Hello🌸 I have disappeared from Tumblr for a long time because I am always too full of things to do ( not to mention The Horrors), but I need to write this down somewhere so I can get it all out of my head (and maybe focus on working on my thesis without getting distracted lol). Yesterday I went to see Nolan's Odissey. I haven't really been interested in the debates surrounding it before it came out, and I did not have any expectations in one sense or another. I was by no means expecting a work that was faithful to the original, and maybe that's why, although I have my issues with it, I enjoyed it. Mostly, though, it sparked an avalanche of thoughts about the role or myth retellings in Western culture that made me miss sleep and has not left me alone since. I kept thinking of all that can be glimpsed from this movie about our society and our times, and especially about contemporary Anglo-American culture. I also kept asking myself whether we should keep treating classical myth as purely universal, when they are very much the product of a specific culture. This post will probably be really long and rambling, but I'd really enjoy if someone wanted to talk about all this with me! I want to point out that, although I studied ancient Greek and Greek literature fairly extensively (and rather passionately) for 5 years in highschool, I am by no means a classicist. I also do not have time to look up sources for anything I say here (although I am more than happy to find them up for you later if you are interested): these are quite literally 3am musings based entirely on what I already had in my head and jotted down during a long bus trip the next day with no internet connection, so forgive me if I make mistakes about anything I mention ( and please point it out to me).
The tldr version is that I think Nolan's Odissey becomes much more interesting if we do not consider it an adaptation, but a mythical rewriting in a long line of Western mythical rewritings, and analyse it as such.
Western culture is built on a foundation of shared myths. The accepted idea is that these myths differ from stories because they permeate the very air we breathe: they are the building blocks of our common consciuosness, whether we are aware of it or not. A myth trascends the contingent elements that tie it to a particular time, culture, or author, and becomes universal.
In his essay Le Vent Paraclet, Michel Tournier (a French writer who has written several mythical retellings) distinguishes two types of myths. Ancient myths were the outpouring of a nation and a culture's soul. They often had no single author, tried to explain reality and regulate life, and were -at one point- considered to be true. Modern myths are stories written by a known author and published as novels or plays, but they are so powerful that eventually they transcend the original work and start to have an independent life.
Some examples of this second kind of myths I can give off the top of my head are the myth of Don Juan, the myth of Don Quixote, the myth of Hamlet, the myth of Robinson Crusoe, and the myth of Faust. The first kind, on the other hand, are the corpora of ancient mythologies and epic poems, from the Celtic to the Norse, but two sources of myth in particular have been the veritable bedrock of Western culture, art and literature from the Middle Ages to the present day: the classical and the biblical.
All these myths are constantly subjected to rewriting: a myth that is not rewritten stops breathing. It becomes history. It is dead. When myths are rewritten, the bones stay the same, but the skin changes: the story becomes the vehicule of new values, of a new age, of a new culture, while still somehow being recognizable as its old self.
Biblical stories, from both the Old and the New Testament, are a particularly fruitful well of these kind of rewritings. Literary studies in recent years have been focusing on the Bible not just as a sacred text but as a source of mythical structures, of tropes and characters. It is incredibly interesting to trace the metamorphosis of figures like Salome, Eve, Cain, Judith, Judas through centuries of transformations and shifting values.
The same goes for Greek and Roman mythology. The Homeric poems, in particular, have been used to legitimize and glorify different civilizations, and to express different value systems. We can already see a first transformation in works like Euripides' The Trojan Women, written centuries after the Iliad, which focuses on the grief and suffering of the enslaved women of Troy rather than on the heroes' triumphs. Then Virgil rewrites the character of Aeneas, who becomes a model of Roman virtue and whose journey is used to legitimize the translatio imperii and Rome's current role as the Mediterranean's egemonic power ( not to mention Augustus as its leader). More than a millennium later, in the anonymous XII century romance Le Roman d'Énéas, the Trojan hero becomes a medieval prince guided by Christian virtues, whose courtship of Dido and Lavinia is described according to all the norms of the troubadoric fin amor. This removed from classical antiquity, the poem is virtually useless to learn about either Roman or Greek culture, but it is a veritable enyclopedia for the study of the so called "XII century Renaissance" in France. In the XVI century, the poet Ronsard takes a page out of Virgil's book and in his Franciade he invents Francion, Hector's supposed son, whom he casts as the founder of France, thus glorifying his own country as the true heir of classical antiquity as opposed to the Holy Roman Empire. And on and on it goes, the roots of the war of Troy gradually forgotten, the story told and retold, until we get to the American appropriation of the myth through works like Troy and The Song of Achilles.
Nolan's Odyssey is part of this long tradition. His Odysseus is no more similar to Homer's than Dante's Ulysses, or Joyce's Leopold Bloom ( not to say that Nolan is Joyce or Dante, obviously, but the mechanism is the same). It is just the later incarnation of the character: not a bronze age Greek warrior, not a medieval man, not a Jewish Dubliner wrestling with the problems of the early XX century, but a thoroughly American hero of the 2020s. This is the natural life of a myth, or at the very least it is the latest example of how western culture has always dealt with its shared mythology: as a neverending source of archetypes and stories that can be used to convey universal messages while being adapted to different contexts.
