Christopher Nolan Didn't Give Us the Real Odysseus

[00:00:03]Adysius is the man who can help us through this terrible time. But Christopher Nolan did not give us the real Adysius. Hi, I'm Sema. This is Art Lust, where we talk about arts and culture in context. And I'm going to talk about Christopher Nolan's new movie, The Odyssey, and talk about how it fails the original, but it sure does tell us about our own time.

[00:00:29]So who is Adysius and did Christopher Nolan tell his story? So potentially around 1200 BC it's sort of contested but we can say a long time ago in the Greek isles these stories start coming up and they're all stories that are being told like this oral tales and it is about a man who fought a war. What war you ask? The Trojan War. How did the Durian war start? There was a woman who was incredibly beautiful. But was she a woman? Well, not exactly. She was the daughter of Zeus. Zeus comes down to the queen of the Spartans, Lea. And then they have two babies. The babies are born of eggs. They are not human. One of them is Helen. Now, Lea's daughter Helen is so beautiful. And so when Paris, not a city but a human, decides that he um has to guess between who is the most beautiful goddess, the prize he gets is Helen, except for she is somebody else's wife. So she is stolen to give to Paris.

[00:01:40]It starts the Trojan War. And Adysius, after that's all over, has to get home.

[00:01:46]He, however, is a complicated person.

[00:01:49]Adysius is described as somebody with many faces and that's really to imply that he is a complicated character. He is not a blameless hero. He didn't only do good things in war. He is very much closer to the truth of humanity and warriors frankly. And so he then is about to go find his wife, go back to Ithaca, and he gets into a fight with a cyclops. He blinds that Cyclops, which turns out is the Cyclops father, Poseidon, decides, I'm going to make sure that you don't get home. And so then the odyssey is the 10 years it takes for him to get to his wife. And in those years, he fights monsters. He finds beautiful humanish keep women. He does all sorts of things.

[00:02:41]The Odyssey that I just described in 2 minutes is thousands of lines of poetry and in most places it was probably told slightly differently. Not to mention it's supposed to tie into all the existing Greek mythology. You should actually think of how people who consumed it originally a little bit like if you are somebody who loves let's say X-Men or MCU or any kind of very large multicared universe. They understood all of the backstory. So if in the Odyssey Helen barely registers, they would have understood all that story about the war in Paris and you know Zeus and whatnot.

[00:03:21]So it is basically something that celebrates being part of a culture and understanding that culture except for unlike X-Men and MCU and all of those things, this was their faith. And I think in our western conception we call it mythology because we call religions that we don't understand mythology but it was their faith. And so while a lot of these Greek myths come to us like narcissus um and the phrase narcissism for Greeks, this was religious and the Greek gods were not the people who were necessarily laying down what is right and what is wrong in a black and white way in as in Judeo-Christian religion.

[00:04:07]They were actually described as being very complex. They had a lot of emotions. they got really mad.

[00:04:14]But one thing that is very interesting is in their um pantheon and in the stories that their faith told they probably saw themselves more in God that God was closer to humanity making mistakes. You know, there was a lot of very uncomfortable truths in Greek religion and all of those come out in the Odyssey as well.

[00:04:39]So, with all of that said, what about Nolan? Well, before we get to Nolan, how come Nolan is telling the Odyssey? He's a 21st century British filmmaker. Well, what happens is the Greeks begin an effort of colonization that results in the world we're in. The Greek isles all really were separate little communities. you know the polus the little tiny towns and so you have Sparta and Athens are separate and for millennia there probably almost a millennia there was a lot of people who still live very separately and then what happens is you start to see the cohesion of a Greece and that Greece is centered on Athens and they start codifying things with language including taking these oral tales and making them text which simplifies it.

[00:05:36]Then they start a colony. It's called Magna Graia. It's Italy. And then the Greek world really is subsumed into the Roman world. And so what you have is that whole side of the Mediterranean becomes interconnected and all of them know this story. So a lot of people can lay claim to this who are on that side of the Mediterranean. But the Romans also increase their um empire quite a lot.

[00:06:04]And so they take north and west Europe.

[00:06:08]And so the story really moves from being a Greek story about Greek faith to instead being basically literature and something that should edify us without religion. So it becomes secular. And when it becomes secular, it also becomes even more simplified. And really it's sort of like a um way to share morality without having to share religion. And so many of the elements of it become kind of proof statements. Look at look at Adysius. He does find his wife. And so it becomes simplified and simplified and simplified. And it gets retold repeatedly particularly in British art. You see it you see elements of it in neocclassicism.

[00:06:55]You see it for example in Wedgewood pottery. Lots of depictions of Greek art. And it's very simplified. Now, it is not the brightly colored sculptures that the ancient Greeks probably had.

[00:07:07]Instead, it is beautiful white figures.

[00:07:11]This is particularly important because this kind of neocclassicism is coming out where our conception of race is coming out. A lot of that stuff and the age of exploration are all happening at the same time. So now those stories that were Greek that probably talked about people who looked sort of southern Mediterranean now look completely white like literally the paper white and then after Wedgewood you see it in stories from the pre- raffulites and so the women are depicted very often as basically people from the British Isles with very very fair skin and these stories become less body and more serious and more beautiful and of course at this time. Also, the Greeks um sculptures are literally in England. You see, for example, the Parthonon marbles that are still in the British Museum that are very much um not necessarily um something the British Museum should have, but they're also completely devoid of the original coloration they probably had. So all of that happens and it becomes something that in the 19th century becomes something that everyone kind of knows because everyone is what a white male British or um Western European person imagines everyone should know. And so while there are lots of other myths that could have been or epic poems that could have been the thing that we all see as an important crosscultural story, the Odyssey is perfect because it's European but not too European. So they can say that it's a story that they can basically turn into anything, right?

