The Odyssey: The Original Fantasy and Nolan's New Film

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Hello and welcome to Myth Makers.

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Myth Makers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.

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And to kick off our new season, I thought we would take a look at The Odyssey.

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This has obviously been the big film of the summer.

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But I wanted to think about it as a fantasy work that has spread through the ages, influencing so many other stories, but also then going on to look at what they did in the film itself.

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Now, the key facts about the Odyssey are that it is written by somebody called Homer.

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Ah, hang on a minute.

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We don't know who Homer is.

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People usually depict him as an old guy with a beard.

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Yeah.

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But it could be Homer is many people or it could be he is the poet who collected it together from a set of oral traditions.

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And this collection happened around the 7th or 8th century BC.

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So that's a very long time ago, almost, well, almost 3000 years ago.

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So we're talking about a very old work.

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What is it actually like to read?

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I've only ever read it in a verse translation, so I'm not talking about the original ancient Greek here.

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For that, I will refer you to all those classicist experts who have been making waves with their not-so-complimentary reviews of the film.

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But when you actually go to the book, what you get is an epic poem set in 24 books.

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And it uses a rhythm called the dactylic hexameter.

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So this is a kind of beat.

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You may have learned a little bit about beats when you were thinking about Shakespeare when you were at school, because he uses iambic pentameter.

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Homer is using a different beat.

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They try to reference this in the film, if you notice, when they had the bard standing up for a stick and striking the stage as a way of marking out time.

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So that was a nice nod to the original story.

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The plot is focused on what happens after the Trojan War.

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But actually, that gives the wrong sense because it's not linear.

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As it did in the film, it starts with the people waiting behind in Ithaca.

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So that part was correct.

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And then it's told in a series of retrospective accounts very often.

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So later on when we meet Odysseus for the first time, we meet him on Calypso's Island and he escapes from there or gets away from there eventually.

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He then goes to another court where he tells a lot of the tales that we read.

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which happened earlier.

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So things like meeting the cyclops, meeting the sirens.

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So it's quite, it folds back on itself very often, the story.

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It's a story with stories set within.

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And obviously it has the famous encounters that we all know.

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What they did in the film is they put them more or less in chronological order.

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So they teased out, not the order in which they come in the poem, but they put it in the order in which Odysseus encountered them.

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And you probably saw from the movie version, but you can tell from within it that there are very strong themes of the desire to go home.

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The idea about what is sacred hospitality?

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How do you break that?

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How do you respect that?

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And.

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and also the idea of the aftermath of a war, what happens to people at the end of the war.

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The big focus that is missing from the film and is very clear in the book is the role of the gods.

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So actually a lot of the conversations are going on in another court, which is the court of the ancient Greek gods.

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who are pulling the strings behind, you know, they are the ones deciding when a storm comes or who he meets or if he's forgiven.

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And so that kind of thing.

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What the Nolan film did is he internalized that.

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And we only saw, well, we saw Athena, who could have been a projection of the Matt Damon character's war guilt, grief.

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And we heard, we had the sound of thunder and we saw the wrath of the sea.

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So we've got Poseidon and Zeus sort of being shown in the natural world.

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But in the film, they're sort of naturalized, whereas in the book, they are characters who are arguing over the fate of this particular cunning warrior.

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So the story of the Odyssey has also been known for years and years and years, and bits of it have been retold by the Roman writers.

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So you get the next big civilization coming along.

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So Virgil, for example, retells some of the Trojan stories using the Greek text.

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models.

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So it does stay around.

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And then of course, there is a period of history when Greek and Roman literature was less well known in the western parts of the world that I come from, so Western Europe.

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And it was rediscovered in a sense,

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in the medieval period going into the Renaissance.

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And here it begins to have an effect on other works of art again.

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Of course, there's a whole world of pictorial art, sculptures, paintings, and so on.

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But I'm thinking mainly in terms of literature.

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So what we have is

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a resurgence these days of a fascination with Ulysses, Odysseus.

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Ulysses is the Roman name for him.

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The one that I sort of go to first in the sort of early modern period is the Tennysonian wonderful poem, Ulysses, which has the line to strive to seek and not to yield.

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The idea that after Odysseus, Ulysses has returned home, he goes on a final adventure.

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And if you thought the ending of the Nolan film was a little bit odd with Penelope and Odysseus going off into the West, very like the ending of Lord of the Rings.

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It did feel like Frodo and Gandalf or Galadriel, maybe, going off into the West to honour Odysseus.

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the war dead.

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That isn't how the book ends.

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The book ends with a sort of discussion about creating peace out of war.

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So it has quite a rapid end.