Now, should we challenge and question this dynamic? Absolutely. I think it is high time we did. We should remember that while Greek myths, being myths, present universal elements, and while they are undoubtedly one of the foundations of European and American identity as a whole, they were Greek first. Their universal, transcendental nature is embodied in a specific cultural and historical context that should be aknowledged, studied and respected. I do not think we should stop using them, transforming them and rewriting them, but we should do so carefully, remembering that there's a whole nation for whom these are much more than universal stories. Above all, to properly change and subvert a myth you have to study it thoroughly: you have to understand it deeply, far more so than an ordinary reader. In these respects, Nolan's movie is undoubtedly a failure, and I understand the rage of Greek people towards this film. I am Italian: I can relate, at least in part, to the commodification of their culture, to the anger caused by the looting of their artifacts, to the feeling of being appreciated for their past but disregarded in the present. I am frustrated myself by how Hollywood has always dealt with our history and our mythology. I also think that is worth pointing out how these movies keep ignoring the fact that these stories are set during time periods and in cultures in which the barycentre of our world was not Northern or Western Europe, but the Mediterranean, from Greece to Turkey to Italy to North Africa and the Middle East. The ethnic and cultural diversity of this world is always erased. I think the polemic about the casting of the movie, in one sense or another, becomes entirely moot when you consider that not a single actor is of Greek or Turkish or at least Mediterranean heritage. Beyond the landscapes, the movie does not look like the Mediterranean in any way: it looks American and Western European. Since it is not an isolated case, but a pattern, it is worth noticing and questioning. But it is important to remember that Nolan is just the latest manifestation of a shared attitude to myth that started centuries ago. Just like all of Europe since the Middle Ages, American filmmakers and writers consider classical culture as theirs. It is quintessentially Western, so it belongs to everyone. And in a sense, they are not wrong: at this point in our history, it has penetrated into every aspect of European (and by extension American) culture and art to the point that Europe as a cultural concept wouldn't exist without it (just like it wouldn't exist without the Bible, which is another text that should definitely be contextualised in the cultures and periods that produced it).
What Nolan did is not outlandish: he is operating within the coordinates Western culture has always operated in, and which we can most definitely struggle with and object to.
So, I think we should look at his movie and analyse it just as we would any other mythical retelling: it has nothing to say about Greek culture and mythology, but everything to say if we read it as a mirror of the culture that produced it.
When my friends and I got out of the cinema, we started discussing the movie- what we liked, what we didn't like, which changes to the source text were interesting and which ones we objected to- and one of the things that came up was that it "felt very American" (duh). That's a feeling everyone who's not from the US experiences often with movies and TV shows, but this time I found myself stuck on it: what about it, precisely, "felt American"? And what did those changes we noticed tell us about American-and in some sense Western- culture today?
So last night, while trying to fall asleep, I started analysing mythemes. [ EDIT @bosscrow23 yes, my friend, before you say anything, I REALLY could not fall asleep last night after we went home. Don't kill me.]
Mythemes are a structuralist concept that I find incredibly useful. They are to a myth what phonemes are to sounds and morphemes to words: its minimal units. They are narrative structures that can be used to analyse it, to take it apart and to rewrite it.
For exampe, in the myth of Cain we have the mytheme of Cain, killer of his brother, but also the mytheme of Cain cursed by God, the mytheme of Cain builder of cities, and the mytheme of Cain the father of blacksmiths. Over the centuries writers have taken one or several of this mythemes and rewritten the myth, sometimes even intertwining it with others.
Another example that naturally comes to me is the myth of Hamlet (purely because I have worked on Hamlet a lot, although never through the lense of mythemes). When rewriting or adapting Hamlet, we can choose to focus on different mythemes. There is the mytheme of the prince's uncle killing the king and stealing the throne, which in its simplest form is found in the Lion King. There is the mytheme of the ambiguous, possibly Oedipal relationship between mother and son, which is at the centre of Olivier's Hamlet movie, but has also been reworked (and cited) by Chekhov in The Seagull. There is the mytheme of the hamletic doubt, which has known thousands of incarnations: the first one I thought of right now, for some reason, is Turgenev's novel Rudin, where it becomes the basis for the portrayal of the Russian "superfluous man" of the XIX century. There is the mytheme of the ghost of the father, which we find in Goethe's Wilhelmeister. There is the mytheme of Hamlet as an individual fruitlessly struggling against an oppressive power, which has become a metaphor for dictatorship in Kozintsev's Hamlet, as well as in theatre representations in Prague before the Prague Spring and in several Arab countries. Or the mytheme of Polonius, the rambling, cerimonious counsellor, reworked in Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. And so on, and so forth. We can tell a lot about an author's or director's intentions from which mythemes they choose to explore and transform and which ones they choose to ignore.
When it comes to Nolan's Odissey, these are some of the ones I thought of that I feel are relevant to his rewriting-in reference to the myth of Odysseus as a whole, as presented by multiple sources, not just in the Odissey. [spoilers ahead]
1) The mytheme of Odysseus ( and Penelope) as πολύτροπος (polutropos): the many-faced, ever-shifting, cunning hero. This is the defining characteristic of Odysseus (and of Penelope, his mirror) and we know it from the very first verse. The epithet is repeated frequently as far as I remember, and everyone and their mother knows that Odysseus is intelligent, cunning and manipulating. Now, don't get me wrong, there are definitely elements of this in the movie, but two of the most famous episodes are omitted. As for Odysseus, it is the "nobody" scene (up to and including the fact that in the source he gets Polyphemus drunk on undiluted wine and manipulates him before blinding him). For Penelope, it is the bed scene.
Why is this aspect toned down? What does this tell us? I think it doesn't fit with the kind of hero Nolan wants to portray. These are characteristics we, in our society, generally associate with villains. They do not correspond to either the ideal portrayal of masculinty nor femininity (ironic, since Odysseus was a new kind of hero in his time too).
