Who Owns the Odyssey?

8:01Alexandra Schwartz:I'm not, I don't care. But man, what pictures. I couldn't, it was just a huge. A huge spectacle that bowled me over.

8:11Naomi Fry:I know. You know what it was like? I felt like I was like watching the Lumiere brothers. It was sort of like I was seeing the train. The train was coming towards me. And I was like, ah! Yeah.

8:27Vinson Cunningham:We were on the wave-dashed rocks. I just want listeners to understand something about the pod and the people in it. I know that some devoted listeners already get this, but if there's a film, here's where I'm sitting, in the back. Here's where Vincent Cunningham is sitting, in the front. So, like, we get to the theater. We were separated. We were torn asunder. We were torn asunder. I'm sorry, guys. No, no, don't be sorry. It's if we had been on Odysseus' ship and we had passed through Scylla and Charybdis and Scylla had reached down her monstrous fingers, Vincent would have just been plucked up and eaten in one second.

9:00Vinson Cunningham:First one. That is how close to the screen this man was sitting. He was in it. He was ready to go into that cave and blind that cyclops.

9:08Alexandra Schwartz:Front and center. Yes. Wow.

9:10Vinson Cunningham:So that's the true experience. But we also got the true experience, don't we? Yeah, yeah. I mean, when the cameras were rolling around on the waves, when we were climbing up the rocky cliffs of Ithaca after finally making it home, I could feel all that. Christopher Nolan, I know you went to a lot. I'm sure you're listening. I know you went to a lot of effort to shoot this thing in IMAX. We've heard all about it. The cameras are huge. They're IMAX cameras. They're super loud. They have to be blimped, which means they have to have, like, a special little covering. The actors, they're so big, the actors couldn't see each other, so they used mirrors so the actors could make eye contact.

9:44Vinson Cunningham:Also, they're dashing around, as far as I can tell, the Grecian Isles. Like, gorgeous scenery. I believe Sicily as well. The boats, the rowing, the this, the that, and the huge cameras. Okay, I'm going to give it to you, Christopher Nolan. It was worth it. How quick can we do a synopsis of Homer? We can do it. Here's the Odyssey. The Odyssey is a story of an attempted homecoming, an eventual homecoming. Odysseus has left Ithaca, where he is king, at the point in the story, I would say maybe 17 years earlier. And after nine years of fruitless stalemate in the Trojan War, in the 10th year, has won the Trojan War by devising the mechanism of the Trojan horse.

10:26Vinson Cunningham:And after the sack of Troy is trying to return home with his men. He goes on a lot of adventures on the way back. There are a lot of problems and makes every effort to get home to Ithaca where his wife and son are waiting. His wife Penelope has been alone without word of him for all this time and is being courted by many suitors who are just, they suck. They are rude. They're eating up all the food in the house. They're abusive to her son. They just want her power. and they won't go away. Her son Telemachus is right on this interesting verge of coming of age. He's not a boy, not yet a man. And as Nomi loves to say, that's right.

11:12Vinson Cunningham:As Nomi loves to say, he recognizes that Ithaca needs a strong leader. So he goes out to look for his father. And so in a very interesting way, and this is already cinematic, and I think Christopher Nolan does an amazing thing with this, there are two journeys happening in the Odyssey at the same time. One is a homecoming and one is an outward bound journey for a kid who's only ever been at home to try to go out in the world and figure out what has happened to his father and also what his role as a man should be. Masterful. Thank you. As usual. Well, thank you so much.

11:44Naomi Fry:You know, so many movies now, you know, superhero movies, of course, but even sort of like historical, like even Troy, you know what I mean?

11:55Vinson Cunningham:2004's Troy. I just want to note that I reviewed Troy for my high school newspaper, and that was maybe my first work of criticism. Really? And what did you say? I remember coming up with a line I felt really proud of about wanting to throw popcorn at Brad Pitt's Achilles heel because I really thought it was bad. Oh, my God. That's hilarious. As like a 15-year-old.

