Can a film give us rationality? Consider one person’s 3-hour “Odyssey”.
• When is war justified?
• What moral boundaries do we owe our enemies?
• What transgressions merit the ultimate punishment?
• Who, in the end, determines civilization’s common set of values?
Johan Pablo
Long Beach, CA
“I saw it on Sunday, and all I can say is that it was the movie we needed. Nolan gave us space to mourn our fallen state and with it the desecration of kindness and honor, allowing us to recognize the monsters we've become. Now, back into our disguises.”
You can tell the Trumpish maga cult don’t read. They think the Odyssey is actual history…
This is a story set 3,000 years ago that features Greek gods, cold rivers, a cyclops, a multi-headed sea monster, and a witch who turns a crew of men into pigs.
Theoxenia isn’t a word that gets thrown around a lot these days, but it’s at the core of both ancient Greek, Hebrew, Christian, and Iranian religions (among others) and traditions and The Odyssey. It means that there are gods wandering the Earth disguised as humans, and therefore we have an obligation to treat others — particularly strangers or people we don’t know or understand — as we would want to be treated, ourselves. With compassion, honor, and generosity.
Trump broke a 3,000-year-old sacred law — and triggered a nightmare
Christopher Nolan completely reimagined the Trojan Horse to make the famous deception feel more believable.
Let This Be the Final Word on Culture War Feuding
Ms. Waxman is a contributing Opinion writer.
What a nothing burger the whole “woke” controversy over “The Odyssey” turned out to be.
Many thousands of people lined up to see the movie this past weekend, selling out IMAX screenings — so many people, in fact, that the film made $264 million globally on its opening weekend, an astounding result for a three-hour epic about Bronze Age warriors. Critics have called the film a classic, and the online rabble-rousers, egged on by Elon Musk,who dismissed the film over so-called woke choices — like the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and the transgender actor Elliot Page as the warrior Sinon — have all pretty much shut up, or been shut up by the film’s overwhelming success.
Thankfully, a livelier and smarter debate has emerged in its place, one that’s a lot more relevant to Western society in the midst of an identity crisis. When is war justified? What moral boundaries do we owe our enemies? What transgressions merit the ultimate punishment? And who, in the end, determines civilization’s common set of values?
Suddenly, there’s an actual conversation worth having.
“The Odyssey” tackles these questions through an examination of the abuse and neglect of xenia, the Greek gods’ sacred code of hospitality that requires treating strangers as honored guests. Odysseus’ clever Trojan Horse trick, which led to the fall of Troy, violated xenia by misleading the city’s residents into believing they were receiving a gift. In Christopher Nolan’s retelling, this deceit metastasizes for his hero into a larger moral failing — one that haunts Odysseus as he makes his treacherous, 10-year journey home.
Odysseus’ betrayal of xenia is not the only failing that plagues him. He’s also consumed with shame over abandoning his family and losing the lives of all of his men. In Mr. Nolan’s film, these issues weigh on Odysseus in a way that many scholars and historians say is scarcely found in Homer’s original.
“The Odyssey” isn’t woke, wrote the conservative commentator Michael Brendan Dougherty on X. “Its view of war and the gods is closer to mine than it is to Homer’s.” The Odysseus portrayed in the film, he pointed out, “is morally horrified by war,” while in Homer’s version “war is a normal and potentially glorious enterprise.”
According to the classicist Emily Hauser, “Here is a modern-day Hollywood hero who learns remorse for the atrocities he commits and spends much of his time trying to excuse having lost all his men, and retrospectively (with a final journey, not in Homer, to pay homage to them) earning their forgiveness.”
This mapping of contemporary Western values onto the plot of a Greek epic poem is the true artistic project of Mr. Nolan’s film, and it makes for a better political debate than anything about colorblind casting or imagined D.E.I. Today, all the prerelease noise around the film’s ostensible wokeness seems predictable and tiresome, the kind of drivel that drives our exhausting culture wars, a ritual of the online mob that insists on rehashing the same right-versus-left, Hollywood-versus-Main-Street argument that film audiences clearly ignored.
In an interview with Jon Stewart, Mr. Nolan discussed the link between his vision of Odysseus and Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of his previous, Oscar-winning film. “What so stayed with me in that movie,” said Mr. Stewart, “was the weight that Oppenheimer must have felt when he saw the reality of what he had created.”
Mr. Nolan readily agreed, explaining how he deliberately brought the gravity of “Oppenheimer” into his new project by exploring the question of what happens when a man participates in something too destructive to be fully understood.
This doesn’t make the film woke. It makes it worthy of thoughtful discussion.
In the months before the film’s release, Mr. Musk gleefully fed the culture wars by accusing Mr. Nolan of “desecrating Homer,” and by affirming an online post that claimed “The Odyssey” was part of a left-wing plan to “destroy Western Civilization and everything that helped create it.” This week, Mr. Musk announced that before year’s end, there will be another full-length version of the “Odyssey,” created using his artificial intelligence program Grok, which he promised would be “true to the art of Homer.”
None of us are holding our breath. We’re all too busy engaging in the much more interesting debate that Mr. Nolan’s film has already inspired.
