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There\u2019s too little sex and violence in Christopher Nolan\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>. And it matters. There\u2019s too little religion and supernaturalism, too. That the anodyne Epicureanism of Nolan\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> is widely construed as Nolan \u201cChristianizing\u201d Homer\u2019s story is testimony to the insipidity of much of what passes today for Christianity.<\/p>\n We\u2019ll start with sex and violence, and then get to religion.<\/p>\n First, though, a preliminary comment on film adaptations of books: Screen adaptations of books must necessarily alter the story. Even a three-hour movie cannot reproduce an epic poem the length of Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>. But the necessity of change does not grant a director or screenwriter carte blanche. Viewers (and readers) can ask about the film\u2019s selection of scenes from a book and whether the changes made by a director faithfully reflect a book\u2019s story.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also fine for directors to be inspired by a story to adapt it to other situations or thematic ends. That said, these directors often signal the significance of the changes they made by renaming the film. Apocalypse Now<\/em> (based on Joseph Conrad\u2019s Heart of Darkness<\/em>), O Brother Where Art Thou<\/em> (also based on The Odyssey<\/em>), or even Clueless<\/em> (based on Jane Austen\u2019s novel Emma<\/em><\/a>) are examples.<\/p>\n There is a middle area, however, in which directors are inspired by a book\u2019s story, and maintain formalistic elements of the plot, but want to tell a different story than the original. All adaptations do this to some degree. But there is a risk that a movie adaptation can be something of a bait and switch in which the director uses the cache of the original story to increase ticket sales from viewers interested in a cinema version of the original story but not necessarily interested in the director\u2019s insights unconnected with the original story.<\/p>\n At its core, much of the argument over Christopher Nolan\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> concerns whether, while drawing on the cache of Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> to attract viewers, he changed Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> in ways that matter. In other words, is Nolan\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> a bait and switch?<\/p>\n Christopher Nolan wants to speak to the topic of civilizational decline in his version of The Odyssey<\/em>. That\u2019s an interesting and provocative topic and I\u2019m personally interested in Nolan\u2019s take on the subject. But it\u2019s not what Homer writes about in his Odyssey<\/em>. In his adaptation of\u00a0The Odyssey<\/em>, Nolan gives the audience a kinder, gentler Odysseus, if not a more neurotic Odysseus, than Homer did. Even though I\u2019m more comfortable with the behavior of Nolan\u2019s Odysseus than I am with Homer\u2019s Odysseus, that comfortableness is a problem with the film\u2019s adaptation of the story, not a virtue of it.<\/p>\n The Cold-Blooded Violence of Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n There remains a fair amount of violence in Nolan\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>. The cyclopes, the attack on Troy, Odysseus\u2019s fight with Penelope\u2019s suitors on his return to Ithaca. Yet for all the action in Nolan\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>, Nolan dulls the sharp, even shocking, edge of violence in Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>. Homer describes a much less sympathetic Odysseus for modern audiences than Nolan does.<\/p>\n Start with the dramatic ending of Homer\u2019s story in which Odysseus clears out the suitors from his home. This is the conflict to which Homer\u2019s epic crescendos from the very start. Homer\u2019s story culminates with Odysseus exterminating the suitors. All of them. It is a brutal conclusion to the story.<\/p>\n For all the action of Nolan\u2019s fight scene in the film between Odysseus and the suitors, he blinks at the systematic, murderous violence of Homer\u2019s Odysseus. In the film, after Odysseus dispatches perhaps two-thirds of the suitors, the remaining suitors one-by-one take a knee in surrender, yielding to Odysseus and asking for quarter from his vengeance. Nolan\u2019s Odysseus extends mercy to them and accepts their surrender.<\/p>\n In contrast, in Homer\u2019s epic, Odysseus gives no quarter to any of the suitors, including those who surrender and beg him for mercy. In Homer\u2019s telling,<\/p>\n Leodes rushed in and caught the knees of Odysseus, Odysseus rejects Leodes\u2019s petition and kills him without mercy:<\/p>\n Looking darkly at [Leodes] spoke resourceful Odysseus: The only nod that Odysseus gives to the slain suitors in Homer\u2019s story is to chasten his wife against exulting openly at their deaths because \u201cit is not piety to glory so over slain men.