A tall man stands upright in a dimly lit and crowded hall, beating a thick, long staff against the floor in steady rhythmic intervals, his dreadlocked hair swaying dramatically to and fro. In between beats he grunts a word or two, as the surrounding men roar in response, expressing what may be either pleasure or possibly indigestion from the sumptuous meal strewn on the tables in front of them. Fire flickers all around, just barely piercing the prehistoric darkness.
Where are we, and what is going on? The guttural invocations, subhuman almost, suggest cavemen—a time when protohumans had just recently emerged out of Africa but were not quite fully human. This is a society that has no words to speak, and certainly no poetry to recite. Grunts and beats of a stick are its language. Except, with a shock we recognize that these are no neanderthals—they are Greek men of the Late Bronze Age. We are meant to be in Ithaca, in the halls of King Odysseus who, of course, has not yet come home from Troy. And such is the welcome director Christopher Nolan offers to his viewers into the world of Odysseus, the epic world of Homer about the crafty hero and his decade-long saga of returning home from the Trojan War.
In 1954, the fabled classicist Moses I. Finley wrote his pathbreaking book The World of Odysseus, attempting to historically parse the world of Homeric epics—When did it exist? What were its defining characteristics? The contradictions many have noted in Finley’s book largely presage Greek historian Kurt Raaflaub’s more recent article, whose pithy title sums it up: “A Historian’s Headache: How to Read ‘Homeric Society’?” There is still much that we do not know about the world of traveling bards who composed the Iliad and the Odyssey over centuries, adding new episodes entirely orally, as the Greek alphabet, yet to be borrowed from the Phoenicians, was still not yet even on the horizon. Poetry, though, can exist without writing, as these epics remind us powerfully, even as we struggle to wrap our minds around anyone being able to recite twenty-four hours’ worth of poetry by heart.
Could it be that oral tradition alone is insufficient and that epic poetry passed down from generation to generation is the true marker of civilization? Speech is certainly important, but it is poetry that allows us to remember, commemorate, and glorify the tales that are inspirational today and for future generations. The power of poetic memory defines the world of Odysseus, as Homer presents it. Not only is the epic itself one giant narrative poem, but nestled within it are further narrative poems, relaying reports from characters to each other. The world of Odysseus, whatever else may be said of it, is undoubtedly a world saturated with poetry.
Except, we are not speaking here of the world of Odysseus as described by Finley or Raaflaub. This is, rather, Homer’s Odyssey filtered through Nolan’s modern imagination. The result seems more like someone cosplaying the Odyssey, imagining what the epic should be like, but without ever having read it, or at least read it deeply. There is certainly no poetry in Nolan’s Odyssey—no understanding of this long-lost world where bards passionately recite flowing verses of beautiful poems, gorgeous hexameters unfurling onward, six feet at a time, each slow beat followed by two fast ones or one slow one, repeating on and on and on. Instead, there are hints of Nolan having done just enough historical research to be dangerous, but not of expending enough thought to pull it all together.
For instance, clearly Nolan has researched the Greek concept of xenia, the hospitality that is sacred to the gods, especially Zeus Xenios (“Zeus the protector of strangers”). Such hospitality demands something in its code from both hosts and guests. And so, time and again the characters in the film dutifully refer to Zeus’s Law, carefully letting it roll off the tongue, as though afraid of mispronouncing a spell. But without understanding the concept, it becomes a Homeric Golden Rule—“do unto others as they would do unto you.” Really? This is not what made The Odyssey (and, of course, The Iliad) the civilizational touchstones of the ancient world—regardless of where one lands on the various smaller debates regarding Homeric society, its influence is indisputable. More than this, both epics tell stories that can move audiences today no less powerfully than two and a half millennia ago. We live in the literary world the Homeric epics made, even if we don’t realize it. But Nolan is utterly unaware of this world.
Beyond the misunderstanding of “Zeus’s law,” more incongruities pile up. The Cyclops lives all alone, rather than in proximity to others like him—losing Homer’s point about societies that exist as alternatives to the nascent city-state, the polis, whose origins we can discern in the epics. For the civilized dwell in citadels; the rest in forests and caves like animals. Epic poetry, in the process, is a key civilizing—and civilizational—force. Every time Odysseus in the epics visits other realms, the civilized ones always offer him a nice banquet and recite some poetry—preferably about the Trojan War proper. But not in this rendition. At least the Cyclops’s cannibalism is presented as vividly as possible, affording opportunity for near-cartoonish grotesqueness. Other stories of civilizations and palaces Odysseus visits are not in Nolan’s story. We have no visit to the Phaeacians, for instance. Instead, only the monsters make it into this tale—grunting their way through the story much like Odysseus’s men.
The men at least still made it into this tale. By contrast, the gods appear only in the brief mentions of Zeus’s Law and in Athena’s periodic visits to Odysseus to spew some more New Age wisdom before disappearing yet again. Why is she there? What is the point of this character—or many others briefly mentioned, then dropped? The Homeric world, inhabited by active and involved gods whose scene of debate over the fate of Odysseus opens the Homeric epic, did not make it into Nolan’s vision of Homer.
We could quibble further about other bizarre decisions. For instance, Helen has mysterious scars on her face and arms in her post-Trojan War appearances in the film—scars that are not present there during the flashbacks to earlier times. What happened to the face that launched a thousand ships? Did someone slash her at some point, disfiguring her? And if so, when? Where? Why? We get no answers. She is just mysteriously maimed. Moving along—another slaughter scene awaits.
Shortly before the film’s confusing ending, we are back in Odysseus’s great feasting hall. This time, there is no bard beating rhythm with his staff, and there is certainly no poetry. Instead, Telemachus and other men beat their swords against the floor in clanging unison. A new world order is dawning, it seems, one even less literary than the one that came before, a world much like ours.