Scattered Notes on a Scattered Epic

“In a man’s house every monster is repeated.”

— Derek Walcott, The Odyssey: A Stage Version

1. British soft power continues to wither away. Even Christopher Nolan, Hollywood’s favourite record-shattering Centrist Dad, seems to think so. Five minutes into The Odyssey, and I’m unsettled by the American drawl emanating from man and nymph alike. RP was the gold standard for the sword-and-sandal genre, with that particular accent lending a kind of transhistorical gravitas. Can we have anything left?

2. The sound design is a triumph. It groans and rattles, like a waterlogged dirge. It’s an assault, evoking the ghastliness of being stuck on a battered ship with people you know you have failed. Nolan’s sea surges, as it does in Homer’s epic. This is the shuttle of the sea moving back and forth, as imagined in Derek Walcott’s staged version of the poem. Walcott’s Homer is a blind blues singer, crooning from the sidelines, always returning to the sea in tribute and terror. Even after reuniting with Odysseus, Penelope can still hear the sea shaking in his body.

3. I loved all the parts where the ship’s sails resemble bloody blots against a cloudless sky.

4. Odysseus is one of the earliest portrayals of an absentee father in Western literature. He is the OG deadbeat.

5. Charlize Theron’s Calypso is dressed like the boho-chic Slavic women I meet at Red Sea resorts whose income is derived from candle-making and beachside vinyasa classes. They are easy to satirise until they tell you about fleeing Putin’s Russia, which technically makes them political exiles.

6. The less said about Pallas Athena, the better. It’s easier to suspend disbelief when all I can see of a famous actor is the back of their head. Benny Safdie, of all people, received this treatment as hulking Agamemnon, whose face we never see. More of this please, Hollywood.

7. Simone Weil wrote her essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” in 1940, as the Nazis swarmed France. Like Troy, her country had fallen. In The Illiad, she saw the force that animates violence as pitiless and essentially untameable. Force exists outside even those who wield it. It crushes some and intoxicates others, but in the end, can’t be entirely possessed by anyone. Weil saw this in the despair of the soldier, as well as the obliteration of the slave and the conquered man, all swept away in tides of blood and glory. Nolan’s Odysseus is similarly adrift, hanging on to a wooden raft. Force, not moral injury, should be the driving thrust of any worthwhile Homeric adaptation.

8. Unlike my siblings, I didn’t formally study the classics, which weren’t taught at the terrible schools I attended. My fascination with Odysseus was cultivated through my own reading habits. Odysseus exemplifies metis, the practical intelligence and cunning so admired by the ancient Greeks. He is the man of many ways, as one translation puts it. Polytropos, Homer calls him, the “much-travelled” drifter, the changeable survivor, he of wandering eyes and hands. Turning this way and that, like a fish wriggling free from the hook. Matt Damon is gruff and rigid, a drab vision of an irresistibly slippery hero. After tricking and maiming the cave-dwelling giant Polyphemus, Odysseus can’t help but rub it in, revealing himself in the process. He wants his name etched in legend. Omitting this part from the film is one thing, but this moment of reckless hubris is reduced to Damon wordlessly shooting an arrow at the giant, to the horror of his escaping men. In Nolan’s version, wiliness falls by the wayside. I prefer the Odysseus who pretends to be insane in order to avoid the Trojan War.

9. Scylla is the most underwhelming monster by a country mile. There is a frightening dignity to Polyphemus, a 60-foot animatronic puppet towering above the bite-sized perspective of Odysseus and his crewmates. I appreciate Nolan’s dedication to CGI-averse naturalism, apparently inspired by Guillermo del Toro’s monsters, but the Scylla encounter deserved no more than the bare minimum screentime it got. Nolan’s Scylla looked like Onix, the first generation Pokémon. Blink and you’ll miss it. Relatedly, The Police’s 1983 new wave earworm “Wrapped Around Your Finger” might be the only hit single that name-drops Scylla and Charybdis. There are more graceful ways to fold these things in.