This is tied to the exclusion of another mytheme, that is mabe a little less well known: the mytheme of Odysseus faking his madness. This is not in the Odissey or the Iliad, as far as I remember. I do not know what the source is (I will check later), but my friends and I all knew it as an integral part of the story and it immediatly came to mind because of the themes being discussed in the movie. Nolan's story puts a lot of emphasis on Antinoo's cowardly decision to avoid going to war by bribing Sinon to take his place. It is seen as the first symptom of his lack of bravery and honour. But Odysseus himself also tried to avoid going to war by pretending to be mad. He ploughed the earth and sowed salt until they stopped him and proved he was sane by putting the infant Telemachus in his path. It would have been interesting to explore, but it wasn't included because once again it does not fit with the intended portrayal of the protagonist.
The Western, Anglo-American hero of our times does not desire to go to war (obviously, he is not a barbarian) but he does not try to get out of it: that would be cowardly and dishonorable, and not something real men do. He is a good fighter, and he does not hesitate to do what needs to be done, up to and including causing the massacre of innocents-but then he regrets it. He is tormented by guilt: he is a Good Person™ who only caused such horror because it was necessary. It is not a very edifying portrayal, in my opinion, even though it is well developed, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Homer's Odysseus, but Jesus Christ if it does not hit the nail on the head about what American culture in particular (but European culture too), and especially the most moderate currents of it, consider to be The Ideal Man and Soldier.
2) The mytheme of the νόστος, the voyage home. There would be no Odissey without it, and the movie highlights it by insisting on paralleling Odysseus's journey with Agamemnon's (interestingly, Odysseus meets his shadow, but an not Achilles'). What I find compelling s that here the return home is above all a return to family. The relationship between Odysseus and Penelope is central, and in places it reads very much like a contemporary love story, in my opinion. Odysseus does not have relationships with Circe or Calypso here: it is not even hinted at, or left ambiguous, because it would be unacceptable according to modern American ethics. The portrayal of women also reflects our contemporary view of female rights and issues, rather than focusing on historical accuracy (what a surprise).
3) The mytheme of Odysseus as a storyteller. I find this particularly fascinating. In the movie, Odysseus does not narrate his adventures to the Phaecians at Alcinous' court, but in a series of heart to hearts with Calypso. Public storytelling becomes intimate, and this tells us a lot about how we narrate stories in the West. Storytelling is no longer a collettive, collaborative and public excercise. When it is oral ( and it almost never is) it is not done as a performance, spontaneously, among a crowd. I listened to a conference recently about how Native American storytelling has always bene largely oral and collaborative, and how in Canada it keeps being erased because the West only recognizes one way of telling stories as legitimate. This made me think of that.
4) The mytheme of the Trojan horse. The core thesis of this movie is that, by tricking the Trojans through an abuse of the laws of hospitality, the Greeks have destroyed the very basis of their own world and culture. I was VERY intrigued by this. I think it was an interesting choice. Among other things, centering the theme of the death of a culture due to a deterioration of values (and of hospitality in particular, not to mention immoral conduct in combact) in the current political climate has implications, even if we choose not to read too much into it. However, what I kept coming back to was Odysseus' debilitating guilt about Troy and about the death of his companions, and his need for expiation. Now, unless I am seriously misremembering ( the last time I read the Odissey was several years ago) this is not at all a theme in the Homeric poems and it feels....decidedly Christian. You know the traditional distinction between classical culture as a culture of shame, and Christian culture as a culture of guilt? Yeah, this is 100% culture of guilt, and it betrays a deeply embedded cultural Christianity. Speaking of which,
5) The mytheme of the journey into the unknown west. To be honest I am not at all sure this was intentional, but the journey into the unknown west is part of the myth of Odysseus, in a broader sense. It is not in the Odyssey, where Tiresias predicts a future journey inland until Odysseus is among people who have never seen the sea, but it is present in the Divine Comedy. Dante writes that Odysseus, driven by his thirst for knowledge, convinced his men to journey beyond the Pillar of Heracles (the Strait of Gibraltar, which were the end of the known world, as far as Dante knew). They sailed into unknown waters until they glimpsed the mountain of Purgatory, and in that moment god struck them down for their unforgivable act of hubris. They all drowned, and Odysseus and Eurimacus ended up in Hell. So, in Dante's version, the journey into the unknown west is undertaken in direct defiance of the divine order; in Nolan's Odissey, it is god-ordained. Nolan has Odysseus say he will defy the gods to save his men, but he eventually surrenders: his last test is a test of blind faith, which he passes. I think this is also quite telling, as far as our reading goes.
I am not saying any of this was done intentionally, or that this is the only way to interpret the movie, but I think that if someone saw it a hundred years from now they might learn a lot about XXI century America just by comparing it to Homer and seeing what was changed. This is the case with many successfull mythological rewritings. I truly hope that in my lifetime I will see an adaptation of either the Iliad or the Odyssey built on historical accuracy and intensive study of the source text. If that is what you expect or want, and seeing the latest example of an uncontextualized Anglo-American myth retelling might make you spontanously combust with rage, I fully sympatise and I would suggest that you avoid watching it. But for what the movie is- that is to say, a contemporary American epic inspired by the Odyssey- I think it is a success and an intriguing cinematic experience. And, if nothing else, an interesting anthropological study.
