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- [00:01]
A
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- [00:30]
B
It's the biggest movie of the year, which we and a massive number of other people across the world have been looking forward to seeing with enormous excitement. And for us, I have to say, a bit of trepidation for some time.
- [00:43]
C
Not only that, but it's a lightning rod in a culture wars row with Elon Musk wading in to condemn the casting of Lupita Nyong' o as Helen as woke Nonsense. Because Musk is, after all, such a noted Odyssey expert.
- [01:01]
B
But actually, dare I say it, we are Odyssey experts. At least. I mean, in this very particular sense. We have both actually seen the film and read the poem several times, may I say, unlike Elon, who at least at the time of the recording, had not seen the film. We know that because we both went to the world premiere last night. Lucky us.
- [01:24]
C
My first time at a premiere, so I was very starstruck, let me tell you that to start with.
- [01:29]
B
Me too. Me too. And we also did actually study the Odyssey at university. We've read it a lot of times. And we are hosts of Exploring the Odyssey, our fabulous book club in which we are reading the poems slowly together with our wonderful listeners.
- [01:44]
C
But we've been running the book club alongside the main podcast for nearly a year now, and we're more than 20 episodes in, and that's just over halfway through the poem. But we're ready for you to join us, to catch up and to continue with us on this very long, exciting adventure in reading.
- [02:08]
B
But this morning, which for us is the morning after, the night before, the morning after we saw the film, we are very, very ready and fresh and prepared to get give our first verdict on Christopher Nolan's version of the Odyssey. So this episode, we're going to. We're going to review the film, looking
- [02:26]
C
at the big picture, and in the next episode, we're going to allow ourselves to put our nerdy classical hats on and to talk about what the film got right in Our expert opinion and what it got wrong. And I'm not just talking about the colour of the actor's skin, begins here. This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping the world today. And I'm Mary Beard.
- [02:57]
B
And I'm Charlotte Higgins. Each week we dive into the myths, the dramas and the characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us. Now, this week, Christopher Nolan's the Odyssey. Our verdict,
- [03:23]
C
Let's say our preliminary verdict. I mean, it's fair enough. It's only a hot take.
- [03:28]
B
It's a hot take. It's.
- [03:29]
C
It's 12 hours. 12 hours ago, we were sitting in that movie theater. This isn't the product of careful, gestated thought. This is Instant Classic's instant reaction.
- [03:43]
B
Actually, it is. It's very instant. Very instant. So, cutting to the chase, I mean, we, we. We've barely spoken about this together already. We are not. We were messaging last night after the end of the film, and I think we already realized that we have kind of different instant reactions. What's yours, Mary?
- [04:06]
C
I think it's probably the kind of inverse of yours, because I was actually, overall, I was a bit disappointed, sadly disappointed in what it had done to the Odyssey, while at the same time I thought that there were wonderfully clever, enriching bits in the movie which gave me a lot of pleasure. So I thought. I didn't think it pulled off for me a convincing representation of the odyssey for the 21st century, but I thought there were some jolly good filmic moments.
- [04:45]
B
Oh, dear. Well, I can tell you that I'm much, much more positive about this movie than you are. I have a lot of quibbles, a lot of ifs and buts and a lot of. I would question a lot of the specific choices made. However, I would definitely say, go and see this movie. I would. For me, it was a four star movie. I enjoyed it. I wasn't bored. I thought there was some terrific performances in it. And actually, for me, what it did, taken as a whole, and we'll get into the details as we go on, but you know, we've talked about this poem so much, Mary, and one of the things we talked about in relation to what we hoped Nolan would do with it was that he would do something narrator. Logically interesting. That is, he would somehow reflect the twisty, turny nature of the storytelling of Homer's Odyssey, which is told through flashbacks and embedded stories. And I think what he did with the narration in a very Christopher Nolan style was really inventive and really brilliant and did reflect the twisty, tiny nature of the Odyssey. So a lot of it was told in flashbacks. It was told through people telling each other stories that brought you into different worlds. If you had laid it out as a map or a graph, it would have been a really fascinating, dizzying structure. And I felt that's one big point. And I felt just to make the other big point because then we can get into all of it. I thought it was a very good movie about a man coming home from a war, which is the basic thing that this movie that the poem is about, I would say, and the difficulties and the anxieties of finding your way back home metaphorically and literally, and being recognized by or recognising the people that you left behind and what it is to be a husband, what it is to be a leader, what it is to be a father and a son. I thought all these big ideas that are present in the Odyssey, the poem, were very well explored by Christopher Nolan in the movie.