\u201d Nonetheless, Odysseus has no qualms about what he has wrought; responsibility for the slaughter lies fully on the victims. They were \u201cdestroyed by the doom of the gods and their own hard actions. \u2026 By their own recklessness they have found a shameful death.\u201d<\/p>\n The extermination of the suitors without mercy does not exhaust the vengeance of Homer\u2019s Odysseus. He next instructs Penelope to \u201cassemble here the women [servants] who are in the palace, both those who have done me no honor, and those who are innocent.\u201d<\/p>\n In Nolan\u2019s telling, Odysseus fails to return home; he trades a new exile for the old one on account of his sins.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n In Nolan\u2019s screenplay, the fate of Melantho, Penelope\u2019s quisling maid, is left ambiguous; we last see her cowering under a table.<\/p>\n In Homer\u2019s telling, twelve of the 50 female servants in the house were disloyal, collaborating and cohabitating with the suitors. Odysseus tells his son Telemachos to have the twelve collaborators first clean up the bloody mess created by the slaughter of the suitors. Then, after they have cleaned up the house, Odysseus instructs his son to kill the traitorous maidservants:<\/p>\n After you have got all the house back in good order, Yet Telemachos thinks that Odysseus\u2019s order shows too much mercy<\/em> to the maidservants. Rather than \u201ccleanly\u201d killing them with the sword, in Homer\u2019s stomach-turning description, Telemachos instead hangs the women,<\/p>\n like thrushes \u2026 or pigeons, who have Finally, in both Nolan\u2019s film and in Homer\u2019s epic, Odysseus anticipates that the families of the slain suitors will seek to kill Odysseus to avenge their relatives\u2019 deaths. Nolan\u2019s Odysseus takes the opposite action of Homer\u2019s Odysseus in response to this threat: Nolan\u2019s Odysseus flees into exile in the face of this threat; Homer\u2019s Odysseus remains to fight and vindicate his return to Ithaca.<\/p>\n In Nolan\u2019s story, Odysseus and Penelope quite literally sail into the sunset. Nolan\u2019s exile of Odysseus is the capstone to Odysseus brooding over his (ostensible) sin for destroying Troy. Nolan draws on the trope of the scapegoat in concluding his Odyssey<\/em>: Nolan has Odysseus again returning<\/em> to exile to save Ithaca from the destruction of the suitors\u2019 blood avengers. As scapegoat, Odysseus carries the consequences for his sin against Troy (and the consequences of his totalizing vengeance against the suitors) away from Ithaca. Odysseus pays the price of his sin and of his love for Ithaca and home. He is forever exiled from the city he loves and to which he sought to return. (The \u201cscapegoat\u201d is a well-known trope in the Bible. See, for example, Leviticus 16.21\u201322 and Hebrews 13.11\u201313. Ren\u00e9 Girard argued for the broad, archetypal nature<\/a> of the theme.)<\/p>\n In contrast, in Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>, not only did Odysseus not flee from the blood avengers of the suitors, he and Telemachos \u201cwould have killed them all\u201d\u2014that is, they would have slaughtered all of the suitors\u2019 blood avengers\u2014had it not been for the intervention of Athena to stay Odysseus\u2019s and Telemachos\u2019s hands against them. Homer\u2019s story concludes with both sides making peace, and with Odysseus victoriously reestablished on the throne and at home in Ithaca.<\/p>\n The difference in the conclusion to Nolan\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> relative to Homer\u2019s is both significant and telling: The trajectory of Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> has Odysseus victoriously returning from<\/em> de facto exile to<\/em> home and throne. This is the sweeping telos<\/em> of Homer\u2019s entire epic. In contrast, in Nolan\u2019s telling, Odysseus fails to return home; he trades a new exile for the old one on account of his sins.<\/p>\n To be sure, the conclusion to Nolan\u2019s Odyssey is poignant and thought-provoking. But he gives us an insipid, hand-wringing Odysseus where Homer gives us a victorious, if disturbingly sanguine, Odysseus. It\u2019s a stark difference, and it necessarily affects the narrative arc of the respective story each tells from the very start. That Nolan\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> has a cyclops and a Circe is mere formalism; we encounter a fundamentally different Odysseus and narrative arc in Nolan\u2019s telling than we do in Homer\u2019s telling.<\/p>\n Nolan\u2019s odyssean melancholy derives from a neurotic Odysseus who wrings his hands over the conceit that his actions inaugurated the end of civilization.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n This is not to suggest greater sympathy for Homer\u2019s bloodthirsty Odysseus relative to Nolan\u2019s tamed Odysseus. It is a canard that classical literature is necessarily uplifting or edifying. But Nolan softens his Odysseus to avoid challenging modern sensibilities as Homer\u2019s more brutal Odysseus does. And that\u2019s a loss. One reason to engage literature from other times and places is that it exposes us to worlds and worldviews different from our own. Learning about them does not entail that we approve or embrace those worldviews. Nonetheless, they expand our understanding of the world even if\u2014or even because\u2014we are appalled by what we see and learn. I learn more from Homer\u2019s unexpurgated Odyssey<\/em> than I do from The<\/em> Odyssey<\/em> that Nolan calibrated for modern sensibilities.