12:13Alexandra Schwartz:Amazing. Amazing. Sorry to have me gone.

12:15Naomi Fry:Amazing. So.

12:16Alexandra Schwartz:That's incredible.

12:17Naomi Fry:There is a slickness there that, of course, CGI was used here in certain—but I think from what I've read and understand about Nolan's filmmaking, he tried to be as analog as possible. Like, they literally, they did climb, like, the blood, sweat, and tears of shooting in these, like, very harsh conditions, the rocks, the water, the caves, the, it really makes a difference. Yeah, it's gorgeous. It's gorgeous. It comes across on screen. And for me, that made the movie.

12:57Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I mean, I love to see something that we never seen in movies. Like, I love to see real sweat. I always love when there are flies, which there never are anymore. But, like, if you see a movie from the 60s and it's a little bit low budget and there's just kind of a fly, no one could deal with that and it was hot outside. And, like, the teeth are bad. Yeah, exactly. Like, that's—so you're going to this physical world. The Odyssey is about physical and intellectual struggle, among many other things. But Odysseus as a hero embodies both. He embodies this physical ruggedness and at certain points exhaustion and also cleverness, wiliness, all of the things that he's known for, the wily Odysseus, all the epithets that go with him.

13:36Vinson Cunningham:So the physicality of this world is extremely important. You have the suitors at Odysseus' palace in Ithaca who are courting his wife Penelope and they're eating up all of his stuff. And I think, like, one of the things that seems so weird for a modern reader to read about in the Odyssey is like, wait, you can just go into this person's house and eat his stuff and his wife and his son can't really do anything about it and you just feast all the time? Like, yes, that isn't— Listen, it's Zeus's law. It's, well, it's a total perversion of Zeus's law, in my opinion. But that is— My God.

14:11Alexandra Schwartz:They're all about it. This idea that runs through the whole movie, an ancient Greek idea that Nolan sort of super invests in is this idea. They call it Zeus's Law. The Greeks call it Xenia. The truth that you have to not just like greet the stranger, not just like, okay, sure, you can come in. But like there's a ritualized friendship that has to bloom from our meeting with one another.

14:36Vinson Cunningham:Did you guys catch the really funny moment in the movie when it was given a Christian gloss? I think Penelope was like, do unto others as they would do unto you. I was like, I'm pretty sure that came later and that's something else. Turn the other cheek. Yeah, exactly. So it was a different, very interesting historical character who came up with that idea. But I just mean that the physicality of this world, the exhaustion of the soldiers, the exhaustion of the sailors, the satisfaction of eating and drinking, and of sexual pleasure, something that is totally missing from this movie, interestingly.

15:07Vinson Cunningham:Those things are right there in the Odyssey, in the text of the Odyssey. And so, yes, putting visual value on physicality, beauty, harshness pays off in a huge way here.

15:22Naomi Fry:Yeah.

15:22Vinson Cunningham:Yeah.

15:28Naomi Fry:In a minute, we go from Christopher Nolan to Emily Wilson. Critics at large from The New Yorker will be right back.

15:44Alexandra Schwartz:Hey guys, I'm Brian, the host of Brian Enten Investigates. Most other true crime and breaking news podcasters are in their basement or studio, but not me. I am out on the road every single week. From inside prisons, to murder scenes, to active manhunts, there really isn't anywhere I won't go. Coast to coast, I am all about old-fashioned boots-on-the-ground reporting. You have to show up in person to cover the news and get the secrets, and I have a way of getting people to talk. I cover stories others ignore with a relentless determination to get to the truth. Listen to Brian Enten Investigates every day, wherever you get your podcasts.

16:31Naomi Fry:Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey isn't the first adaptation of The Odyssey. Our colleague David Denby wrote a great piece in The New Yorker recently, and it was titled Why The Odyssey Keeps Defeating Filmmakers. And, you know, he kind of runs down a long list of reasons that make the story notoriously hard to get right in film. What are some of the reasons, either by Denby's Lights or your own?

