Why Conservatives are SPLIT on The Odyssey’s True Message

[00:00:00]You also have thoughts on the Odyssey, which smashed records over the weekend.

[00:00:03]We can put this up. Uh, according to ABC, the Christopher Nolan Odyssey quote launched with an estimated 124.5 million in domestic ticket sales and another 139.6 million from overseas, notching an even better debut than Oenheimer and marking the filmmaker's best opening since 2012's The Dark Knight Rises, which of course was a Batman film. Now, on top of that, I did also see another headline that IMAX stock is up today because so many people I think it's at records at IMAX theaters as well. John, you wrote, "We are living through an era of cultural destruction amidst all of the celebration of the Odyssey." John decided to write, "We are living through an era of cultural destruction." But you say, quote, "The larger problem," first you kind of summarize the debate, but you say, "The larger problem is Nolan's reinterpretation of a major of major themes in the Odyssey, which doesn't just change the visual presentation of the material, but its meaning. What it amounts to isn't just artistic license, but deliberate deliberate deconstruction." Let's go, John. Make your case.

[00:01:08]>> Okay. Now, I have some caveats. First, I when I when I wrote that, I hadn't seen the Odyssey, and I still haven't seen the Odyssey. like you. I'm not a go to the theaters uh kind of person. I I I think the last movie I saw in the theater were was Kevin Cosner's Horizon Part One. I thought that was awesome. I was super excited for it and it did not disappoint. So, go see it if you haven't.

[00:01:32]>> That's not what I expected you to say, but it's actually the perfect answer.

[00:01:35]>> So, okay, that said, I I haven't seen Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, uh but I I did minor in ancient Greek at Hillsdale College and Uh well no it's relevant. I had to recite the first 11 lines of the Odyssey in Greek dactillic hexameter for my home Greek final when I was in college and I and I still know them. I'm not going to do them right now.

[00:01:59]>> Huh?

[00:02:00]>> No not in a toga that was you got extra points for that but I I refuse to do that. No. Um obviously I've read the Odyssey. I've read the Odyssey in Greek.

[00:02:10]I read it in English. Um and I'm an educated person. So any educated person in the west can weigh in on Christopher Nolan's Odyssey uh especially, you know, if you kind of have been paying attention to the discourse around the film. There's a there's an entire discourse around the film now. It's a cultural kind of event. And so I I I wrote what I wrote to say that um you know, it's not like I'm uh it's not like I'm breaking uh the internet by saying that uh noting that Christopher Nolan changed the presentation. He changed things in the story in a way that changed its meaning. And there's been a lot of people talking about so this is a sort of a almost like Christianizing of or the imposition of or putting a Christian moral gloss on this ancient Greek myth. And the problem with that is that it it sort of destroys the Odyssey as the Odyssey. uh and it turns it into something else like uh I don't know this theme in Christopher Nolan's work of uh torture heroes with post-traumatic stress disorder like Batman or Oenheimer or Odysius in this case. Um and and you know that's that's you know setting aside kind of the woke casting uh stuff and the questionable um modernization.

[00:03:29]This modernizes the story in a way that as I say I think deconstructs it. And I say that because it renders the story incoherent. You can't really keep the story of the Odyssey by trying to put a uh you know superimpose Christian morality over it. Uh to say that Odysius was felt guilt Odysius didn't feel guilty about uh the Trojan horse or about sacking Troy. That that kind of ruins the story. He was >> Well, John, can we can we pause there though quickly because you write about this in Pagan America as we've talked about before. Some folks might be listening to this and say, "What do you mean that's Christian?" The guilt that >> is being glossed onto the Odysius character and Nolan's rendering. Why are you saying that's a Christian gloss particularly? because uh uh Christians uh specifically uh the Catholic Church in in the the medieval period developed uh as a as a response to the pagan theory of war. Uh the the what we call just war theory now which everybody was talking a lot about earlier this summer during the Iran war and the spring, right? Just war theory was uh was the discourse and not the odyssey. uh but uh but the idea that there is a just and an unjust way to wage war uh that uh coercive force there's a difference between coercive force and violence.

[00:04:53]Violence is unjust. Coercive force under circum certain circumstances uh is just and and is obligatory uh for certain leaders. These are all ideas that came out of Catholic Europe uh after the fall of the Roman Empire. and uh and they don't do they do not map well and I would argue they do not map at all onto pagan Greek myth where the entire moral framework was completely different and the idea that um you know for example that every person has inherent dignity or that people are made in the image of God and that uh you distinguish between combatants and non-combatants in warfare. Those are all Christian ideas.

