The Gods manipulating events in Fritz Lang’s “Odysseus”, the film within a film, in Godard’s Le Mépris.
It was 92 in the shade and we fled to the nearest theater to escape the heat and the shrouds of smoke from distant fires that had drifted across the Cascades into the Valley. The movie was “The Odyssey.” Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, not Homer’s, which quickly became apparent. The screen was 28 meters wide, roughly the width, by the way, of the theater of Dionysus on the south slope of the Acropolis in Athens, where many plays depicting episodes from the Trojan War and the homecoming were performed. The cost of the ticket was $35, much cheaper than the $1,000 some New Yorkers have shelled out for the chance to watch the three-hour epic on 70mm IMAX screens, through the latest innovation of late-capitalism, dynamic pricing. (Thank you, Bruce Springsteen.) In 4th-century Athens, the city-state comped entry fees for the 25,000 people who would assemble to watch the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Maybe Mamdani will provide a city subsidy for at least a bag of popcorn, which now costs more than a movie ticket did a decade ago, when there was still a film industry in the US.
The less said about Nolan’s film, the better. Frankly, there’s not much to critique. It is what it is, a spectacle in search of a reason to exist, like Cleopatra or Ben Hur or Gone With the Wind. It’s not history. It’s not literature. It’s an entertainment. It’s, in the words of a pretty astute cultural critic: “a joke.” 173 minutes summed up in two words. Top that, Pauline Kael. It is a joke, but alas, not a funny one. Christopher Nolan has no sense of humor. Neither did his hero Stanley Kubrick, but Kubrick at least had the smarts to hire screenwriters like Terry Southern, who did, and actors like Peter Sellers, who could inject a jolt of life into an otherwise dreary exercise in literature-to-big-screen hokum like Lolita.
The funniest thing Nolan did was to cast Matt Damon as Odysseus, the great prankster of Greek literature and not give him one funny line, not even a pun. Nolan has populated his films with recognizable faces, an all-star lineup of Hollywood celebrities. Some of them are fine actors. But not in this film. None of the actors act. They pose and speak, stilted words, arthritic phrases. (In a revealing casting choice, Menelaus, Helen’s cuckolded and abusive husband who scars her face to despoil her legendary beauty, was played by John Bernthal, an outspoken defender of Israel’s genocidal rampages in Gaza, who invited ex-Israeli special forces soldiers onto his Call to Arms and praised their “wet-work”.)
Nolan doesn’t need actors. There’s little room for acting here. Nolan said that because he insists on shooting with 70 mm IMAX cameras, he can only film for three minutes at a time. The demands of character development and emotional depth must be sacrificed to the demands of action. How can Odysseus have the time to think about what he has done or what he will do, when a jump cut must be made every couple of minutes to a new scene of peril? In fact, Nolan doesn’t even need much of a script. It’s all about the images, even when the montage of images is inchoate. The classics scholar Emily Wilson, whose vivid and energetic new translation of The Odyssey Nolan claimed to have consulted for his film, scorched the film, saying she would have been “ashamed to have written any part” of the screenplay.
The heresy, if that’s what you want to call it, in casting Zendaya as Athena and Lupita Nyong’o as Helen (and her sister Clytemnestra) isn’t that they are black actors but that the allegedly “woke” Christopher Nolan gave these black actors so little to do. Like Helen, Nyont’o is one of the world’s most beautiful humans, a rarefied model of the perfection of the species. And that captivating allure shines through her scar-riven face. Nolan gives her a handful of lines, merely to advance the plot. But how does Helen feel about being dragged back to Sparta, bound as a sex-slave and war trophy to the dull-witted man who shredded her face and killed her lover? We’re left in the dark.
Athena may well have been black (see: Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization). As one of the supreme Olympian deities, she was certainly capable of assuming whatever form or skin color she desired and Zendaya may well be the closest living human to a goddess on Earth. But Nolan has her do little more than console Odysseus, while wrapped in a drab woven cloak, looking like Mary Magdalene, patting Jesus on the back. But this is Athena, the great intellect and warrior goddess, who, consumed by petty jealousy (See: the Judgement of Paris), plotted and enabled the sacking of Troy and the genocide of the Trojans and provided a shield of LAPD-like impunity for her favorite killer. We’d like to hear her explain herself.
