The Odyssey: Reaching the Emotion of the Past
“Miles Stephenson has never been a Christopher Nolan devotee, and he’ll be the first to tell you The Odyssey is not, strictly speaking, Homer’s. So why did our chief film critic walk out more moved than he’s been by a Nolan film since Memento?”
— Ryder McNeal of PREVO’s The Weekend Read
After reading nothing but casting controversy and art direction debates for weeks, I went to my local theater and saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. I have to say: I’ve never been a Christopher Nolan devotee. None can deny his technical mastery, but the flesh and blood of his characters and stories? The emotional experience of watching them? They make me feel like some alien watching another species, how The Cyclops must’ve felt watching Odysseus and his Achaeans stumble into his cave.
I found Interstellar — or, climate change 2001: Space Odyssey — too self-serious for a movie with a dime novel sci-fi plot. In Tenet (and his logic puzzle movies more broadly), I felt as if Nolan tried to plaster over surface-level characters with mind-bending “4D chess” tricks. Worse still, many of his movies feel as if they were directed by a committee; they have wide international appeal but not a specific sense of perspective. They are not grounded in a particular human moment or culture in the way Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or Tarkovsky’s Solaris might be. I always felt Nolan could benefit from adding more anthropology to his toolbox. How do people actually talk? What do his characters think about when they go home at night? What culture are we looking at? Who are these people? What do they value?
Memento gets closest to answering these questions and for that reason it’s a stand-out to me, his highest achievement alongside The Prestige. I enjoyed his Batman films for being Heat-inspired noir crime thrillers that happen to feature a superhero instead of “superhero movies,” but they’re still not my ideal type of movie. Christian Lorentzen had the best words on Dunkirk: “Better for the dialogue to be sparse when it’s otherwise this platitudinous.”
And finally I found Oppenheimer to be an elegantly shot and scored music video on nuclear existentialism. But again, while my eyes and ears were stirred, I felt nothing. That’s why it was perhaps surprising that I went into The Odyssey expecting disappointment yet came away thoroughly entertained and even emotionally invested.
How does a director make their audience emotionally relate to the ancients? Nolan’s answer is to bend the ancients to our will and our modern understanding of the world. Like the best of the mid-2000s action adventure movies, The Odyssey enthralls you with a likable and magnanimous hero right from the get-go: Matt Damon. His performance sells the movie emotionally; a war-weary soldier tries to get home to his wife and son but is tragically thwarted by trials and tribulations. Is it Homer’s Odyssey? Certainly not. Nolan takes the prideful, cunning, and mischievous Homeric Odysseus (the archetypal Greek hero who fights for plunder and glory) and turns him into a solemn PTSD-addled veteran filled with regret about the devastation of The Trojan War. Even Emily Wilson, the latest translator of Homer’s Odyssey long judged for her overly-modernized version of the text, criticized Nolan’s unfaithful choices, saying it shows Odysseus in a “very modern, psychiatrized way.”
And yet, this new character, this psychological Achaean Matt Damon, is quite compelling! Nolan said that the Bronze Age moral universe of the original story is too alien for us moderns; so he steeped it in Christian morality. To be sure, something is lost in this transfusion. The reason so many find The Odyssey and The Iliad fascinating is because they show the values of Mycenaean civilization, a time when Greeks valued strength, glory, and beauty over all else in what Nietzsche dubbed master morality. Before The Bible told us to revere the sick, the poor, and the downtrodden with “The meek will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5.), Homer exalted Achilles as the peak figure of human achievement, a god among men who Homer introduces to us in a moment of rage as his war prize, a living woman named Briseis, is taken away from him. This is a prideful, wrathful man who takes what he wants and kills hundreds of people. Yet to the Bronze Age Greeks, he’s a hero.
Nolan finds this master morality of The Odyssey and The Iliad too dangerous or alienating for us moderns. Nolan told TIME Magazine, “Talking about choices of adaptation, the end of the poem is so grim and so misogynistic, I had to exclude some of that material.” Nolan’s solution is to cut it off at the knees and inject what Nietzsche would call “slave morality” into Homer’s story; Odysseus and his Achaean comrades are evil because they were cunning and strong enough to win the Trojan War. Because of their victories, they feel shame. Homer’s Odysseus is admired for his mētis (or cunning intelligence); there’s no moral rejection of warfare deception in Homer.