10. The Odyssey is rooted in the pathologies of our time. It gives us therapeutic culture by way of Thrace, in 70mm IMAX film. Guilt is a coveted burden, fetishised in a script that wrestles with wartime trauma and prolonged displacement. Odysseus is the scarred Bronze Age veteran, the hero denied a homecoming, a leader whose final act of gallantry is distancing himself from the barbarity of his victories. As a king, he can pardon himself. As a man, he hallucinates savage episodes from the Trojan conquest, locked in the inevitability of his crimes. Ours is a culture of emotional greed. We want it all. The prize and the pity, adoration and absolution pouring from the same tap, the monkey without its paw. Nolan’s Odyssey emerges from that infantilised and infantilising tendency. This is the war film narrated by the PTSD-riddled soldier standing on the ashes of a Vietnamese village. The colour of the sky as described by the drone pilot. Nolan’s Odysseus stutters to these familiar beats, attuned to the soothing charms of self-flagellation in an age clamoring with enthusiastic victims. Shame can understand guilt, but guilt cannot understand itself. Bernard Williams was considering the ethical framework of ancient Greeks when he wrote this, but you could take this much further. They had no direct equivalent for the word “guilt”, a concept tied to the internal and individual. Nolan’s Odysseus gives Antinous back his shame, an act which feels more violent than killing him. Shame is something to carry, a branded forehead everyone can see. It is the threat of exposure.

11. Zeus’ Law is like the rules-based international order, creaking under the weight of its contradictions. It protected travellers in an insecure Mediterranean world with few formal institutions. (I have a faint and apt memory of feeling light-headed in Cyprus and resting in a bar named after Odysseus some summers ago). In wary and mocking tones, Nolan’s characters reference this Law throughout the film. With their treacherous gift of the Trojan horse, the Greeks tore apart the governing principle of a “civilised” world. They were blatant with their disobedience. Odysseus turns xenia, the sacred code of hospitality, into a pillar of dust, ushering in Total Moral Collapse, which eventually reaches the shores of his beloved Ithaca. The old rules are simple enough. Treat the stranger as the god he might potentially be. Feed the hungry and welcome the wayfarer. Long-suffering Telemachus and Penelope are held hostage by their own belief in this Law. They are little worker bees at a bloated NGO, waving about their impact reports. Their belief makes the world go round, ensuring that even after 20 years, there’s still food and wine to fill the bellies of grubby suitors. This code now lies stripped on the beach like Odysseus’ dying comrades. We’re in uncharted waters, as Nolan keeps reminding us.

12. Fans of HBO’s historical drama Rome will recall legionary soldier Lucius Vorenus returning home after years on the battlefield. Finding his wife Niobe with a baby in her arms, he is immediately enraged. The show makes it clear that, according to Roman values, he is well within his right to kill her. Their reunion is strained with suspicion. The Penelopes of this world are loyal under the threat of the knife. Demanding the unmovable secret of their marriage bed, Penelope frustrates a disguised Odysseus. In Homer’s poem, he laments Penelope’s hardened heart, though we see none of this in Nolan’s adaptation, where Odysseus never doubts or falters. There it is again, that uninspired rigidity, which after almost three hours, feels like savouring an ice cream cone only to find the deliciously gooey middle scooped out.

13. In Margaret Atwood’s novella The Penelopiad, twelve maids testify against their master Odysseus and his complicit wife. They were hanged for supposed treason, their short lives cut with Penelope as witness. Atwood stages this confrontation in a 21st-century court, overseen by an unsympathetic judge. The maids belonged to Odysseus, and he could freely punish them as he wished. Still, they beg the Fates for a justice that will not come. In The Iliad, Achilles sacrifices twelve Trojan youths in the flames of Patroclus’ funeral pyre, as summarily as he slaughters sheep and cattle. Nolan is concerned only with the most simplistic interpretations of betrayal. Considering what they’re working with, you can’t fault the cast for their adequate performances.

14. Having pulled an all-nighter, I was nodding off when we watched 1995’s Ulysses’ Gaze during a grad school seminar. I remember peeling my eyes awake to the sight of Harvey Keitel’s bare bum, which was certainly a jolt. Since then, I’ve grown to appreciate Theo Angelopoulos’ foggy ordeal of a movie. A Greek filmmaker searches for the lost reels made by Balkan pioneers Milton and Yanaki Manaki, journeying across a fractured region. Returning from self-imposed exile, Keitel’s lonesome Odysseus places his faith in images. When everything else fails, they can concretely point towards another world, one uncorrupted by war and genocide. They are both loot and inheritance. In Sarajevo, he dances with locals for a brief moment. Snipers interrupt their brief joy. The present is always intruding. A budget of $375 million and Nolan still couldn’t be this self-indulgent. What a shame.

15. Speaking of self-indulgence, I’m enjoying Richard E. Grant’s Very Modern Odyssey, as the actor gabs and gobbles his way through Odysseus’ 10-year Mediterranean detour, from Sicily to Tunisia.