The Odyssey’s Neverending Journey Through the Discourse

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1:03Hey there, just a quick heads up that today's episode is all about Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. And I know that this story is nearly 3 ,000 years old, but we're going to be talking about a lot of things that make this particular movie unique. So if you haven't seen it yet, consider this a spoiler warning.

1:26so sam christopher nolan's the odyssey has been out for a little while now and i wonder if you're comfortable declaring a winner in this round of the culture war i don't think there's any way to look at this and not see christopher nolan as a hands-down winner in this one sam adams is a senior writer and editor and a film critic here at Slate. It feels weirdly like we're kind of, he's returned us to the era of monoculture again. This is, I'm getting texts from like family members who never talked to me about movies. People are stopped, literally stopping me on the street to ask if they need to see this in 70 millimeter IMAX.

2:03Like it is just the level and the depth of cultural involvement is something we really almost never see anymore. I am all in on the Nolan hype train. I mean, Memento, Inception, Batman. We don't have to talk about Interstellar, but a huge part of the reason I was so psyched to talk to Sam is because it gave me an official excuse to see this blockbuster during the workday. I went to a 2 p.m. showing on a Thursday afternoon, nearly two weeks after opening weekend, and the theater was sold out. He's almost certainly going to make over a billion dollars on his version of a 3 ,000-year-old story. The movie hasn't even opened in China yet, which is going to make it another boatload of money.

2:45And it is driving conversation all over the place. Not all of that conversation is great. That comes with the territory.

2:59You know, as a daily news producer, I'm maybe not as steeped in like pop culture as much as I'd like to be. Like I saw on the periphery that there was this conflict happening mostly between like people in Elon Musk's X and elsewhere. But like, how would you articulate what people were actually pissed off about here? So much of this apparent culture war is being driven by an only scene on X. And there's one thing we know about Elon Musk. First of all, like two things. One, he hates the Odyssey or he hates Christopher Nolan's version of the Odyssey. He hates the idea of it. He hates the idea of it being kind of culturally diverse and not quote-unquote historically accurate.

3:40And we also know that he is more than willing to put his finger on the scale as far as X's algorithm goes. So the fact that you were seeing all this stuff platformed on X and makes it seem like, oh my God, everybody is like mad at this movie. They are, there's some people, at least we could say, who took issue with the fact that, you know, for example, he made, you know, Helena Troy Black cast Lupita Nyong 'o in that role that there weren't, as if this is something that anybody normally hears, but there weren't enough Greek actors in it. He used this sort of multiracial cast, which didn't reflect the makeup of ancient Greece at the time, yada, yada, yada.

4:20And you would see people saying, oh, wow, they know they're in trouble. They know this movie's going to tank. You can tell they're worried about it. They're running scared. Clearly, they weren't. Clearly, they were wrong. This movie is like a bigger hit than anybody predicted. It's just like a massive smash. around the world. So the idea that those people, I mean, they're very loud, but the idea that they represent a significant faction or that their apparent boycott of the film is going to make any noticeable dent has obviously turned out to be completely untrue. So, I mean, this was a runaway success, but that kind of makes me think like this whole battle that was waged before and during the opening, it almost makes it seem like it was artificial.

5:03Like, was this a Pyrrhic victory if we're getting like Greek old school here? Like, what do you think we learned here? Do we learn anything? I mean, we're probably still learning things. I mean, the discourse has not cooled down. I mean, it's still the biggest movie in the world, at least I guess Spider-Man's open now. So give it a few more hours. Right. But I mean, it's interesting because we have now sort of entered a different kind of culture war coming, if not from the left, precisely, at least from a sort of more like academic intellectual perspective where there are people, you know, who are now like, oh, this is not a faithful adaptation of the Odyssey.

5:38This is, you know, trivializing Homer's greatness.

5:44But, you know, it's it's this weird, almost like being in a time machine. I feel like I'm back in like, you know, the 90s or something where people are just like, I feel like some of these people are kind of trying to like tell me that they don't even own a TV. like there's just this sort of like kind of high culture disdain for the idea of like big blockbuster movies across the board which is sort of almost like thrilling in a way to see it come back because it's just like we haven't had this argument in a long time this is fun Today on the show how the Odyssey conquered the box office and a cultural backlash I'm Rob Gunther sitting in for Mary Harris.

