Why the Odyssey Keeps Defeating Filmmakers
In Book XIII of the Odyssey, which is both the most familiar and the strangest of great epics, Odysseus comes home at last. After ten years at war and ten more at sea, he is borne back to Ithaca by his gracious hosts the Phaeacians, who have feasted him and delighted in his tales. They lay him in the stern of a ship, where he remains through the voyage in a sleep “like death,” and unload him with great delicacy:
A tired warrior needs his goods, but most of all he needs sleep. Homer’s homecoming epic is full of such lovely touches. The poem that precedes it, the Iliad, is a cruel and beautiful work, the ultimate story of war; the Odyssey has its warlike passages, but its central energies seem almost commonplace beside the merciless fury of Achilles. In Ithaca, Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, is besieged by insolent young men, freeloading suitors who want her to choose one of them. Homeless, his body torn, Odysseus needs to get back to her and Telemachus, his anxious son, and to clean up the mess. Along the way, when he’s lucky, he enjoys hot baths, a proper bed, carnal companionship, and gut-busting meals of spitted sheep, cow, stag, or pig. Few great works have been so devoted to physical pleasure and pain.
Odysseus is a warrior with wit and intellect, a con man and fabulist who constantly reinvents himself. Yet this complicated man wants only what any of us would want after terrible troubles—recovery and consolidation. Perhaps that is why he is the most beloved of heroes, and his story the most imitated of forms: a model for James Joyce’s word-drunk one-day Dublin epic, “Ulysses,” but also for “The Wizard of Oz,” for Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain,” and for countless other works, large and small, of adventure and return. The three-thousand-year-old poem is always with us, and always distant from us. The chaos in Ithaca may be political and ethical—a violation of custom—but stretches of the poem are barbarous and wild, beyond civilized life altogether. The foundational coming-home story is also the birthplace of science fiction and of horror. In the Odyssey, you swim for miles or drown at once; you attain knowledge or lose your mind; you eat or are eaten. None of Odysseus’ men make it back to Ithaca with him.
At the moment, the media is awash with storm-tossed boats and tufted bronze helmets. Christopher Nolan’s version, which reportedly cost two hundred and fifty million dollars and stars Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as Penelope, opens on July 17th. I haven’t yet seen it, and I wonder: Do we need a big movie of the Odyssey at all? Filming it is like filming the Bible, or “Huckleberry Finn”—books so closely woven into us that some part of us doesn’t want to see them externalized as spectacle. The epic has been adapted many times, but the stiffness of most attempts makes one wonder whether the difficulties aren’t insurmountable. In recent years, Nolan has produced pop-sadistic fantasy (“The Dark Knight”), self-referential movie puzzles (“Inception,” “Tenet”), and real-world political and scientific drama (“Oppenheimer”). He likes to take chances, but he is now competing with a masterpiece in another form. It’s a death-defying risk.
Nolan and the cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, wielding heavy IMAX cameras, shot their picture across the Mediterranean and beyond, in caves, castles, beaches, black-sand wastes, and open water. Nolan seems to be striving for geographic realism interspersed with violent and fantastic episodes. A spectacular travelogue with thrills, however, will not be enough. We want some equivalent to what Homer provides—not just a sense of awe at natural and supernatural events but also a profound realization of the physical sensations of men and women. And maybe we want something harder to articulate: a movie that answers the needs of a sorely troubled national culture. The Odyssey has stuck around for three thousand years in part because every era takes what it wants from it.
The problems begin with the gods. What to do with them? Leisure-world swells, lustful and violent, they play favorites, altering the appearance of those they love, punishing those who have injured them. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, protects Odysseus, but she promotes mayhem and at times seems more interested in power than in any human being. Nolan has indicated that he mainly kept the gods off camera, signifying their presence through nature, yet he has cast Zendaya as Athena. Good luck to her: gods do not come off well in movies. In “L’Odissea” (1968), an eight-part Italian TV miniseries, conversations among Zeus and the other gods were heavily intoned offscreen, while the camera, in a series of jerking zooms, landed on statues of the immortals—highbrow kitsch. In “The Odyssey” (1997), an American TV series directed by the Russian Andrei Konchalovsky, Hermes, the messenger god who advises Odysseus on how to handle the temptress Circe, is a barely clothed young man butterflying around the Aegean. The gods belong to poetry, not to cinema.
