Polytropus

Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey comes at just at the right time for me. I spent the last two years reading the Robert Fagles translation, finishing it just a few months ago.

When I heard that Christopher Nolan was adapting Homer’s poem, I thought it made perfect sense. I really like the way that he plays around with flashbacks and narrative structure—something that The Odyssey is absolutely stuffed with.

Meanwhile, inspired by Madeline Miller’s Circe, I’ve also been reading lots of modern retellings of Greek myths, including new takes on the events in The Odyssey.

I’ve mentioned it before, but one of the most interesting choices in these interpretations is how to treat the gods in these stories. Do they actually exist, directing the narrative? Or are events told in a purely factual way?

Claire North’s Songs of Penelope series has different gods narrate the story, but they themselves are non-interventionist. Likewise Pat Barker’s Trojan war trilogy is full of grit, avoiding supernatural occurrences.

So I was wondering what approach Christopher Nolan would take.

Having seen the film, it looks like it’s chock full of gods and monsters: Polyphemus the cyclops, the Laestrygonian giants, the song of the sirens, the sorcery of Circe, the fearsome Scylla and Charybdis.

But…

As with Homer’s original poem, all of those events are told in flashback. And they’re told by one very unreliable narrator. Odysseus, the much-travelled, adaptable, wily, ingenious, complicated man of twists and turns. His superpower is manipulation through storytelling.

Not only that, but Nolan combines two different story elements to have Odysseus narrate those supernatural events to Calypso having been drugged up on lotus leaves. He is, at this point, the last surviving member of his fleet. There is no one left to contradict his account. His men are dead, perhaps by cyclops, giant, whirlpool and monster, or perhaps by more mundane starvation, exhaustion and disease.

Recently I read Finn Mac Cool by Morgan Llywelyn about a hero from a different mythology:

For the characters in this book, their belief in magic is as real as their belief in the weather. But there are no supernatural powers here. If anything, Finn’s superpower is his ability to tell—and believe—tall tales involving supernatural intervention.

All the usual accounts of Finn Mac Cool’s prowess are retold as deeds that may have a basis in reality but then get exaggerated almost immediately.

It’s a framing device that works well. It’s all too easy to believe in the rise to power of a charismatic man skilled in controlling the narrative.

I think this is what Christopher Nolan has done with The Odyssey. Odysseus probably believes himself that he tricked a cyclops, fought giants, saw his crew turned into pigs, and led them between a whirlpool and a cliff monster.

But when he returns the real world of Ithica, there are no supernatural foes and no supernatural allies. Just a grubby story of disguise and household combat, a sort of Glencoe massacre, a Red Wedding, where Odysseus delivers the killing stroke to the very concept of xenia, a process he began with his Trojan horse deception.

We get one final reveal from the flashbacks, and it’s to show that the one supernatural character on-screen—Athena—is likely a figment of Odysseus’s conscience.

Knowing that we’ve been getting the narrative from a hallucinating traumatised combat veteran should make us question everything he’s been telling us. I’m looking forward to rewatching the film with this in mind.