eat the rich

I mean if you just want to take, "There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible." This line makes me laugh every time I see it, it rules. And it has nothing to do with Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026).

Presumably it's coming from the same complaint well as the majority of Wilson's piece: that while the Homeric poem is a celebration of fucking around and feasting, this movie is not. But in just saying, "it's not this" and nothing more, she's not discussing or even acknowledging how sex and food are actually used in this retelling. Both are tied together in what has been widely praised among audiences as one of the most indelible sequences: Samantha Morton's scene as the witch Circe. In it, the threat of sexual violence and act of eating are linked in a commentary on warmongering rapaciousness writ large, as a part of Nolan's intently laid out thesis of the Trojan horse as a kind of atomic bomb xenia violation whose nuclear winter the whole Mediterranean is now living under. And yes the food does look horrible, because it's horror food! It's difficult to describe in words, but it's like the stew Odysseus's men are eating is turning into gristly tentacles in their mouths, the sounds of their eating ghastly and so disgusting, while Morton transforms them through....something I will not even try to describe, I've just never seen anything quite like it onscreen. Largely practical effects too, astonishing.

Not a bit of that is in that line, of course. Great line, but isn't about the movie, it's about the author.

And honestly, the author is a bit out on a limb with much of how she has actually interpreted The Odyssey (film) itself, must also be said! And not just by me, or by film critics naturally, but also other classics scholars:

I mean when early on she summarily defined the work of cinema as "light and noise" and moved on, it was pretty clear that Wilson just doesn't have a ton of respect or feeling for epic scale movies in general. Which is fine! Everyone has types of art that they don't jibe with. But you don't go to the person who's not keen on dance for a good assessment of the new ballet, negative or positive.

If you want just like, One Neat Trick to having much more fun and interesting conversations about art with your friends, I'd say a great thing is to try to avoid value judgments without reasoning. That's what that same oft-quoted section of Emily Wilson's piece is doing, where after non-specifically mentioning "Nolan's trademark jumps and twists" in the opening paragraph, the only other comment she makes on The Odyssey's structure in 4000 words, and again, for a Christopher Nolan movie, is “its narrative structure is gimmicky.” Okay! What is the narrative structure that you found gimmicky? And gimmicky how, or why? Actually getting into what the structure is and what you thought the effect of that was on the story and the viewer is going to be so much more rewarding for everyone, because the people who felt the same way (including the person making the argument!) are gaining insights into why this element didn't work for them, and the people who did not feel the same way can now see where you're coming from, and identify where they're responding to the same filmmaking choices differently.

Because value judgement without reasoning is pretty prescriptivist at the end of the day. Good criticism shouldn’t be telling you what to think, it should be giving you more to think about.

GRAVEWHALE!

Okay seriously this is some fascinating shit.

And I don’t know shit about fossils, marine biology or ocean research.

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

I nod, setting down my chalk and spellbook. “It does sound like there might have been a bit of a misunderstanding.”

“She took against me, that's what happened,” the dead girl says with a scowl. She looks about fourteen, round faced and spotty, with whisps of brown hair peaking out from under her mob-cap. Her face and her crossed arms have a tell-tale bluish tinge to them. A cholera death.

“I been here for don't know how long and never gave any trouble. Nobody ever complained about me 'till her.”

…well, that's not strictly true.

Number 12, Barclay Street has been attracting rumours of haunting since the mid nineteenth century.

Sounds of faint singing and crying in the corridors at night. Cold spots. Doors that open and close by themselves. Animals acting strangely. Harmless, mid to low-level stuff, typical for a bored teenage poltergeist.

Still, pointing that out isn't likely to achieve much, and certainly the most recent complaints of blood running down the walls, screams in the dark and paralysing night terrors seem distinctly out of character.

The ghost toes the chalk again, more tentatively this time. It stays resolutely unbroken.

She could get out if she wanted to. I'm not one of those assholes who brings out their full arsenal of wards and sigils for a first meeting with a level 2 spectre. The summoning circle will keep her in one place for as long as I need her to talk, but it wouldn't hold for a moment if she really fought against it.

