Race-Swapping: An Assessment

SUPPLEMENT:

A Critique Of Nolan’s “The Odyssey”

In Homer’s “The Odyssey”, the moral of the story was: If you try to defy the gods, there will be dire consequences.  In addition to a paean to home-coming, the Odyssey was an indictment of hubris.  According to the ACTUAL tale, Odysseus learned that he cannot—and should not try to—defy the gods.  Weirdly, in the one place Odysseus WAS defiant (when he steadfastly rebuffed the allure of the lotuses), Nolan has Odysseus CAPITULATE (cravenly accepting the invitation to trade comfort for the recognition of reality).  The hero of the story went from the only one to RESIST the temptation to the only one to INDULGE in it.  So this nescient director seems to get things exactly backwards.

(That; and—peculiarly—Nolan decided to dispose of the iconic lotus-eaters altogether, and instead make Calypso the peddler of the magical plant.)

This was not an isolated case.  Dismayingly, Nolan’s overall characterization of the story’s protagonist entirely misses the mark.  Instead of portraying Odysseus as a heroic figure—brimming with pride—who longs for home, Nolan portrays him as a hapless bloke—wracked with guilt—who is reticent to go home.  (Nolan’s Odysseus is doddering, beleaguered, and remorseful—bearing little resemblance to the actual protagonist.  Instead of a shrewd man grappling with his own vain-glory, we get a broken-down man dealing with PTSD.)  The signature features of the ACTUAL Odysseus were pride and cunning.  Nolan discarded those qualities entirely.  He ended up with a protagonist characterized by contrition rather than by arrogance; addled with regret rather than impelled by the gravitational pull of “nostos” (a longing for home).

It’s one thing to completely miss the point of epic tale (a dereliction of which many are guilty); it’s quite another thing to make a high-budget feature film about it and STILL get such a fundamental thing wrong.

Peculiarly, Nolan saw fit to not feature the Phaeacians (spec. his enthralling liaison with Princess Nausicaä).  Nor did he include the classic line about Odysseus saying to the cyclops that he was “nobody”.  Odysseus’ pivotal meeting with the ghost of Achilles in the underworld—replete with the latter’s profound existential message: omitted.  Odysseus dealing with the loss of his mother (including a poignant encounter with her ghost): omitted.  Hermes: omitted.  The bag of adverse winds: omitted.  All the steamy coitus on the edenic islands of Aeaea and Ogygia: omitted.  Calypso is changed from the embodiment of hedonic indulgence to…a stolid therapist.  In lieu of an office couch, the setting is a desolate beach.  Instead of offering temptation, she simply peddles opiates.  Circe is a crotchety witch instead of a beautiful sorceress.  (She’s more skittish than regal.)  Rather than a wily seductress, we are given a crone bursting with resentment.

Meanwhile…Athena is rendered a proxy for Odysseus’ conscience.  The jaded goddess of the original lore was entirely redacted.  Zendaya was actually not playing Athena, but Athena inhabiting the body of the slain Trojan maiden, Cassandra (who served as a phlegmatic interlocutor for Odysseus’ inner monologue). *  Menelaus is reduced to an abusive spouse (hence the scar on Helen’s face).  He is bursting with arrogance rather than fraught with remorse; so is depicted as more conceited than contrite.  And as a peculiar narrative garnishment, Nolan shoe-horns Sinon into the story—a character from Virgil’s “Aeneid”.

But the film’s main blunder is the portrayal of the protagonist.  Nolan transplanted the theme of how a man deals with the consequences of his own hubris (Homer’s actual theme) with the tale of a man grappling with post-war trauma.  This is a distortion of the source-material.

Rather than a purposeful trek where formidable obstacles are overcome, the fabled journey is depicted as a meandering sojourn where Odysseus broods over having flouted Zeus’ law (by hoodwinking the Trojans with a wooden horse so that he might get inside to slaughter them)…only to transgress that very law AGAIN upon arriving home (hoodwinking Penelope’s suitors with an unassuming disguise so that he might get inside to slaughter them).  In other words: He ends up repeating the very transgression he’d spent the entire movie lamenting.

