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when he says he went for a "more domestic, more intimate" tone and language in the odyssey than in the iliad except for a few key moments of great heroic action that harkened back to the iliad, i'm like yesss i felt that! the moment odysseus notched that arrow and killed the first suitor i was instantly transported back to the war of troy, and that made me think how odysseus probably felt that way too as he did it (how could he not! unlike nestor and menelaus he hasn't had ten years of peace and domesticity to process the war)
and what also strikes me about that moment is that up until then the violence in the odyssey has been so... clean and indirect. the actual deaths have been mostly stuff like... men swallowed by monsters in one big gulp or "and then they drowned" (or the one dolt who got drunk and fell of a roof). but when odysseus' anger and humiliation finally comes to a head, i mean -- christ:
[...] Odysseus aimed and shot Antinous square in the throat
and the point went stabbing clean through the soft neck and out [...]
The shaft sank home, and the man's life-blood came spurting from his nostrils -- thick red jets -- a sudden thrust of his foot --
that's some iliad violence! that's odysseus carrying the war inside him for ten years after it ended and now right here in his own home he'll have his big aristeia, his moment of heroic and terrifying glory. it's so exciting and satisfying and horrific all at once
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suppose that penelope is essentially odysseus-but-a-woman. not just in the sense of "genderflipped personality" but "same personality that has to find a way to survive in a gendered social role different from his and with less freedom to transgress." now i'm obviously not gonna claim this is serious literary scholarship but i think if, for fun, you were to open the odyssey and read penelope with that in mind, you might come to some different conclusions about her behavior than you would otherwise.
and there's my little exercise i would give students if i were a lit professor. thanks for your time
I like The Odyssey well enough, but I love movies. And it's zero percent surprising that Tumblr would love Emily Wilson's LBR piece, because it's just premiere posting. Her prose fucking crushes, so many lines are absolutely killer. But I do just need to mention that it's really not film criticism. It's hardly speaking to or about the movie at all, and when it is, it's predominantly her positing that because she is not interested in what it's saying, then it's not saying anything.
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:
Emily Wilson used baffling arguments to flay Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s poem.
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.
And if one of the things someone claims about a movie is that casting actors of color flattened all of those roles into the stereotypical "Black best friend," but not by anything that can be seen in the script or their performances, so seemingly suggesting 'we', to use her skeptical punctuation motif, should read them that way merely because they aren't white, worth a pause to consider that while haterism can be a rush to read (or write), it can also mask any number of deeply iffy assertions that could definitely stand to be questioned!
Okay truly I posted this going, Tom Holland’s non-alcoholic beer me strength…"wading in"..., but have gotten such an engaged response! People interested in a discussion about what good film criticism can do and is for is so exciting and heartening for me! I am certainly not a professional film critic, but I love reading and listening to it, because as you may have heard, I love movies.
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.
Anyway, some real thoughtful stuff on this post, and I also want to highlight the reply below from @fursasaida, who was making a sort of argument about arguments using the Calypso scenes, if you’re interested in a great example of how to critique a film adaptation on it’s own terms!
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i think there's a very simple reason (besides athena's guidance) that odysseus tests and is tested by penelope, but reveals himself to telemachus pretty much right off the bat. and it's because there is no test. all the tricks in the world but not one hint he could drop that would allow his son to recognize him. i just don't think odysseus can stand that. he can stand to be in disguise, but not unknown.
still thinking about various recognitions and anti-recognitions in the latter half of the odyssey. from telemachus onward, the reunions (which are actual reunions—argos, eurycleia, penelope) scale up in both intimacy and danger, because, of course, those things directly proportional. with eurycleia it finally jumps out, and he threatens her life. but he doesn't try to lie to her. and he asked for her to bathe him! he knows he can't be recognized yet but he longs for it, too. he is living for the moment when he can clear out all the old ghosts that people are talking about and half-remembering and longing for and be the only definitive odysseus again.
i think there's a very simple reason (besides athena's guidance) that odysseus tests and is tested by penelope, but reveals himself to telemachus pretty much right off the bat. and it's because there is no test. all the tricks in the world but not one hint he could drop that would allow his son to recognize him. i just don't think odysseus can stand that. he can stand to be in disguise, but not unknown.
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please say something about odyssey 4. i have my own opinion on what's going on there but people read it so differently
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.
I do think it's significant that when Telemachus arrives in Sparta they're celebrating the marriage of Menelaus' son, whose mother is an enslaved woman. Menelaus has elevated his illegitimate son, and his legitimate wife, whose children ought to be his sole heirs, is powerless to stop him. In the Rhodian tradition, Megapenthes drives Helen out of Sparta after Menelaus dies. There's something very sad in the scene where Telemachus leaves Sparta and Helen gives him a textile that she made for Penelope to keep until he marries, something desperate about the way she asks him to remember her through the work of her hands. That's a woman who feels trapped.
i straight up do not believe that odysseus did everything he did to get back to penelope and telemakhos. or even that he did everything he could. wanting to return to them is not the whole story. i like the myth about odysseus pretending to be mad to get out of the war for lots of reasons, but one of them is because it's an attempt to escape the narrative, foiled by his love for his son, but also because there is contrast to what we know of him long after the narrative has sucked him back in. odysseus is no less kleospilled than anyone else! he fights for his pride; he makes mistakes; he gets worn down; he delays his homecoming, in ways that are and aren't his fault, all the time. he wants to go home. he doesn't just want to go home.
but he does try. by leaving ogygia he willingly goes back into the narrative one more time, and he never gives up until he finally returns. isn't that compelling enough? do we have to sand it down?
another reason this tension interests me is that odysseus does seem to question if it was all worth it. at least by the point that we meet him, twenty years on. that doesn't hit as hard if he wasn't invested in the war at all, right? if there's no definitive moment where he gets peace, there's also no definitive moment where he gets anything the war promised, either. there's that provocative simile where songs about troy make him weep like a woman whose husband has been killed, who is about to be taken into slavery, a condition he inflicted on countless trojan women. the sirens promise a version of the war that makes sense of his suffering. so he must be wondering.
but it's all very well for achilles in the underworld to say it's better to be alive without glory than dead with it: he doesn't have a choice anymore. but when odysseus tells that story, too, he must still be wondering. was it worth it? what can i do that would make it worth it?
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