I take it as a good sign that she's still here. Pouting or not, she's clearly willing to work with me.

“None of the others could do this,” she says. “None of 'em even saw me.” She looks up. “Are you here to exise me?”

“Exorcise,” I say instinctively, and curse myself when she flinches. “Sorry, no, no! I don't exorcise people from their homes without good reason, not if they're happy where they are.”

“I was happy. Till she started calling in all them ghost hunters.”

Mrs Delaney had been quite persistent in her attempts to 'fix' her haunted house. Most of the people she found were charlatans, of course, but I'd still arranged an appointment as fast as I could once word reached me. It wouldn't have been long before she happened upon somebody with Talent, and unfortunately not everybody in this field knows how to behave like a professional.

“I think we might be able to help each other,” I say, careful to keep my voice calm and level.

“Don't see how. Not unless you can exorcise Her.”

“Not quite what I had in mind.” I pull out my phone and scroll through my photos. “You say that you're not the cause of the most recent incidents of paranormal activity?”

A pause. The ghost gnaws on her lip. I wait, patiently, keeping my body language open and nonthreatening. “I… I knocked her coffee cup over,” she admits at last. “She was being mean and talking on her telephone, saying I done all these things when I never did! So I decided to show her what I could do if I wanted.”

“Hmm.” The ghost eyes me nervously, as if expecting me to pull out a book, bell and candle and banish her on the spot.

“I only tipped it,” she adds. “I didn't break it or nothing!”

“You shouldn't have touched it at all,” I say sternly. “But… I can appreciate that you were frustrated, so let's say no more about it.”

The ghost looks relieved.

“My point is,” I continue, “if you weren't the one making blood rain from the ceiling or tormenting people in their sleep, then what was? There's no other ghosts on the property.” I find the picture I was looking for. “You can get anywhere around the house, right? Including behind the furniture and in the backs of cupboards?”

“Yes'm.”

I hold the phone up so that she can see the picture on the screen. “I'm going to let you go free in a moment, and I need you to see if you can find anything that looks like this.”

The ghost wrinkles her forehead. “What's that when it's at home?”

There's just SO much tension between Menelaus and Helen in Odyssey 4!!! She tells a story about how she was always on the Achaeans' side and helped them from within Troy, then he tells a story about how she was working with the Trojans to actively set a trap for the Greeks and tried to get him personally (among others) killed, then she drugs everyone at dinner. Is one of those stories a lie? Are both of them lies? This is not a portrait of a happy marriage or of a man who's just so in love with his wife that he's put the events of the past twenty years behind him! You have to wonder what exactly Helen is suppressing with those drugs of hers that are νηπενθές τʼ ἄχολόν τε, κακῶν ἐπίληθον ἁπάντων, "against sorrow and against anger, causing forgetfulness of all evils." I think (in part) that she's suppressing other narrative possibilities for their relationship, because we know in many accounts Menelaus does intend to kill Helen and comes very close to doing it.

Like look at the Trojan Women, where Menelaus is deciding between killing Helen right there at Troy or bringing her back to Greece to kill her there, and the scene ends with him assuring Hecuba that she won't have a chance to seduce him into sparing her life because she'll be on a different ship. The audience presumably knows that he will indeed end changing his mind, as mentioned in Andromache (627-631). I don't think there are any versions where Menelaus actually does kill Helen (although there were some weird local Helen cult-myths on Rhodes), but both his intention to kill her and her convincing him otherwise by baring her breasts are older traditions that Euripides is working with, not things he invented.

The Odyssey doesn't directly allude to that post-sack moment but I do think it's absolutely behind the text, and it's what Helen's suppressing with her drugs. Can't let Menelaus remember what happened during the war for too long, or he'll be overcome by rage as well as grief. The only things keeping that marriage together are 1) the drugs and 2) the fact that she's Zeus's daughter. He can't harm Zeus's daughter, especially not in the Odyssey where his status is premised upon his being Zeus's son-in-law (according to Proteus). So Helen has several kinds of power over him that prevent him from moving toward the other narrative possibility of outright killing her.