16:56Vinson Cunningham:Well, one that stuck out to me was the problem of the gods. When you read the Odyssey, you really realize this is a religious text. This is about the way that the gods control the lives of people and that people react to the gods and curry favor with them or don't. So much of it is about the relationship between people and the gods. It's a religious book. So that's really hard when you have a bunch of gods just, like, talking about—like, there's a whole scene in the Odyssey where Poseidon, the sea god, is really pissed off because he's mad. The Cyclops is his son. Odysseus blinded him. He's mad, and he goes to the other gods, and he's basically like, okay, so what do you want me to do about it?

17:38Vinson Cunningham:Like, I hate this man, and you want him to get home. No one's going to help me here? Like, there's a whole thing going on with the gods being annoyed with each other and dealing with their own shit.

17:46Naomi Fry:Denby, in his piece, talks about this, like, eight-part Italian TV miniseries, L 'Odissea, from 1968, where apparently the kind of, like, the words of, you know, Zeus and the other gods, conversations among them were kind of, like, heavily intoned, he says, offscreen.

18:20Naomi Fry:While the camera zoomed into, like, statues of gods, right? In a kind of very, kind of artificial, very highly stylized kind of effect.

18:35Vinson Cunningham:And this is the opposite of that, obviously. And I think Christopher Nolan deals with that by essentially not having gods very visible. but I was a little bit feeling like, where are the gods, Christopher Nolan? Where are the gods? Athena's around, and she's played by Zendaya, who— It's a very small role. It's a very small role, and it's a very sober role. She's—Athena in— And this is— If I were to quibble with this odyssey, there's not a ton of humor in here. And there could be some more. There could be a little more. Athena's a really funny character. Athena loves to change shape. She could appear as a young man.

19:09Vinson Cunningham:She can appear as whoever. And she loves to kind of like poke fun at Odysseus and be like, not so fast. Or like often in the Odyssey, she'll kind of be like, yeah, I thought of that. You're wondering how to kill all the suitors by yourself? Guess what? I also have been thinking about this. And that note is missing. So that was one potential pitfall that Christopher Nolan, I don't know how you guys feel about that, if you miss the gods or if you were just fine.

19:34Alexandra Schwartz:We kind of see the effects of the gods. You know, we see you did something wrong. Here's a great big storm. And it's sort of the relationship between man and the gods, or in this case, specifically Odysseus and the gods, becomes largely psychological. It sort of, it almost like brings us back to the Bronze Age and reminds us that like, you know, in many ways, this is still a very dangerous world. And therefore the man is trying to propitiate the gods in order to just make it home. It's never the god coming down and being like, you're fucked. It's just like, and then a great big storm came or the right winds never came.

20:16Alexandra Schwartz:And sometimes Odysseus looks to the left or the right and there is Athena and nobody else is seeing her. So it becomes this negotiation of like, what is fate? And who is its author? Is it a matter of retribution for one's actions? Is it a matter of the capriciousness of the gods and by association of nature? All these things, you know, every time we look at the Odyssey and we look back at it, I was wondering, you know, we inject it with things that we know already, like, you know, cultural phenomena that we know. And this Odyssey reminded me so much of Eugene O 'Neill. Oh, wow.

20:54Naomi Fry:Say more about that.

20:56Alexandra Schwartz:You know, in so many of his plays, you know, he has all of these, you know, interesting seafaring plays where you're on the ship and the waves and the moon play tricks on you. Sailors lose their mind by this, like, you know, howls that they can hear from the shore, that sort of tidal, psychological pull of the moon. And that to me seemed, it was like the danger of voyages and the lure of the sea. It almost like that became the figure of the gods in this odyssey. I was really interested in like, yeah. And I thought it was a really good handling.