Thank the gods: Nolan steers clear of Homer’s epic gardens in The Odyssey
Another island stop takes Odysseus to the palace garden of Alcinous, king of Phaeacia, where fruit trees produce pears, apples and figs all year round © British Museum Prepping for the film, I have just noticed a problem. In the poem, Calypso is singing and weaving at her loom with a golden shuttle when Hermes arrives. Scented wood is burning in her hearth, logs of cedar and what Homer calls “thyon”. Later Greek botanists located thyon in North Africa and Libya, applying the name to the citron tree whose finely grained wood was so highly prized by rich Romans as a wood for tabletops that they made it extinct. If Calypso was burning citron on her fire, she had already begun its eco-decline. As a goddess, she might have brought it all the way from North Africa and Homer, her poet, might have known a North African tree, even in c.720BC. I wonder, however, if by thyon he referred to something else, a type of juniper perhaps, before the citron tree was known to Greeks. Odysseus leaves Calypso’s island for another, legendary Phaeacia, which is also in Neverland, but not in Nolan’s film. His meeting there with young Nausicaa, the king’s daughter, and then his farewell to her are episodes of the highest humanity, but the film ignores her too. Guided by Athena, he is taken by Homer to her father Alcinous’s palace and enters the hedged garden in front of it. It is a wonder, the most admired garden in poetry and fiction for the next two thousand years. Like Calypso, Alcinous would never be bothered by hosepipe bans in summer as two springs run in its centre throughout the year.
On Calypso’s island Ogygia, Homer refers to the landscape of alders (above) and poplars, varieties of which grow well in wet ground in Greece © Getty Images Alcinous’s garden produces pomegranates year round — as in Paradise and many a modern supermarket © Getty Images Pomegranates, pears, apples and figs grow in its big orchard and miraculously bear fruit in every month, like trees in the Christian idea of Paradise or the counters of modern supermarkets with chilled and imported fruits all year round. Olives ripen too, a rare reference in Homer to olives as food, and grapes are being dried to be turned into wine. Beyond their vines lie planted beds, “prasiai”, which have a “gleam”.
In other contexts prasiai can refer to flower beds, but in Alcinous’s productive garden they are probably beds of vegetables. I cannot agree with those who have argued that they are beds of leeks, as if Alcinous anticipated that leek-loving Welshman, Shakespeare’s Owen Glendower.
This marvellous garden is described in the present tense. One great scholar has argued that this tense shows that the garden is a later insertion which Homer moved from another context, perhaps a speech. I do not believe that notion, either: the garden is described in the present as if it is still alive in Neverland, though it is not on general release on Imax screens this month. One of the poem’s last great scenes of recognition takes place in the garden of Odysseus’s father, Laertes, and is of the son identifying the trees his father named for him as a child. ‘Odysseus Observing Laertes’ by Jan Styka (1858–1925) The third garden caps it and rounds off major themes in the poem, though Nolan left it out. It, too, is an orchard, the one in which Odysseus finds his elderly father Laertes after slaying the suitors of his wife Penelope. Without his son, old Laertes had withdrawn in grief and distress to his orchard far beyond the palace on Ithaca. It is there that his long-lost son Odysseus watches him at work. Like Laertes I have avenues of pears in my garden, ornamental Chanticleer pears, however, not varieties grown for fruit. Like Laertes I garden there in scruffy clothes, though without his humble cap of goatskin on my head. Laertes wears leather guards on his legs, to the puzzlement of archaeologists who consider that they are versions of the metal greaves worn as armour but not yet attested when Homer composed. I, too, wear leather knee patches, without needing armour as a model: they are the knee pads sold for gardeners who kneel or work among thorns.
A Roman reader assumed that Laertes was spreading manure round his pears. Actually he was scratting on the soil, just as I do while wondering if my excellent son, too, will return, not from the fall of Troy but from travels round investments in young tech companies throughout the world.
Like Laertes, I have avenues of pears in my garden, ornamental Chanticleer pears, Pyrus calleryana — though unlike him, I refrain from wearing a goatskin cap while gardening © GAP Photos/Elke Borkowski
Odysseus “tries out” his father by telling him one last tale of lies about his own identity, but then he reveals who he is. His father wants proof, so Odysseus recalls to him how once he took him out as a boy into the orchard and named the fruit trees which would one day be his. Pride of Aphrodite? Penelope’s Wonder? I think Laertes just pointed to the trees involved, but Odysseus remembered how many. It is the poem’s last great scene of recognition, one based on trees in an orchard. Recommended Robin Lane Fox Would the corgis love the new Queen Elizabeth II Garden in Regent’s Park? The scene has been trailed in advance and is surely Homer’s own. I will not spoil its poignancy, which is heightened by Laertes not yet recognising Odysseus, but remembering him from so long ago and wondering “if he was ever really so”. In the Iliad, the earlier poem, Homer had already invented moving pictures, described for us as scenes which the god Hephaestus was crafting on a metal shield for Achilles and which Homer’s poetry brings to life as we look on. His eye so often seems filmic before its time, using close-ups, long shots and other tricks of style. He would be fascinated by watching a film, but he would never call it “the” Odyssey, his own masterpiece, one so much richer and subtler. Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
Sharon Waxman is the founder, chief executive and editor in chief of The Wrap.