non ho visto il film ma da quello che ho letto, quello che hai scritto (splendidamente) qui potrei averlo benissimo scritto (meno bene e senza tutti i riferimenti che hai fatto tu perché di letteratura moderna so poco poco aha) io (brain twins brain twins). domanda, hai letto achille e odisseo (ma anche tutto il resto che ha scritto, non ho ancora letto tutto di lui ma quello che ho letto è meraviglioso) di matteo nucci? se no, fallo immediatamente. (il sottotitolo è "la ferocia e l'inganno" e tu pensi che l'una sia associata ad achille e l'altro a odisseo MA hohohoho)
altra domanda, leggi il post? luca misculin ha fatto un podcast in due puntate sul primo libro dell'odissea, non l'ho ancora ascoltato (i podcast lunghetti/da concentrarsi li ascolto facendo passeggiate ma passeggiate con mille gradi e 101% di umidità anche no grazie) ma mia mamma sì e comunque misculin lo adoriamo quindi sono sicura che ha fatto una Bella Cosa
bon molto probabilmente queste cose le hai già lette/ascoltate ma non si sa maiiii
Ciao Marghe! Scusa se ti rispondo solo ora, ho avuto una settimana assurda. Sono contentissima che ti sia piaciuto il post! Vale la pena averlo scritto solo per questo (di solito queste cose non le scrivo mai, al massimo le infliggo alle mie amiche, ma il giorno dopo aver visto il film dovevo tornare a casa e i ritardi di Trenitalia hanno fatto in modo che avessi l'intera giornata da riempire lol)
No, non ho letto il libro di Nucci. Grazie di avermelo consigliato, sembra bellissimo! Purtroppo io ho un problema contrario al tuo: conosco abbastanza bene la letteratura moderna, ma negli ultimi anni quella antica ho praticamente dovuto abbandonarla, e mi dispiace un sacco. Devo assolutamente recuperare. (È anche vero che se mi mettevo a studiare letteratura latina e greca oltre a quella inglese, francese, italiana, russa e tedesca probabilmente mi buttavo da un balcone xD).
Di sicuro ci vorrà un bel po' prima che abbia il tempo di leggere il libro, ma il podcast me lo salvo subito! Entro la fine dell'estate lo ascolto. Anche a me piace moltissimo ascoltare i podcast lunghi mentre passeggio (o mentre faccio le faccende di casa), ma sì, passeggiare per ore in questo momento equivale ad andare per direttissima al pronto soccorso.
Mi ha fatto davvero un sacco piacere il tuo messaggio. Se mai ti va di chiacchierare io ci sono, anche se è possibile che risponda dopo giorni😅
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Hello🌸 I have disappeared from Tumblr for a long time because I am always too full of things to do ( not to mention The Horrors), but I need to write this down somewhere so I can get it all out of my head (and maybe focus on working on my thesis without getting distracted lol). Yesterday I went to see Nolan's Odissey. I haven't really been interested in the debates surrounding it before it came out, and I did not have any expectations in one sense or another. I was by no means expecting a work that was faithful to the original, and maybe that's why, although I have my issues with it, I enjoyed it. Mostly, though, it sparked an avalanche of thoughts about the role or myth retellings in Western culture that made me miss sleep and has not left me alone since. I kept thinking of all that can be glimpsed from this movie about our society and our times, and especially about contemporary Anglo-American culture. I also kept asking myself whether we should keep treating classical myth as purely universal, when they are very much the product of a specific culture. This post will probably be really long and rambling, but I'd really enjoy if someone wanted to talk about all this with me! I want to point out that, although I studied ancient Greek and Greek literature fairly extensively (and rather passionately) for 5 years in highschool, I am by no means a classicist. I also do not have time to look up sources for anything I say here (although I am more than happy to find them up for you later if you are interested): these are quite literally 3am musings based entirely on what I already had in my head and jotted down during a long bus trip the next day with no internet connection, so forgive me if I make mistakes about anything I mention ( and please point it out to me).
The tldr version is that I think Nolan's Odissey becomes much more interesting if we do not consider it an adaptation, but a mythical rewriting in a long line of Western mythical rewritings, and analyse it as such.
Western culture is built on a foundation of shared myths. The accepted idea is that these myths differ from stories because they permeate the very air we breathe: they are the building blocks of our common consciuosness, whether we are aware of it or not. A myth trascends the contingent elements that tie it to a particular time, culture, or author, and becomes universal.
In his essay Le Vent Paraclet, Michel Tournier (a French writer who has written several mythical retellings) distinguishes two types of myths. Ancient myths were the outpouring of a nation and a culture's soul. They often had no single author, tried to explain reality and regulate life, and were -at one point- considered to be true. Modern myths are stories written by a known author and published as novels or plays, but they are so powerful that eventually they transcend the original work and start to have an independent life.
Some examples of this second kind of myths I can give off the top of my head are the myth of Don Juan, the myth of Don Quixote, the myth of Hamlet, the myth of Robinson Crusoe, and the myth of Faust. The first kind, on the other hand, are the corpora of ancient mythologies and epic poems, from the Celtic to the Norse, but two sources of myth in particular have been the veritable bedrock of Western culture, art and literature from the Middle Ages to the present day: the classical and the biblical.
All these myths are constantly subjected to rewriting: a myth that is not rewritten stops breathing. It becomes history. It is dead. When myths are rewritten, the bones stay the same, but the skin changes: the story becomes the vehicule of new values, of a new age, of a new culture, while still somehow being recognizable as its old self.
Biblical stories, from both the Old and the New Testament, are a particularly fruitful well of these kind of rewritings. Literary studies in recent years have been focusing on the Bible not just as a sacred text but as a source of mythical structures, of tropes and characters. It is incredibly interesting to trace the metamorphosis of figures like Salome, Eve, Cain, Judith, Judas through centuries of transformations and shifting values.
