🖤

And so it is finally complete! 🦄🩸🐉🛹

I’m sure many of you have been watching my process in my stories. It took over a month to figure out how I was going to pull this off because I haven’t painted much in a while, let alone on a surface like a skateboard deck. It was already hard enough to figure out the subject I was going to paint! I ended up wanting to go for a medieval y2k style considering the surface I was instructed to paint on. I had to make it harder for myself and sketch it out digitally so that the composition would look exact, but of course the projector warped the image on the edges of the deck. Luckily it was an easy fix. Honestly for my first time painting with acrylic gouache on a skateboard, I’d say it looks pretty decent?

now allow me to dive into the catholicism of it all, because it's interesting how ronan coming to terms with his sexuality is informed by catholic vs. protestant stances on queerness (very broadly speaking). whereas many protestant christian religions encourage praying the gay away and becoming heterosexual through god's will (aka conversion therapy), the stance of the catholic church on homosexuality is more along the lines of "you can't control that you have same-sex desire, but everyone has their crosses to bear so just don't act on it." as such, the catechism states that “homosexual persons are called to chastity.” (in the 1986 letter, the cardinal says, "although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder." this article also provides context to the catholic church's views on queerness.) all in all, there's that distinction between being gay vs. acting on it. gay thoughts vs gay actions. you can see this echoed in ronan's arc and how he struggles with his sexuality in several key ways.

for one thing, ronan is more concerned with concealment and repression than he is with changing or "fixing" his sexuality. his shame stems from lacking the vocabulary to understand or accept himself in numerous ways, but i wouldn't say ronan expends much energy trying to pray the gay away. ronan is pretty much allergic to attempting to change himself or conform to what others want, and this is no exception. for example, his acknowledgement that he has no interest in lamps, i.e. women, is very matter-of-fact. therein lies that catholic acceptance of his homosexuality; ronan cannot control what he is, but he can control whether he acts on it or not. i've seen analysis that considers ronan's sexuality as totally buried prior to tdt vs. his sexuality being something he's already open about prior to tdt; for me, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle because of that gay thoughts vs. gay actions split. the beginning of tdt cements this: "the second secret was perfect in its concealment. ronan did not say it. ronan did not think it. he never put lyrics to the second secret, the one he kept from himself." we know adam is his second secret, thus the tangible nature of his feelings for adam is what he's keeping from himself, not merely the fact that he's gay.

tdt is where ronan is specifically grappling with the possibility of his gay urges becoming action. imo the earliest example of this is the dollar city scene, with ronan wanting to punch the wall over gansey looking like "very clearly a real human, an attainable human." the word attainable speaks again to the idea of attraction as a contained feeling vs. something that ronan could act on (not necessarily with gansey, but it's broaching that difference as a concept). later on there's the adam-kavinsky sex dream after which ronan wakes up "ashamed and euphoric." the dream has given multiple faces to a nameless concealed desire, which has again made it a more real possibility and therefore what ronan has been trying to avoid. in a dream with kavinsky, "it felt like anything could happen. all of his secrets felt dangerously close to the surface." again, the idea of something happening, of a feeling being acted upon. and finally, when adam confronts ronan about his rent, "something inside ronan unwound and he almost said something." repeatedly an emphasis is placed on ronan's holding back, on concealing himself through refusing to act on what he feels.

John Matthias Kuehne, Electrical discharge patterns

I'm very proud that generations of activists before me are the reason why I can freely access menstrual products and condoms in the places I frequent, they have saved my skin multiple times. I'm very proud that generations of activists before me are the reason why my parents could have an interracial marriage, I wouldn't have my step family or my sisters without them. I'm very proud that generations of activists before me are the reason why my little brother wasn't taken from my family and institutionalized or beaten for being semi-verbal and high support needs, I wouldn't have my baby brother in my life without them. I'm very proud that generations of activists before me are the reason why my aunt was able to have both a medically necessary surgery for an ectopic pregnancy and a medically necessary abortion for a late term miscarriage, those activists saved her life and kept her in mine. I'm very proud that generations of activists before me are the reason why I can safely go to the gay bar and loudly and proudly exist as a faggot with my friends, they have brought me immeasurable joy with so much sacrifice and loss of their own.

Groundbreaking drawing of nerve cells by Camillo Golgi using his innovative process of making single nerve cells visible by staining them black with silver. Detail.

Sulla fina anatomia degli organi centrali del sistema nervoso. Camillo Golgi. 1886.