In the original material, Odysseus is upset because he misses home, not because he feels guilty about his military triumph.  In Nolan’s telling, the victory over the Trojans was Pyrrhic because subterfuge had been used.  (It seems not to have occurred to Nolan that obligations of [philo-]xenia are suspended during battle.)  The giant, wooden horse was a clever trick, not a source of shame.  For thousands of years, from Alexander the Great at the walls of Tyre to Sultan Mehmet II at the walls of Constantinople, attacking armies use whatever trickery they can to breach a city’s walls.  This is almost always done by—as it were—cheating.  Joshua invoked the powers of the Abrahamic deity to breach the walls of Jericho. (Think of the Visigoths orchestrating starvation to get into Rome.)  This has nothing to do with “xenia”, or a breach thereof.

The fabled “Trojan horse” was presented as readily-available booty—a clever way to smuggle soldiers past the city gates.  Even children understand this concept.  Yet Nolan depicts the horse as an abandoned relic, stuck in the sand.  For dramatic effect, he then pretended that the Aegean tide was several meters instead of just 20 or 30 centimeters.  (One would presume that the Greeks would have been aware of this fictive tide, having resided on the beach for a decade; so planned their ruse accordingly.  Alas.)

So…why the outlandishly circuitous route to get back home?  Well, Nolan’s Odysseus states that he no longer wants to follow Agamemnon.  Goodness gracious.  (Poseidon’s displeasure takes a back seat to the protagonist’s obtuse thinking and impetuosity.)  Again: Nolan switches shame for pride.  Rather than a chronic yearning for hearth and home, the protagonist’s guilt-ridden conscience is what drives him…as he stumbles through haphazard encounters during a series of maritime escapades.

Taken together, all this is not a matter of creative license; it is dereliction.  Nolan’s tenuous grasp of the material from which he was ostensibly is on full display.  (My hunch is that Nolan has never actually read the full Homeric epic…on which he ostensibly based his movie.)  That so many raved about this movie attests to the level of cultural illiteracy to which we have sunk.

Ridiculously, Nolan had characters saying things like, “We’re Greeks from Ithaca” and “Our Bronze Age is collapsing”.  (It’s as if a ten-year-old wrote the script.)  During the Mycenaean epoch, the people in question—precursors to the “Hellenes”—referred to themselves as “Achaioi” [Achaeans]; and the place-in-question was effectively a small island in Kefalonia.  Not everyone on his ship was from Ithaca; though anyone who WAS from Ithaca was assuredly not African, Korean, or Indian.  Whoever they might have been, they certainly did not refer to their own time as “the Bronze Age”…let alone perceive it as a “collapse”.  And it is laughable that they would have seen themselves as having caused it.

(Ancillary note: Troy was known as “Wilusa” / “Ilios” / “Ilium” during the Mycenaean era.)

After such a high degree of omission, alternation, and confabulation, there is a point at which the work ceases being an adaptation, and becomes—well—something else.

Alas, the director of The Odyssey was not the only one with glaring nescience regarding the subject matter.  Lupita claims to have not known anything about “The Odyssey” until she was approached to play this role.  That statement—in and of itself—would be rather odd.  But once we realize that she graduated from Yale University (with a degree in the humanities, nevertheless), the only explanation is that she’s either a moron or a liar.  Add to this the fact that she’s a hypocrite—something brought to light when, after insisting that fidelity to cultural heritage was imperative on the set of “Black Panther”, she proceeded to blithely dismiss such concerns when it came to the Homeric epic.  As if that weren’t bad enough, she also exhibits a strange sense of entitlement—openly admitting that when she thinks about casting / characterization, “I think about what is due to ME.”  (In trying to make the case for how beautiful she should be considered, she seems to have forgotten how ugly narcissism can be.)  Lupita’s grievance was that Homer gave short shrift to women.  This is ironic; as Nolan actually dialed DOWN the elements of female empowerment that existed in the source-material.

Granted, Lupita-as-Hellen was in the film for—cumulatively—only about three or four minutes; but this is rather beside the point.  Even if there had been a shot of Hellen lasting only a few seconds (in, say, a brief flashback), the prudent reaction would be the same: “That’s not Hellen of Troy.  That’s a Black woman.  What the fuck are you doing?”

