Surveying the Filmed Adaptations of Homer's Odyssey
In 1956, I was seven years old, and my parents took me to see the new movie Ulysses, with Kirk Douglas starring as Ulysses (the Romanized name for Homer's Odysseus). I was fascinated by the adventures of Ulysses. But I remember feeling slightly uncomfortable with Ulysses's raging violence.
In 1967, as a college freshman, I read Homer's Iliad and Odyssey for the first time, and I began to understand why I found Homer's heroes disturbing. I wondered, why did these men think fame and honor were to be earned through cruel violence in war that often lacked any moral justification?
In 1977, I taught a course on The Iliad in the Basic Program in Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago. Since all of us in the class had read Socrates' criticisms of Homer in Plato's Republic, some of our discussions were about whether those criticisms were fair, and particularly whether Socrates was justified in arguing that the guardians in the best city should not read Homer's poetry because its models of conduct--the gods and the heroes--were immoral.
So when I saw Christopher Nolan's Odyssey and read about the debates over the movie, I began to think again about the strangeness of Homer's Bronze Age gods and heroes and about how they have been depicted in American popular culture.
I have come to two conclusions. First, Nolan's movie is actually a Platonic revision of Homer's Odyssey. Second, the intellectual response to the movie shows how thoughtful--even philosophical--American popular culture can be in considering what counts as a virtuous life.
CENSORING HOMER
As far as I can tell, the movie has been well received by audiences and most of the movie critics. But I've noticed that the harshest criticisms are from people who have read Homer's poem, and they criticize the movie for how it distorts Homer's poem to the point that the original meaning of the poem is lost.
Critics have identified four kinds of distortions. First, while the world of Homer's Odyssey is full of gods, in Nolan's film, people refer to the gods, but the only member of the classical Greek pantheon who appears is Athena; and consequently the story of Odysseus is an almost totally human drama.
Second, while Homer's Odysseus wins glory through cruel violence without ever feeling guilty for the injustice of what he has done, Nolan has Odysseus confess to Penelope his crippling guilt. He has an extended flashback to the atrocities that the Greeks committed during the fall of Troy, and he tells Penelope about the guilt he feels for the Wooden Horse episode:
We left them a gift, an offering of peace that they took into their home. We violated all that is held sacred between people and turned a fight into a hunt. To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire. . . . What if [Odysseus] knew, that very night, as he walked through the fires of anarchy and pain and in the days of sweaty celebrations that followed . . . what if he knew exactly what he'd done?
In The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn--who is the author of one of the best translations of Homer's Odyssey--observes: "this resounding speech . . . sounds nothing like the heroes of Homer--who, after all, gleefully vaunt over the mutilated bodies of their slaughtered enemies--but a lot like the heroes of Christopher Nolan movies. . . . Nolan has merely remade Homer's hero in his own image, just as he has imposed on Odysseus's adventures values utterly foreign to Homer."
The third distortion of Homer's story in the movie comes from what some critics have identified as Nolan's "woke" feminist interpretation of the Odyssey as showing the toxic masculinity of male dominance in war, politics, and marriage. This biased reading of the Odyssey could have come from Nolan's reading of Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, and indeed Nolan has stressed the importance of Wilson's translation as an influence on him. Wilson was the first woman to write an English translation of The Odyssey. And many readers have seen a modern feminist slant in her commentary on the book and in her translation.
The fourth distortion is in Nolan's changing Homer's story--perhaps most importantly in Nolan's giving the story a new ending. Homer's ending comes when many of the people of Ithaca start a civil war in rebellion against Odysseus because the suitors of Penelope killed by Odysseus were their sons. Athena orders the fighters to stop the war. The Ithacans drop their weapons and go back to the city. But Odysseus chases after them to continue the war. Zeus then sends down a thunderbolt, and Athena orders Odysseus: "Odysseus, you are adaptable; / you always find solutions. Stop this war, / or Zeus will be enraged at you." Homer then writes: "He was / glad to obey her. Then Athena made / the warring sides swear solemn oaths of peace / for future times" (24.448-549).
For thousands of years, many of Homer's readers have found this ending unsatisfying. Nolan's alternative ending has Odysseus giving up his throne to Telemachus and leaving Ithaca with Penelope, seeking peace in exile, sailing west to honor the dead. The pair muse that people will know the Trojan war only as a song, the songs will forget Odysseus' mistakes, and a new civilization will arise to replace the old Bronze Age civilization.