21:37Naomi Fry:One thing I think that's important to note, and we've touched on this a little bit before, is that, you know, there have been many adaptations, many translations. notably Emily Wilson's 2017 translation of the Odyssey, that I think raised a lot of responses. Alex, do you want to speak to it a little?

21:59Vinson Cunningham:Definitely. I mean, Emily Wilson's translation is so wonderful. I really, really recommend it. You're not hearing it here first, obviously. But what's kind of amazing about this translation is it reads so easily, and I think there is, with an ancient text, of course, even one as famous as The Odyssey, there's definitely this idea going in, like, I had last read The Odyssey many years before. I'm not a classicist. And so while, again, reengaging with The Odyssey, I sort of thought, oh, okay, here we go. And then you're just swept up in a way in this Emily Wilson translation, and there are a few reasons for that.

22:33One reason is that she decided

22:35Vinson Cunningham:to match the verse count in Homer. So rather than making it more verbose or adding extra words in, She decided to keep each line in the Homer as a line in the English translation. She used iambic pantameter, which is not the hectic pantameter that the Homer uses, obviously, but is our own English poetic version of speech. And she used a really plain spoken language that returns the Odyssey to—it just brings it down a notch from this sense of great literature. and into the world.

23:14Alexandra Schwartz:Her first line is, tell me about a complicated man.

23:17Vinson Cunningham:Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost. That's it. So, you know, people got very worked up about this translation in both directions. People were very excited about it for the reasons that I got excited about it and that I've described. It's a beautiful thing to read and it really gives this very fresh and immediate gloss on this ancient tale. And then people got worked up. Why does it sound like that? Why is its language too colloquial? There was a bit made about a woman translating it, which I think is just kind of dumb. There were other choices that were interesting that Emily Wilson made that she's talked about quite a bit, like late in the Odyssey.

24:01Vinson Cunningham:Spoiler alert, Odysseus comes back, and he's not happy. And after a great deal of bloodshed, He also kills the slave girls at the palace who've been sleeping with the suitors. And in earlier translations, they've been called sluts or whores. And that's not what's in the Greek. In the Greek, it's slave girls or servant girls. And that's what she does. So she has engaged in a kind of stripping away that I think people, because most people are reading this, yes, they're classicists, but many people, it's coming to them in their own language, reading and translation that they've associated with this.

24:38Vinson Cunningham:text.

24:38Naomi Fry:How do you think the Wilson translation relates to the Nolan movie in the sense of do you kind of see a similarity there like an attitude let's say if not an exact language?

24:53Alexandra Schwartz:Nolan himself has cited that translation as an inspiration for his screenplay and you can the famous dad that we spoke about with which Telemachus and the other like sort of chief suitor played by Pattinson both use i think is in this maybe in the spirit of the wilson his sort of the flexibility of the screenplay i would say owes something to to wilson one of the more discussed choices in the wilson too i think it's so important about the character of odysseus is that word complicated you know this like very much contested word polytropos is the is what's being translated there i was raised on the fake the robert fagel's translation which puts polytropos as the man of twists and turns and and it's an interesting way of sort of making double-sided this epithet yeah he's inside he's got many he's resourceful he's crafty wily all these things but also he's gone through many twists and turns so trying to find the epithet that matches the inside to the outside um complicated man sounds like to me it sounds like the theme song to shaft you know he's a complicated man so i'm i'm sure emily wilson has had contemplated that like blaxploitation angle on odysseus yes um daniel mendelson's uh translation has who had so many roundabout ways you know but this idea is so important to the text like what kind of guy are we talking about there are times in the Wilson where she, sometimes she'll be like, I think there's a line where it's, she translates the epithet as lying Odysseus says, I'll tell you the truth.

26:36Alexandra Schwartz:She does these little ironic moments that kind of like really trouble our idea of Odysseus. And we see, you know, Nolan, he talks, there are a lot of times where his men are like, you lied to us. Yes. And so that, and Nolan who is obsessed with leadership, you know, and I think that comes through in this movie. okay, so what happens if the leader isn't just straightforwardly good, noble? What happens if you have a cunning person who governs or leads by hook or crook? It's a really interesting aspect, I think, of every sort of translation of this text and really calls into question what kind of guy are we dealing with and what kind of person can win the favor of the gods, can be thought of as special.