I’m a little dismayed at MAGA’s hostility toward Nolan. After all, he shares their rosy nostalgia for a past that never existed. He wants to Make Cinema Grand Again in the tradition of Griffith, DeMille, and Ford. Big pictures with big budgets made only on film (despite its environmental consequences) projected onto big screens in big movie palaces. Big, big, big. All of it backed by bankers, private equity, insurers and reinsurers. Nolan’s megalomania is almost Trumpian. But surely the future of movie-making, if it has a future, is elsewhere. At the end of his life, Jean-Luc Godard was making movies shot on his iPhone and found it liberating. The two breakout films of the summer, Obsession and Backrooms, were made by former YouTubers. Why go back? Why chain yourself to the demands of the money men and cinema owners?
The procession of Odysseus’s Horse into Troy. Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, 1760. National Gallery, London.
A genocide has taken place. A city has been burnt to the ground by an invading force. All of its men have been killed, even the boys. Its women have been raped. Some of them have been taken back in cages as property of the killers. A man is adrift on a makeshift raft in the Mediterranean, fleeing the war zone, a refuge of sorts, looking for a homeland. Who is this man? Where is he going? What does he want?
He’s a killer. He’s a conman. He is a liar, a thief, a plunderer. He’s a rapist, an adulterer, a child killer, and a blasphemer. He’s committed genocide. He’s a head case. He’s haunted by the past. Wracked by the things he’s done and the travails he’s endured trying to get home, if home is really where he wants to get. He’s the earliest case of PTSD in literature. He’s Odysseus!
These are the elements of a story that speaks across the ages to our own moment of genocide, plunder, tyranny, exile and refugees. But Nolan’s film doesn’t. In fact, it’s hard to say what Nolan’s film does and why he wanted to make a film called “The Odyssey” and not, say, another space opera. He gets so much wrong about the poem that you wonder why he was attracted to the story in the first place. It’s the ultimate act of hubris to rewrite Homer, which is fine, if you’ve got the chops. James Joyce did it, but Nolan is not Joyce, even in his own limited medium of film. He’s not even the Coen Brothers.
Joyce was a master of wordplay. But there’s little imageplay in Nolan’s film; the visual allusions are obvious and trite. Nolan’s Odyssey won’t deepen in meaning on repeated viewings. It is how it looks on the surface. In other words, it’s superficial. Joyce was an early cineaste. He opened and ran one of the first movie theaters in Dublin, showing films such as the pre-surrealist The Bewitched Castle and the Tragic Story of Beatrice Cenci, which often aroused the consternation and fury of conservative Catholics who saw themselves as the guardians of Irish morality. Would Joyce have wasted three hours of the screen time at Cinematograph Volta on Nolan’s tendentious flick or played the slapstick films that he and his pal Samuel Beckett adored, such as The Deviled Crab, the Scylla of the silent film era? The answer is self-evident.
Nolan says he was only able to make the Odyssey because of the huge box office returns from his previous film, Oppenheimer. And in a sense, the Odyssey is the perfect sequel to Oppenheimer.
The Odyssey is a sequel, in many ways, to Nolan’s previous film, Oppenheimer, a heroic treatment of the man who designed the atom bomb. Here is the story of genocider, turned into a hero, because of his ceaseless determination to find his way home. But how ceaseless was Odysseus’s desire for home, really?
What happens after the bomb goes off? What happens after the mass killing? Odysseus gets lost. He gets lost in his own mind. Is he consumed by guilt or his own hubris? Hubris was a big thing for the Greeks. All their heroes seemed to have it and nearly all were undone by it. It was hubris that led Odysseus to set an uncharted course home to Ithaka. It was hubris that prompted him to shoot a parting arrow at Polyphemus, enraging his father Poseidon. It was hubris that sent him to the land of the Lotus Eaters. It was hubris that made him raid the Cicones, destroy their city, commit genocidal slaughter again, steal and rape the women. It was hubris that made him open the bag of winds. Hubris that made him try to loot the land of the Laestrygonians (who appear briefly in Nolan’s film in shiny armor like giant versions of the Arthurian knights in Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac), with fatal consequences for his crew. And on and on.