Every filmed version of the poem takes on the sea god Poseidon, who is furious at Odysseus for blinding his monstrous one-eyed son Polyphemus (a.k.a. the Cyclops). In retaliation, Poseidon whips up the ocean, shredding sails, cracking oars, sweeping Odysseus and his men overboard. We’re eager for whirlpools and squalls, for “white calm” and mists. Homer does great weather. Yet Nolan has often expressed his wariness of C.G.I., which is the easiest way of roiling the elements. In the past thirty years, weightless digital imagery—exacerbated algorithms contending in nowhere space—has invaded everything from grand adventure stories to late-night commercials for S.U.V.s. Reality, in movies, has become fungible; nothing stays itself. Nolan’s distaste is palpable, up to a point. The visual distinction of his Oscar-winning “Oppenheimer” was enhanced by his sparing use of C.G.I. (The test detonation at Alamogordo was a real, non-nuclear explosion.) As he has recently remarked, he likes to work “in camera,” using sets, miniatures, and puppets—traditional special effects—before, inevitably, the C.G.I. boys get to work repainting the image.
When Odysseus and his men are trapped in Polyphemus’ cave, they blind the Cyclops with a red-hot stake—the sharpened end of an olive tree. The scene is discomforting in any version. How to make the moment scary but watchable, disgusting but entrancing? Homer at his most explicit can be unnerving. In Book XII, navigating between the twin female menaces Scylla (a six-headed sea monster who eats men) and Charybdis (a whirlpool who swallows ships), Odysseus loses six crew members:
Agony is hard to watch in a movie. As for the simile of the little fishes, the cinema can hardly match it; the medium is mostly wedded to what it shows. An image may resonate with deeper meanings (that’s what great directors can bring about), but the compression and displacement that make the simile devastating on the page have no cinematic equivalent. Sometimes poetry leaves the cinema behind, gasping for breath.
Ravenous nymphs, cannibals, spirit-draining drug peddlers, the shadowy dead with their sorrows and rages: all threaten manhood, or life itself. Earlier movie versions have managed the story’s most frightening moments with the limited technology available at the time—much plastic and spongy stuff; monsters in process shots looming over little men; papier-mâché boulders flung from hilltops. With ready sympathy and the best will in the world, we are forced to complete the magic in our minds.
The film “Ulysses,” from 1954 (“Ulysses” being Odysseus’ Roman name), has Kirk Douglas’s overwhelming zeal, his big chest and big teeth, but not much else. At times, the movie almost turns into the sword-and-sandal Italian schlock of the late fifties. “L’Odissea” is much more serious. As the camera roams the ruins of Troy, we get a stern historical lecture, followed by heavily populated scenes of actors standing around talking or gazing out to sea. The moviemaking is faithful, literal, and dead. The actors speak their own language (“I feel responsible for their lives—do you understand, Circe?”), which was then dubbed into the language of the countries where the series played. Dubbing universalizes mediocrity.
The 1997 American TV series was at least beautiful—a plenitude of sea, air, rock, and beach. And blissfully material, too: pewter and clay, burnished swords and golden flesh. The thickset Armand Assante was a phlegmatic Odysseus, but Greta Scacchi, as Penelope—who has so little to say in the poem—became the physical embodiment of anger, and Isabella Rossellini was a teasing Athena.