Comes the fatuous retort: “The only reason anyone could possibly be displeased with that casting choice is because they don’t like Black people.  Or perhaps they don’t think that Black women can be beautiful.  So any qualms with casting Lupita as Helen must be based on racism.”  This breaks the world record for straw-manning a legitimate grievance.  It is a deliberate refusal to engage in the substance of the compunction.  (I imagine a fussy child who insists, “They say she’s the most beautiful woman in the world; so I want her to be BLACK.  If you don’t oblige, then you’re racist!”)  The best reply to such petulance: “This isn’t about what YOU want.  This isn’t YOUR story.  And the world’s cultural heritages are not all required to be changed in order to accommodate YOUR racial insecurities.”

Incidentally, Lupita ALSO plays Agamemnon’s disgruntled wife, Clytemnestra…as if she were somehow the twin sister of Helen.  (Helen was actually Clytemnestra’s maternal half-sister; as her father was Zeus.  Friendly neighborhood reminder: Zeus wasn’t a sub-Saharan African.  The mother was Aetolian.)  Nolan changes Clytemnestra’s motivations for killing her husband upon his return from Troy: as revenge for sacrificing their daughter to Artemis (in order to secure blessings for the upcoming military campaign) rather than so that she could pursue her lover.

There were so many missed opportunities—a chance to address universal themes, to illustrate timeless principles—it’s exasperating.  So many weighty issues could have been explored by a more competent writer.  And so much more could have been exhibited of Greece’s cultural legacy…that is, had those in charge given a wit about such things. They opted for inane spectacle instead.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there were also problematic cinematic issues.  Parts of the movie were filmed in West Sahara, where there are currently rampant human rights abuses being perpetrated (slavery is legal).  The crew ended up making a mess of the place, then refused to pick up all garbage when they left.  Whoever was in charge of costume design should never be allowed near a movie set ever again.  (When it comes to costumes in period pieces, one can either go for historical accuracy or—instead—opt to make the outfits look super cool.  Miraculously, this film opted did neither.)  Aside from the poor costuming, Nolan decided to use Viking longships from the 9th century A.D. …instead of anything resembling Achaean / Mycenaean ships from the 13th century B.C.—a discrepancy of over two millennia.  (Note: The production borrowed the main ship from a Swedish non-profit, damaged it, then refused to pay for the damage.)  The lighting was unnecessarily bleak.  And in terms of cinematography, the color-palate was gratuitously drab.

The one saving grace is that Nolan refrained from over-using CGI.

Even the score was awful—reduced to cacophony rather than symphony.  (It was more a clangor than it was a moving accompaniment.)  The daft idea was to use a combination of wooden flutes and electronic equipment in lieu of a classical orchestra because the bassoon didn’t yet exist in Iron-Age Greece.  Gadzooks!  Greeks could have been used here as well.  (It turns out that there are Hellenic composers.)  If you’re not a big fan of Yanni…then there’s Vangelis.  Or Nana Mouskouri.  Or the music of Mikis Theodorakis.

Bottom line: To be impressed by this cinematic product is to betray a stunning level of culturally illiteracy.  Worse, it is to demonstrate that one is unconcerned about respecting others’ cultural legacies.  These derelictions would be bad enough for the average bystander; but they are inexcusable for anyone deigning to bring another culture’s classic literature to life.

The result: Another big budget Hollywood spectacle that disrespects the source material and is heedless of any cultural legacy that isn’t American.  (Regarding anyone who chortled about this film being a “masterpiece”, here’s a helpful tip: Never trust their opinion ever again.)

To assay “adaptations”, it is necessary to distinguish between interpretation and alteration.  This blockbuster movie is not Homer’s epic tale; it is Nolan’s peculiar riff thereon.  It might be charitably characterized as a daft re-imagining; yet it is best described as a distortion.  (Want an estimable re-imagining of “The Odyssey”?  It’s been done quite well already. See “O Brother Where Art Thou”, “The Return”, or Jorge Rivera-Herrans’s “Epic: The Musical”.)

In brief: This film is a clumsy re-telling by Nolan that he entitled “The Odyssey”…which was vaguely inspired by Homer’s classical epic by that name.  Nolan didn’t “interpret” things, he changed them.  We have once again been subjected to a vanity project–in which a Hollywood darling is profiting handily off of a cultural legacy he neither respects nor understands.  There is a difference between creative interpretation and desecration.  I would argue that this movie is most accurately described as the latter.

*  Oddly enough, in the source-material, Cassandra was murdered by none other than…Clytemnestra (upon being brought to Mycenae).  That definitely would not have worked within Nolan’s revamped narrative.