I believe that all four of these distortions in Nolan's movie come from the influence of Wilson's Odyssey--both her translation and her commentary in the Introduction. I also believe that Wilson's criticisms of the Odyssey ultimately coincide with the criticisms coming from Plato's Socrates in The Republic, which have to do with the immorality of Homer's gods and heroes. And while I have no reason to believe that Nolan has read Plato, Nolan could have absorbed Plato's critique of Homer from reading Wilson's book, which motivated him to write a script for his movie that is in effect a Platonic revision of The Odyssey that corrects its moral failings.
This would explain why Nolan plays down the importance of the gods. Wilson says that Homer's gods "are self-interested beings, whose interventions in human lives are motivated primarily by their own desires, whims, and preferences rather than by a consistent commitment to uphold moral law" (30). Nolan probably anticipated that such gods would be confusing to his modern audience, who assume that divine powers must uphold moral law, and so he pushed the gods largely offstage except for Athena.
Actually, as Wilson indicates, many readers of Homer have seen evidence in his poems that the gods--or at least Zeus--generally enforce moral conduct by punishing the bad and rewarding the good. After all, The Odyssey begins with Zeus defending the justice of his providence before an assembly of the gods. He points to the example of Aegisthus, who took the wife of Agamemnon and then killed Agamemnon when he came home from the war, but then Aegisthus was killed by Orestes, Agamemnon's son. Zeus says that he sent Hermes to warn Aegisthus not to take Agamemnon's wife or murder him because surely Orestes would grow up and then take his revenge. Aegisthus was foolish in rejecting this good advice. "But now his death has paid all debts" (1.31-45).
Similarly, Odysseus often invokes the justice of the gods in taking vengeance against Penelope's suitors. He tells them: "You did not fear the gods who live in heaven, and you thought no man would ever come to take revenge" (22.37-40).
I am reminded of John Alvis's book Divine Purpose and Heroic Response in Homer and Virgil: The Political Plan of Zeus (Rowman and Littlefield, 1995). Alvis argued that both Homer's Zeus and Virgil's Jupiter (in The Aeneid) show divine providence in the service of justice. Alvis saw the principle of divine providential justice explicitly stated by Virgil, and then he tried to find this in Homer, although it is only "barely implied in Homer" (259). This is an important issue for Alvis because "the gods must be known if human conduct is to be measured against the most authoritative standards" (vii). I have written about this as posing the question of moral cosmology versus moral anthropology: must the moral law be grounded in a divine cosmic law, or can it be grounded in a human natural law?
Nolan's Odysseus feels guilty for violating that moral law through his unjustified violence against the Trojans. But this is not clear in Homer's poem. Wilson directs our attention to a scene in Book 8 of The Odyssey where Odysseus asks Demodocus, the Phaeacian bard, to sing the story of the Wooden Horse. Inspired by a god, the bard sings the story of the Trojan Horse--of how it tricked the Trojans into bringing the Wooden Horse--full of Achaean fighters--into the city, and of how Odysseus and the others poured out of the horse and slaughtered the people of Troy. Now, one would think Odysseus would be happy to hear this song of his glorious triumph. But instead, he weeps!
Odysseus was melting into tears; / his cheeks were wet with weeping, as a woman / weeps, as she falls to wrap her arms around / her husband, fallen fighting for his home / and children. She is watching as he gasps / and dies. She shrieks, a clear high wail, collapsing / upon his corpse. The men are right behind. / They hit her shoulders with their spears and lead her to slavery, hard labor, and a life / of pain. Her face is marked with her despair. / In that same desperate way, Odysseus / was crying. No one noticed that his eyes / were wet with tears, except Alcinous (8.521-535).
Wilson suggests there are two possible interpretations of this passage:
The simile compares the desperate weeping of Odysseus, a military conqueror, to the grief of a woman who is a victim of war, a woman whose husband is dying and who knows that she herself, and her children, will soon be led off into slavery by the victors. Perhaps the comparison suggests that Odysseus himself feels some kind of deep guilt over the suffering that he himself has caused, in his instrumental role in sacking not only Troy but may other towns and settlements. Or perhaps the simile works to downplay Odysseus' responsibility for the suffering he has caused, by inviting us to see him as a suffering victim, even in his role as the sacker of cities (68-69).
Nolan preferred the first interpretation, and so he has Odysseus feeling deeply guilty for what he has done, and the image of the suffering woman who is a victim of war becomes the flashback memory of Odysseus stunned by the cruel desolation that he caused in leading the sack of Troy. This interpretation supports Nolan's new ending for the story because it shows Odysseus seeking some atonement for what he has done by going into exile from Ithaca and giving up his throne to his son.