The most recent version, the nearly wordless, extremely violent “The Return” (2024), with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, dispenses with gods and monsters altogether and gives us Odysseus as a ruined man: gaunt, silent, washed ashore like debris, barely able to account for himself. A silent Odysseus? He’s the chattiest man in literature. “The Return” is a fashionably severe reduction of the poem, but it links up with the kind of analysis that can be found in the writing of the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, who has worked extensively with Vietnam veterans. In his books “Achilles in Vietnam” (1994) and “Odysseus in America” (2002), Shay asserts that Homer’s heroes suffer from a form of P.T.S.D. he calls “moral injury”: the shame of having witnessed or taken part in acts that violated their conscience. P.T.S.D. produces fear; moral injury produces guilt. All of these men, in this view, have experienced a collapse of “social trust,” which would explain Achilles’ withdrawal from the community of warriors and Odysseus’ habitual trickiness and dissimulation, even with his own family.
But moral injury, formidable as the idea is, doesn’t apply to Odysseus, who suffers from neither shame nor guilt. He weeps over his men who have died, but what he feels is grief, the misery of bereavement. Dr. Shay, I believe, has focussed on the wrong patients: the Greek warriors in the epics are rarely troubled by conscience, and the audience for their exploits did not expect them to be good; it expected them to be hardy and ruthless. The question is which Odysseus Matt Damon will give us—a man who has suffered damage and acts strangely, or a man whose violence is inseparable from the ancient code of honor that makes him a hero.
Adaptations of the Odyssey are always fleshy affairs, with half-naked men lying happily or forlornly on beaches. Going through earlier versions provides an archeology not only of special effects but of gym-bunny culture developing through the decades. Earlier suitors were sometimes flabby; the crew was not always in tip-top shape. But in “The Return,” for all its austerity, the suitors are so muscular that they could have been cast in a London CrossFit. By necessity, Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway also submitted themselves to the rituals of transformation. In his mid-fifties, Damon eschewed gluten and did many pullups. Hathaway does three-minute planks and eats lean proteins. Filmmakers can be as high-minded as they like, but they must display the idealized bodies of warrior and queen or the story loses its aura of splendor.
Every adaptation violates Homer, but it’s worth remembering that adaptation was essential to creating the poems. Of Homer’s existence there is no possible assurance. Was he one poet? Or two, each writing an epic, the first fierce and concentrated, the second world-embracing? Or was there no master poet at all? There is general agreement that, in the seventh century B.C.E., itinerant oral performers, later known as rhapsodes, entertained private and public audiences by reciting heroic histories and myths from an earlier age, when men were braver and women more beautiful. The poems still bear the marks of that world and its oral delivery: repeated epithets, stock scenes, formulaic phrases, and rhythmic units that helped a singer summon the next line while holding an audience in thrall. Playing to the house in front of him, cutting here, embellishing there, each rhapsode reshaped what he had received. The bards were the first adapters.
In the sixth century B.C.E., the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus turned the Panathenaea into a grand civic festival, with public competitions in athletics, music, and the making of beautiful pots; he sponsored contests among bards, too. I would like to believe that the tyrant said, “We can’t have these fellows reciting different versions at each performance. Let’s get the thing written down.” He was, in effect, a studio executive, demanding a locked script. Three centuries later, the librarians of Alexandria took charge of the text, collating competing versions, marking doubtful lines, imposing a measure of order on the teeming verses. Their heroic labors produced the versions that, copied and recopied on papyrus and later on parchment, arrived at last at a printing press in Florence. In 1488, the Odyssey became a book. The survival of the epics feels at once overdetermined and magical. They rise from the past, unappeasable and unstoppable, like one of Homer’s fantastic creatures. Perhaps a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar movie is simply the most skilled, extravagant, creatively inspired (crazy, one hopes) event in the sequence.
Since the fifteenth century, most adaptations of Homer have taken the form of translation, which has never been easy. Homer wrote a very long line of poetry—dactylic hexameter, with its six beats, and as many as seventeen syllables. Daniel Mendelsohn, the most recent translator of the Odyssey, preserves that scheme, writing a detailed, luxuriant, often beautiful line. Nolan, however, has seized on Emily Wilson’s celebrated 2017 translation. As poetry, some readers may prefer Mendelsohn’s version, but for a movie made now Wilson’s seems the natural choice. She compresses the poem by about thirty per cent, writing a much shorter line, and produces a version—the one I’ve been quoting—that is direct, clear, tough-minded, even bracing.