[00:08:58]It's not the same as Arthur who is one of the British's own people, but it's also not non-western. So it fits what they need to become a global classic and so it gets printed and reprinted and retold and retold and retold. Now I will say part of the other reason it happens is not just the mechanism of colonization. It's also the story itself. The way that the Greeks told stories was to make them very flexible.

[00:09:27]So originally the Odyssey probably was told a lot of different ways. And so as a result, we do have that one part of the ancient Greeks still with us in how we tell the story. So with that in mind, how did Christopher Nolan fail us? Well, Christopher Nolan takes this very complex story. He uses Emily Wilson's translation. She is the first woman to translate it into English, and it's a very good translation. I've read it. Um, but he also adds all of his own sort of parts of it. So, it's really Christopher Nolan's Odyssey and he adds he makes a lot of complications that really highlight how every retelling of the Odyssey since really all the times it's been retold is a reflection of the teller more than the Odyssey or the ancient Greeks. And so for example, he makes Adysius a very complicated man, a man with many faces, one who made many difficult decisions. Um, one who expects fidelity from his wife, but certainly doesn't give it to her as the likable, you know, goodwill hunting Jason Bourne.

[00:10:42]They wanted a Matt Damon who could not be less Greek. You know, Adysius would have been in the sea. He probably would have been a little bit different looking. Um he would not have looked like Matt Damon who you know is very sort of affable blonde all-American.

[00:11:02]He really wanted to lean into that aphability because for American audiences and for Western audiences and British audiences we see the hero is somebody you have to root for. The Greeks did not see Adysius as someone you had to root for. He was just an every man. So that framing already transforms it. The thing that we really need though since we are pretty much without heroes in contemporary society and mostly just being run by very fallible men is a fallible Adysius. That would have transformed this story. Then he adds that he wants to put it in basically not the classical Greece that we often see on film but in kind of bronze age Greece. I will say that like the um the armor that he's wearing is not what bronze age armor. It's much more like you know Corinthian armor. He has there's a lot of things and it's I mean I'm not like the people who are like it has to be historically correct.

[00:12:00]I understand why you make film making rules, but what's interesting is he picked up the things he wanted like Corinthian armor, but he left the world really dark and basically monotonous color-wise, which is untrue. It was probably a very colorful world. It is a conceit of western film making that the past was dark and depressing and our present is brightly colored. And it is so that he can really lend an air of gravitas to what he is telling. So we have this dark world with this all-American kind of junial guy. He he does play the character as complicated and his beard does get grayer through it. But underneath it all, we all see Goodwill Hunting. So then we have a lot of other complications like Helen who started all this is supposed to be the most beautiful woman in the world and also not a human and he cast Lepita Nyongo which has made a lot of people who've never read the Odyssey very angry but the thing is the ancient Greeks first of all probably would have known people from Africa and been sort of okay with them. their problem would have been the barbarians who they would have seen as Matt Damon and uh Christopher Nolan.

[00:13:16]So that's the first problem. My bigger problem is that he adds that her husband abuses her which is not in the Odyssey.

[00:13:26]Now it might be that Nolan is saying in our world beautiful women's husbands are pretty much [ __ ] and that could be it.

[00:13:34]But it is an interesting addition that he put in here because he does really um kind of make a point of it that she is both beautiful and living in a terrible situation. Next he continues to kind of have that story of women. For example, Cersei is really a very kind of sexless woman who turns people into pigs as the story goes, but um her depiction is much closer to a British raffleite depiction of a very pale woman, not the what the ancient Greeks would have conceived. So what you have in the two women is evil in two ways, right? She uh a beautiful woman suffers evil at the hands of men.

[00:14:26]A woman who is sexless causes evil for men being turned into pigs. And so it's a very um skewed vision of the feminine, but it is true of our society on some level. He is really showing where we are, not where we're going. And I think to me that is the interesting point.

[00:14:50]Nolan did not create an Odysius or an odyssey that will help us through to the future. There is not any postc colonialism in this. And so by casting figures like Lepita Nyongo or Zenaia as Athena and Elliot Paige as um Sinnon a soldier, I think the the the actors did a great job, but they actually only place themselves in the same positions their own um kind of complex personalities and personas in popular culture already place them. So uh a trans man Elliot is already always under fire in society and then he plays a soldier who it it's sinnun had a lot of problems and similarly Zenaia plays an awesome Athena but people are a little nervous that a half black woman would be Athena in public and she has always had a lot of commentary about her mixed race heritage and then of Of course, I just mentioned Lupitaonga. So rather than give us an odyssey that took us to a new place and gave us the chance to be on an odyssey to the future, Nolan really depicted either our past, our recent past or our present. Both of which really only replicate the truths of patriarchy and identity in our colonial era. And we are still in the colonial era. if Nolan is anyone to say, we're still in a place where whiteness is still at center and where we are sort of stuck. And so, in a way, I feel like we are Adysius maybe like two chapters in. We still have a long odyssey to get out of the identity and um class struggles that we are in thanks to capitalism and colonialism.

[00:16:59]And so Nolan maybe is just telling us we're still stuck here. Anyway, thank you very much for watching. Like, follow, and subscribe.