- [07:01]
C
I should make clear. I think that the fact that I was disappointed wouldn't stop me recommending people going to see it, particularly if they've been reading the Odyssey and following the book club. Because I think that. I think there is an intellectual interest in engaging with what he's done and for me, actually in working out why I don't find it particularly, well, as gripping and as satisfying as you do, Charlotte. So I think that it's the kind of movie that I would say to anybody, go and see it and see what you think. And look, you're not going to sit there for almost three hours being bored, right? But I think that it's. You can really get your mind in gear about it and also your mind in gear about its interface with Homer. Now I am really up before anybody kind of says, oh, God, Beard is such a purist here. She doesn't want the Odyssey to be messed around with. I love the Odyssey being messed around with and being reinterpreted and, you know, how could you not, you know, whether it's, oh, brother, we're out there, or, you know, James Joyce. My test really is whether it was an effective and interesting eye opening engagement with the original. And I thought that Nolan's attempt to give us an odyssey for the 21st century was a bit self righteous. You know, there was a strand. And we'll come on to talk about this about, you know, civilization is, you know, on its last legs. And that's partly because of, you know, our behavior. We, you know, we have we are to blame, you know, we. In the. In the movie, the actors in the movie, the characters. But I thought that also maybe this is just me and Nolan. One of the things that I have so much enjoyed about reading the Odyssey carefully is seeing the lightness, the humor, the irony, the wit of it, you know, And I have to say, I might have missed them, but I didn't see a single joke in this film. Not a single moment of, you know, a wry twitch of the lips. It was pretty serious. It went along with a portrayal of Odysseus, which I think really disappointed me, because you say, look, it's a twisty, turny plot. And I think that Nolan did as well as anybody could, I think, in seeing the kind of Chinese boxes of the story, the fact that somebody is telling the story to somebody else and that it isn't a linear narrative. I think he did. For me to say Christopher Nolan did quite well here, in some ways. Obviously he did, and I couldn't, you know, I'm not a movie maker. But there's two sides, as we said when we've been reading it, there's two sides to the twisty turniness of the Odyssey. One is the twisty turniness of the plot, and I think there was some good stuff there. The other is the twisty turniness, the difficulty in Emily Wilson's translation words, the complicatedness of Odysseus, the fact that he's a wily bastard. And I didn't see any of that. I mean, he was quite a straightforward, what you see is what you get kind of character. And therefore I thought that the whole kind of, for me, intriguing allure of this character was lost. It was. I thought this was the odyssey for Hollywood. Well, you know, it's fair enough. You can have an odyssey for Hollywood. You know, far be it from me to say you can't. And, you know, I hope for all sorts of reasons that it will be successful. But I was sad not to see some of the. Some of that ironic wit which runs.
- [11:33]
B
I completely. I completely agree with that, Mary. The lack of, you know, Matt Damon's Odysseus is a very particular. I mean, sort of slightly Jason Bourne transported into the Bronze Age. Very serious, a little bit dour. I mean, I'm a huge Matt Damon fan. I adore the Jason Bourne movie, so casting no shade, but he did not have that. The thing that we most associate with Odysseus, as you say, Mary, is this sort of extraordinary articulacy and rhetorical gift of the gab and his skill, his skill at getting out of difficult situations and sometimes he gets into difficult situations because of his articulacy. None of that was really present. And I think that, that I agree it was, it was a humorless film and it is. And that is a real shame because the Odyssey is so funny and I think along with that lack of laughs, I think quite sort of connected to that. There was a lack of sexiness, there was a lack of flirtation, there was a lack of, you know, in the film, a Linley poem, but in different ways, as I'm sure we will also discuss. Odysseus encounters many women. And somehow Christopher Nolan's version drew back from the fact in the poem that Odysseus has fabulous sex with all these women. Well, with some of them. With some of them. Or flirts with them or that there are these kind of lovely. And they're sort of witty, as you say, it's witty, it's humorous, it's kind of beguiling. The encounters with women were not beguiling. Not to say that actually, you know, the women who played the major characters in the poem and you know, Anne Hathaway's Penelope, but I would really say for Samantha Morton in this particular version of Circe was just acted fab. She's such a fantastic actor. And Charlize Theron as Calypso, given what she was given to do, which is not Homer's. Calypso also did a fantastic job. But these were not particularly that they were not sort of sexy, fun encounters. And it's a bit, it's a bit of a shame.