27:23Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, there's another tendency I think about now that is less literal and it's more imaginative that I think Nolan is working with also, which is there has been for a long time this kind of feminist re-envisioning of the Odyssey and the world of the Odyssey and the Iliad as well. And it's not hard to understand why. These are men's stories in a men's world where men determine the fate of everybody. And yes, you have very strong and determined women. Some of them are evil, like Clytemnestra, who waits for Agamemnon to return from war and kills him with her lover. And some you just kind of puzzle over, like, Helen, what was going on there?

28:03Vinson Cunningham:What was going on behind that beautiful face? What was the deal? So I'm thinking of things like Pat Barker, the English writer Pat Barker's Women of Troy trilogy, which reimagines the Homeric epics from that kind of female point of view. I'm thinking of Circe by Madeline Miller, exactly. So there are interesting moments in the Nolan where you can see that he is very alive to this strain of reimagining. And that was interesting to me because, for instance, let's talk about sex. When you meet Odysseus in the Odyssey, he's been living with Calypso on her island and having great sex with her for seven years with Cersei.

28:49Vinson Cunningham:Cersei turns all these dudes into pigs. Then Odysseus comes and is like, eh, you know what, Cersei? I'll sleep with you. Turn them into men again. Like, we'll hang out. And she's like, okay. They just stay for a year. He's sleeping with her. He's having sex with her. like everything is great, it's beautiful. And meanwhile, of course, at home, Penelope has to remain chaste. Everything depends upon that. The entire political and moral order depends on that. So these are obvious imbalances. And so what Christopher Nolan has done intriguingly to me is first of all, eliminate sex from this movie. Yes, you can understand like if Charlize Theron was alone on an island and like was really into you, what would happen?

29:25Vinson Cunningham:I think we can gather what's been going on there. But they're not physically intimate. And it's Circe, who is—Samantha Morton gives a really interesting performance about Circe—is a really aggrieved person who points out the danger that a bunch of men would pose to her. And the most significant one is Helen of Troy. What's very interesting in the movie itself is that when Telemachus, Odysseus' son, goes to visit Menelaus, who is Helen's husband, and Helen to try to get word of his dad, Helen turns her face and Jon Bernthal, Menelaus, says, oh, it's a face that launched a thousand ships, maybe just 500 now.

30:02Vinson Cunningham:And she turns her face and you see that part of her face has become scarred. He's obviously disfigured her. In the text of the Odyssey, Helen and Menelaus get along great. And I do think Christopher Nolan is interested in a more modern take where just think for a second about what that would have been like and what a man in this world might have done to his wife in this situation. Probably not great. And is part of it about appealing to modern audiences? Maybe, but I actually think he doesn't care so much about that. I think Christopher Nolan is like trying to work out his own vision of the text and his own truth of the characters.

30:38Vinson Cunningham:He's definitely gotten criticized over the years for thin female characters, and that was a problem I had with Oppenheimer. I did not love the women in Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer is not my favorite of his movies. So, yeah, I don't know what you guys make of that, but I thought that was an interesting choice to kind of eliminate pleasure from this world.

30:51Naomi Fry:I do think that having Odysseus be this kind of like relatively chaste, you know, I mean, sex is implied, as you say, with Calypso, but you don't see him, you know, cheating on Penelope as he does, you know, with no problem in the original text. It also connects to me to him being played by Matt Damon, who's this, like, quintessential good guy. Like, when I— Have we ever seen a sex scene with Matt Damon? Well, he's a very much, like, maybe it's in life, too. He's kind of like a wife guy. He's not Affleck, right? He certainly is not. It's the yin and the yang, right? So if Affleck was Odysseus, we would get a very different Odysseus.