Wilson strips away the heraldic formality of earlier translations and brings the dialogue closer to contemporary speech, in ways Nolan has reportedly drawn on. The dialogue in Homer adaptations has always been an excruciating problem for filmed adaptations. The story is legendary, and told in verse; if the characters onscreen speak to one another in Jersey Shore or Standard Southern British, say, they bury the project in absurdity. It’s a Scylla and Charybdis affair: speech that is grand and stately is laughable on camera; speech that is too present-day comes off as a “Saturday Night Live” parody.
Wilson also makes plain the power and property arrangements of Greek “palace societies,” like Ithaca. She calls the housemaids in Odysseus’ palace “slaves.” Ithaca a slave society! However modernized in language and attitude, the Odyssey can never be carried fully into our world. It remains distant from us in its insistence on hospitality as an absolute moral commandment, and in its extreme ruthlessness in war, where victorious armies kill the defeated men and carry off the women and children. And, of course, in the literature of the West, the Iliad and the Odyssey unfurl the proud banner of patriarchal order.
Consider, among other things, the inequality of pleasure. On the island of Aeaea, Odysseus encounters “beautiful, dread Circe,” a minor goddess with pharmaceutical powers. She drugs his men and turns them into pigs. Odysseus makes a bargain with her: if she swears not to destroy his manhood, and if she turns the swine back into men, he will join her in bed. Which he does, for a year, while the men sit around feasting. Later, he lands on the luscious island of Ogygia, where the nymph-goddess Calypso reigns amid alder, poplar, and scented cypress. It is the most sensual episode in the poem: “A ripe and luscious vine, hung thick with grapes, was stretched to coil around her cave.” Odysseus spends seven years under Calypso’s spell. When we see him near the end of his captivity, in his twentieth year away from home, he is sitting on the shore, where he “wept sweet life away, in longing to go back home, since she no longer pleased him.” Yet he still performs dutifully at night.
The enthralled husband enjoys the sexual companionship of women, while Penelope remains chaste, fending off the suitors with tricks and sheer denial. Homer approves equally of the man’s satisfactions and the woman’s chastity. But is it cynical to wonder how badly Odysseus wants to get home? Is it implausible that Penelope is more than a little inconvenienced by her years of celibacy? In “Ulysses,” Kirk Douglas looks miserable when he is captured by Circe, and his misery is deepened by the movie’s one smart idea: Circe and Penelope are played by the same beautiful actress, Silvana Mangano. Douglas looks tormented, though he does give in. It is hard for an actor to convey dismay and delight at the same time. Will Matt Damon suffer in his captivity, or enjoy it? Suffering in bed might look strange, even perverse.
For the past thirty years or so, feminist scholars and critics have returned insistently to the two epics, and their work helped make Wilson’s translation possible. Her version restores to the poem what many earlier translations softened or disguised: the brutality of power and the costs of heroism to those who serve its imperatives. It also makes clearer how much the poem already understands. All those female mouths and caves! Circe and Calypso, for instance, are fantasies of pleasure and captivity, projections of men’s fear of losing control; Odysseus’ abandonment of them is part of his return to command. Wilson’s achievement is to bring these meanings forward without flattening the poem’s strangeness or grandeur.
Under this light, Penelope emerges as exemplary, cunning, wounded, and trapped by the male order that praises her. In “The Penelopiad” (2005), Margaret Atwood, the author of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” gives us a Penelope speaking from beyond the grave. Her voice is sour, derisive. Her girlhood in aristocratic Greece, it seems, was a sordid farce: “I was handed over to Odysseus, like a package of meat. A package of meat in a wrapping of gold, mind you.” The marriage is a kind of tepid suburban arrangement; Odysseus won’t shut up after sex. This Penelope is knowing, gossipy, disabused. While Odysseus is gone, a story drifts back to her that the Cyclops was actually a “one-eyed tavern keeper . . . and the fight was over non-payment of the bill.” Atwood’s demystifying wit is sometimes fun, though it has its cost: legend and heroism shrink, and the epic’s wild poetic pleasure shrinks with them.