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10:12Three years ago, Christopher Nolan won Best Picture for Oppenheimer. at that time. Do you remember any sort of like woke fighting happening around the release or reception of that movie? I mean, yes, Oppenheimer definitely got it from all conceivable sides. One of the major complaints was that the movie didn't show the suffering of the Japanese people that were incinerated by the weapon that Oppenheimer created. You have his vision of it, but you never actually see anything like from their perspective. You never see Hiroshima or Nagasaki. And you had, you know, the sort of criticisms that dog every one of his movies, some of which are quite valid.

10:51I mean, the fact that he's like not super great at writing female roles, certainly not as interested in women as he is in men. I think that's just like mathematically accurate. And, you know, just, you know, the idea that he kind of turns everything into spectacle, that he makes everything into a Christopher Nolan movie. There's always going to be a scrambled timeline. There's always going to be a husband with a troubled relationship with either his wife or his daughter who's trying to get back to them. The same people going after The Odyssey, were they already sort of like warmed up from having gone after his previous movies?

11:25I mean, one thing that's been interesting watching Nolan's career over the last 20 years or something is that when he was the guy who did the Batman movies, the conventional wisdom was that he was a conservative, certainly from a British perspective, a Tory. You know, he was making these kind of, you know, low key pro fascist anti Occupy Wall Street, you know, movies about vigilante justice. And, you know, he was a sort of a little little, you know, home focused guy who was just all about like white men and their nuclear families and protecting that. And so he took it a lot from kind of the left at that point in his career.

12:05He was a, you know, a sort of small C conservative at the very least. And now, you know, because he's no longer making movies about Batman, I guess. And he's, you know, taken a pretty, you know, pronounced anti-war stance, certainly in his last couple of movies. he is now and he's just become like a much bigger cultural object like he was a blockbuster filmmaker before yeah now he is a oscar-winning blockbuster filmmaker he is you know the biggest target there is and i think part of what um when we talk about the sort of right-wing crusade the elon musk crusade against him failing um if the goal was to depress the movie's box office that clearly didn't work if the goal was for these sort of influencer grifters to boost their own profiles and, you know, get an Elon Musk good graces and get the kind of, you know, numbers on Twitter that they can monetize.

12:58Maybe they succeeded in that. So after Oppenheimer, after the success of Oppenheimer, he had his pick to do pretty much anything you wanted. What do we know about how he chose the Odyssey? I mean, he says that he was it's a story he had always been interested in telling. And this is clearly like, I mean, you had the biggest chips you could possibly have. I took a$100 million movie and made a billion dollars, move it, won all the Oscars. You know, I think this is a story that he had wanted to tell for a long time as he tells it, it's kind of, he's referred to it as like the Urtext. It is one of the foundations of Western literature.

13:32You can read, you know, romance, adventure, morality plays, all sorts of descendants of it back into Homer. You can look at all these things as kind of offshoots of what he's doing. But also having seen in the movie, it really, he actually had a very specific purpose, which he wasn't talking about beforehand, because it's weirdly when you're talking about a 3000 year old story, it is possible to spoil the Odyssey in some ways. So I will tread lightly on this, but he has made this essentially a movie about the betrayal of social and Western ideals. And if people like Elon Musk are claiming this as, you know, the foundational text of Western civilization, by which he means white, Western, you know, white civilization, this is where all our values and our heritage comes from.

14:23Christopher Nolan is kind of agreeing with him, but he's also made a movie about how we have betrayed those ideals. He focuses his movie very much on what the movie calls Zeus's Law, what Homer's Scholar calls Xenia, which is kind of the Greek code of hospitality, which goes way beyond sort of welcoming someone into your home and is about sort of being kind to strangers. It's the golden rule that like every major religion and philosophy seems to adhere to, right? Yes. Yeah. And that and he's basically, you know, built this movie around the idea that a society that does not embrace strangers, that does not treat.

