It feels silly to say for a 3000 year old story, but this essay does contain spoilers for Nolan’s adaptation. For those who still haven’t seen it, you have been warned.
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Three weeks.
Three weeks & still I am consumed by it.
Consumed by how a director plays with it. Consumed by how a mother & son trace the whispers of it. How an army inspired & set fire to it. How homesick sailors–loyal to their king & pilot–cannot help but spread as they sail for a home where he–with his fame for cunning & wit–must learn to reckon with it.
Three weeks & two occasions since, I am too. Haunted, not just by the tale or its telling, but the question Odysseus posed. Two decades gone & ten years lost on his quest for home, his is a question for all men be they cloaked in a suitor or beggar’s clothes:
“What if he knew exactly what he’d done?”
It seems so simple. So quaint & unsurprising. A question so ready to fulfill itself with dotted lines waiting in rhetorical prophesy.
Much ado about Christopher Nolan’s interpretation of Homer. Of his work with all its flaws & all its glamour. Of his screenplay with all that it cuts & gathers. Of his vision with all of its modern lenses for ancient wonders. Of the gallery heralding triumphs on one end & decrying ruin on the other.
The Odyssey is a tale as rich in rewards as it is in riddles. A story worth telling across the ages. A narrative as worth it to see in cinemas as it is to sing aloud with the sages.
A journey replete with lessons we can remember amid a history we have forgotten & the consequences of a Bronze Age struggle more pertinent than ever.
To know the story of the late Bronze Age is to know what only be told from remnants. To understand a world from collected pottery shards & shattered arrowheads. To estimate the makings of an age from baked clay tablets & the stone layers mixed with ash.
It is to recognize an era marked in commerce & diplomacy from Mycenae to Hattusa & Babylon to Egypt until it came to be seized by the grip of conflict. To witness a collapse catalogued by Sea Peoples & failed harvests. A world that was until it wasn’t.
Equally, to know Homer’s Odyssey is to know but one piece of an eight-part cycle, It is to hear the lyrics composed from songs told & retold over centuries in nameless halls by countless mouths until alphabet was found by the hand of author we cannot even ascertain to be real.
It is to recognize that what have is all that survived as library after library burned & the cities fell. To appreciate whatever history incurred within the words has become legend & whatever figures interred within the characters have transformed into parables.
And yet, despite these natural limits, there is still I have found in researching for parallels. A joy I have found in detailing the mystery without stripping it.
For every description of boar tusk helmets & testimony of thighbones burned in Homer, an archaeologist has found its counterpart. For every headache given by Achilles to Agamemnon, another linguist has deciphered a letter on the exploits of Piyama-Radu raging on the plains of western Anatolia.
For every scene set in the palace of Priam, another layer is discovered on the site [Schliemann] declared to be Troy & what the Hittites called Wilusa. So what then can be said of stories of lost pilots sailing home & how they match records of rapacious sea warriors raiding from Cyprus to Achaea?
Standing here, the stories we thought we knew are born again. Recontextualized & reimagined in ways closer to when they were first fashioned.
When, in Nolan’s telling, Penelope & Telemachus seek news of Odysseus & find only tales of Sea Peoples, what they might fail to recognize are the deeds of lost Achaeans.
Where Homer sings of the violence visited upon the shores of giants & witches, Nolan bears witness to a world where foreigners are no longer welcomed as honored guests but as swine costumed as men.
And when Odysseus returns home in the rag of a beggar, recounting his greatest trick to his greatest beloved, he no longer heralds the tale of great warrior but the lament of a veteran to a slaughter.
Thereupon rests Nolan’s great success: he challenges audiences to consider their heroes alike their myths. To question whether the legends we save have confused the chronicle of sorrows for the romance of an epic.
When Odysseus opines the fate of Troy, he forces us to weigh which laws we hold sacred & which pacts we are prepared to break. He defies us to find what glory can be left behind in a world laid to waste.
And we are left to wonder on the greatest of our society’s great assumptions:
That the direst of dire threats to our way of life could arise from anywhere else but us.
–The Casual Rambler
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