The Magasphere’s endless appetite for culture wars is wearily familiar. But who could have foreseen that Greek literature would become the new casus belli? Ahead of its much-anticipated general release next week, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey has triggered Elon Musk and other supposed defenders of western civilisation. Directorial decisions such as the casting of the Kenyan-Mexican actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, Mr Musk ranted incoherently, amounted to “pissing on Homer’s grave”.
The absurd insistence on the white skin of a mythological figure reveals nothing we didn’t already know about the owner of X. The rest of us can move on and look forward to a lavish cinematic take on a story that has inspired artists for almost 3,000 years. Homer’s account of Odysseus’s 10-year struggle to return home from the Trojan wars has been reworked by Virgil in the Aeneid, relocated to Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and given a feminist treatment by Margaret Atwood in her Penelopiad. Now for the 21st-century Hollywood treatment.
Armed with an estimated $250m budget following the unexpected box-office success of Oppenheimer, Nolan has produced a film which is, by all accounts, appropriately epic and old-school in scale. Props and locations, including a formidable-looking Trojan horse, have been laboriously built rather than generated through green-screen special effects. Lasting three hours, the Imax version went though around 11 miles of celluloid.
Indolent lotus-eaters, a terrifying but gullible cyclops and enchanting goddesses will grab the attention. But the Odyssey can also speak directly to a modern audience. In its portrayal of exile and the longing for home – and in the case of the eponymous hero’s wife Penelope, the predicament of those left behind – Homer’s verse deals with universal human themes. As an account of postwar trauma, disillusionment and dislocation in the ancient world, it also has a notably dark side.
Homer repeatedly describes Odysseus as polytropos, skilfully rendered in Emily Wilson’s recent translation as “complicated”. As Wilson observes in her introduction, he is “a migrant … a poet, a loving husband and father, an adulterer, a homeless person … a pirate, thief and liar … a mass murderer, and a war hero”. Reaction to this week’s premiere in London suggests that Nolan has not skirted the grimmer stuff. As a brutal war continues to play out in Ukraine, and migrants continue to die making treacherous sea crossings in the Mediterranean, some scenes may carry an uncomfortably modern resonance.
As a blog by Mary Beard entitled “Odyssey fever” indicates, classicists are jubilant at the prospect of a Homeric summer blockbuster. Emerald Fennell’s sexually frank adaptation of Wuthering Heights may have been criticised for not being sufficiently faithful to the novel. But Fennell’s film sparked an explosion of new interest in Emily Brontë, and sent a new generation of pilgrims to the West Yorkshire moors.
Can the pulling power of Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland do the same for Homer? A wave of new Odysseus reading groups suggests the answer is yes. The superhero genre that made Nolan’s reputation as a fine and subtle film-maker may be on the wane. But at a time when the derivative powers of AI have spooked artists of all kinds, he is returning to the source. It is no more than one of humanity’s greatest storytellers deserves.
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