First, a few words about what I am not going to do here. I'm not going to catalogue all of the ways that Nolan diverges from the source material and make a case why that's a bad thing. As I mentioned in the post I made on this blog a few days ago, I think it's essential when dealing with adaptations of ancient texts and especially the Homeric epics to keep in mind that the text in the form we have it, as well as the cultural meaning that it carries, is itself a construction of a ~2700 year reception tradition, and does not inherently have some sacred primacy. An adaptation is not necessarily "bad" and does not necessarily "misunderstand" the source material simply because it diverges from it. Neither O Brother, Where Art Thou? nor Derek Walcott's Omeros (both of which are much better Odyssey adaptations than this one) is especially faithful to the source text, and a lot of their power comes from the willingness to engage in a conversation with the source material rather than follow it to the letter.

Now that's out of the way, let me say that on every level but technical this is a terrible film. It's terrible not just as an Odyssey adaptation - although it certainly is that - but because of its own failings.

I'll start with what I believe the film is about, which is a white male American Christian war veteran on a long journey home haunted by guilt for the war crimes he committed overseas against a populace that mostly remains faceless. This is not a joke - it's my best attempt to make sense of the moral universe of the film, in which Homeric/archaic Greek religious concepts like xenia have been replaced with "Zeus's law" (Christianized as the Golden Rule) but also in which Odysseus fears that by devising the Trojan Horse, he has essentially caused the Fall of Man via the breakdown of "Zeus's law." Alissa Wilkinson writing for the NY Times and plenty of others have noted that the film is thematically a companion piece to Oppenheimer, but that might actually be underselling the extent to which Damon-as-Odysseus might as well be Oppenheimer. It's ancient Greek dressing on a story that makes no real sense outside of a 20th-21st century American Christian framework, a point that is uncomfortably driven home in a scene in which Odysseus' comrades tell an elderly man who does not speak their language that "we're Greeks. from Ithaca" in the film's koine of burly American-accented English as his village burns. Of course, the elderly man who has just lost everything is speaking Modern Greek - a hell of a metaphor for the way in which this film is so deeply assured in its rewriting of the Achaeans as Americans and its claiming of the ancient Mediterranean world as terra nullius for an American-war-veteran-going-home story, an ethos that also seems to have pervaded the filming process.

There are, of course, other consequences to the portrayal of Odysseus as a proto-Christian war veteran haunted by guilt and PTSD. My lovely mutual Mal ( @gaius-sempronius-grackle) points out in this review that Nolan clearly wants to be adapting the Aeneid, an observation I completely agree with, and the Odysseus we get is far more pius than polytropos. But there's also not a single character in the entire film that is polytropos or even seems to show much hint of complexity. Excellent actors like Lupita Nyong'o and Elliot Page are wasted in poorly-scripted roles that give them nothing to work with, and Penelope is not the complex, tactically-minded woman of the Odyssey but an utterly one note character. Tom Holland's Telemachus likewise doesn't really do much of anything, because no one in this film does except for Matt Damon.

Emily Wilson's review also points out another crucial issue with the film - its complete sexlessness. The removal of any material from Books 23 and 24 from the film means that we don't get any real emotional resolution to Odysseus and Penelope's arc - much has been said about whether and when sex scenes are "necessary" (a framing I mostly reject), but it's hard to argue that there's a more necessary sex scene in all of ancient literature than the one in Odyssey 23. But we also have no sex between Odysseus and Calypso (who, because she's not a goddess, puzzlingly just seems to be a woman living alone on an island who feeds lotus to passers-by) or Odysseus and Circe. At the same time, for a movie that seems to be extraordinarily keyed into a certain aesthetic of male homosociality, we don't even get any spark of eroticism or emotional connection between men, either. In fact, from this blogger's perspective as a bisexual man, it's striking that a movie with this many sweaty men manages to feel this utterly sterile, sexless, and uninterested in the human body and embodied experience.

This all brings me to one of the few moments that bizarrely enough does work, which is the Circe scene. Mostly this is because of Samantha Morton's performance, but the actual portrayal of the transformation of Odysseus' men into pigs is notable both as one of the most unnerving things I've seen in a recent film (and most of the cinema I watch is horror!) and as a bizarrely erotic scene. It's one of very few moments where you actually feel the uncannyness of the Odyssey's apologue, and one of few moments where the lack of faithfulness to the source material actually seems generative (side note: if you are at all sensitive to emetophobic triggers or body horror, I would recommend fully walking out of the theater for this scene). The Polyphemus scene is similarly unnerving, with creature design that reminded me quite a bit of the Pale Man from Pan's Labyrinth, although it's held back by its refusal to sit with the implications of Odysseus and his companions' violation of xenia and (ok, I said I wouldn't list infidelities as flaws but just this once) its decision to make Polyphemus incoherent rather than allowing one of the most famous exchanges in the poem to play out.

Mother of pearl mounted English folding knife, circa 1830′s-1850′s