Epic Discourse

I actually got to The Odyssey relatively quickly, by my standards. My thirteen-year-old son wanted to see it, and I agreed with him that we could go see it in the theatre. We left his sister at home, because my personal rule is that I don’t take nine-year-olds to Christopher Nolan movies. (It turns out she wasn’t interested in the movie so much as snacks and the arcade room, and they took out the arcade room anyway.) Their dad didn’t want to see it, so it worked out. And we had a good time! My son was annoyed at a couple of places where Nolan changed things away from the mythology, but other than that he enjoyed it.

Here’s where I confess I haven’t actually read the Odyssey since about 1991. Freshman year in high school, which I know because I still have the map a friend and I made as a classroom assignment. I know the story, because of course I do. Even if I hadn’t read it as a work, I have been a Mythology Girl since elementary school, and Odysseus is kind of important to that. I couldn’t tell you what translation we read back then, but after well over 2500 years, I’m not sure how much it matters with how deeply it’s soaked into European-derived culture.

Still, I avoided The Discourse until I’d seen the film because I wanted to judge the Nolan version on its own merits. Probably in order to fully understand, I’d have to read the Emily Wilson translation, though I’d note that it isn’t the only translation Nolan used. I could also watch the Nolan movies I haven’t gotten around to yet and so forth, just to be really deeply grounded in the whole thing and have a properly educated opinion. I could watch all the other adaptations people recommend over the Nolan one.

Or I could not bother. I could like the movie a lot and have my feelings about it and not have to share them with everyone. Which I admit is ironic given I am literally writing about the movie and its discourse, but stick with me for a minute, here. We’ll start with the fact that unlike some people, I bothered waiting until I saw the movie to have opinions about it. But also, you know, we’ve seen this happen over and over, and Nolan is one of those directors who seems to attract it. Anyone else remember when we were talking about Heath Ledger as the Joker before Nolan shot a frame?

Now, it was much more gross this time around. I don’t think there’s such thing as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” because beauty is so personal and subjective, but if I had to cast a single woman to play the role, I’m not saying I wouldn’t cast Lupita Nyong’o. And Zendaya is a really good choice for Athena in my opinion, honestly, because she is skilled at projecting an aura of quiet wisdom. If we’re going to be complaining about “they aren’t Greek,” well, Matt Damon’s father is of British ancestry and his mother is of Scandinavian ancestry, but anyway.

I won’t say Nolan is great in how he writes women—he, like Stephen King, kind of needs someone to help him with that—but I personally felt the women of The Odyssey are better than he usually writes. I particularly liked Penelope’s point about how the throne of Ithaca had been occupied the whole time. By her. And that Helen didn’t have agency and knew she didn’t because she knew the lengths Menelaus would go to in order to keep her from having any. Any agency women have in the original epic is more than the average woman in Ancient Greece, admittedly itself not a monolith.

Though I do think the obsession with making it “historically accurate” misses a bit of a point. It’s mythology. So what if the armour’s basically Roman and the boat is Viking and a lot of the other bits are just fantasy? I’m perfectly aware that Homer would have had no concept of Iceland and it didn’t matter to me when I watched that desolate black landscape of fire and ice. It worked for me even knowing it wasn’t even a little what anyone in Greece would have pictured when they heard the tale told to them.

That, to me, is what it all boils down to. So okay, there’s some Problematic aspects to at least one of the filming locations. This I grant you. But I think half the Discourse I’ve heard has been bigots of one kind or another—we haven’t even gotten to Elliot Page—and the other half has been people who don’t vibe with Nolan movies much. And you know what? That second half isn’t wrong. If you don’t vibe with Nolan movies, you don’t. I wrote years ago about “snails and oysters,” an idea I borrowed from Spartacus about the idea that taste and appetite are different and there’s no shame in taste.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to talk about a movie, whether you liked it or not. I’ll confess it’s sometimes more fun to talk about a movie I didn’t like. I haven’t checked, but I’m sure my Disney Byways articles are longer when they’re rants. What bothers me about Odyssey discourse is not so much the Discourse itself but the attitude that it’s all objective. And, okay, it’s objective that Nolan can’t write women for beans. But the appeal of his movie is about as objective as that Lupita Nyong’o is the most beautiful woman in the world.