- [14:02]
C
I mean, I think it's not just they weren't sexy fun encounters. If you came to the movie not knowing about what the story was between Circe and Odysseus, you would know never in a month of Sundays. Guess they've been to bed together. Right. It's, you know, it was. The sex was removed and in the Odyssey that is what is so important. But I also think it's not just. I mean it came over very clearly. That lack for me came over very clearly with the female characters, but also with some of the male characters too. And I think that one of the things that a lot of people remember about the Odyssey when they're thinking about the tricksiness and Odysseus, Odysseus being a bit too clever for his own good aspect of the plot is his encounter with the one eyed cannibalistic cyclops. And it's almost a schoolboy story to know that when Odysseus has actually escaped from the cyclops cave, has blinded him. He has already, when asked by the cyclops, who are you? What's your name? And he says, nobody's my name. And there's absolutely famous moment when the cyclops comes out of the cave, tries to get help from the fellow giants living around. They say, who's hurt you? Who's been hurting you? And the cyclops says, nobody's been hurting me. Giving Odysseus name, as he had been told it. And they say, oh, no one's hurting you, that's fine. We're not going to come to your aid. Now that is just the essence of Odysseus's smartness. And it turns out to be the essence of the danger of his smartness too, because it leads to the cyclops, who's the son of the God Poseidon, cursing Odysseus. And a lot of the disasters of the plot subsequently turn on that moment. But here we actually have a mute cyclops. And at one point, one of Odysseus's crew, when the cyclops does, after quite a long time of eating human beings, grunt, something says, oh, he can talk. Well, in the Odyssey, one of the key encounters is the verbal encounter between the cyclops and Odysseus and then the trick Odysseus pulls and the disastrous consequences of that. And I felt that this had just, it just lost that central element.
- [17:00]
B
I don't disagree with that. I suppose to pull, yeah, the kind of rhetorical back and forth in the poem between Odysseus and cyclops. Polyphemus is super important to the poet, super important to the Pope, and that was stripped away. What I would say in Nolan's defense was that I thought the cyclops physically was incredibly well imagined. You could see where he got his inspiration. It was in Goya's paintings. You know, this is sort of. He was terrifying. And I think what, I think what the film did very well was to really go in very deeply on questioning Odysseus's virtues as a leader. And I think in that sense, in that sense this is an incredibly 21st century interpretation of the Odyssey. I don't think, I actually don't think that before Emily Wilson's translation, actually we would have found an Odyssey adaptation that was so critical of Odysseus skills as a leader of men. The poem, the film goes really deeply into the relationship between the remaining men on Odysseus ship and Odysseus himself and pulls out of the poem. You know, we get Strong hints of this in the poem, that the men, particularly when they approach the fateful island of the Cattle of the sun, are not happy, not happy with what Odysseus has done. And it pulled out the inferred problems with Odysseus leadership around what happens with the cyclops. Clay, you know, he shouldn't have gone into the cyclops's cave. This is implicit in the poem, but it's explicit in the movie. And I thought. I actually thought that was very clever of Nolan to sort of go in on that aspect. That's what he wanted to pull out.
- [19:01]
C
I could see that. But I thought, I mean, you said you liked the portrayal, the digi portrayal of the cyclops and how it had become a kind of Goya esque, you know, and. Yeah, they were lovely, you know, and some of the things that I liked about it were those kind of visual quotes. But in the end, I felt the cyclops has gone back to being an unreflective monster. Like, I was kind of brought up with the cyclops being. It was hard to feel, particularly when you saw the. Him eating some of the crew. You know, cyclops huge. The crew are kind of. They look about. They're about a foot tall compared with the cyclops. I thought that it. You. It was very hard to see the cyclops as in any way sympathetic.
- [19:59]
B
I think it was hinted for me. I don't. I mean, maybe we'll pass the cyclops by after this, but I. For me, it was hinted, the idea. It was strongly hinted that if they hadn't gone in hard, had either left the cyclops alone or had tried to reason with it in some way, that it wouldn't have gone so badly wrong. You know, there's a kind of retrospective, oh, my goodness, this creature seems more sentient than we had given it, than we had given it. Than we had given it credit for. And I do think that that's a kind of quite a PC point maybe of Christopher Nolan's actually, in the end that, you know, maybe we should try talking to these people who seem so very different from us and we may find that.
- [20:36]
C
And so that was. So you're turning on its head. My idea that at certain point they say, oh, wow, it speaks. Yeah, we'll come back to the Cyclops next week. You know, there's lots of things to say about the cyclops.
- [20:51]
B
We have nerdier points to make about the cyclops. Yeah. But we'll spare you for now.
- [21:05]
A
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- [21:32]
C
Let's go. Hello, lovely listeners. If you're not yet part of our Instant Classics Book Club, well, now is the perfect time to join because we are making our way through one of the most exciting works of literature ever. That's Homer's Odyssey.
- [21:53]
B
We would love you to join our book club, which we absolutely adore. So please do join now to give you all the access to our previous episodes and loads of other perks like being able to join our online community and getting early booking access to our live events.
