New Big Picture - American Odyssey

[00:00:00]So, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey came out, and it made, I don't know, [ __ ] all the money, much to the bewilderment of people who get their media analysis [music] exclusively from Twitter, YouTube, podcasts, and Fox News, and had been assured that everybody was going to boycott the movie because a black woman and a transgender person appeared in it for like 5 minutes a piece, [music] probably less than that. In all seriousness, people who believe what the internet tells them being wrong about something is in reality about as surprising as the actual fact of a big-budget Hollywood epic from one of the biggest directors and a major star adapting one of the most famous stories ever written being an obvious hit. But, as it happens, what's particularly funny to me is that the audience most looking for an excuse to rage against this particular feature over partisan politics actually would have found plenty of reason to do so simply by waiting to watch and understand it on a layer even slightly deeper than the presence of a non-white person in the cast, which is in itself its own kind of funny. The fact is, while Nolan's Odyssey is in many ways one of the more traditionalist takes on the material real anyone has attempted, it also turns out to be a very topical work, and a lot of its more eccentric aesthetic [music] decisions feel unmistakably like pointed jabs at the modern political world of its own audience. Art, [music] yes, even big-budget movies, is usually about things. This is something I ended up touching on in my initial review of the movie, but since it involved getting into some spoiler territory, I decided it was better to cut some of that out and leaving, of course, some of the attendant connective tissue from the review parts and expand on it in a separate piece of its own. Uh so, here's that.

[00:01:34]>> [music] [music] >> To the degree that you can have spoilers for a movie about mythology that's thousands of years old, uh to the extent that Nolan's take on Homer can be said to have a big fancy new twist [music] on the material, it's that the movie is actively engaging with the fact that if If even try to fit The Iliad, The Odyssey, just about the basic outlines of the Trojan War story and its major players into what relatively little we know about the Bronze Age history in that part of the world, and in particular the story of the Odyssey into actual geography, none of it makes any goddamn sense. Specifically, the fact that if we even assume that the places described in the Odyssey and the Iliad are where later historians decided they are, which is an entirely [music] different historical and archaeological can of worms unto itself, the roots of traversal and general geography of this story are completely baffling.

[00:02:25]It is one of the template stories where the machinations of gods and literal winds of fate just kind of have to be employed because otherwise there's no accounting for why anyone goes the direction that they go or does what they [music] do when they get there. But instead of just writing it off as, "Look, Bronze Age people were primitive and stupid." or just opting to take it at face value because it's old and therefore supposedly important, it feels like this adaptation is approaching the problem as just that, a problem, a mystery to be solved. If you're trying to imagine what the tone of this thing might be, my main tone structure comparison here would be imagine like early Terry Gilliam dark fantasy comedies, you know, Holy Grail, Time Bandits, Jabberwocky, but like with all the jokes and ironies sucked out because [music] this is Christopher Nolan after all. So, like emphasize on the weirdness and the bleakness, the unstuckness, just the understanding of what it must have been like in the Bronze Age to be [music] just some guy stranded like hundreds of miles from your own island, you know, where you really could just see like a new kind of tree you'd never seen before or a slightly taller guy and that would be enough to scare the goddamn [ __ ] out of you and make you run back to your boat and say, "Nope, nope, just write there be dragons on the map and nobody come back here for a whole [ __ ] century." Like in that context you can understand how something like the Odyssey becomes a real account. Not that that's the take the movie has, there are real monsters in this one, real creatures and stuff. It's not so sure about the gods, that seems to be how Nolan is splitting the difference.

[00:03:48]Like the Cyclops and and monsters and the giants, that's all there. Gods, that might just be in everyone's head, which I think is a pretty interesting way to square how mythological and otherwise realistic take on the Odyssey might be.

[00:04:01]A Cyclops? Yeah, that might have been around back then. Zeus? Yeah, probably not. In point of fact, we only really see a manifestation of one goddess explicitly, and it's Zendaya as Athena.