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It doesn't have this elegiac end.

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But anyway, what Nolan is doing there perhaps is nodding, I'm guessing, nodding towards the feeling that Tennyson evokes in his poem Ulysses.

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It's not long, that poem, and it's well worth a read.

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So do go and have a look at that as a little bit of

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added flavour to explain why he chose that particular ending.

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I thought it was a shame in the film that the staging of it was so like the end of Lord of the Rings.

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I mustn't, I can't have been the only person thinking that.

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I think that was an odd ending, particularly as Odysseus had spent a lot of time saying it's the end of civilization as we know it, the people of the seas, which could have been him, of course.

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I think there was this understanding that maybe he realized he was the breakdown in civilization.

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But anyway, he was leaving poor old Telemachus, who only knew his dad for about five minutes with a massive amount of problems.

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I think what they were intending to say was Telemachus is now grown up.

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He's now able to control his kingdom and the old order is changing.

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Yielding place to new, the Tennysonian line.

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I see what they were going for.

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I'm not sure it was achieved.

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It felt a bit unbalanced.

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But anyway, I did enjoy the film.

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I'm not slating the film.

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But I thought there were some odd choices, shall we say.

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Anyway, where was I?

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So yes, the other things that the Odyssey has inspired in...

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Our time is, of course, most famously, I think, Ulysses by James Joyce, using the same name, which is a modern version of that Homer's epic set over a single day in Dublin, following the structure and the adventures of Homer's epic series.

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Now, I find Ulysses quite a difficult book to read, but probably what I should do, having kind of struggled my way through it in order to tick it off on my book list, I should now go back to it with the Odyssey next to it to actually explore that better.

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Because one of the parts of Ulysses, which is so difficult, is that it is...

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there is no it's very hard to see a plot and if the plot is actually provided by an older work it will explain why it's so difficult to follow so there we go this is a when the this 3 000 year old work can be a key to help you read a modern masterpiece so definitely time to revisit ulysses perhaps i will read it in bits because i try to read it like sit down read it like an ordinary book

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Didn't totally enjoy the experience.

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Anyway, and then going on, we've got books like the women have moved in in a big way into this space.

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So we've got the Penelope ad by Margaret Atwood, her of the, well, does Margaret Atwood need any explanation?

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No.

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But anyway, she has retold the story from the point of view of Odysseus' wife, hence Penelope in that.

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And that's what a lot of women have done.

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Women writers, they have said, what about the women in these stories?

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And I did notice that in the...

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Nolan film, he was trying to foreground the experience of the women.

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So we have that really interesting speech really from Penelope herself saying, why is my service as queen not good enough?

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Why do all these horrible suitors feel they deserve the throne more than me?

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and saying to her son, look, you're just a boy.

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I'm the mature woman who's been running the country.

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Said in better words than I've just paraphrased.

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So, perhaps again, I'm guessing that Nolan has taken on what the modern female novelists have been doing, Margaret Atwood, but also a book that came out more recently, Margaret Atwood, which was 2005, but Circe by Madeleine Miller.

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She wrote The Shield of Achilles, which is a really wonderful book about Achilles.

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And it tells the story that came before this, you know, the Iliad.

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It tells that from the point of view of Achilles.

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And that's a great book.

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But Cersei is looking at the witch character played by Samantha Morton in the film, the one who changes the men into pigs.

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And so she is looking at it from that.

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And of course, you've got the Pat Barker, Women of Troy and Archer,

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And quite a few other stories that are set in this classical world period.

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So it is definitely something that gets published, by the way.

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If you're looking for a way of writing fantasy that connects to something that people already have a handle on, going to classical myths is what a lot of people have been doing of late.

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That could itself be a problem in that the market might feel glutted.

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That is the problem.

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but it's also not a bad idea.

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Or you could do what James Joyce did and think, okay, what would this be like today?

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That would be a fun area to explore.

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Anyway, just a little bit about Cersei and the Cersei in the film.

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It was one of the most interesting episodes in the film, but not...

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It was...

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It was a little bit weird.

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I mean, Cersei is weird, but there was unexplained elements that didn't get an answer in the film.

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So you had to be really quick to notice that the dear Odysseus shot turned back into a man face down in a ditch.

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I think it was a man.

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It was a naked torso.

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Yeah.

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I suppose it could have been a woman.

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Hard to tell from... You only get a glimpse.

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But anyway, a person turns back into a deer.

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And then obviously those large cats, the lion, the tiger, the panther, aren't native to that island and they're sort of in thrall.

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So the idea is that maybe they were previous visitors turned into the cats.

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But what kind of visitor are you who's turned into a cat?

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big cat like that.