15:00You know, people who are not a part of it well, cannot sustain itself and in fact will crumble into ruin as ancient Greece did. Yeah, what I found subversive about this interpretation of the golden rule, like we kind of think of it in the Judeo-Christian version of like, treat others as you would want to be treated, right? Zeus's law is more like, don't pick on the homeless guy because he might be a god in disguise and will smite you. So there's a real saying to me that this law that undergirds our society is not just because it's the right thing to do, but because if we don't do it, like shit's going to get bad.

15:35Yes. Yeah, exactly. I mean, like this is, it applies in many circumstances in this movie. And what turns out to be sort of surprisingly, there is an Oppenheimer-like moment in this movie, which is, you know, Nolan sort of views the Trojan horse, which the Odyssey and the other versions of the story, because the Trojan horse isn't really very important in the Odyssey itself. um but you know Odysseus is the one who kind of came up with the idea who designed it and this is part of what the Odyssey characterizes as his most important quality which is this kind of craftiness he has those sort of wily um intelligent man um able to trick people and then the movie says like well yeah that worked out great um for the siege of Troy specifically but it kind of like you know as the last line of of Oppenheimer says like kind of blew up the world in a way like it just you know destroyed the idea that like there is you know kind of that there are rules right that you like even in war in the bloodiest of combat you will sort of abide by certain uh principles that you can you know trust um people to act in a sort of quote unquote civilized manner and once you've done away with that um everything's on the table you know uh You're talking about the horse as this atom bomb, right, of this movie.

17:02And the movie opens up with this scene of Elliot Page, who I had not realized was in the movie. I know Elliot Page has been a longtime Christopher Nolan collaborator in many movies. And right away, I was like, oh, this is to me, it was like, this is why people are pissed on the right wing, because they just they don't want trans people to be like in society. And then, of course, there was the previous controversy, Lupita Nyong 'o playing central characters that have not often been cast as anything other than white actresses. I mean, for me, like before you even get into the ideological disagreements about what the movie could mean, we just had on its face like identity politics.

17:40Like we don't want to see these people in our zone. Right. And that's just sort of, I mean, I'm conflicted about how much to even treat that as a good faith objection because it's just so nakedly racist and transphobic. And the idea that it has anything to do with historical accuracy or, you know, was Helen actually black? I mean, actually, according to the story, she hatched from an egg. so like i mean you know probably none of these people existed i mean there was troy there probably was a war um was it actually fought over a woman being running off for the wrong guy probably not that's not usually what wars are fought over um the movie certainly suggests otherwise that was essentially a ruse to have a war over trade routes which is the kind thing that wars are more often fought over.

18:28I mean, that objection is just obviously bigoted on its face. And I think that's how it should be regarded. But as far as like why Nolan made that choice, I mean, I think he is, the movie is for better or worse, I think essentially race blind when it comes to casting. I mean, he's working with actors that he's worked with before, like Kimesh Patel, who's incredibly great as Eurylochus. It is his second in command. And, you know, I think he and because, again, he is making a point and telling the story about contemporary society and not about ancient Greece, you know, all these questions about like, oh, are those the right kinds of armor?

19:10Is that the kind of sword that someone would have wielded at the time are really not relevant to the story? He is telling, you know, a myth about myth.

19:23After the break, just how seriously do we have to take Elon Musk and his movie meltdowns?

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20:48is like clearly an utter lunatic. That seems actually not that funny, but he's just so transparent in some ways. I mean, he ginned up this whole right-wing backlash, you know, platform to amplify these people who are saying this movie is going to be a big failure, would often sort of jump in with his little, you know, 100 emoji, which is usually his contribution to the discourse. That utterly failed, and I think that's a problem for him both in terms of his agenda and in terms of the legitimacy of Twitter. Like, the success of this movie is just a giant advertisement for the idea that Twitter is not real life, that influence on Twitter is meaningless, that it does not affect anything, and that is both very bad for his brand, bad for his business, and, you know, I think really gets under his skin in a pretty obvious way.