[00:05:34]they they they were not around at the time of Homer or the time the you know of Greek the the Greek mythology that he kind of set down uh the story of Odysius and so you see that reflected in Odysius's character he is proud of having sacked Troy the whole there's a reason I think and and I won't go on and on about this other people have great other others have pointed this out I think the reason that Christopher Nolan left out the nobody exchange with the Cyclops you know uh the Cyclops asks you who who should he say has has you know has done this or has given him this wine or whatever and he says nobody Odysius says nobody as though that's his name but as he's leaving and after they've blinded the Cyclops Odysius proclaims his name and he says it is I you know Odysius king of Ithaca sacker of Troy who have done this to you and he's bragging about what he has done he can't help himself and which is a major plot point because then the Cyclops cries out to Poseidon to curse Odysius of of of of Ithaca. Uh and and that's when all the troubles come for, you know, sort of disaster after disaster befall Odysius and his crew. Nolan leaves all of that out because it doesn't fit with his his sort of Christian gloss on the morality of the Odyssey that he's trying to do.

[00:06:54]He he can't have his Matt Damon Odysius character be proud of what he he's done at Troy and boast of it. And so there's all these key changes. That's just one key change, but there's other key changes that basically make it a completely different story in my view.

[00:07:10]And and the effect of it is is cultural deconstruction or cultural destruction.

[00:07:17]>> Well, we had uh Victor Davis Hansen here before the film came out. Speaking of Hillsdale, by the way, Hills is wonderful.

[00:07:24]>> You're going to say, and Victor Davis Hansen disagreed with you, which I have to say, I don't know. I would be fun though. That would be fun.

[00:07:32]Well, what I was I was going to say is he pointed out what a lot of people pointed out when Nolan's Odyssey was announced that Nolan drew inspiration directly from Emily Wilson. He said that he he drew inspiration directly from the Emily Wilson translation, which was already controversial in its own right.

[00:07:48]So, that's a choice off the bat. Now, Wilson spoke to ABC News about the film now that it's out and said, ABC News reported she questioned a range of omissions and other choices from the absence on screen of the gods Zeus and Poseidon, Athena is played by Zenaya, to the incoherent messaging that condemns both war and physical cowardice. She found Penelopey's role that Anne Hathway so thinned out that it endangered any possibility of believing in this marriage. Wilson also said also thought that parts of the movie, notably the scene with Odysius's dog Argos, quote, catered towards modern sentimentality, everybody's a sucker for a dog. John Danielson, what say?

[00:08:33]>> Yeah. I mean, so e even Emily Wilson was scandalized by Nolan's modernizing gloss on this myth. uh which which I think you know not having seen the film it seems like it would sap a lot of the pathos and a lot of the coherence just to the story and and make it so that you do have to omit major characters entire sequences the motivations for the characters stop making sense and so that's why at the end you know Odysius and Penelopey just leave Ithaca um you know I I think one reviewer uh said that this ultimate boomer ending. They just sail off uh you know and leave the mess to Telamachus to clean up uh and and and they you know they're done with it, right? They're so over it. Um I I think it's a testament to the fact that that you know even people who may have a modernizing tendency Emily Wilson's translation is terrible. I'm a I'm a Fagels man myself. I know you know everybody's sorted themselves into camps now with translation.

[00:09:35]>> Why is why is the Wilson uh translation terrible? Just teeing you up here, John, for some fun.

[00:09:41]uh because it's too it's colloquial in a way that changes the meaning as well. Um it it maybe it's a little bit more subtle in how it changes the meaning than Nolan's uh re modern kind of interpretation. Um but but it's uh you know even the opening saying you know um sing to me oh muse of a complicated man.

[00:10:01]Well that's not what the you know as somebody who's read the Greek that's not what it says. And it's the kind of approach to um translation that that takes too many literary liberties uh and and you know for the sake of making making something palatable to an audience. So I think Emily Wilson's critique is kind of ironic because that's exactly I think what Nolan has done here. He's tried to make this story palatable to a mass theatergoing audience, which I get it. He's a he's a blockbuster filmmaker. That's his job.