This interpretation might also explain why Plato's Socrates in telling the "myth of Er" in The Republic says that in the afterlife the soul of Odysseus "from memory of its former labors had recovered from love of honor," and it had chosen to live "the life of a private man who minds his own business" (620c). Elsewhere Socrates says the philosopher "minds his own business" (496d). It seems that Odysseus had learned from his mistakes in living as a glory-seeking warlord, so that in the afterlife he chose the obscure private life of a Socratic philosopher. At least that was Allan Bloom's reading in his "Interpretive Essay" in his translation of The Republic (p. 436).
And yet Wilson's second interpretation of the simile comparing Odysseus' weeping to the weeping of the woman suffering in war is well supported by the textual evidence--the idea that this simile invites us "to see him as a suffering victim, even in his role as the sacker of cities." Alcinous asked Odysseus to "please explain why you were crying, sobbing your heart out when you heard him sing what happened to the Greeks at Troy" (8.576-578). Odysseus answered him by telling him "my own sad story" of the many ways he had to suffer in his adventurous travels to finally achieve the fame and honor. His storytelling stretched over four books of The Odyssey--from Book 9 to the end of Book 12. Early in the story, he relates his attack on the Cicones: "A blast of win pushed me off course towards the Cicones in Ismarus. I sacked the town and killed the men. We took their wives and shared their riches equally among us" (9.40-44). He gives no justification for this act of piracy. Nor does he express any sense of guilt for this and other acts of piracy. At the end of the poem, once he has returned to Ithaca and Penelope, Odysseus tells Penelope that he will resume his piracy: "I have to go on raids, to steal replacements / for all the sheep those swaggering suitors killed, / and get the other Greeks to give me more, / until I fill my folds" (23.355-360). This is not a man who feels any guilt for his life of piracy.
Like Plato's Socrates, Nolan worried that reading, or hearing, or seeing this story on a movie screen of Odysseus' winning heroic glory through immoral conduct would either endorse such immorality or provoke the moral disgust of the audience. To avoid that, Nolan censored Homer by revising his story so that Odysseus regrets his life of unjustified and cruel violence and seeks atonement for his guilt.
THE BOURGEOIS VIRTUES OF AMERICAN LIBERAL CULTURE
As I have indicated, some of the critics of Nolan's movie have complained that he is being dishonest in hiding the true meaning of Homer's Odyssey from the audience. Moreover, some have argued, the special thrill that comes from reading Homer is in seeing the great gulf that separates our modern moral sensibility from Homer's Bronze Age world of warlords glorified by poets for their brutal cruelty; but Nolan's movie does not allow his audience to have that experience of being provoked by the violence and mystery of Bronze Age life.
That is not a fair criticism, however, because Nolan has talked openly about how he has changed Homer's story, particularly under the influence of Wilson's translation, and he has encouraged his audience to read, or reread, Homer's Odyssey for themselves, and then argue about how the movie differs from the book. In fact, in recent weeks, Wilson's translation has become one of the top five books on the Amazon and New York Times bestsellers lists.
This refutes the claim of those Nietzschean critics of American popular culture who say that it has become degraded--perhaps to the level of the "last man"--because people watch movies and television, but they don't read books, particularly "great books." On the contrary, Nolan's movie has spurred many Americans not only to read the Odyssey in translation, but also to read the original Greek text. Google Trends reports that people searching "learn Greek" has increased by 400% over the past month compared with the same period last year.
I am reminded of my years teaching in the Basic Program of Liberal Education, which is a Great Books program established in 1946 by Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins, who believed that cultivating human excellence in a liberal democracy required opening liberal education to all adults.
I have written about how Leo Strauss praised Great Books programs like the Basic Program and explained: "Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant. Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear of human greatness."
Here we see that what Deirdre McCloskey calls the "bourgeois virtues" of a liberal social order include the intellectual virtues of a liberal education for a philosophic life.
In a liberal popular culture like America, popular media like movies and television can complement the liberal education based on reading classic books. In the Basic Program, we had Fall and Winter Weekends, where we would meet for a weekend at a lodge in a state park. One classic text of literature, philosophy, history, or science would be the assigned reading for the weekend. We would have a series of lectures and discussions centered around that text. But we would also usually have a movie of some kind that was related to that text, so that we could talk about the intellectual questions raised by both the movie and the book.
At this blog, I have written essays on various movies (such as The Lord of the Rings, The Last Duel, Song Sung Blue, Nuremburg, and Disclosure Day) and on various television shows (such as The Good Place, The Big Bang Theory, and Hill Street Blues). And in each case, I have argued that these filmed productions of popular culture can raise profound intellectual questions and that they can prompt viewers to read some books that might probe those questions at a deeper level.
Christopher Nolan's Odyssey does that.
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