In his much too brief life, Rainer Werner Fassbinder made 44 films, including some of the best in the history of cinema. The combined cost of all those films was less than the cost of Christopher Nolan’s $250 million production of The Odyssey. In fact, you could add the cost of all 40 of Jean Renoir’s films to Fassbinder’s and still have enough left over for Agnès Varda to have made a film or two. Varda could have made a film of the Odyssey for a few dollars, relatively speaking, which would have mined the misogyny of the Greek heroes, including the main man, and celebrated the retribution of the women they’ve abused and betrayed. Because Nolan portrays Odysseus as a hero, longing to return home to his wife, the faithful Penelope, he elides Odysseus’s great sin, an act as dark and depraved as anything an ISIS fighter or US GI at My Lai did. He’s slaughtered the innocent. He’s tricked them into sacrificial deaths.
In Hades, Agamemnon rises from the grave to tell Odysseus the story of his own homecoming, bearing Cassandra, the soothsaying princess of Troy, back with him to Mycenae in a cage as booty, only to be slaughtered in his own bed by his wife, Clytemnestra. The maniacal king warns Odysseus that he might face a similar fate in Ithaka. Odysseus has reason for concern, for reasons Nolan doesn’t explore. His wife Penelope is Clytemnestra’s cousin and she’s likely to have learned of his own role in the vile killing of Clytemnestra’s daughter, Iphigenia. As the Greek fleet assembled in the port town of Aulis, Agamemnon decided to go hunting in Artemis’s sacred grove, where he killed a deer, enraging the goddess, who loved animals more than men. Artemis calmed the winds and Agamemnon’s invasion force was stuck in port until, warns the priest Calchas, the king sacrifices his own child. Odysseus comes up with the plan. He persuades Clytemnestra and Iphigenia that the young girl will be wed to the great warrior Achilles and escorts her back to Aulis and places her on the sacrificial rock where her father slits her throat. It would be easier to rehabilitate Harvey Weinstein than Odysseus.
Odysseus and Diomedes hauling Iphegenia to her death at Aulis. Fresco from Pompeii.
Penelope must know this. She was Clytemnestra’s cousin. She had lived in Mycenae. She was Iphegenia’s aunt. Odysseus had every reason to delay coming home to her. After all, Penelope, the siren calling from Ithaka, means a kind of predatory seabird, a kingfisher, a fisher for kings. And like Iphigenia, Penelope was once sacrificed by her own parents, who had cast her off the cliff into the sea, only to see her saved by the very birds for whom she was named.
What does Penelope think? How does she really feel about the man who left her and took his time coming home, philandering and killing across the Mediterranean? We don’t know. Nolan doesn’t tell us. He doesn’t understand women. They’ve always been one-dimensional characters in his films. But she wasn’t for the Greeks. There’s an ambiguity to Penelope, a mystique, if you will, that makes you ask, how much she’s really yearning for her lost husband. After all, she isn’t weaving a shroud to honor Odysseus, but his aged father, Laertes, who stayed home, faithful to her, her son and Ithaka.
Penelope was exalted in early Christian theology for her fidelity. But you can’t say the same for our hero. While he may have been mesmerized by Calypso, he spent a year canoodling with Circe of his own volition. He wasn’t all that eager to get back to Penelope’s bedchamber. But Nolan elides this telling detail from his film.
Only the brooding nymph Calypso succeeds in slowing Odysseus down. The wanderer stays seven years on Ogygia. But there’s little time for contemplation in Nolan’s slaughter fest. The seven years in Calypso’s thrall are squeezed into seven minutes of film and Calypso is reduced to the role of Odysseus’ therapist, feeding him lotus flowers like Prozac. Is Calypso a Freudian or Jungian? We don’t know. We don’t even learn what’s really bugging him or how he exorcizes his demons enough to apologize to Poseidon, the earth-shaker, and ride the current back to Ithaka. What did he learn? To honor the dead, maybe. But he would continue to make many more of them.
But this is not Calypso’s role in the Odyssey. She is another avenging proto-feminist, who tricks the trickster Odysseus and keeps him captive for seven years, taking her pleasure with him, doing to Odysseus what Odysseus would have done to her and had done to the Trojan women.
In The Odyssey, Odysseus doesn’t unload his story to Calypso, but to King Alcinous of the Phaiacians and his enchanting daughter Nausicca on the island of Scheria (Corfu), a city-state which treated sea-borne immigrants like Odysseus with kindness and hospitality, a running theme of Homer’s poem, which Nolan manages to mangle.