[00:10:31]But I think you could argue that if that's what it takes to make an adaptation of a story like this, then you shouldn't make an adaptation of a story like this, right? Like what's the point? So on the Emily Wilson note that is just as you were saying that I was thinking tell us more about the opening line if if you could John Nolan cited that as one of the reasons he liked the Wilson's trans the Wilson translation particularly and it there was a great review in compact of the Odyssey and the compact review pointed out the similarities between Nolan's particularly Nolan's Oppenheimer and Nolan's Odysius that >> there's an intentional effort to almost do a kind of young analysis of the characters in a very modern western way.

[00:11:24]Uh am I in the right direction on that?

[00:11:27]>> Yeah, I mean and maybe it works for Oppenheimer uh because he was a modern guy and uh you know inhabited a world that's very familiar to us. Um, that that said, I did watch most of Oppenheimer, but I didn't finish it because I got bored. Okay. I was boring.

[00:11:45]Uh, I'm more >> It's No, it wasn't a a Kevin Cosner film.

[00:11:50]>> No, that's not boring. Are you kidding?

[00:11:53]>> Have you seen Horizon?

[00:11:55]>> No. No.

[00:11:57]>> Well, >> that's part one, not part two.

[00:11:59]>> Well, no. I They haven't They haven't released the other parts because nobody would go see it, but uh you know, big mistake. very very uh engaging western film. Um yeah, I that that's uh I I think it's there's a kind of stock character that Christopher Nolan has produced time and time again. Uh and Oppenheimer is the most recent because it it's you know it's top of mind for everybody that just came out. But it's this kind of character who is a uh who is a tortured soul who is complicated.

[00:12:29]Um but that you know that is not that doesn't work for Od Odicius wasn't complicated in that way. He was like clever. He was good at lying. He was he was delighted the gods. The gods were intrigued by Odysius. They were they were entertained by him. He exhibited a kind of godlike ability in his intellect and his ways with you know strategy and his his ways of manipulating people. um that that's the sense in which if we're going to say Odicius was complicated, he was complicated in that way, not in this sort of PTSD, you know, 21st century kind of beta way of being complicated. Uh that that doesn't work. And and I and I think that it renders the story uh something other than the Odyssey, right? Well, John, having actually seen the film, uh, which I mean, listen, I'm not I'm not an Odyssey nerd, so I'm not going to do a justice to the comparison between the text and the film. I have a interesting perspective or I I have an interesting question. My perspective is always interesting, but let's just go with the question for now. um on the costbenefit analysis which you brought up yourself of doing the film like the cost of insulting the poem in that way or degrading the poem in that way or even maybe perverting the poem in that way versus the benefit of bringing us to a place of like kind of shared cultural literacy in the western tradition. I think that's genuinely kind of a complicated trade-off type question because I bet if you asked a bunch of high school graduates in like the 1950s to go watch a film adaptation of the Odyssey, they would be able to fluently kind of explain discrepancies or what they thought of the film versus the poem and it would probably just be a shared language uh that people from different parts of the West would be able to speak and we don't really have that anymore.

[00:14:28]So here you have Chris Christopher Nolan smashing records >> with at least a film that strings together basic plot points, people know names, people know places. It sounds dumb and simplistic, but I was thinking about that this weekend.

[00:14:43]>> Yeah. Sort of like so the un an positive uh result of it is that more people know about the Odyssey and maybe more people will read the book. Um but but the problem is when when the way that they know about it is through the corruption of the thing. This is something I talk about in that piece which is not just about the Odyssey. It's also about Netflix's Little House in the Prairie adaptation.

[00:15:06]>> Yeah. Tell us more about this which is also an act of cultural destruction. Um it's not you know the the the impulse I think uh among these um you know essentially revolutionaries isn't just to censor or to ban or to ignore. Eventually, it is to co-opt, to transform, to corrupt and claim for their side these uh cultural stories, myths, monuments, works of art.

[00:15:41]>> And that's what we I think that's what we see. And so, yes, um it's it's great that uh you know, I think part of the reason a lot of people are going to see uh The Odyssey is just because it's the first like really big kind of like epic film that has been released in theaters in a while that that I can think of aside from Kevin Castner's Horizon.

[00:15:59]>> Um >> that aside, >> uh but uh but that's the problem. The problem is is taking it and corrupting it. You know, uh Amazon has done the same thing with rings of power. Um, yeah, maybe more people know about >> Don't get John started.

[00:16:14]>> Maybe more people know about the Sylmerelion now, but how many of them are going to go through and read all of the family trees and the genealogies uh and the pronunciation guides? Okay. Huh?

