they/them/theraclitus

personally i have stopped caring about the movie itself in terms of whether it's a "good" version of the odyssey. there are things i have heard about it that i think are kind of dumb choices to make but i also like my odysseus to suck bigly and unrepentenly and tbh the version of odysseus in my head is not a very homeric one at all! it's more informed by things like the philoctetes and the aeneid because i personally find those depictions more interesting. there are also things i've heard that intrigue me but i refuse to pay money to see this movie

what i find is more important to focus on is the conversations about things like the treatment of shooting locations or the fucking iranian artifacts turned into jewlery for an american actress to wear while the us is actively waging war against iran. just as any ancient telling of odysseus's story, the nolan odyssey does not exist in a vacuum. i'm sure there are interesting things to analyze in the movie as a story but personally the issue that concerns me more is the analysis of this movie as a way for the classics to once again be interpreted and used by someone from a powerful colonizing nation for entertainment while actively appropriating aspects of other cultures. like it feels like heavy handed satire at this point except it's real. if we're going to give this movie critical attention i just think this is more important to think about than whether the movie is "good"

This kind of assessment creates a false dichotomy of the Smart Reaction of Scholars and the Stupid Reaction of Hoi Polloi, when there are plenty of classical scholars (hi) who also very much dislike what Nolan has done with this text. My thoughts on the film are more aligned with the people bewailing the Nobody episode. Now not all those people have the toolbox I have for criticizing the film, and certainly some of them are being a bit myopic and histrionic about XYZ pet peeve, but that doesn’t mean that they’re seeing problems that aren’t there. I’m one of Martin’s fellow classicists, and I seriously disliked what this film was doing as an adaptation. I’ve had conversations with several of my colleagues who’ve seen the film and had similar thoughts to me. So putting it this way is at best an oversimplification, at worst insufferably smug and elitist.

"what if I've read part of it" if it's a large enough part that you would consider yourself to Have Read It in general contexts, then it counts. if it's not, then it doesn't. only you can be the judge of that, but I'm not giving you a nuance button.

any translations count, but abridged retellings don't

tags courtesy of @postarcadian

yeah, exactly! and I wanna expand on this just a little. the "doing humanities in an informal para-academic setting" is something that one gets used to when they're in academia. There are posts on here that I read in the manner in which I treat the conversations had with phd candidates over coffee (weed or w/e vice of choice, i've certainly posted about my subjects of study while high), in that these conversations can be both highly informative and highly generative. I've had informal convos both irl and online turn into papers. While we aren't going to treat these conversations as the same level of authority as we might a peer reviewed paper or a book, we recognize that they can be genuinely productive scholarship. (Which is part of the fun of following other academics on here. Besides that so many of them are delightful, intelligent, and pleasant to be around; but im digressing)

But for someone without the experience, that difference between expertise and someone faking expertise is often not legible. And so we have some folks blithely spouting absolute nonsense that gets treated with the same or greater authority than folks who've spent 8 years in intensive study. And while I'm not yet 8 years along in my studies, I'm enough of an expert in some subjects to be occasionally pulling my hair out in the same way an astronomer will at youtube videos about black holes or in the same way epidemiologists have been driven bald since the start of 2020.