The same goes for Greek and Roman mythology. The Homeric poems, in particular, have been used to legitimize and glorify different civilizations, and to express different value systems. We can already see a first transformation in works like Euripides' The Trojan Women, written centuries after the Iliad, which focuses on the grief and suffering of the enslaved women of Troy rather than on the heroes' triumphs. Then Virgil rewrites the character of Aeneas, who becomes a model of Roman virtue and whose journey is used to legitimize the translatio imperii and Rome's current role as the Mediterranean's egemonic power ( not to mention Augustus as its leader). More than a millennium later, in the anonymous XII century romance Le Roman d'Énéas, the Trojan hero becomes a medieval prince guided by Christian virtues, whose courtship of Dido and Lavinia is described according to all the norms of the troubadoric fin amor. This removed from classical antiquity, the poem is virtually useless to learn about either Roman or Greek culture, but it is a veritable enyclopedia for the study of the so called "XII century Renaissance" in France. In the XVI century, the poet Ronsard takes a page out of Virgil's book and in his Franciade he invents Francion, Hector's supposed son, whom he casts as the founder of France, thus glorifying his own country as the true heir of classical antiquity as opposed to the Holy Roman Empire. And on and on it goes, the roots of the war of Troy gradually forgotten, the story told and retold, until we get to the American appropriation of the myth through works like Troy and The Song of Achilles.
Nolan's Odyssey is part of this long tradition. His Odysseus is no more similar to Homer's than Dante's Ulysses, or Joyce's Leopold Bloom ( not to say that Nolan is Joyce or Dante, obviously, but the mechanism is the same). It is just the later incarnation of the character: not a bronze age Greek warrior, not a medieval man, not a Jewish Dubliner wrestling with the problems of the early XX century, but a thoroughly American hero of the 2020s. This is the natural life of a myth, or at the very least it is the latest example of how western culture has always dealt with its shared mythology: as a neverending source of archetypes and stories that can be used to convey universal messages while being adapted to different contexts.
Now, should we challenge and question this dynamic? Absolutely. I think it is high time we did. We should remember that while Greek myths, being myths, present universal elements, and while they are undoubtedly one of the foundations of European and American identity as a whole, they were Greek first. Their universal, transcendental nature is embodied in a specific cultural and historical context that should be aknowledged, studied and respected. I do not think we should stop using them, transforming them and rewriting them, but we should do so carefully, remembering that there's a whole nation for whom these are much more than universal stories. Above all, to properly change and subvert a myth you have to study it thoroughly: you have to understand it deeply, far more so than an ordinary reader. In these respects, Nolan's movie is undoubtedly a failure, and I understand the rage of Greek people towards this film. I am Italian: I can relate, at least in part, to the commodification of their culture, to the anger caused by the looting of their artifacts, to the feeling of being appreciated for their past but disregarded in the present. I am frustrated myself by how Hollywood has always dealt with our history and our mythology. I also think that is worth pointing out how these movies keep ignoring the fact that these stories are set during time periods and in cultures in which the barycentre of our world was not Northern or Western Europe, but the Mediterranean, from Greece to Turkey to Italy to North Africa and the Middle East. The ethnic and cultural diversity of this world is always erased. I think the polemic about the casting of the movie, in one sense or another, becomes entirely moot when you consider that not a single actor is of Greek or Turkish or at least Mediterranean heritage. Beyond the landscapes, the movie does not look like the Mediterranean in any way: it looks American and Western European. Since it is not an isolated case, but a pattern, it is worth noticing and questioning. But it is important to remember that Nolan is just the latest manifestation of a shared attitude to myth that started centuries ago. Just like all of Europe since the Middle Ages, American filmmakers and writers consider classical culture as theirs. It is quintessentially Western, so it belongs to everyone. And in a sense, they are not wrong: at this point in our history, it has penetrated into every aspect of European (and by extension American) culture and art to the point that Europe as a cultural concept wouldn't exist without it (just like it wouldn't exist without the Bible, which is another text that should definitely be contextualised in the cultures and periods that produced it).
What Nolan did is not outlandish: he is operating within the coordinates Western culture has always operated in, and which we can most definitely struggle with and object to.
So, I think we should look at his movie and analyse it just as we would any other mythical retelling: it has nothing to say about Greek culture and mythology, but everything to say if we read it as a mirror of the culture that produced it.
When my friends and I got out of the cinema, we started discussing the movie- what we liked, what we didn't like, which changes to the source text were interesting and which ones we objected to- and one of the things that came up was that it "felt very American" (duh). That's a feeling everyone who's not from the US experiences often with movies and TV shows, but this time I found myself stuck on it: what about it, precisely, "felt American"? And what did those changes we noticed tell us about American-and in some sense Western- culture today?
So last night, while trying to fall asleep, I started analysing mythemes. [ EDIT @bosscrow23 yes, my friend, before you say anything, I REALLY could not fall asleep last night after we went home. Don't kill me.]
Mythemes are a structuralist concept that I find incredibly useful. They are to a myth what phonemes are to sounds and morphemes to words: its minimal units. They are narrative structures that can be used to analyse it, to take it apart and to rewrite it.
For exampe, in the myth of Cain we have the mytheme of Cain, killer of his brother, but also the mytheme of Cain cursed by God, the mytheme of Cain builder of cities, and the mytheme of Cain the father of blacksmiths. Over the centuries writers have taken one or several of this mythemes and rewritten the myth, sometimes even intertwining it with others.
