The tales that were

Photo by Constantinos Kollias on Unsplash

I haven’t talked a lot about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey here, in part because while I have some issues with the casting—and how it’s fine to take European stories and make them “diverse” but, to do that with anyone else’s stories is too great a sin to be tolerated—I haven’t seen the movie yet.

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And I won’t until it comes to streaming, in part because I don’t want to find out that my herniated disc doesn’t like movie theater seating the hard way, but mostly because the armor looks like crap and, as a historical armor nerd, that’s more than I can tolerate spending money on.

I was the same way with The Last Duel.

Anywho, The Odyssey…

As I said, I haven’t seen it, but I will. However, I’m even less excited than I was. Sure, there seem to be some voices on the right finding themes that align with conservative values, but there’s something else that seems to be lurking there, too, which was described in this piece from The Federalist :

Other, less enthusiastic reviewers have more deeply analyzed these deviations from Nolan’s source material and exposed them for what they are. Writing for Compact Magazine, John Byron Kuhner concedes that the material is Homeric, but “the connective tissue and the overall shading suggests guilt, and in particular an imperial, tonally British version of white guilt. Think of it as the ghost of Kipling’s White Man’s Burden taking up his abode in the conscience of a Bronze Age Greek.”

This is not to say that giving Odysseus survivor’s guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder isn’t a plausible, if hopelessly modern, interpretation of Homer’s poem, and Kuhner concedes as much. But it’s not how Homer told the story. Writes Kuhner: “Homer carefully begins Odysseus’s journey on Calypso’s island, where he lives with a beautiful goddess and has no responsibilities yet is still unhappy, and ends it on Ithaca, where everything is a struggle and a responsibility: but that is where true satisfaction resides. Nolan has come to a different conclusion, however: It was a mistake to go to Troy. It was a mistake to win that war. And being king of Ithaca is not worth the responsibility. So Nolan ends the film with Odysseus and Penelope leaving.”

So yeah, maybe casting black actress Lupita Nyong’o as the legendary “white-armed” beauty Helen of Troy or Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page as one of the Greek heroes are relatively minor blips of wokeness in a sprawling epic. But the larger problem is Nolan’s reinterpretation of major themes in The Odyssey , which doesn’t just change the visual presentation of the material, but its meaning. What it amounts to isn’t just artistic license, but deliberate deconstruction.

This is what happens when you try to reframe a story for a modern audience. The idea is that this audience doesn’t want or need grand heroes who are just happy to be home and to take on the responsibility of kingship after battle. The audience can’t accept that the idea of a just war in Ancient Greece was different than what we might accept as a just war today. They can’t accept that not everyone who goes to war comes back haunted by their actions.

Stories are more than entertainment. They’re a time capsule that can show us a great deal about the past. Oliver Twist describes the conditions of the poor in Victorian England. Red Badge of Courage tells us of what it was like to try to atone for cowardice during the Civil War. And The Odyssey tells us what the Greeks valued in their heroes.

And we need heroes. We need tales of great men and women doing great things. We need the hack-and-slash heroes who take their enemies apart by day, feast and drink by night, and we need the quiet heroes who fight the noble causes with their minds rather than their brawn.

We need them all, because heroism is necessary to a stable society. Without heroism, who would rush the mass shooter and save lives? Who would run into the burning building to save a small child? Who would do the things with high risk, little chance of reward, simply because it’s the right thing to do?

The deconstruction I’m seeing in this discussion, and in many other places, is the idea that the classical hero has no place in society. He must be damaged, broken, or vile. He can’t be more than us. He has to be one of us, fallible to the core, because that’s what we are.

But stories don’t have to reflect reality exclusively. Stories can and should also be aspirational. They can make us think we can be more. We can be better.

I don’t know if that’s the role Homer’s stories played in Ancient Greece, but I know that we need those kinds of heroes. Odysseus was the brilliant king, the man who devised the Trojan Horse that allowed the Greek forces to end the war once and for all. His trials and tribulations on the return home were many, with many points where he could have quit, but didn’t until he returned home to Ithaca. That’s more than aspirational; it’s inspirational.

I mean, life sucks sometimes, but at least you’re not having to lash yourself to a ship so you can withstand the song of a siren. A cyclops isn’t eating your crew. An IRS audit sucks, but not quite as bad as sailing between Scylla and Charybdis. How many of us have found our own version of the Land of the Lotus Eaters and had to pull ourselves away from it?

Modern filmmaking seems more interested in taking away this aspect from many stories. It’s bad enough when it’s their own original storytelling. At least then, though, it’s their tale to tell.

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But when it’s something like The Odyssey, removing these elements is far worse. These were the things Homer wanted readers and listeners to know, to feel, to think about on their own trip home, though it would never take them a decade.

And while our time is different, some things are still the same. We still need heroes, and we still need stories that show heroes doing heroic things, even if it’s just sitting back on the throne after everything he’s been through.

After all, going through the hell of war, then the hell of that trip back, sure makes it look good to walk away from everything, but a hero does what’s needed, not what’s attractive, and that means taking back up his role as king.

The tales that were are just as important as the tales that are. They need to be told, and if you want to retell them with more modern trappings, it can be done without trying to erase the original from the minds of men, nor the lessons they may impart on a modern, falling world.

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