I went to see Nolan’s Odyssey. And let’s get real here: it is Nolan’s Odyssey just as Emily Wilson’s Odyssey is hers, and Fagle’s is his. I did not go to the movie expecting a “faithful” translation of what we call Homer’s Odyssey. I was a huge fan of sword and sandals flicks as a kid: it doesn’t get any better than Jason and the Argonauts, The 300 Spartans, the old Hercules flicks or Spartacus. I showed up at the South Center Mall IMAX theater ready to be entertained (or at least hoping to be). It ticked all the boxes for me: swords, sandals, big battles, vague connection to a classical text, exotic scenery, storms, more battles, bows and arrows, spear fu, shield fu and chair fu.
Were there things that were annoying and distracting? Sure. In the theater I was in, it was too damn loud. The inclusion of other books (people and tropes from the Aeneid), missing and combined sequences from the text, missing people, and as Mary Beard also pointed out – complete lack of sex or humor which the book has plenty (but there were things that Mary Beard, one of my favorite classical scholars, liked about the movie). Despite the peculiarities and changes, what we have is Nolan’s film. It is a movie. It is not an analysis in Classical World, it is not a presentation or record of a book. Nolan is doing something that people have been doing for 2500 years and that is responding to art by creating art. If we measure art’s greatness by the creative response it engenders, then Homer’s Odyssey is just that: great art. All of the great translations throughout the centuries, all of the incredible retelling of the stories throughout many media including prose, more poetry, music, opera, James Joyce, etc. have not diminished the work of Homer but added to it.
I was disappointed in Emily Wilson’s response to the film. She has created a new translation of the Odyssey which I am looking forward to reading. She has a different project than Nolan. She has to cover the whole text because she is translating a text. And she has to make decisions, obviously, based on her experience, education, and viewpoints. I think it is unfair of her to expect so much from a 2.5 hour film made by a filmmaker. But my disappointment is assuaged when I remember that she is a classical scholar and not a film critic. It is just as unfair of me to expect expert film criticism from a classical scholar as it is for the classical scholar to expect philological expertise from a filmmaker. Wilson should go back and look at the countless retellings of the Odyssey: I think she would see that their value is mostly what they tell us about the time the retelling was told rather than anything really concise about the text.
To make that point, Dr. Emily Hauser at the National Gallery, made a great little video to talk about the painting “Penelope and the Suitors,” by Pintoricchio (1509). It is really worth a look because it is one of those marvelous paintings that captures a scene from a poem and then catches you up on the whole story in the background. The painter does not try to figure out what ancient Greeks must have looked like or wore: The whole painting is in Pintoricchio’s contemporary Italy. His painting provides a number of beats from the text but does not bother to cover the whole thing due to the values and limitations of Pintoricchio’s milieu. But if you know enough of the story, by looking at the background, you can fill it all in as if the painting was a mnemonic tool for story-telling. I love when renaissance painters do this – it is like an early form of hypertext. Another great example is Hans Memlings “Tafel mit Szenen der Passion Christi“ where the crucifiction is central but in the background, the whole of the painting follows the story of the passion of the Christ.
My interest in Homer started when I was young with my interest in mythology, languages (Greek and Latin), and later, reading in archetypal literary criticism. From and Jungian perspective, the female characters are absolutely critical to the text (see also Joseph Campbell’s “Hero with a Thousand Faces”), so yes, there were things that I missed, but I am thrilled that so many people are returning to Homer.
Note: I saw the movie with Jacqui and she liked the film except she was put off by the puppet dog. She said “right in the middle of it, they go full Jim Hensen” putting real actor dogs out of work. Spoken like a true labor leader!