[00:04:11]And even there, we only ever see her as perceived by Odysseus, and the implication is that he's projecting the physical form of a woman he saw at a key point in the recent [music] past onto her manifestation. Otherwise, the gods' presence exists in the human characters' belief in them, specifically whether or not they can [music] see the potential for other people to be the gods walking among them behind their eyes as this omnipresent reminder that Zeus's chief commandment was that the Greeks had to show hospitality to and as strangers, travelers, and houseguests. This, of course, is the load-bearing civilizational touchstone that by implication Odysseus may have violated by winning the Trojan War through deception involving a false peace offering, and which the suitors at Ithaca have also exploited by nesting around his home like vultures [music] waiting to claim his throne. Not to put too fine a point on it, but while these simple-minded cretins shrieking about diversity casting remain as obtuse as ever, the Odyssey is, in fact, as bluntly political and topical as many of Nolan's other features. And the main point it's sounding off most, well, pointedly about is that adhering to the norms of civility, society, decorum, dignity, and the proper way of behaving, especially when it comes to leadership and even war-fighting, actually are pretty important. And that if we start breaking or ignoring these norms, we might just be inviting disaster and collapse onto civilization itself. I wonder what could have invited that line of thinking lately. In any case, doing this as a more or less traditionalist version of the Odyssey allows Nolan to employ a flashback structure for this, turning it into essentially a mystery story. That if we assume that even parts of the story were based on real things that happened to real people at some point in real time, and there are things that just don't line up, why did the story you told and retold incorrectly in the first place. The flashbacks in question being the Muses, [music] other veterans of the Trojan War, and Odysseus's own memories are covering all the expected beats. We see some of the Trojan War, the Trojan horse, the Cyclops battle, exploring all the other weird islands, Circe, the giants, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, the forbidden cattle. Realizing I kind of butchered a couple of those names. Sorry. Like I said, it expects everyone knows the basics of the Odyssey. It also has the same countdown clock as the original story with the suitors back home in Ithaca, but it also adds another one with this looming idea of the people of the sea, which is this real thing from Bronze Age [music] history that there were these various raids different parts of the world by this still somewhat unknown by history. Most historians think they now know who they were. The movie has a theory as well and that all of the different Greek states, [music] we don't know who these guys are, but they are attacking everyone all up and down the coast and we need to get ready [music] for this. That's another reason why the queen really should hurry up and pick a suitor so we can get ready for what will probably be the next big war, but we don't know who these people are, where they're coming from. We hear about it while Odysseus is out at sea. They keep showing up in places like, "Oh, we thought you might be the people from the sea. No, we don't know who those guys are. Those must be other guys. What's going on? This We better get back home.

[00:06:57]Apparently, there's this new enemy we've got to fight."

[00:07:05]And when you look at it, the Odyssey is already an ideal story from the classical Greek canon to do this with because everyone, including Odysseus, keeps trying to figure out why it's taking him too long to make a not that long voyage back home from Troy is the [music] key part of that story. In the original version and most subsequent adaptations, the general thrust is, "Well, he and his men kept pissing off the gods and/or various agents of the gods, so they pushed them off course and strand them as punishment." Most of the various adaptations across centuries make their own amendments as to what made the gods mad or not this was just or unjust in accordance with the morals and messages of the storytellers of that era. So, how does Nolan choose to square the circle in his version?

[00:07:58]Odysseus just didn't want to go home because he had PTSD moral injury for what he did during the Trojan War.

[00:08:06]Yeah, that's that's the very basic, very straightforward allegorical thrust of what it comes down to in this one. As it ultimately turns out, Matt Damon's Odysseus was only actually doing the lost between different monster islands part of the Odyssey for like three of the 10 years, but then he got {quote} trapped with Calypso and lotus-induced partial memory loss for like 7 years, but then he more or less admits that he didn't really want to remember who he was or where he should be going because he realized as soon as he did it that the Trojan Horse and the sacking of Troy were war crimes, and he's both punishing himself for this and terrified of returning home and potentially finding out that he won't be able to face anyone after that. And yes, this is also the aha ultimate reveal as to why the Greeks can't figure out who the people from the sea are. It's been [music] the Greeks themselves as perceived by the rest of the world after Troy the whole time.

[00:09:04]>> Oh, don't look so shocked.

[00:09:06]>> Or for those of you sitting all the way in the back, this is why pretty much everybody, even the British actors, Irish actors, Norwegians, Asians, everybody in this movie about a proud and powerful civilization that turns on itself and implodes following a protracted and unnecessary war of choice, speaks in contemporary American accents.

[00:09:27]>> Wait, is this [ __ ] play about us?

[00:09:31]>> [music] [music] [music] >> Mhm.