The People's Mess

It’s an adaptation, not a line-for-line retelling, he’s supposed to interpret it through his own perspective and bring his own ideas to the table, otherwise why do the movie at all?

I definitely didn’t like absolutely everything about it, and think that every movie should be critiqued in good faith. But it’s not in good faith to say a whole movie is garbage because it doesn’t faithfully depict the entire source material exactly as written. The poem still exists: you can always read it. If you read it in translation, that’s an adaptation too.

Some things I thought were interesting and worthy of discussion (not that I endorse these as universally good choices, I just think they are interesting choices):

- focusing on the violence of the Trojan War, and the resulting guilt of the conquering hero. It’s been a while since I read The Odyssey, but I think this is a new take on the material? My memory of the poem is that whoever wins the war is “right,” and the gods take their sides to effect that result. So whoever wins in battle is favored by the gods. It was really interesting for the hero of the final battle of the Trojan War, Odysseus, by that reading the most favored of the gods, to then become so unfavored on his journey home as he struggles with the violence that he himself caused and participated in. This isn’t a particularly classical philosophy but is more modern, but I think it’s really interesting. It’s perhaps why he feels, at the end of the movie, he has created a world that he has no right to live in and self-exiles. Or maybe he punishes himself so that the gods don’t?

- The idea of poor leadership and its consequences. Odysseus leads his men to ruin and death, and seemingly can’t avoid it (due to prophecy). I think this is why the scene with the bag of wind from Aeolus is cut- if the men open it, then they are not taken off course by Odysseus’s decision. In Nolan’s movie, it is his very first decision NOT to take established trade routes home that dooms his crew. He is always a little too clever for his own good. An interesting follow-up conversation is the idea that Antinous “leads” the suitors in any way. I don’t think this was fully developed in the movie, but it seems like it was suggested as he was a rival to Odysseus, and his death caused the remaining suitors to stop fighting and declare loyalty to Odysseus. It’s a reminder that actually, Antinous’s men were always Odysseus’s men at the end of the day, and even Antinous was one of Odysseus’s people too. They all just forgot who their leader was for a while until order was re-established through the use of extreme violence. What does it mean that the extreme violence in Troy resulted in the guilt that haunts Odysseus for 10 years, but similar violence in Ithaca re-secures his family’s rule?

- Nolan left out several instances of Odysseus behaving like a regular Greek hero, probably to make him more palatable and heroic to modern audiences. For example: he does not sleep with Circe, and he does not kill the slave girls in Ithaca who had slept with the suitors. What does this say about how ancient audiences viewed their heroes, and how modern ones expect them to behave? Modern audiences typically hate it when heroes cheat on their wives- fair enough. But how are we meant to read the fact that the only punitive action taken against a slave girl collaborator was doled out by Queen Penelope- is it more acceptable because the betrayal was against her personally, or because these actions are between two women?

- Why did Nolan remove the arc of Calypso sexually assaulting Odysseus while she held him captive for many years? The poem tells us that he slept with her unwilling, and the movie even shows that he is in a kind of disoriented brainwashed state- as far as it is willing to go. He is clearly unable to consent to anything sexual, but the movie refuses to say if anything happened. Why stop there? Are modern audiences still not ready to accept male heroes that have been victimized in this way? (This is not a question asked in earnest- I know the answer.)