31:39Naomi Fry:I don't think I can handle that. No, but you know what I'm saying?

31:41Vinson Cunningham:Yes, I know exactly what you're saying, and I'm chilled by it.

31:45Naomi Fry:So to me, the choice of him dovetails with this kind of interpretation of the character is kind of like, ultimately, yeah, he's complicated. Obviously, he's shown to do many bad things over the course of the movie, but it doesn't seem to come from a love of kind of like slyness. and I think that aligns with his chaste sexuality.

32:12Alexandra Schwartz:It's like, here's the thing. Here's where the movie dovetails with our modern notions of trauma, though, because the Calypso episode is refigured. She's feeding him these lotus flowers.

32:23Vinson Cunningham:Yes, which is not part of the deal.

32:25Alexandra Schwartz:It's not part of the deal in the Odyssey. And she says over and over to him, like, no, I didn't just keep you here out of, like, it seems much more sort of forced and horrible in the actual odyssey here it's like we've had a good time together let me tell you again the implication is sex but she says hey you had to take these seven years because if you had remembered before it probably would have killed you and so what sounds like a beautiful island spa vacation to the rest of us has actually been a period of preparation so that you could finish the journey because you've seen too much and if you could remember all of it a lot of the episodes of Odysseus and his men are told to us almost retrospectively.

33:07Alexandra Schwartz:It's her coaxing him to remember what happened, and then he tells us, and then we see it.

33:12Vinson Cunningham:It's the talking cure. Yeah, it's the talking cure. Well, whereas, of course, in the Odyssey itself, it is Odysseus recounting those episodes himself. He recounts them. It's not, yeah, he doesn't need much spurring. Yeah, there is something very modern, I think, about this idea of you need to be rehabbed now. You have had a very hard time, and we've got to get you ready to go back into society and to confront all of that.

33:36Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah.

33:39Naomi Fry:In a minute, what does this new translation of this ancient text tell us about ourselves today? I think something's going on with Matt Damon.

33:50Vinson Cunningham:I think he's— What do you mean something's going on? I think that he— I think he has a no sex scenes policy. I think that, like— Maybe his wife is jealous. I mean, I don't know what it is, but isn't this fascinating?

34:03Alexandra Schwartz:Think about it.

34:13Naomi Fry:Introducing Meta Glasses. Hey, Meta.

34:17Vinson Cunningham:Any last-minute tables for two tonight?

34:19Alexandra Schwartz:Sure. There's a great Italian restaurant 15 minutes away. Hey, Meta.

34:24Naomi Fry:Where's the nearest flower shop?

34:26Alexandra Schwartz:Five minutes away, straight down Broadway, past the bodega. Their lilies are trending on Instagram. Just saying. Hey Meta, am I forgetting anything else? How about setting a calendar reminder for next year?

34:39Naomi Fry:Meta glasses, available in more than 20 styles.

34:49Naomi Fry:so guys obviously we've established that many many people still care about homer still care about the odyssey are very excited for this movie and the question is why why now what is the relevance of the story? What is the relevance of this character of Odysseus to our lives as they stand? What do you guys think?

35:19Alexandra Schwartz:It seems to me that certainly Christopher Nolan has answers to this question. Because, yes, it's a war text, The Odyssey, and it's a war film. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. But it's also I think it takes war as an opportunity to talk about

35:38Naomi Fry:the connections between people and how civilization depends on a kind of

35:47Alexandra Schwartz:openness and congeniality between people that is not necessarily natural but is the product of generations of work and therefore can be shattered you know this whole thing we've been talking about all episode, the law of Zeus, Xenia, the welcoming the stranger. I can't imagine that Nolan emphasized that so much without thinking about today's questions about immigration, pluralism, trade between countries and nations. There's a moment toward the end of the film where Penelope, and this is like a total Nolan invention, I believe, says, you know, we had this beautiful world of palaces and trade. She says trade, you know, and it's almost like the fall of the sort of pre-existing Bronze Age, which Odysseus really blames on himself.