The historian Mary Beard ridiculed Nolan’s film for its lack of sex, which, as Freud made clear, is the driving force behind almost all Greek drama and comedy. But Nolan has no feel for human sexuality. Does divine Eros make even one fleeting appearance to alter the course of any film in Nolan’s brutalist oeuvre? No. He’s only comfortable in the horrorshow realm of Thanatos. Nolan makes movies that appeal to bros with college degrees, usually in finance.
There are unanswered questions, left hanging, because of the box office. What are the sirens singing, “each to each,” Eliot put it. Are they singing songs of seduction, tempting him into the fatal waters? Or are they singing songs of horror, threnodies for the needless death, tempting him to drown himself in shame? Nolan doesn’t even hint at the answer, for there’s another thrilling episode just a few scenes away. This is high-T film-making, cinematics for the manosphere. It’s gotta move, baby. The warrior ethic ain’t got time for introspection.
We see them only at a distance, women lounging on rocks. For the Greeks, the sirens had the bodies of birds. They sang songs of death. They were made by the Goddess Demeter to search the Underworld for her daughter Persephone, who’d been taken into the eternal darkness by Hades to be his bride. Were they taunting Odysseus with shades of the men and women he sent there?
The most generous thing that can be said about Nolan’s film is that it’s a movie about a man who has committed genocide and who is so mentally unbalanced by the experience that he kills and plunders all the way home, making one bad decision after another, until every member of his own army has joined the ranks of the dead. Then he finally arrives home, where he cleanses his bad conscience–to the extent he has a conscience–by killing nearly every man left in Ithaka, especially savoring the murder of a draft-dodging suitor of Penelope, someone who didn’t want to go slaughter Trojans to open the trade routes for the tyrannical Agamemnon. This final act of mass violence instructs his previously non-violent son Telemachus how to kill too, so that he can become king and the killing can go generation after generation. Nolan tacks on an ending that’s more Lord of the Rings than the Odyssey, as Penelope and Nolan’s now sanctified-through-more-blood hero Odysseus set sail for the West to honor the dead, but only the Greeks, not the Trojans whose entire population Odysseus and Agamemnon have wiped out.
In Homer’s poem, a truer ending takes place. The mass slaughter at the palace is greeted with rage by the populace, who gather to storm the gates, until Athena, once again, intervenes to save her own private mercenary, Odysseus. He just can’t stop killing. If Homer had enjoyed Cassandra’s gift (or curse) of prophecy, he too might have had Odysseus setting sail into the West to spread the genocidal method to the nascent empire across the sea.
Still from Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris.
The greatest cinematic version of The Odyssey is a film about the absurdity of making a film about The Odyssey, Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt), where Michel Piccoli’s character is hired by an American producer (Jack Palance) to rewrite the script for a film of the Odyssey being shot on Capri by Fritz Lang. Piccoli brings his wife with him to Italy, herself a living goddess, Bridget Bardot, whose ravishing beauty and erotic allure overshadow all of the characters in Lang’s film. Ultimately, Bardot, unlike Penelope, wastes little time leaving her husband, who is lost in the endless rewrites of the script, and runs off with the American moneyman to their own rendezvous with tragedy.
Godard’s movie was made for $1 million, double the amount of any of his previous films. Half of the budget went to Bardot’s fee. Even so, the images of the film within a film, shot by arguably the greatest cinematographer in the history of film, Raoul Coutard, are more evocative and visually entrancing than scenes in Nolan’s made-for-IMAX production. (IMAXxing is the looksmaxxing of the film industry.) Le Mépris can almost be seen as a prescient parody of Nolan’s–with better acting, editing and cinematography.
Neither of Nolan’s heroes, the mythic Odsseus, or the mythologized, Robert Oppenheimer, faced any sanctions, legal or divine, for their war crimes, except, I guess, for how bad the movies that celebrated them as flawed heroes turned out to be.
If you’re thinking about going to see the Odyssey, I’d recommend renting Pasolini’s Medea and Oedipus Rex instead, films made by a poet who understood the contemporary resonances of the poetic myths he was reenacting.
Massimo Girotti, Maria Callas and Pier Paolo Pasolini on the set of Medea.