21:40And so he is so sort of wounded and just being such a big crybaby about this that he has now come out on Twitter and said, okay, I'm going to give a hundred million dollars, you know, to make a historically accurate version of this. And every day it's something different. So I'm going to pay a filmmaker to do it. I'm going to get Mel Gibson to do it. I'm going to have Grok, my AI, generative AI tool, make a historically accurate version of this, which is, I mean, you know, and this is all like Elon just says stuff, right? Like this is going to happen around the same time as he establishes a colony on Mars.

22:15Right. But it's clear that it has gotten under his skin. And that is, I mean, as someone who, I mean, the only consolation I can take in the fact that he wields so much power and is such a complete lunatic is the fact that he clearly, that this clearly does get to him. And I can kind of enjoy that from a distance. He's also, you know, pretty dangerous when he's crazy. He's very dangerous because he has, you know, so much money. And I was going to say, like, you don't have to take him seriously. And I think the fruits of his labors are like comical, maybe not comical, but you know, they're easy to dismiss in retrospect.

22:51But when he says something like, I'm going to spend a hundred million dollars to fuel an AI movie. And then you have a director like Neil Blomkamp from who made District 9. He recently just came out with his own AI generated short movie. It's kind of like the position that he has and the power that he has is able to influence culture in such a broad way. Like just yesterday, he also announced he's going to spend$100 million on supporting right wing causes leading up to the midterm. So, you know, trivial as he is, or as insignificant as his actual followers are, he commands such an outsized role in our money, in our politics.

23:30And he's bought this soapbox that can amplify even his most deranged thoughts. $100 million is not a lot of money for a movie budget. That is Oppenheimer money, not Odyssey money. But it is a lot of money in the political arena. And that is, he is actually spending that and not just saying he's going to. And that obviously does have a very tangible and I think pretty dangerous effect. So it is easy and frankly fun to laugh at how much he is like losing his mind over this movie being a huge success. But then, you know, there are parts of the non-culture war that he is much more effective at winning.

24:11Yeah. I wonder if we, and I say we like in the media, gave too much oxygen to this in the lead up to The Odyssey. Like, because it was such a blockbuster film, because the ticket sales speak to the success of the film, of Christopher Nolan, like, what if we just didn't pay attention to Elon Musk? I mean, this wouldn't have been a story, right? It would have just been like, oh, everybody's excited for The Odyssey, and it did really well. what's next yeah i'm i'm of two minds on that because on the one hand i i try to i think there is a too much of you know what i think of a sort of like almost like magical thinking when it comes to you know people like elon musk i mean like what elon musk thinks matters i wish it didn't right but he is the richest most powerful man on the world like what he thinks makes a huge difference.

25:03I do think the media gave way too much credence to the idea that they were sort of like a legitimate, significant, widespread, you know, backlash to, you know, this movie before it even came out. I think, you know, pretty much all those articles were just written around posts on Twitter. So I think I do think the media was way too credulous about the idea that this was like a real significant phenomenon like clearly there are people who didn't want the odyssey to exist i mean there are people who are just straight up racists who were like i don't think the story should have black people in it and that's not a surprise um but i don't i don't think we need to care about that i think we don't certainly don't think we need to write articles about it you talked earlier about how christopher nolan is a lightning rod for both sides and there was a much uh less uh dramatic controversy coming from the other side of the spectrum We had classicist Emily Wilson a few years back.

25:58She made this like really novel translation of the Odyssey, which was in fact cited by Christopher Nolan in the lead up to this movie. And everybody kind of turned to her for a reaction to the movie after it came out. And she had something a little surprising to say. What was her deal? I mean, she hates it. I don't think that is an exaggeration or a simplification. I mean, it's interesting to look at, go back and watch the sort of videos and the stuff she was making about the movie before she saw it. And they didn't show it to her particularly early. I mean, they had a screening for her and some other people from her publisher, but it was like a few days in advance or something.

26:34So she did a lot of interviews and being a piece of sense before she'd seen the film. It was like, hey, you know, he came at this good faith and, you know, adaptations are never faithful to the text. And, you know, we're going to see what his vision of it is. And then she saw the film and clearly, like, is just hopping mad about him and having put years of her life into scrupulously translating not just Homer's language, but his intent, thinking incredibly hard about that. I think this, you know, movie is, I mean, it's not that. This is not Homer. on screen. This is Christopher Nolan's Odyssey.