36:47Alexandra Schwartz:He doesn't like the whole Trojan horse thing. He remembers it as when we kind of broke the world, you know. And he says, you know, people are going to forget these lessons and they're going to do this again. This is, to me, the whole sort of like, this is Nolan really like writing his essay in the middle of the film. And I think it has everything to do with the sort of right populist world that has emerged that we all understand and how I think Nolan, to me, it has always seemed like a sort of, you know, post-World War II center right. I mean, people talked a lot about the sort of the Dark Knight as a sort of post 9-11 sort of George W.

37:34Alexandra Schwartz:Bushian contemplation on leadership and warning against various forms of, you know, radical socialism, etc. And here, he's kind of looking from that same vantage point at the contemporary right, it seems, and saying, you're closing the world, you're cutting off pathways of congenial behavior that took decades and decades, really a century to build, and you're destroying it, and you don't build these things as quickly as you can destroy them. And so it's this really civilizational warning, I think. And so he's really—I think he's working out some really contemporary stuff in this film.

38:18Naomi Fry:I think it's really some of the most thrilling stuff in it. I think that's really smart, Vincent, in the idea that we're talking about civilization. Like how quickly we can shatter, you know, mores, customs, ways of behavior that made things, you know, possible. But I think it's also about individual psychology and the effects that the shattering of a world has on a person's life, emotion, you know, psyche. In some ways, you know, it's really a movie about PTSD, you know, kind of. And you see it, obviously, you see all the horrible things, horrible and thrilling to us as viewers, but mostly horrible for Odysseus and his men, the absolute carnage, just like an inescapable horror, right?

39:22Naomi Fry:and towards the end after we've been through the ringer with this man went literally to hell and back yeah when he comes home and he has that conversation that you alluded to with penelope and he talks about the trick of the horse and yeah how he was against it and because it that That was like, it was an underhanded, which is also funny because we know he's an underhanded hero, you know, in the original text. But here, and that has to do with the kind of Damon-esque bent of his character. He's like, that's the moment when things went wrong. Like, I regret that. They thought we were giving them a gift.

40:10Naomi Fry:Like, they were open-hearted. We burst out of that horse, and it was like Pandora's box or something. You know, like, every which way horror kind of, like, visited upon Troy. And you see this. It's kind of a flashback. You see him coming into Troy, and you see all the warriors around him, yeah, raping, pillaging. And you're experiencing this with him, and you feel the sense of loss, you know? You feel the sense of, like, the world breaking and how it happens on the broad level, as you suggested, but it also happens to a person. And that was very effective, I thought, and felt very contemporary and very relevant to things, you know, whether we ourselves are experiencing or things we're seeing other people experiencing, you know.

41:07Naomi Fry:It's constant, and it's that pinpoint into the individual of, like, this is what it does, even when you're the perpetrator.

41:17Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. Often. And perhaps especially.

41:20Vinson Cunningham:Yeah. Yeah. I think the Odyssey endures for a lot of reasons, and some are complicated, and some are like Odysseus, and some are simple. The simple one is I don't think anything can endure and retain its cultural prominence without giving pleasure. and the Odyssey gives an enormous amount of pleasure. It's so fun. It's so beautiful and fun and interesting and scary and all these magical weird things happen in it. All these crazy monsters come out and humans have to make decisions about what to do when confronted with this magical unpredictable world. Those things, the shock of them feeling fresh, it's hard to get over that.

42:09Vinson Cunningham:And part of it is just how beautiful and enjoyable it is. And Nomi, I think you're right that that's for very psychological reasons. I also think there's the coming of age aspect, which we haven't touched on quite as much, but is, I think, maybe a little bit also at the heart of the weird right-wing response to the Odyssey. Because Telemachus is trying to figure out what it is to be a man. And I think when we've hinted at it, but we can say explicitly, like I think a lot of the right wing focus on the Homeric epics is this idea that this is the foundation of Western culture, that Greece is the foundation of Western culture.

