Odyssey, Movie, Christopher Nolan, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Modernity,
I read the Odyssey forty-five years ago as a very naïve 17-year-old
preparing to go off to college – not knowing that college would be my own Odyssey. I also had a basic misunderstanding of the
text that Christopher
Nolan’s new movie (Wow!) helped correct.
Odysseus (Matt Damon) was not just lollygagging
on the way home – he was confronting and dealing with obstacles to his return
from a war that, at least according to Nolan, he hadn’t wanted to engage in to
begin with.
The movie version of the Odyssey differs from the text in
numerous ways – and I have this on authority of many reviewers, but also of the
classics scholars at my University (I am clarifying here that I am not solely relying
on my decaying memory of a misreading of a text here). While I rely on others for the context and, to some extent, the original text, it is I, myself, who disagree with the critics that Nolan
shouldn’t refresh the Odyssey. I think
that, just as Shakespeare
refreshed others’ texts to address the political realities of the England he
lived in, Nolan should do the same. I
also think that Nolan, intentionally or not, made his refreshes both in the
spirit of and in alliance to the original purpose of the text, at least as I
understand what the classicists told me. Further, as my reluctant brother-in-saw proposed, this is a myth to begin with; we are not alterring history!
In the wake of the movie, I have learned a ton of Greek
history that I had not previously known.
The Iliad and the Odyssey tell the story of the fall of Troy – one of
the leading Mediterranean centers during the first golden age of Greece – the bronze
age. During this period of time, the Greeks
had their first written language – crude, but useful for tracking trade, and
they had a kind of civilization that we can guess at based on the archeological
evidence. Historians have surmised that it was a
palace culture, with the palace of the epicenter of all trade. If you produced beans or shoes or wool, you
delivered them to the palace. Anything
you needed was then supplied by the palace.
This culture, if indeed this is the way it was organized, relied
on a benevolent, if autocratic leader and its limitations were that there were
no connections between people except through the center -so if the palace fell or the leader
was corrupt, the system would fall apart, and, apparently, the entire system
did fall apart – perhaps hastened by the fall of Troy, a critical and
problematic trade hub, but also serving as a communication and trade center
between hundreds of city states like Ithaca.
As Homer and Nolan tell it, Representative leaders and men
of many of the affected city states were gathered under Agamemnon’s ( Benny Safdie) leadership
to attack Troy, apparently in retribution for the theft of Agamemnon’s little
brother Menelaus’s (Jon
Bernthal) bride Helen (Lupita Nyong'o) (who,
according to Shakespeare, anachronistically quoted in the movie, launched those
thousand ships or, as Nolan adds, at least 500 of them). The war was mostly a bloody siege and multiple battles on the plains outside the city as described in the Iliad. It lasted for ten years and ended only when
the wily Odysseus devised a plan to leave a parting gift of a gigantic horse
when the Greeks apparently left the battlefield. Of course, the hollow horse contained men who
emerged after being taken inside the walls of Troy. They emerged at night from the horse at night to open the gates and
let the Greeks in to slaughter the Trojans.
After this, in the dark ages that followed the bronze age,
when the proto-alphabet was lost, before the second golden age, when Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, and then Alexander the Great would help create, benefit from and forward the
Greek foundation for Western Culture that came to be known as Western Civililization,
reciting the epics was a way of keeping alive a vision of an idealized world –
one in which heroes, born of Gods and watched over by them, led states that
could work together to achieve greatness.
And one of the critical elements in those two poems was that the leadership
of the heroes was dependent on the will of the people, of the polis, to
govern. That is, the democratic
principles that would flower in the second golden age were preserved in nascent form from the
first golden age in the amber of Homeric poetry.
Troy was strategically located near a narrow strip of water
that was essential to trade in the ancient world, much like the strait of
Hormuz in our current world. One of Nolan’s
theses is that the heroes’ moral compromises, including the malicious use of a
gift filled with the seeds of destruction and Agamemnon’s decision to sacrifice
his own child Iphigenia (the closer to the heart, the greater the sacrifice) to
get favorable winds to sail to Troy, along with the destruction of a critical
trade center and, presumably, seat of civilization, led to the dark ages. The failure of the heroes to function heroically,
then, pre-dates a dark age.
The Odyssey is also an anti-war movie. The book was not. It is also an anti-religious movie. The book was not. When Odysseus disavows the Gods, one of my
classics friends stated that the hair on her arms stood up. And her point is well taken – Odysseus is the
only character in the film to converse with a God (Athena (Zendaya)) and the Dead. Nolan is telling a modern tale, and it is a
godless Odysseus who leads us from the ancient to the modern world, and we are
led to wonder if Athena is actually a goddess or merely an hallucination – a kind
of Post Traumatic ghost haunting Odysseus through the rest of the movie – trying to
help him get back on morally solid ground after losing his way in precipitating
a battle where women were raped and civil society destroyed.
