Vibe Queen: Jennifer Lame's Editing in The Odyssey

There’s a beautiful shot in The Odyssey when, over the deck of Odysseus’s ship, we see a pod of dolphins jumping through the waves. Apparently, the pod gathered unexpectedly around the ship during production and the camera team managed to grab the shot.1 It’s a brief and wonderful moment of documentary realism that, rather than grounding the viewer in reality, adds to the awe of witnessing this mega-production of unbelievable scale: you can practically hear the audience muttering, “Wow, they really did that.”

For me, this moment distills the priorities of Jennifer Lame’s editing. Yes, it is a lovely shot, but if you have an eye for color correction you’ll notice that it’s muted, more gray than the scene around it. Snatched from reality, the dolphins are slammed in the middle of two sunny shots of Odysseus looking out to sea. The shots barely connect, but the vibe is high. He’s looking. At what? Fuck it, dolphins, let’s do it. It’s short - 60 frames? Move on. No time to linger, go go go.

It’s a difficult job to get the wheels rolling on a three-hour movie, let alone a 3,000-year-old epic, but Lame’s editing gathers speed with a staccato ticking-clock momentum that I found infectious. She’s a shark in the water, healthy in the fear that, with a movie so massive, slowing down or, God forbid, luxuriating equals death.

You can feel this fear pulsate through the scene when Odysseus tells Penelope he must leave for war as their infant son sleeps. Even this relatively quiet scene is full of jump cuts, two of which are mid-conversation, punctuated with quick flashes of memories, imagined horizons, and stories of sacrifice. It’s a cascade of images that will return again and again, repeating as the larger structure reveals itself.

I don’t particularly like Christopher Nolan movies [dodges tomato]. In fact, I find his writing impersonal, didactic, and hollow [dodges mysterious beggar’s arrow]. But Nolan does write unconventional structures, so I wanted to take a minute to examine the tension between what I believe is Nolan’s writing and Lame’s editing.

You can imagine the structure of Inception as a downward spiral, relate Tenet to a palindrome, or, as Nolan explains in my favorite video on the internet, the shape of Memento is a…uh…

Huh. Anyway.

Not having read the script, I’m going to venture a guess that the structure of The Odyssey is Nolan’s creation, not Lame’s. I picture the movie as a checkerboard, with Odysseus and Telemachus each toggling between present day and flashback. As Odysseus regains his memory, he sees his past in fragments. As Telemachus searches for news of his father, he hears stories in fragments. Back and forth, piece by piece, memory by memory.

Combine Nolan’s fragmented writing with Lame’s paced-up editing and some of the story becomes garbled. For example, I watched the film twice with two different people and each was confused about Antinous’s draft-dodging. Was he conscripted? Or was it Sinon? Was Odysseus in on it? And what happened with Sinon’s dad? Some might argue that this is “layered storytelling” we’re intended to parse on subsequent viewings, but I found it unnecessarily confusing.

Fumbles like this are, as Odysseus might argue, casualties in service of the greater good. Details fall through the cracks with a “fuck it, they’ll figure it out” attitude in order to keep the whole, giant endeavor moving forward. We the audience are left to puzzle the pieces together and try to keep up, not unlike the structure of Nolan’s Memento…

…wait, so, it’s like a rocket? A hotdog. Submarine.

Never mind.

Lame’s editing is ragged, defiantly uninterested in continuity or fluidity. In some scenes, like the Cyclops’s cave, the orientation of the characters is completely ignored, spun around in space until what was once north is south. Other scenes, like the conversation between Circe and Odysseus, take on a stop-start, herky-jerky feeling as Lame relentlessly cuts between two set-ups so jarring it hurts my brain: one shot drifts toward the actor, the other is static, one shot is over the shoulder, the other is centered.

Who would shoot dialogue like this? And why would you cut it so fast? But somehow…this scene rules? It is both maniacally wrong and totally works. Lame’s editing has a consistent smash-and-grab energy of someone using everything at their disposal to just barely get a scene to work, shot types and awkward staging be damned.

The result is a style that is choppy, talky, and invigorating. Vibe is queen, coherence is for the weak. At least for me, the exciting thing to watch is the incongruity of that type of editing in this type of movie. Sometimes the friction causes unnecessary drag, but sometimes sparks fly.

Joe Peeler is a Sundance award-winning director and editor who writes about the art of making movies through the lens of film editing.

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