<\/p>\n Odyssean Melancholy<\/strong><\/p>\n Odysseus\u2019s victory over the suitors (in Homer) does not mean that Homer\u2019s Odysseus is uninflected with melancholy. Nolan\u2019s odyssean melancholy derives from a neurotic Odysseus who wrings his hands over the conceit that his actions inaugurated the end of civilization. (In a jarring anachronism, Nolan\u2019s Odysseus expressly refers to the end of the age of bronze.)<\/p>\n The melancholy of Homer\u2019s Odysseus, however, derives from the telling exchange in the epic that Odysseus has in Hades with Achilles\u2019s spirit. In that exchange, Achilles subverts the honor ethics of the Greeks. This ethic is a signal motivating force for Odysseus in Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>. It is a fascinating development for Homer to place at the very center of his story. Achilles utterly dismisses the value of being remembered by humans or gods after one\u2019s death for heroic deeds.<\/p>\n When Odysseus meets Achilles\u2019s spirit in Hades, he lauds Achilles as the most blessed man who ever lived and who ever will<\/em> live. Achilles is the epitome of the fulfilled life in ancient Greece:<\/p>\n No man before has been more blessed than you, nor ever will be. Before, when you were alive, we Argives honored you as we did the gods, and now in this place you have great authority over the dead. Do not grieve, even in death, Achilleus.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Achilles melancholy reply, however, is shocking. He tells Odysseus that his afterlife in Hades is misery; he would prefer to be a slave to a subsistence farmer than king of the dead:<\/p>\n O shining Odysseus, never try to console me for dying. I would rather follow the plow as thrall to another man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on, than be a king over all the perished dead.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Nolan is correct to pick up on the melancholy theme in The Odyssey<\/em>. But the sources of Odysseus\u2019s melancholia differ entirely in Nolan\u2019s telling and in Homer\u2019s telling.<\/p>\n The great Achilles\u2019s melancholy response to Odysseus\u2019s praise in Homer\u2019s epic casts a pall over the whole of the Greeks\u2019 honor\/glory ethic. The implications of Achilles\u2019s comment for Odysseus (and other Greeks) are that Odysseus can at best eke out what pleasures remain in the days he has remaining in this life in small pleasures of domestic life with Penelope. That is the only joy he has in the face of an unremittingly grim future after death. This thematically underscores the need in Homer\u2019s story for Odysseus to reestablish himself in his home with Penelope; that is the only glimmer of happiness Odysseus can attain in Homer\u2019s epic.<\/p>\n Sex in Nolan\u2019s Odyssey<\/strong><\/p>\n The omission of much of the sex in Nolan\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> relative to Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> is perhaps not as pivotal to the poem\u2019s narrative arc as Nolan\u2019s decision to tame the violence in Homer\u2019s story; nonetheless, the omissions are telling.<\/p>\n First, while not narrowly limited to sex, in Nolan\u2019s telling, Helen\u2019s abduction from Sparta and the violation of hospitality\u2014\u201cZeus\u2019s law\u201d\u2014was merely the pretext for the Trojan war and was not its true cause. Rather, the real motivation of the war was economics: King Menelaus desired to eliminate Troy\u2019s dominance over the trade routes. That is, money, not sex, was the real cause of the conflict. Given the significance Nolan ascribes to \u201cZeus\u2019s law\u201d of hospitality throughout the film, his substitution of a crass economic motivation for the violation of Zeus\u2019s law as the cause of the war against Troy is jarring.<\/p>\n More directly related to sex, Kalypso held Odysseus captive as an object of her sexual obsession. \u201cBy nights,\u201d Homer writes, Kalypso would force Odysseus to sleep with her \u201cagainst his will.\u201d<\/p>\n Kalypso subsequently retorts to the god Hermes when Hermes informs her of Zeus\u2019s command to let Odysseus go, \u201cYou are hard-hearted, you gods \u2026 when you are resentful toward the goddesses for sleeping openly with such men as each has made her true husband.\u201d<\/p>\n Amusingly then, while Odysseus maintains that \u201call he pines for is to go back to my house and see my day of homecoming\u201d\u2014note again how Nolan\u2019s exile of Odysseus at the end of his story dramatically changes the narrative arc of Homer\u2019s epic\u2014he nonetheless spent his final night with Kalypso \u201cwithdrawn in the inner recess of the hollowed cavern, enjoy[ing] themselves in love and stay[ing] all night by each other.