We are moving from an objectively defined world, one
where our accomplishments are honored, and these, in turn, are driven by striving
to be virtuous by living up to an externally imposed moral code, to a
subjectively determined one, where people are driven by internally felt drives
such as love and attachment; in Odysseus’ case feelings towards his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway)
and son Telemachus (Tom
Holland). This transition was
one that Shakespeare first imagined, but Freud put into motion by listening to
the ideas of his patients rather than simply diagnosing them based on objectively
determined criteria.
In creating a modern movie, one that predicts our own coming
dark ages, Nolan creates a hero that looks like Homer’s and one who, like Homer’s,
is fighting like mad to get home (not lollygagging as I mistakenly thought –
though both Nolan’s and Homer’s heroes taking up with multiple women along the
way home offended my modern suburban sensibilities, if not my psychoanalytically
informed ones). Odysseus is not
returning home to regain and retain what is rightfully his, but to assuage the
guilt that he feels for having abandoned those he loved for so long. And when he returns home, he sees his task as
restoring the order that was disturbed by his violation of the laws regarding
civility, generosity, and honoring the dead.
Further, he chooses to engage in the peaceful (by Greek standards)
transfer of power – recognizing that a legacy is one that extends into the next
generations – we do not simply take all that we can in any span of time.
OK, I said I wasn’t going to rely on my memory, but I don’t
think either the Iliad or the Odyssey depict the actual fall of Troy. But the movie does. It is at the center of the film and the formation
of Odysseus’ moral quandary. He develops
the Trojan horse, he lies to the person who would have held his confidence
about his presence in it, and he feels the moral responsibility of the rape of
the Trojan women and the destruction of their Temples. He feels, the reviewers point out, PTSD –
something that will not be invented for 4,000 years.
More importantly, Nolan is trying to induce PTSD in us. We are meant to feel the waste, the loss of a
moral center, the trials of warfare. In
the wake of World War II, one of the elements that prevented nuclear warfare
was rumored to be the Russians’ experience of the brutality of the war with
Germany. The leaders of Russia knew what
a post-apocalyptic world looked like and they did not want to create it
(again). The question was whether
subsequent generations would feel similar concerns. And that question is very much alive today. Nolan's answer is to deputize us all through the narrative of the film - we will realize that the destruction of war is a dangerous thing to unleash.
So, one of the factors leading Odysseus to become woke is
that he has survived the trauma of war – but in order to do that, and to survive
the trauma of losing his men as he worked to get them home (I will skip that
part of the story – though some of the most interesting scenes are here,
including Cerce (Samantha
Morton) exposing the men’s true gluttonous selves – removing their “costumes”
of being human to reveal them as the pigs they are).
After the war and losing all of his men, Odysseus can’t face
his memories, and Calypso (Charlize Theron)
helps him forget by feeding him lotus flowers (this helped me realize why so
many boats are named Calypso – I assume they were named by divorced men fantasizing
about a woman feeding them lotus leaves to help them forget their first
marriages). Ready to acknowledge his
part in bringing about the devastation on multiple levels, including the chaos
at his home (palace) that has gone unmanaged and been filled by indolent and
incompetent suitors who have not had a mentor (OK, his sone Telemachus does get
a little bit of time with the original Mentor – Mentor himself – but not enough
to figure out how to succeed his father and govern in his stead), Odysseus returns, disguises himself so that
he can check out the situation (and his return is also a return to the opening
scene in the film, with the suitors maltreating a beggar who, it turns out, is
Odysseus himself), and devises a succession plan.
Odysseus’ succession plan is different in the film than in
the book. In the book, the hero reinstates
himself in his right and entitled place – he becomes again the King of Ithaca
and order is restored. In the modern version,
Odysseus cedes his place to his son. He
does the heavy lifting to get him there – he is the one who continues to
violate the law of Zeus by killing the houseguests/parasites/suitors. He then sails off with Penelope to the West,
as she had proposed they do when he was called up for the Trojan war.
If Odysseus had just followed Penelope’s advice to begin
with, all of this mayhem could have been avoided. Without their best general, and the one that finally
came up with the plan that led to Troy’s downfall, the Trojan war would never
have been won by the Greeks. The old
system could have stayed in effect – which would have prevented (in my reading)
the renaissance following the dark ages that allowed Greece to become our moral
and philosophical cornerstone.
Sometimes things need to come to a head, despite the turmoil
that will ensue, so that we can pursue a new course. Nolan’s hero is invested
in creating a better world for the generations that will follow – generations that
will spring from the loins of his son. Nolan has rewritten ancient history, so we know he is talking about our
history. Is he hoping that our current
leader will let go of power so that the sons of liberty can move our country
and with it, the world, forward? Are we
to learn that we should take care of our own mess, steer our children clear of
our work, and cede the business of governing to them as we head into exile (we
could just call it retirement) without burning the place down?
Nolan is notoriously cagey about interpreting his work,
leaving that to the viewer (a very modern, or even post-modern, approach). If I were to take this down to the micro
level, I think that my retirement(s) from professional life might also include
a retirement from my paternal role in the family; or, at an even more micro
level, I need to get over myself and my aspirations and to turn towards
enjoying and living more fully in the moment, living in the pleasure of
appreciating the setting sun pulling me forward into those remaining days that
I have, each more precious than the last, less for what I might do and more for
what I might experience.
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