Another example that naturally comes to me is the myth of Hamlet (purely because I have worked on Hamlet a lot, although never through the lense of mythemes). When rewriting or adapting Hamlet, we can choose to focus on different mythemes. There is the mytheme of the prince's uncle killing the king and stealing the throne, which in its simplest form is found in the Lion King. There is the mytheme of the ambiguous, possibly Oedipal relationship between mother and son, which is at the centre of Olivier's Hamlet movie, but has also been reworked (and cited) by Chekhov in The Seagull. There is the mytheme of the hamletic doubt, which has known thousands of incarnations: the first one I thought of right now, for some reason, is Turgenev's novel Rudin, where it becomes the basis for the portrayal of the Russian "superfluous man" of the XIX century. There is the mytheme of the ghost of the father, which we find in Goethe's Wilhelmeister. There is the mytheme of Hamlet as an individual fruitlessly struggling against an oppressive power, which has become a metaphor for dictatorship in Kozintsev's Hamlet, as well as in theatre representations in Prague before the Prague Spring and in several Arab countries. Or the mytheme of Polonius, the rambling, cerimonious counsellor, reworked in Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. And so on, and so forth. We can tell a lot about an author's or director's intentions from which mythemes they choose to explore and transform and which ones they choose to ignore.
When it comes to Nolan's Odissey, these are some of the ones I thought of that I feel are relevant to his rewriting-in reference to the myth of Odysseus as a whole, as presented by multiple sources, not just in the Odissey. [spoilers ahead]
1) The mytheme of Odysseus ( and Penelope) as πολύτροπος (polutropos): the many-faced, ever-shifting, cunning hero. This is the defining characteristic of Odysseus (and of Penelope, his mirror) and we know it from the very first verse. The epithet is repeated frequently as far as I remember, and everyone and their mother knows that Odysseus is intelligent, cunning and manipulating. Now, don't get me wrong, there are definitely elements of this in the movie, but two of the most famous episodes are omitted. As for Odysseus, it is the "nobody" scene (up to and including the fact that in the source he gets Polyphemus drunk on undiluted wine and manipulates him before blinding him). For Penelope, it is the bed scene.
Why is this aspect toned down? What does this tell us? I think it doesn't fit with the kind of hero Nolan wants to portray. These are characteristics we, in our society, generally associate with villains. They do not correspond to either the ideal portrayal of masculinty nor femininity (ironic, since Odysseus was a new kind of hero in his time too).
This is tied to the exclusion of another mytheme, that is mabe a little less well known: the mytheme of Odysseus faking his madness. This is not in the Odissey or the Iliad, as far as I remember. I do not know what the source is (I will check later), but my friends and I all knew it as an integral part of the story and it immediatly came to mind because of the themes being discussed in the movie. Nolan's story puts a lot of emphasis on Antinoo's cowardly decision to avoid going to war by bribing Sinon to take his place. It is seen as the first symptom of his lack of bravery and honour. But Odysseus himself also tried to avoid going to war by pretending to be mad. He ploughed the earth and sowed salt until they stopped him and proved he was sane by putting the infant Telemachus in his path. It would have been interesting to explore, but it wasn't included because once again it does not fit with the intended portrayal of the protagonist.
The Western, Anglo-American hero of our times does not desire to go to war (obviously, he is not a barbarian) but he does not try to get out of it: that would be cowardly and dishonorable, and not something real men do. He is a good fighter, and he does not hesitate to do what needs to be done, up to and including causing the massacre of innocents-but then he regrets it. He is tormented by guilt: he is a Good Person™ who only caused such horror because it was necessary. It is not a very edifying portrayal, in my opinion, even though it is well developed, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Homer's Odysseus, but Jesus Christ if it does not hit the nail on the head about what American culture in particular (but European culture too), and especially the most moderate currents of it, consider to be The Ideal Man and Soldier.
2) The mytheme of the νόστος, the voyage home. There would be no Odissey without it, and the movie highlights it by insisting on paralleling Odysseus's journey with Agamemnon's (interestingly, Odysseus meets his shadow, but an not Achilles'). What I find compelling s that here the return home is above all a return to family. The relationship between Odysseus and Penelope is central, and in places it reads very much like a contemporary love story, in my opinion. Odysseus does not have relationships with Circe or Calypso here: it is not even hinted at, or left ambiguous, because it would be unacceptable according to modern American ethics. The portrayal of women also reflects our contemporary view of female rights and issues, rather than focusing on historical accuracy (what a surprise).
3) The mytheme of Odysseus as a storyteller. I find this particularly fascinating. In the movie, Odysseus does not narrate his adventures to the Phaecians at Alcinous' court, but in a series of heart to hearts with Calypso. Public storytelling becomes intimate, and this tells us a lot about how we narrate stories in the West. Storytelling is no longer a collettive, collaborative and public excercise. When it is oral ( and it almost never is) it is not done as a performance, spontaneously, among a crowd. I listened to a conference recently about how Native American storytelling has always bene largely oral and collaborative, and how in Canada it keeps being erased because the West only recognizes one way of telling stories as legitimate. This made me think of that.
