It's not queerbaiting if it's queerfighting

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.