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Because the one about all men are pigs kind of thesis, where she turns the hungry crew into pigs, that feels more at one with the sort of view that Cersei has of men.

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So I found that maybe there's some

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Maybe I didn't hear all the dialogue or maybe there's a missing scene or something.

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I was just intrigued by that.

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I thought, what are you doing there?

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What is that?

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What's being said about that?

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Because obviously it's the people who accept her for hospitality who are turned into these things.

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And what the classical world would have understood is that is breaking Zeus's hospitality.

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Yeah.

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That was repeated again and again during the film.

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The reason why the suitors are allowed into Ithaca is because of the practice of hospitality.

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And then I also enjoyed what might have been the only joke in the film, which is the crow.

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The crow who seems to give a bit of a warning to Odysseus, who turns out to be Cersei's sister.

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And that Damon, Odysseus says, why is your sister a crow, still a crow?

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And Cersei says, oh, we get on better that way.

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Which made me laugh.

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I could have done with more jokes.

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I did find the whole piece very stressed.

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Everybody was stressed the whole time.

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And there was very little moments of light and enjoyment and fun.

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So, for example, I'm sort of now moving into my review of the film in a way.

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When you read the poem, it's very clear that Calypso is a sexy interlude of

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on a beach.

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And though he is enthralled to her, he is also having revels with her.

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That's the rather straight-laced translation in the poem version I'm reading.

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I wonder what the original Greek is.

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Anyway, he's having fun with this sea nymph, sweet sea nymph.

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And

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And he hasn't forgotten his wife at all.

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He says to her, ah, yes, but I have a wife at home.

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She's not up to your standard.

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She's not as good at looking as you, but she's my sweet wife at home.

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Again, maybe that's a joke.

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The tone you could imagine in a sort of drinking hall, that would be a bit of a joke in the way this might have been said in the original.

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Whereas by the sort of trajectory of the traumatized war hero slash perpetrator, I think, who certainly unleashed horrible violence on a city, that he is so traumatized by experiences in this amnesia and he doesn't seem to be living together.

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very aware of anything.

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He's collecting the wood for the raft and in a bit of a day saying, oh, surely I had a crew.

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So the way that's done is very different from the poem, which takes away the element of this being Odysseus' journey home wasn't all

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terror.

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There was this period of entrapment, but also a sort of desert island idyll in other ways.

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I could see why Nolan's chosen to do it that way.

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It certainly means that when he does return to Penelope, we think, oh yeah, they're back together again.

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Whereas if you'd done that, oh, I fell in love with somebody else or not fell in love, fell in lust with someone else, it would have reduced that as a sort of

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ending point, but it is a place where it departs from the original book.

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And that's one of the reasons why some of the classicists were saying it was less sexy than the original poem.

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That's why these kind of choices, because Nolan is emphasizing the mental state of Odysseus and everything is internalized.

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The gods are internalized, the struggles are internalized.

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So you can do that, of course, and it then becomes not a fantasy film.

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But because we've got these magical elements outside of him that are not challenged, so you've got the one-eyed cyclops who's a giant.

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That was a weird CGI with a sideways eye.

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I don't know if you noticed that.

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Wasn't keen.

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But anyway.

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And then you've got the Cersei's magic, turning people into pigs.

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I thought actually the way that was realised from a fantasy point of view was really good.

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So she's not casting a spell and waving a wand, but...

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And they're not sort of turning just because they've drunk the magic potion.

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She actually physically manipulates them into it.

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I thought that was very visceral and a really clever way of showing a spell in action.

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I like that.

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And then, of course, the other island of giants, which was felt a bit random, didn't seem thematically to tie in very well, unless he's saying that for some people you are like ants and you treated the red Trojans that way.

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I can make a kind of rationale for it, but I found at the time it a little bit.

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Extra.

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Wasn't sure about his place.

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And missed out the Lotus Eaters.

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There is the Lotus Flower on Calypso's Island, which doesn't come there.

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But anyway, that was a nod to it.

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So I did enjoy the film.

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I did find the pacing moved quite quickly because there was no longer of seven years here and what have you.

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It moved quickly.

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But I would say there was one serious criticism I had, and that's to do with the violence of war.

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And this is where I'm challenging the Nolan thesis itself.

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So Nolan is saying this is about Odysseus feels he is not fit to go home in some way because he, by doing this trick, which may be against the gods, what is sacred, something that they say is dedicated to Athena,

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And leaving that poor guy, Sinon, on the beach, not knowing, you know, that deception, all of that

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And then seeing the violence in Troy.

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And here, closer to your ears if you haven't seen it yet, there is someone who he sees being beheaded who is, then you see a shot of the statue of Athena being beheaded.