27:10It is not Homer's. So as a sort of classicist, as an expert on the Odyssey, it does not surprise me at all that she doesn't like what he's done with it. I don't think her reading of the film is very attentive to what the film itself is doing. You know, what works on screen and what doesn't. I think, I mean, I think she just misreads some of the scenes entirely. It's hard. Here's my thing, though. I kind of felt bad for because it read to me as someone who was not a film person, who was a classicist, was basically called on as an expert in this epic to weigh in. And came with, in one of your writings about Emily Wilson, you said that praise is kind of like a double-edged sword, right?

27:57That's the most damning form of criticism is the soft praise that she gives. She equates it to eating a popsicle on a summer day or something like that. But at the same time, I felt like the backlash, maybe because people were so primed to defend this movie from right-wing trolls i feel like she really got um attacked maybe only for like a day she was like you know twitter's main person of the day for a little bit but i wonder if you feel like this as a critic like do you ever come out with like a hot take that you didn't think would generate the sort of backlash that it does about a certain piece of art and i don't know how does that how does that work when you're momentarily put on the spotlight i mean i think i mean i've definitely i i don't know that i've had a review go quite as viral as emily wilson's odyssey review has gone uh i mean again like my mom texted it to me last night it was like that's very long do i need to read it like a friend sent it to me do i and i was like sure um yeah but um so it is way out there it's definitely kind of broken containment um if you're going to say critical things about other people's work you should expect at least be prepared to get that back and take a shot right unfair about that?

29:03I mean, an interesting thing about Christopher Nolan is he obviously got, you know, he was a sort of esteemed, like, interesting filmmaker. And then his footprint really got kind of supersized by the Batman trilogies. And he has, I think, almost uniquely basically held on to that comic book type fandom while no longer making comic book movies. So, you know, I've seen people kind of expressing kind of nolan-esque fandom for emily wilson um and basically just being like you know she's the expert how dare anyone question her you know like what are we fighting about anymore this is just nolan fanboys who can't take criticism of their hero um so it's you know and none of that is sort of particularly interesting discussion like i think there's all sorts of room in the middle this does not have to be like uh whatever like team emily or team chris which I think is what has devolved into in a lot of places.

29:59But this is good, right? I mean, like the fandoms, the social media wars, not the right-wing stuff, but the fact that we're still talking about this movie, you know, however long, a week and a half, two weeks after its release. I saw it yesterday at 210 and it was sold out. Like I gave up my seat to a senior citizen couple that had to sit in different parts of the theater because I saw them walk in and split up. This is good for movies, right? Like blockbuster movies are good, monoculture, serves a purpose in some way now that it didn't used to. What are your closing thoughts for having seen The Odyssey come and go?

30:32Yeah, I do. I mean, I, to a certain extent, celebrate anything that gets people into movie theaters, and especially for movies that are genuinely worth talking about. I think this is bringing, you know, sort of, you know, adults and educating people about, you know, various kinds of projection and, you know, the experience of seeing movies in theaters. Making people think about war. that all seems really good to me um some of the discussion about it has been incredibly annoying um which is also what happens when people who aren't used to talking about movies suddenly feel like they need to have an opinion about things um but that you know comes to the territory and the fact that this is so everybody's a little out of practice i think in how to have this kind of discussion at this scale um but hopefully we are learn the lessons from it and take them with this into the future.

31:24Yeah, we're getting warmed up for next time. We're getting warmed up for Christopher Nolan's next movie. Sam Adams, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Rob. Sam Adams is a staff writer and a senior editor here at Slate. You can find all this coverage of The Odyssey on slate.com. And that's the show. What Next is produced by Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames-Ducharm, and Patrick Ford. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next TBD. Mia Lobel is the executive producer of podcasts here at Slate. Ben Richmond is the senior director of podcast operations.

31:57And I'm Rob Gunther, sitting in for Mary Harris. You can find me on Blue Sky. I'm at OneRobGunther. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you soon.

32:19Thank you.

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