4) The mytheme of the Trojan horse. The core thesis of this movie is that, by tricking the Trojans through an abuse of the laws of hospitality, the Greeks have destroyed the very basis of their own world and culture. I was VERY intrigued by this. I think it was an interesting choice. Among other things, centering the theme of the death of a culture due to a deterioration of values (and of hospitality in particular, not to mention immoral conduct in combact) in the current political climate has implications, even if we choose not to read too much into it. However, what I kept coming back to was Odysseus' debilitating guilt about Troy and about the death of his companions, and his need for expiation. Now, unless I am seriously misremembering ( the last time I read the Odissey was several years ago) this is not at all a theme in the Homeric poems and it feels....decidedly Christian. You know the traditional distinction between classical culture as a culture of shame, and Christian culture as a culture of guilt? Yeah, this is 100% culture of guilt, and it betrays a deeply embedded cultural Christianity. Speaking of which,
5) The mytheme of the journey into the unknown west. To be honest I am not at all sure this was intentional, but the journey into the unknown west is part of the myth of Odysseus, in a broader sense. It is not in the Odyssey, where Tiresias predicts a future journey inland until Odysseus is among people who have never seen the sea, but it is present in the Divine Comedy. Dante writes that Odysseus, driven by his thirst for knowledge, convinced his men to journey beyond the Pillar of Heracles (the Strait of Gibraltar, which were the end of the known world, as far as Dante knew). They sailed into unknown waters until they glimpsed the mountain of Purgatory, and in that moment god struck them down for their unforgivable act of hubris. They all drowned, and Odysseus and Eurimacus ended up in Hell. So, in Dante's version, the journey into the unknown west is undertaken in direct defiance of the divine order; in Nolan's Odissey, it is god-ordained. Nolan has Odysseus say he will defy the gods to save his men, but he eventually surrenders: his last test is a test of blind faith, which he passes. I think this is also quite telling, as far as our reading goes.
I am not saying any of this was done intentionally, or that this is the only way to interpret the movie, but I think that if someone saw it a hundred years from now they might learn a lot about XXI century America just by comparing it to Homer and seeing what was changed. This is the case with many successfull mythological rewritings. I truly hope that in my lifetime I will see an adaptation of either the Iliad or the Odyssey built on historical accuracy and intensive study of the source text. If that is what you expect or want, and seeing the latest example of an uncontextualized Anglo-American myth retelling might make you spontanously combust with rage, I fully sympatise and I would suggest that you avoid watching it. But for what the movie is- that is to say, a contemporary American epic inspired by the Odyssey- I think it is a success and an intriguing cinematic experience. And, if nothing else, an interesting anthropological study.
Iranians are protesting to reclaim Iran. The Islamic Republic has cut the internet and phone lines-I've lost all contact with my family and friends. It feels like Bloody Aban again, when people were jailed and killed in silence. I'm scared
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these cats are displaying remarkable theory of mind skills by not only registering that the humans can perceive them but actively trying to manipulate that perception! that requires one to be aware that other individuals have complicated interior thoughts of their own, to know that those thoughts are not always based on truth, and to quickly decide on the best possible “lie” for the situation. this is why I despise animal intelligence tasks based on obedience— some of the most clever moments stem from intelligent disobedience.
Millions of Years of Immutable Evolutionary Law: “Cats shall have litters of many offspring at one time. Some will be weak or stricken with disease--they will perish to allow the stronger siblings to escape, and to satiate other predators in order to reduce competition and encourage the existence of more capable adults.”
I follow this lady on instagram who rescues cats, and i have been thinking about this video for literal months. behold the transformation of this wretched little beast
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amazes me sometimes that some people don't know specific rhetorical/literary devices. they need more love. tell me in the tags your favourite rhetorical/literary devices. mine are: conceits, litotes, and tricolon crescens.
A cat is a small creature in the middle of the food chain that is fully aware that you are a very large thing that could stomp its head in at any moment and yet it chooses to rest its tiny little head on your leg for a nap and spreads out on the floor near you exposing its belly and its most sensitive organs. It brings dead mice and bugs to you to share food.
Don’t you get it? This tiny thing trusts you. It wants to help you too. It licks your leg thinking that it’s helping. It kneads on you to find comfort. It shares its body warmth with you in the cold and gives you your space in the heat. It hisses at other mammals it sees outside including other cats in an effort to protect its family.
Cats love you so so much. But they will keep trying to eat plastic.
How many languages are represented in the books you own?
Does not matter if you can read the text or not. How many languages are within the books in your home?
I mean proper "books in different languages." Books that have a few spattered sentences in them as part of a narrative or citation do not count. We're talking books intended to be in different languages for different language readership.
For survey purposes, educational books teaching you how to speak/read another language will count, too. Books paralleled in 2+ languages of the same base text count.
So I just saw the most incredible production of Macbeth that wove parental grief into the whole regicide plot in such a fascinating way.
So at the very beginning of the play there was a scene where Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are at a funeral as the primary mourners. A stretcher is carried on with a covered body. The body was notably very small. They laid flowers on it and Macbeth immediately left for battle.
Now *I* studied Shakespeare in college so I immediately knew there is one single line that implies that the Macbeths lost a child at some point. Most of the time this isn't utilized in productions; it's just a throwaway line, intended to paint just how determined Lady M is for this regicide thing to work and how furious she is that her husband has cold feet. In this production she delivers "I have given suck, and know how tender tis to love the babe that milks me" nearly in tears. She takes a moment to steel herself before saying, "I would while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains pit, had I so sworn" and she very nearly SCREAMED this in Macbeth's face.
Also noted was how the Macbeths looked at Macduff's children. Lady M was clutching her heart, nearly breaking watching them embrace their parents. Macbeth could not even look at them.
At the end of Lady Macbeth's plot, when she is sleepwalking and sleeptalking, she is typically portrayed as speaking to no one or to her husband. However, at a certain point of her monologue she got on her knees, raised her voice to a comforting octave, and began miming tear wiping, hand holding, hair and face stroking, around a child-sized figure. "Wash your hands, put on your nightgown, look not so pale. I tell you yet again, Banquo’s buried; he cannot come out on’s grave." Then she stands and appears to take the child's hand. "Go to bed, go to bed. I can hear knocking at the gate-" then she looks down and realizes that no one is there, followed be the most heartbreaking shriek I've ever heard followed by a full minute of her just weeping while curled up on the floor before she stood up, finished her monologue and left the stage.