[00:16:26]So, true. Instead, they're just going to watch this stupid show on on Amazon that is that is a corruption and uh and and a a mangling of the original source material, which is a beautiful work of art and a great piece of literature and very important for our civilization. And and that is the real problem with this.

[00:16:46]one thing after another they go through and destroy so that future generations have to kind of sift through the rubble and reconstitute and reverse engineer the thing that was lost and that's the problem I have with him >> now the you you referenced the kind of different camps that people are sorting themselves into off the top of my head I think Ben Shapiro Spencer Claven our friend here on the show uh and I think I also Eric Ericson there's a handful of people on the right who are saying that the film isn't perfect, but it's good.

[00:17:18]It's a a relatively faithful adaptation with some minor annoyances, maybe via the casting decisions. There's also people who uh we were talking about earlier who I wouldn't necessarily say they're all on the right, but people who are kind of pro- odyssey, but don't see it as a faithful adaptation. Uh the compact review that we mentioned earlier, I've seen others, but Eric Ericson said this. Um, the trans actress that's referring to Elliot Page, formerly known as Ellen Paige, plays the role of this the deceiver whose lie convinces the Trojans to open their gates to their civilization's destruction. make of that what you will trying to in a in a way I mean there's a pretty obvious rebuttal to that but in a way to defend Nolan by saying this was some sort of sneaky injection of anti-wokeness into the Odyssey. I've seen similar debates being had. I know there was a review in the the Daily Wire uh by our friend Rich Cromwell talking about how the Calypso treatment, the Charize their own Calypso actually was faithful to the uh to the poem because, you know, it's I should I should actually just pull up the meme. There's a great meme going around. But anyway, John, all this is to say um that there was there was sort of sneaky anti- >> Yeah. cultural destruction that WAS LIKE TROJAN HORSE INTO THE ODYSSEY.

[00:18:46]>> So that's that's what Jonathan Pou has said as well. He had a whole uh review of it. Uh he he has a podcast called The Symbolic World and and this is sort of his uh you know his beat. Uh and he thought the whole film was a Trojan horse. Um there's I've seen I've seen similar comments about the casting choices for Helen of Troy using the same actress for Helen of Troy as for u Klein Nestra and then contrasting that with Penelopey and the two sides of the feminine and I think that's giving um Christopher Nolan too much credit. Uh he's a he's obviously a smart guy. uh he's obviously thought deeply about what you know film making but for you know the things he has said about the film uh you know he I you kind of have to take him at his word he he has said what he thinks the film is about and what the themes are in the film and his approach to it and you know why he chose to use a rapper you know at the beginning and why he used Emily Wilson's translation and why he thinks that you can kind of project the golden rule back onto um you know the the world of Odysius or the the world the world of Homer. Uh and so I think that people are are reading things into this that I I think Christopher Nolan would have maybe left a few more breadcrumbs in his his own comments which have been very frank and he's you know he's he's given all sorts of interviews. Um I think it may be just too clever by half. uh the the those those things also are not as important as changing the basic themes and message of of the Odyssey which I I you know even if he was trying to see you know put some little anti-woke hints in there it doesn't cover for what he did to the story which was completely transform it and turn it into something else. Well, the reading of Calypso that I was referencing, there's a great meme going around that like if you think deeper and deeper, it was actually a critique of of therapy culture from Theon's Calypso, which I agree is just I mean there's a a level of galaxy brain happening uh with that interpretation, but uh John Danielson uh the my take on this was it's it's a fun movie. Like it's a good movie. I know it's not supposed to be like super fun, but it's a fun thing to go watch in the theater in the summer. So, I get why it's smashing records. Like, it's it's literally epic the way that it's told.

[00:21:15]There's some great acting. There's some super uneven acting and super uneven even writing. But, >> I mean, at least Elliot Paige didn't play Adysius. Is that maybe the silver lining here?

[00:21:28]>> May maybe so. Maybe so. Um uh you know there there uh I you know if you really want though you know a a great epic film that has great sequences uh that are realistically rendered.

[00:21:41]>> Stop it.

[00:21:42]>> Horizon with Kevin Cosner is your film.

[00:21:47]Oh, John.

[00:21:48]>> There's a whole scene where like these Indians just slaughter some settlers like unad adult like they just did depict the Indians as they were, which is more than I can say for Christopher Nolan's Odysius, who doesn't even kill all of Penelopey's maids who slept with the suitors at the end like they do in the poem.

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