But Nolan wants his hero, Matt Damon, to be likeable. He’s a wife guy. He’s a selfless hero who puts himself at risk to save his own men. He’s so revered among the Achaeans that even the villain of the movie, a wonderfully smarmy Robert Pattinson as the theater kid suitor Antinous, has to sing Odysseus’ praise even while he’s trying to steal his wife. Nolan inverts the morality of the original story to make it more narratively palatable for us moderns. But not every director has the same answer to the above question: how do I make my audience emotionally relate to the ancients?
Director Robert Eggers takes the approach opposite of Nolan: keep the ancients intact, ignore relatability, and have the emotional chips fall where they may. The consequence of this is The Northman (2022) an authentic and visually stunning movie with the emotional weight of a wet napkin.
Like Nolan’s The Odyssey, Eggers’ The Northman is based on an ancient legend: Amleth. In the film, Eggers works himself into a corner in which the successful implementation of his theme requires the total alienation of the audience from his protagonist. How does he do this? Eggers subverts the hero myth by introducing the twist that our hero’s quest to "save" his mother is a misguided task which reinforces a culturally-mandated never-ending cycle of violence. It’s an interesting concept but it presents a new problem: it takes the dramatic teeth out of the character to whom the audience is supposed to relate.
A Viking prince witnesses the murder of his father at the hands of a rival. As he’s fleeing his homeland, the boy swears an oath to return one day to avenge his father by killing the rival and rescuing his mother. When he returns, the script is flipped as the Viking boy — now man — learns that his mother sanctioned the murder of his father, preferring a marriage to the rival. Furthermore, the idyllic home life of his youth is revealed to be a lie as the Viking learns he is the product of rape and that his mother was once his father’s slave. The mission that he’s been single-mindedly pursuing for years turns out to be ill-founded; everything he knows about his life is false. The Viking pursues the death of his father’s rival anyway and dies in battle as he decapitates the rival. His passage to Valhalla is secure and the cycle of violence continues on down the ages.
On paper, it sounds about right for a Viking epic. Eggers’ adaptation is probably more “truthful” than Nolan’s. But emotionally, there’s a problem. We’re alienated from our hero because of the subversion: we can’t connect to the world of the film or its protagonists. Stoic writing and a lack of emotive expression from Alexander Skarsgård make us regard his character (by design I’m sure) more as an empty vessel for a barbaric code than a fully realized human who we want to project our desires and fears onto. Paradoxically, this is a successful move by Eggers because it serves his theme about the tragedy of Amleth arising from “people acting in accordance with their inscribed purpose within a defective social order” (as Marco Roth writes). But in doing so, Eggers sacrifices the audience’s engagement in the pathos of the subject.
Entrails, beheaded corpses, and Icelandic hot spring sex scenes become more Norse interior design than horrors and raptures for our characters to grapple with. They are presented in a mannerist and academic style but lack any disturbing or emotional resonance. We, the audience, look for the emotion in the scene but it never arrives. So we don’t care about the story or where its characters are going.
Nolan, in sacrificing Homer at the altar, fixes this problem. I care about Achaean Matt Damon and I want him to succeed. I prefer Eggers’ approach, but I think Nolan’s movie is dramatically superior. Homer’s narrative is based on real events, real histories, and real civilizations. Letters between the Hittites and Walusa (Troy) complain about the war with the Ahhiyawans (Achaeans), a seafaring Bronze Age people. It’s one of the most important stories to Western civilization. Despite my fondness for Homer, I wasn’t bothered by Nolan’s changes. To me, it’s just an entirely different story, and the new direction Nolan, Hathaway, Damon, and Pattinson take with it solves the pitfalls other directors have experienced when trying to “stay true” to the ancients.
Classicists should steer clear, but moviegoers wanting an entertaining summer action adventure movie will be satisfied. And it has more to offer than just cheap thrills; Nolan captures a real sense of yearning and melancholy with Damon’s hero. It’s the most emotionally invested I’ve been in a Christopher Nolan movie since Memento. So my message to Nolan skeptics and fans alike is this: leave your copy of Homer at home but go see The Odyssey.
Disagree with my take? Let me know at mvs2132@columbia.edu
Originally published on Substack.
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