Relying on Wilson, Nolan may have produced a feminist Odyssey, but the text, however argued with, cannot be thrown overboard. Penelope may look at first like the original trad wife, but Homer makes her intelligent, guarded, and manipulative, almost as wily as her husband. When Odysseus returns to Ithaca, he moves through the kingdom disguised as a ragged old beggar, with Athena’s help, testing his servants and his wife, who seems not to recognize him. Or is she only pretending? Is she teasing him, holding herself back, devising a test of her own? After twenty years apart, their extreme wariness feels absolutely right. It also presents a challenge for Nolan, Damon, and Hathaway. Working close in, the actors could produce a heartrending, second-by-second progression of fear, denial, suspicion, awareness, and perhaps, finally, joy: a recognition of each other and of themselves. The cinema may be king after all.
Joyce told his friend Frank Budgen that Ulysses was the most complete man in literature: “Hamlet is a human being, but he is a son only. Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy and King of Ithaca.”
Yet he is not always, in current moral terms, a good man. As a movie hero, he fits awkwardly into the popular culture of the past decades, especially that of the multiplex blockbuster: the “Star Wars” franchise, the Hogwarts enterprise, a dozen or more Marvel movies, and just about every other series in which good forces fight against evil forces. The good guys versus the bad guys—that’s the “moral” basis of modern commercial mythmaking. Yet it was not the way of the older cultures, and particularly not of the late Bronze Age Greek civilization that produced the stories of Troy and its aftermath. One of Homer’s greatest strengths is his evenhandedness, his palpable sympathy for both sides of a conflict. In an essay in Aeon, Catherine Nichols noted that “neither Achilles nor Hector stands for values that the other side cannot abide.” They are Greek and Trojan warriors asserting themselves, not protecting civilization.
In Ithaca, the suitors have been eating up Odysseus’ livestock and harassing his wife for years. Undisguised at last, and with help from Athena, Telemachus, and a few loyal servants, Odysseus kills them all, a hundred and eight men. In Greek terms, they have persistently violated the laws of hospitality, and they deserve to die. Odysseus also gives the order to kill twelve young house slaves who have been sleeping with the suitors. Although Homer does not say so, enslaved women in a royal house would scarcely have had the power to refuse male visitors, even so surly a bunch as the suitors. Yet Telemachus, a young man of perhaps twenty, and hardly an authority on sexual matters, hangs the women with a ship’s cable. Which leaves Christopher Nolan with two enormous difficulties: How do you stage the slaughter and execution as movie spectacle without producing revulsion, and, even more centrally, how do you portray Odysseus? We cannot, to be sure, simply impose our notions of good and evil on an ancient aristocratic warrior culture. But a slaughter of all the men, without distinction among them? Easy moralizing would be wrong, but moral indifference might be impossible. In the Greek world, honor isn’t tethered to morality. Order is restored not by the triumph of values but by a man, neither good nor evil, doing terrible things.
On Ogygia, Calypso makes Odysseus an extraordinary offer: if he will stay with her, she will grant him immortality and eternal youth. He refuses, choosing to return to his aging wife and to the certainty of death. If Socrates is the intellectual hero of the ancient world, and Jesus the spiritual hero, Odysseus—hardened, brutal, grief-struck, determined to reclaim his home—is the human hero, the whole man. He accepts death, and that’s one reason he remains essential to us. Nolan faces the challenge of creating a hero for the multiplexes who is ruthless and at times cruel. The audience faces the even greater challenge of accepting a man far more complicated than any superhero of recent years. What’s called for in successfully adapting the Odyssey is a great director and—how else can one put it?—a movie audience capable of courage. ♦