42:45Vinson Cunningham:And these are these essential texts of ancient Greece. And they show what it is to be a man, to go to war, to fight. And we get a big version of that in the Nolan movie. It's such a fight heavy movie. And I think he does those things brilliantly. But in the middle of this, you have Telemachus, who doesn't yet know how to do any of that stuff, trying to figure out what he is. And like, Telemachus is, he's very contemporary in that way also. Who do I look to? Who's my dad? Where's my dad? I need to know what to do and what it is to be a man. Emily Wilson has a great note about this in the introduction to her text.

43:18Vinson Cunningham:She points out a couple of places where Telemachus tells his mom what to do. And he says, go get dressed and wash your face. You've been crying so much. No one wants to look at you. He's kind of assuming this role that's totally inappropriate for a young son of telling his mother how to make herself beautiful and how to conduct herself because that's what he thinks. He's trying it out. That's what he's supposed to do. and when Odysseus comes back and again is ready to reclaim his position but not quite there's such a weird odd moment both in the Odyssey and I think Nolan dealt with this really well in the movie where Odysseus is back and it's not a hero's homecoming like this is not Marvel this is not like whoosh now I swoop in and kill all these guys this is still like oh god I have to figure this out I've got to trick him I've got to pretend to be an old beggar to even get in the palace doors otherwise I'm dead so I think so much of this text is foundational to our society but not in the ways of like, what it means to be man is to go to war and be glorious.

44:15Vinson Cunningham:I think it's foundational because of those questions and because of that asking and that confusion. And I also think it's foundational because this is a society that we read about that had real morals and honor. And like we look around us and it's not hard to feel like we're living in a version of Ithaca where the suitors are in the palace. where corruption reigns rampant and the worst are rewarded with the most and so much of it is about self-enrichment. And I think there's a lot of appeal and a lot of reclamation that can be done of the Odyssey, which is about how do you restore order in the world.

44:54Alexandra Schwartz:It's also, you know, a lot of that in this, when we talk about the sort of feminist overtones of this Odyssey, A lot of that resides with Christopher Nolan in the figure of Penelope, who does seem to me to, on a certain level, the way the suitor speak to her, there's one scene between her and Robin Patterson where she's like, he's just like, get over it. It's like, come on, you got to move on. It's almost like she's kind of a Hamlet. But she's a Hamlet of the old order. And everybody is telling her, it's done. So even Odysseus in this telling says, you know. But it's not. Well, here's the thing.

45:32Alexandra Schwartz:Even Odysseus, when he comes back, he says, what if I told you that there was no going back? You know, what he saw in Troy changes. So even Odysseus in this telling says, maybe we can restore order, but it won't be the same as it was. And this endless pining over however we idealize the liberal order or something like that, you know, it's over. And so—

45:54Vinson Cunningham:I think they say, the age of bronze is passing.

45:58Alexandra Schwartz:Age of – you know, and so – and one reason that the Odyssey persists is because the world does keep on sort of evanescing behind us. And the question of, like, how to move on is always fresh.

46:11Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, it is fascinating to get this thing that is one half totally contemporary feeling, the struggle of Odysseus, and the other half is involved with gods who we no longer believe in, who have – Speak for yourself. Yeah, exactly. I was a little bit like, I'm kind of ready to take Athena up again. Like, kind of ready for that. I'm a little bit ready to engage with Zeus directly. Makes total sense to me. Especially in this time of, like, rampant climate change while the forest out the Paris is burning. Gotta respect nature. Zeus has sent lightning. You must respect this. We are angering the gods.

46:46Naomi Fry:We really are.

46:55Naomi Fry:This has been Critics at Large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our show is mixed by Mike Kutchman and we had engineering help today from Vince Fairchild with music by Alexis Quadrato. You can listen to all of our episodes anytime at newyorker.com slash critics.

47:22Thank you.