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite being held against his will as Kalypso\u2019s sex slave, Odysseus is not so aggrieved that he would deny Kalypso a departing tumble for the road, apparently.<\/p>\n So, too, in his interaction with Circe, hospitality required that he sleep with her in Homer\u2019s epic: \u201clet us two go up into my bed so that, lying together in the bed of love, we may then have faith and trust in each other.\u201d<\/p>\n In the cases of both Kalypso and Circe, Odysseus was, as it were, coerced into bed with the women (except perhaps in his last night with Kalypso). Yet when sex was a matter of choice, Odysseus was able to resist temptation to continue his return to Penelope: He declined an offer of marriage to Princess Nausikaa of the Phaiakians despite Nausikaa\u2019s desire as well as her parents. (And sleeping with Princess Nausikaa without benefit of marriage would have been an offense against the king and the gods.)<\/p>\n Religion and the Gods<\/strong><\/p>\n Finally, the gods are present and pivotally acting characters throughout Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>. They intervene personally and repeatedly in the affairs of men. Through Athena (and Hermes), the gods provide Odysseus with warnings, disguises, and protection. Nolan naturalizes all of this. When Odysseus asks (the largely silent) Athena, \u201cWhy can\u2019t the gods speak in a way we understand,\u201d Nolan\u2019s screenplay has Athena responding that the gods communicate through such natural events such as thunder and smiles. The actions and activity of the gods are human projections in Nolan\u2019s materialistic Odyssey<\/em>.<\/p>\n So, too, Nolan turns \u201csacrifice\u201d into a rarefied event relative to what it is in Homer. To wit, in Nolan\u2019s telling, a sacrifice matters only relative to the size of what the offeror gives up to make the sacrifice. (Hence, the significance of Agamemnon\u2019s sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, at the start of the war against Troy, and the significance of Odysseus sacrificing his homecoming and going into exile instead in atonement for his sins at Troy in Nolan\u2019s story.)<\/p>\n As with the violence and sex in Homer\u2019s Odyssey, Nolan muzzles religion in his telling of the story.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n In this, Nolan misses how sacrifice is woven into daily life in Homer\u2019s story, and in ancient life more generally. Specifically, the ordinary butchering of a domesticated animal typically included a sacrifice for the gods. That is, a portion of the animal was offered to the gods, but just a portion. The remainder of the animal was consumed by the people. So woven into daily life was sacrifice and meat that the Apostle Paul needs to address the problem in his epistle to the Corinthian church (1 Co 8.13, 10.20\u201322, 25\u201328). (In the Old Testament, when Israel traveled with the tabernacle, every<\/em> domesticated animal needed to be butchered and offered at the tabernacle [Leviticus 17.3\u20139]. A portion of the butchered animal was sent up to YHWH in smoke, a portion went to the priests, but the bulk of the animal was then consumed by those offering the animal [Leviticus 7.15\u201318].)<\/p>\n As with the violence and sex in Homer\u2019s Odyssey, Nolan muzzles religion in his telling of the story. The gods are not deeply intertwined in routine and daily life in Nolan\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> as they are in Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>.<\/p>\n Nolan Presents an Epicurean Odyssey<\/em><\/strong>, Not a Christian Odyssey<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n It is this last point, that the gods are not deeply and personally involved in the daily life of Nolan\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> that is offered at times to suggest Nolan gives us a Christianized version of the Odyssey<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n
and spoke to him in winged words and in supplication:
\u2018I am at your knees, Odysseus. Respect me, have mercy\u2019;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
\u2018\u2026 Many a time you must have prayed in my palace, asking
that the completion of my sweet homecoming be far off
from me, that my dear wife would go off with you, and bear you
children. So you cannot escape from sorry destruction.\u2019
\u2026\u00a0With this he cut through the neck at the middle,
and the head of Leodes dropped in the dust while he was still speaking.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
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lead all these maidservants out of the well-built palace \u2026
and hew them with the thin edge of the sword, until you have taken
the lives from all \u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
flown into a snare set up for them in a thicket \u2026
so their heads were all in a line, and each had her neck caught
fast in a noose, so that their death would be most pitiful.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
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