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So you don't see the beheading, but the implication is she's been beheaded because the statue is.

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And he conflates that person, that victim, with Athena.

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Zendaya is that random woman in Troy anyway so what I wanted to say here was even though they're internalizing this violence he doesn't come to grips with the fact that the horrors of modern war often include sexual violence rape and murder the two things together he ducks that entirely and

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And I think the only sort of vague nod to it in the background is that on the beaches, you do see some women being led off in chains.

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So classical legend tells us that the royal women of Troy and others were taken off to become the slaves of the Greek leaders.

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And...

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Famously among them is Cassandra.

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She is the prophetess who is cursed by the fact no one believes her prophecies.

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She can see her death.

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She can see what's going to happen to Troy.

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And she's taken off by Agamemnon, who is like the Darth Vader figure in this film in his black armor, and is murdered with him.

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when they returned home because prior to this, Agamemnon has sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia in order to get a favorable wind.

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And his wife, Clytemnestra, who happens to be the twin sister of Helen, so played in the film by the same actress, Lupita Nyong'o, she kills him as a sort of mother's revenge character

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And if you're interested, this then becomes the Orestes story and how he's chased by the Eumenides because he avenges his father by killing his mother.

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Anyway, so it's, you know, family drama.

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The Greeks invented it.

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Anyway, so that element of violence, sexual slavery, and violence done by men to women in war, oddly in the film doesn't really appear.

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Maybe that's a certification thing.

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But the reverse does appear.

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So, and I found this really strange.

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So we do still get Odysseus being sort of held captive by Calypso as a sort of prisoner on her island.

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She's drugging him as a sex slave of sorts, I guess.

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And then finally you think, oh, I've got to let him go.

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So there's a kind of slavery element there that happens to the women of Troy in far more awful, graphic way.

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But there is one scene of sexual violence, and that is when Clytemnestra, after bathing her,

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Her husband sort of starts to climb on top of him as if they're going to have a reunion of the marriage bed kind of thing.

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And she stabs him in the chest.

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And it is done in almost a sort of sexualized way.

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So the sexual violence is upon men in the film.

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And for me, that is a problem.

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I don't know if he realized that's what he was doing, but it did feel that he was ducking a big issue because surely one of the things that Odysseus must be feeling terrible about is the damage done to the innocent civilians, the rape of women and children, and not just their murder.

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So...

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Yeah, that weakened the film for me, that plus the lack of humour.

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So what I did like about the film and the reason why I thought it was worth watching was the imagery that it's left me with from a fantasy point of view.

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I liked the Scylla and Chavodis sort of way that was depicted.

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And I also liked the fact, the trick that he had to force his crew to mutiny to do that.

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I really enjoyed the Ithaca setup with the way Penelope was behind a screen and sort of came forward to sort of take charge from time to time, but yet was also trapped.

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I thought that was really good, the way that was expressed.

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And I did enjoy the performances.

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So there was a lot to like.

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It's not my favourite Christopher Nolan film.

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I wasn't a great fan of Oppenheimer, actually.

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I mean, I've watched it, but...

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in the Barbenheimer thing.

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I kind of preferred Barbie a bit.

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Oh dear.

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But I did like his Dunkirk because what I felt there, it had multiple stories, but he managed to really keep the heart.

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And I'm not sure about where I felt the heart was in the Odyssey.

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This could be partly a problem with the source material and our distance from

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these characters.

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Probably I felt most for Telemachus, or Telemachus, however you say his name.

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And the dog was great.

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The dog was brilliant.

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I was amused to hear an interview with, I think it was Matt Damon and Tom Holland saying, when they were on set with that dog, they all had to app their

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up their acting game because the dog was out acting them.

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Yeah, he is a threat, a four-legged threat.

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Sweetly came out of retirement to take his role.

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So I enjoyed all of that.

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And I thought that was

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you know, the performances were strong.

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But this problem, this fly in the ointment of the overarching thesis is the one I've been left worrying about.

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So it's why I think it's not actually, it's a good film and not a great film in my sort of pantheon of films.

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Yeah.

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Anyway, I'll be really interested to find out what everybody else felt about the film.

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I'm sure there's lots of opinions out there.

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And also, if I've missed, I'm sure I have missed other great works which are inspired by the Homeric legends, do add that in to the comments because it'd be interesting to look at one of those.

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in future perhaps we should do one on Ulysses I need someone Irish as my podcast partner if I do that won't I anyway so that was a review of the history of the Odyssey in brief followed by a quick review of the film itself so thank you very much for listening

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Thanks for listening to MythMakers Podcast.

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