Most of the time when the loss of a child is utilized in a performance or adaptation, it is assumed that the child was an infant and lost some time ago. To imply that the child died IMMEDIATELY prior to the events of the play and had been cared for and loved by their parents for a few years adds such a fascinating layer to the desperation to ascend to the throne, Lady M's madness, and Macbeth's initial hesitation into "in for a penny, in for a pound" attitude, Macbeth's fury that Banquo's, not his, children will take the throne, and even Macbeth's eventual demise following a frenzied final battle.
How far will grief push you to fill a hole? How far will grief push you to desperation? And what happens when none of your new pursuits are filling the void left by the one you lost? And what happens when you realize you have nothing left to lose?
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whenever I see archeological remains of a human who suffered from a terrible disease that couldn’t be treated in their lifetime but could be fixed now, this wave of sorrow and mourning washes over me. a woman in the 14th century who spent her 35 years of life bent at the waist because of congenital scoliosis. a man from the 18th century who died because of a non cancerous mass on his jaw that made eating progressively more difficult. remains of a woman from the Neolithic who died in childbirth having evidence of peri-mortem trepanation on her skull.
and yet she survived to 35. and yet the physicians in his time tried to strengthen his jaw. and yet someone 4,000 years ago tried to save someone they loved from dying of preeclampsia/increased cranial pressure. we tried. we tried and we tried and we tried. we failed and we learned but we tried. that’s what makes humans so beautiful.
My mom sometimes talks about a child in her neighborhood who was born with hydrocephaly and died of it. His parents strove to keep him alive for years, but he ultimately passed after a long decline. No treatment available. No hope at all, and the parents knew it from his birth.
Several decades later my sister had an MRI, as a long shot, to try to figure out why she was sick and deteriorating with a number of symptoms that were close to being written off as anxiety. She was sent straight to the hospital for adult onset hydrocephaly. Two days later she had brain surgery to put a shunt down her neck into her stomach and drain the fluid out. (No, you cannot usually get brain surgery that fast. Yes, it was that urgent.) Recovery was long and squiggly but it happened.
I think of that boy every once in a while. The one who died. I have no doubt that treatments developed for people like him, and tested on people like him, saved my sister's life.
He never knew he made the world better. His condition was severe, he never knew much of anything, I don't think. I think if I ever track down a God or something like one, that'll be somewhere on my List of Wishes. To make sure people like him know that they helped.
I've been type 1 diabetic since I was about one and a half, and was incredibly sick. If my mother hadn't also been type 1 and recognized the signs I likely would have died.
I was born in 1982. Insulin was first given to a patient in 1922, and he survived. Before that, type 1 meant death, often very slow and agonizing. Before insulin, doctors advised a super strict "keto" diet to prolong life, and it could work for awhile - up to a year, I believe. But it was a miserable existence as the body was literally eating itself as the blood turned acidic until the patient eventually died.
60 years. Only 60 years before my birth did that procedure work for the first time. That's absolutely nothing given the span of human history and I think a lot about the people who died from it throughout time.
But yes, people tried. Healers and doctors of all sorts tried all manner of things to allow these (mostly!) kids to live. The fact that it was accomplished at all is nothing short of a miracle. The fact that I've been alive 42 years is fucking insane considering my body doesn't produce a hormone necessary for survival. If you think that doesn't blow me away on a regular basis you have another think coming. It's nothing short of a miracle.
Every medical advancement is. The amount of work that goes into it and the vast amount of luck necessary to get it right even when all the research and information is sound is just astonishing.
Thank you, humanity. Thank you ingenuity and determination to save lives and make them better. Thank you to every medical practitioner and medical researcher in existence now and through all of time. Thank you to all the people who died so I could live.
Diabetes is one of these illnesses that really throws medical history into perspective. It's so common, everyone knows someone who has it, people live pretty normal lives with it. And yet, a hundred years ago, it was an instant death sentence. And then we were able to treat people with insulin and yet - it was extremely disabling. The insulin was extracted from animal pancreas had severe side effects, even with how similar the hormones are, there is always an averse reaction to proteins from foreign species, especially during long-term treatment. Injections had to be given every few hours, at-home-tests were only available from the 70s onwards. Insulin pumps entered the market in the 80s. Genetically produced insulin - humanized insulin - was first available in the US in 1982, in many countries only around the year 2000.
In 1930, having diabetes type I would basically mean being hospital bound, being woken every few hours for regular injections.
In 1965, you'd be able to live at home and get by with a very strict diet and a few timed injections. You'd struggle with chronical side effects. Having children wasn't done - passing on your genes would be immoral, and it might not even be legal for you to marry.
In the year 2000, you'd have a device clipped to your belt that would measure your blood sugar and distribute insulin, you only need to change the needle a few times a day. You might even be allowed to join in P.E. class
In 2025, you stick on two patches that do the same thing. They're synchronized through your phone.
That wasn't fate. It's not natural development that made diabetes a common chronic illness. It was hundreds of people who cared. It was the people who created the keto diet. It was the people who came up with tests. The ones who went through different species, trying to figure out the closest analogon to human insulin. It was the people who fought in court to get genetically produced insulin approved for medical use. It was people who looked at a rare, incurable disease and said "but what if it wasn't?"
