that
Adaptations needn’t and shouldn’t follow the original with anything like the exactitude of a translation. Some of the best radically transform or resist the source material, providing what Harold Bloom called ‘strong misreadings’ of their ancestors. The most memorable creative responses to The Odyssey – such as Euripides’ Helen, Virgil’s Aeneid, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Joyce’s Ulysses, Walcott’s Omeros, Atwood’s Penelopiad, Madeline Miller’s Circe or Lisa Peterson’s play set in a modern migrant camp – reconsider the poem’s structure, narrative and values. In theory, Nolan seems to understand the assignment and its hazards.
She soon adds, “Nolan’s spectacle threatens to drown out his story.” One might say the same of Wilson’s approach to her criticism of Nolan. We need to recognize, however, that none of the works Wilson references above remotely approaches adaptation. They are all new creative works that do, as she says, originate or work at some level of response to The Odyssey, which is not all the same endeavor. Nolan’s film is indeed an adaptation, and my contention is that adaptation is also a kind of response.
The Return is one such example. It cuts out all of the epic before Odysseus has washed up ashore half dead on the coast of Ithaca. The film is concerned with its title and treats that return from a double vantage point that can easily become one. The Odyssey is myth woven, like Penelope’s burial shroud, out of some originating reality. As Fiennes’ Odysseus says, “People love stories.” There are the values of the epic’s world and the experience of the real world in which the epic was created. How much do we hide, obfuscate, bury in the lies we tell through stories? No one believes the Trojan War originated in the theft of a wife. The history of the time, as often, is of increased migrations across waters (the “sea people” of Nolan’s film), encroachments, attacks, colonization, contention for control over commercial sea routes. Why the fiction of a stolen wife? How much else in the myth serves as cover for truths less narratively desirable in whatever way?
Then there is we, today, who can read the original story, artifact of its time, on its own terms but who will be hard pressed to receive something new, or some new version in a different form of the old, on those same terms. It doesn’t fit, has never fit. The Return posits a different context for Odysseus’s reappearance in Ithaca. Ten years of war? My god. Ten more years of fate and sea-tossed wandering over the seas and strange lands while little by little all your men, the best of Ithaca, the men who followed you, their leader, lose their lives? And only you return? What would all of that do to a real person, not a mythological hero, who actually survived it? Your abandoned kingdom in ruins, a wife alone for twenty years, a son who never knew you, both beset by thieving murderous opportunists. How do you face all that? How do you explain yourself to anyone — and what’s become of you?
Nolan’s Odysseus says to Penelope, “We were the sea people.” Well, maybe he means just him and his crew. Maybe something more. One of the men who early on hears the stranger (Fiennes’s Odysseus) claim to have fought at the already legendary Troy with Odysseus, says, “They say that every war will be like it, until time runs out.”
Another man says, “The dead from Troy, their ghosts will come and watch.”
(Nolan’s Odysseus says we will forget all the lessons. The Return’s Odysseus and Penelope also talk about remembering and forgetting.)
Later, hearing the same account from the stranger she perhaps suspects is her husband, Binoche’s Penelope asks him, “How can men find their way to war but not find their way home?”
Odysseus replies, “For some, the war becomes home.”2
Everyone wants Fiennes’s Odysseus to recover himself from the war and death-haunted shell he returned as and save all of them and the kingdom from the suitors. How do they imagine he will do this? (In All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul, home on leave, realizes that “the war” is not just over there: it has its origins at home.) When Odysseus at last does return to himself enough to do what is necessary and is about to commence the slaughter of the suitors, he directs Penelope out of the death chamber, saying, “Is this what you wanted?”
Returning after, to see the carnage, Penelope is horrified and repulsed by what she witnesses, in the chamber and in Odysseus. Where do she and her king go from there? What follows is a profound and personal ending entirely different in scale and tone from that of Nolan’s evocation of Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” in a film of composed, somber beauty entirely evocative of its time and place yet completely of our own in its concerns.
Why did it not become the cultural moment that originated in and descended into spectacle? What does it say of our culture and of our moments that it did not?
AJA
🖊️ Read my Daily Notes on Culture and the World: ➙ 𝓝𝓞𝓣𝓔S 🖊️
Homo Vitruvius and American Samizdat serve as my weekly open house, a salon in which I offer for your view some of my creative writing and intellectual exploration. HV persists as my original and primary Substack of these offerings; AS arose in resistance to Trumpism and in defense of Enlightenment liberalism. From memoir and poetry to fiction and drama, mostly in HV, to history and political philosophy, predominantly in AS, you will find them across the two stacks, which may be subscribed jointly or singly in Manage Subscription.
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
I addressed this issue in my 2012 “Claude Sautet: Purity and Invention,” at Senses of Cinema. https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/claude-sautet-purity-and-invention/
In my 2004 “The Altered State of War: Heaven, Hell, and the Structure of the Combat Film,” in Bright Lights Film Journal, I consider how combat films work off the tension between home as “heaven” and war as “hell” and how warriors, alienated from home, can come to feel at home in war: https://brightlightsfilm.com/the-altered-state-of-war-heaven-hell-and-the-structure-of-the-combat-film/
Adapting to hell is, of course, one of the potential horrors of war — the last for anyone who survives it: a solider temporarily makes a home of hell and then carries hell home with him. “Myself am hell,” says Milton’s Satan, and the realization that Kurtz’s “horror” is not the contagion of some external agent but a constituent part of the self instead is what haunts him, Capt. Willard, and all the rest. With that truth as the newly realized, ultimate horror of war, the interior rather than the exterior experience of war becomes the greater concern of the anti-war film, even while it focuses ever more graphically and realistically on the destruction and the physical human damage.
I have been looking forward to your thoughts. We are of like minds but you said it much more eloquently than I ever could. I also love Interstellar and have seen it numerous times. Oppenheimer I liked quite a bit but not sure if it is one I will rewatch much. With The Odyssey I seem to always approach a new translation or adaptation rather than returning to one I have already experienced. I have seen the movies, read several translations, and each experience is new, fresh. The tale is timeless. I enjoyed Nolen's adaptation and I think its greatest victory is how it has stirred up interest in the classics. I doubt it will be a film I return to frequently though. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this one. - Matthew
I must be the last person in my circle who’s waiting for the crowds to subside before seeing Nolan’s Odyssey. Meanwhile I follow the reactions, both critical and casual, with bemusement. People seem to watch this movie through the scrim of expectation and bias. Your essay, unlike most of the others, draws on sustained attention to Homer, Nolan and the historical arc of culture-making. I enjoyed your fusion of the erudite and the personal. While everyone else debates Nolan’s take on Homer, maybe I should settle in with Uberto Pasolini’s, which I’d never heard of until now.