Overall, a Big Thumbs-up: Classics Faculty React to Nolan’s Odyssey Movie

Winkley Professor of Latin and Greek Barbara Weiden Boyd:

The inescapable nature of historical and cultural mediation characterizes the transmission of knowledge. Language is a key factor: “transmission,” the “sending of something across (physical or temporal) space,” is an inevitable consequence of the communication of stories. Every new storyteller in one sense at least replicates, either knowingly or unknowingly, the experience of Homer’s earliest singers: the language is both their own and not their own simultaneously.

A cinematic Odyssey, whether it is created by Christopher Nolan or The Simpsons writers or anyone else, cannot replicate the text(s) that preceded it; furthermore, I would argue, it shouldn’t. For it to live and thrive, it has to be personal, individual—and evocative of both the similarities to and differences from the text or text it evokes. It has to have a memory, but it also has to know how to forget. Perhaps this is why the single most moving feature of Nolan’s film for me is not the fall of Troy, brutal though it is, or the episode of the Sirens, with Odysseus simultaneously experiencing their song and being tortured by it; rather, it is the clever way in which Nolan has collapsed the episode with the Lotus-eaters into the seven years spent with Calypso. Some critics have lamented the relative absence of sexual encounters in the film’s script and the seemingly single-minded focus on the male experience of loss; while I too note the shift, I find the result intriguing. Calypso is no longer simply a seductress whose temptations wane as a result of a divinely inspired seven-year itch; instead, she plays a therapeutic function that can be read as deceptive and healing by turns, as she deploys the lotus-flower as a pharmakon like the one Helen uses in Book 4 of The Odyssey—again, yet another episode Nolan skips—or does he?

"A cinematic Odyssey, whether it is created by Christopher Nolan or The Simpsons writers or anyone else, cannot replicate the text(s) that preceded it; furthermore, I would argue, it shouldn’t."

A final thought that locates this essay firmly in the twenty-first century: Calypso’s deployment of the lotus-flower rereads The Odyssey as very much a story about trauma, especially but not exclusively the trauma of war. Forgetfulness itself is a secondary form of trauma, even as it allows time for healing; by that I mean that, as with the original Homeric Lotus-eaters, one forgets oneself, and all that it means to be alive. Yet the sort of limbo-condition it creates is essential for healing, if healing from the brutality of war and the civilizational decline that war threatens is possible. Memory makes us human; without it, an entire civilization will indeed die tonight.

Associate Professor of Classics, Chair of Classics Department Jennifer B. Clarke Kosak:

Ancient Greek and Roman storytellers take advantage of two facets of mythic stories: their recognizable core and their flexibility. Because audiences bring with them an understanding of the myth’s basic premise, they will appreciate (or not) the choices that different storytellers make in constructing their narratives. With reference to the core, the early fourth-century-BCE Greek comic poet Antiphanes wrote, “Tragedy is a lucky genre in every way, since first of all the stories are known by the spectators before anyone even says anything; thus, a poet only needs to remind. So I’ll just say, ‘Oedipus’ and they know all the rest: the father is Laius, the mother Jocasta, their daughters and sons, what he will suffer, what he has done.”

Aristotle made a similar point about The Odyssey itself, writing in the Poetics, “Of The Odyssey, the core story is not long: a man is away from home for many years, carefully watched by Poseidon and all alone, while at the same time things at his home are in such a state that his property is being destroyed by suitors and his son is being plotted against; he arrives, storm-tossed, and after making some people recognize him, he attacks and survives, but destroys his enemies. This is the core story; the rest is episodes.” I note a distinction between these two accounts, though: Antiphanes suggests that just the name alone—Oedipus—does all the work, whereas Aristotle deliberately provides the story of “a man,” not naming Odysseus himself. And indeed, while Homer’s Odyssey claims Odysseus’s homecoming story as its central theme, the poem repeatedly plays with the name and identity of its hero (an issue that I feel Nolan’s film only lightly touches upon).

"I enjoyed Nolan’s spectacular film and am still pondering the choices he made. For me, Homer’s epic remains the most fascinating and satisfying version of Odysseus’ story."

Ancient poets use the existence of the core to play with the details, sometimes in radical ways, in order to emphasize their own thematic interests. The many stories that feature Odysseus depict him above all as an extraordinarily capable survivor, but that survivor can be wily, empathetic, cruel, or humble, depending on the interests of the storyteller. The competitive aspect of ancient poetry rewarded the poet who could tell the most compelling version of the mythic tale, sometimes even with prizes; that version became the foundation upon which all the others built. I enjoyed Nolan’s spectacular film and am still pondering the choices he made. For me, Homer’s epic remains the most fascinating and satisfying version of Odysseus’ story.

Senior Lecturer in Classics Michael Nerdahl:

I teach it every year, whether in my myth course (Classics 1101) or in a first-year writing seminar (The Heroic Age, Classics 1017) or in the original Greek (Greek 2204, Homer), and when it was released I heard from both students and alumni who were excited to see it. 

My thoughts on converting the poem into a film correspond quite closely to what Nolan himself said in an interview with [Stephen] Colbert a month or so ago: a great many of our stories are really parts of The Odyssey; it’s essentially timeless. It's a simple story, at its core: a human being wants to get home, and their family misses them. This is a situation we can all identify with, and it's one college students in particular have always wrestled with. Nolan did a wonderful job making Odysseus human to a modern audience, and it's a recognizably different Odysseus from the one in The Odyssey. Nolan consciously brings moral sensibilities into his version of Odysseus that are, at most, implicitly present in the original. Such an adaptation removes some of the original poem's subtlety—Homer's Odyssey is as much about storytelling, fiction, and truth as it is about identity, retribution, and homecoming—but also adds a lot that Nolan himself wants to say to his fellow citizens of the world.

"While there may be a few things I might wish were included or changed a bit, I think Nolan has brilliantly brought to life a powerfully resonant version of Odysseus."

I have, of course, noticed a lot of fervor over "inaccuracies". Leaving aside the fantastical elements of the original (and the very idea they could be "historically accurate"), every translation, as R. F. Kuang has written in her novel Babel, is a betrayal, so to expect a cinematic interpretation of a nearly 3,000-year-old poem to fit some ideal, unquestioned paradigm is laughable. And while there may be a few things I might wish were included or changed a bit, I think Nolan has brilliantly brought to life a powerfully resonant version of Odysseus. He's done what the author(s) of the Homeric poem did and what the ancients recognized was the purpose: he told a story, not the story, of Odysseus. 

Also, it's just a good movie.