The Odyssey, Reviewed

“Where’s the fucking?”

At a critical turning point, a question must be asked. My friend Dexter introduced it after Everything Everywhere All At Once. And then Emily, that same year, when Catwoman Zoe Kravitz and Batman Robert Pattinson ended their movie with no more than a kiss.

Two weeks ago, my rabbinical school class went to Friday night services at a reform temple, to see how it was done. A massive synagogue, with a big community. And yet, the usual: liturgy led by old men, singing old crowd-pleasers to a passive audience. My classmate beat me to the punch before I could say it: “Where’s the sex?”

I loved the new Odyssey movie because it was by no means definitive: it’s a version of a version of a myth, and these artists made it relevant to what we are dealing with, collectively, in 2026. It was fulfilled my one standard, in that it was a movie, with fabulous set pieces and stunting, and finally gave us the return of Anne Hathaway in her grand vamp form. As for Samantha Morton as Circe…she had a packed theater of men (some even straight!) sitting bolt upright and stunned silent. And Lupita N’yongo doing a double-gag for the classicist gays…as usual, she comes ready to annihilate.

The Odysseus of myth is wily, witty, a smooth-talker and a heartbreaker. Matt Damon’s Odysseus cruises through the more somber mythic imagination of 2026, facing with the consequences of marital barbarism, and its obvious implications of sexual violence. It’s a mature corrective to the glorified pornography of Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead and all that other “post-modern” masculine indulgence of the last twenty years.

So he’s not to sleep with every goddess he meets, and in this version, it’s fitting that Samantha Morton’s liberated bog hag doesn’t find him particularly charming. Fine, so long as we can make it to Charlize Theron, cast fittingly as the campy seductress Calypso, with whom Odysseus classically falls into a sex daze for seven years. This time, it’s as if he’s been coerced and fed opiates just to stand her company. Really? That’s it? And even when he does return home to Anne Hathaway’s Penelope, we don’t make it all the way to a proper embrace on their marriage bed. The end of last year’s The Return, with Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, centered around this fabled pieced of furniture. If not for the bedroom, there’s no point to the preceding bloodbath.

My Zohar teacher always pressed this on us: everything, everything, everything is about the sacred masculine (kadosh baruch’hu) and the divine feminine (shechina) coming to face each other. According to the myths of the Zohar, if the two sides of the divine erotic do not come find union, if they stay askew and aloof, ashamed and afraid, then the world slips into chaos. It’s the knowing judgment of their queen that Matt Damon and Ralph Fiennes most fear; and, indeed, Juliette Binoche and Anne Hathaway are righteously fucking fearsome. To overcome that fear and face the force of life incarnate is to complete one’s ascension into mythic hero.

Ruby, a few years ago, said that she fears that men and women don’t really have anything in common anymore. A dear person told me that after attending a chemsex party in a gay guy’s apartment, at which everyone was high but few could stay hard, he got the sense that they all just wanted to cuddle but didn’t know how to ask for it. The source sphere of the Kabbalistic tree of life, Tipheret, is associated to Jacob, the forefather who frankly fucked a lot, and who resolved an age-long biblical family feud by meeting his brother and embracing him in a hug.

What is beauty if trapped in stasis? What is an odyssey without a proper reunion? What is an epic road, a personal transformation, without an ecstatic celebration, a dance on MD to “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)?” Why do therapy if it doesn’t yield a climactic breakthrough? What are we doing so far apart from one another?

The Odyssey brilliantly delivered an ancient myth into the present, into a new dark age of stunted desire, warped masculinity and terrorized bodies. How those bodies come together again, how those spirits come alive, is up to the audience, and to the potential of our own erotic imagination…

For ten days more, all readings on my site are 20% off with the code SUMMER26 and SUMMERGIFT26. Books are now open for August. I hope to see you in the sunshine…

Love,

David Odyssey