- [22:12]
C
All details are on our website, instant classicspod.com
- [22:21]
B
I feel that, Mary, that people are going to go to this movie and say, wow, what amazing female characters. And I want to say right here that I, although, as I said, these actresses, particularly Zendaya, Anne Hathaway, Charlie Theron and the great Samantha Morton, do an absolutely phenomenal job, they're all fantastic. I think that Homer's female characters as written are better and crucially more numerous than Christopher Nolan has provided us with. And one big thing to say is if you've been listening to Exploring the Odyssey, you will know that for about the last 10 episodes we have been on the island of Scheria among this people called the Phaeacians, to whom Odysseus has been narrating the stories of the, of Scylla and Charybdis, of the Cyclops and so on and so on. This entire people has been removed from the film. So along with them, one of the best female characters in the Odyssey, the poem Nausicaa and her mum, who's also a kind of very vivid presence.
- [23:39]
C
Arete, I think people who know the Odyssey will find, will be, I think, challenged by the centerlessness of Nolan's adaptation. Because in the books nine, for the next four books after book nine, the poem is about Odysseus at the court of King Alcinous and he is telling the story to the Phaeacian court. And that is the story within the story. Now, in a way, quite cleverly, I think Nolan obviously decided that at a certain point the Odyssey maybe suffers from character overload. And so it just would have been
- [24:34]
B
a very long move if he hadn't compressed it. That's another.
- [24:36]
C
Yeah. So something has got to go. And so what he does is he turns the nymph Calypso, with whom Odysseus has spent a very long time having sex and wanting to go home simultaneously as you do. That's life. He turns her into the person to whom Odysseus tells the, the story of his wanderings. Now, you know, I can, you know, I can see thinking that was a very good, clever, economical way of keeping the complexity while just lowering the character numbers a bit. And suddenly we're another place and it's this island of Scheria. Whatever. I think, as you say, the problem is that in the poem itself the, that journey of Odysseus, the sojourn of Odysseus on the island of Scheria is so important and his encounter in these with slightly different and slightly differently charged sexual or non sexual encounters with women. Here we have Odysseus encounter potential marriage even on his way back home to his wife with the young princess Nausicaa. And it is a fantastic moment in the poem that here this is. We're not now with a enchanting goddess or whatever, we're not with oral witch like Circe. Finally Odysseus is face to face and in fact he's been shipwrecked and he has no clothes on. He's face to face with this marriageable girl. And the poem says he, she is on the brink of being married. And so in a way it's part and parcel of Nolan's de sexing the poem but also very much part and parcel of I think of what Nolan misses by desexing the poem that Nausicaa and all her family and the whole incident on Scheria which takes books and the Odyssey is whited out. And I think that for me that's, that's a big loss. I can, I can see why he did it. You know, as you say, it would go to be a massive movie.
- [27:09]
B
I missed them. I missed them. I missed NASA, Kat and I actually missed Arete because although she hasn't got much to say in the Odyssey, she's such a powerful figure and she's the dominant royal person on this island. So you know, she could have been a really intriguing like senior female actor, small role. But I liked the solution where he's actually narrating his story to Calypso. He sort of, he has cleverly merged the idea of the episode of the Lotus Eaters which is an episode where he and his men end up on an island where they take a lot of drugs and forget all their past. And the Phaeacians, he's merged the lotus eaters and the Phaeacians into Calypso so that he ends up with Calypso. He sort of has. He's given these drugs by her to soothe his ptsd. He very. He eventually. He eventually regained his memory. He. He is able to narrate what happened to him to her. It's a kind of form of therapy, maybe you would say it was all about 21st century. In woke Up, I did like I thought Charlize Theron did a great job with it.
- [28:22]
C
I felt reversed. And I suppose this is where I, you know, I'm much more down to earth about plots, I think, than you are, Charlotte. I thought probably the historian I knew. Yeah, this is the historian. Yeah. Who is this? Right. And it'd be interesting to see when we see what the reviews are like from people who are not classicists, who spent their life with the Odyssey. I thought, who on earth is this person Calypso? I mean, she'd, you know, in the Odyssey, we know exactly what she's doing. She's entrancing. She's a nymph. She's a kind of junior goddess. Entrancing and seducing and not letting Odysseus go. I thought she was made to do so many different things. I thought, if I didn't know who Calypso was, what earth would I have thought Odysseus was doing with this woman who was sometimes wearing a net? I couldn't quite understand why she was wearing a net at some point. But, you know, what is going on here? And in some ways I felt like that with quite a lot of the incidents that we had, that if you didn't have the background knowledge, I mean, when Odysseus, the other seductive female characters we haven't mentioned in the Sirens, and, you know, rightly, I suppose there's Odysseus wanting to hear the Sirens singing and totally understandably and perfectly cleverly. What Nolan doesn't let you do is because we have all got wax in our ears, like the crew, you know, we're not, you know, you can't hear the Sirens singing, otherwise you will be dead. Right.
- [30:03]
B
I thought that was smart. Very clever.
- [30:05]
C
I thought it's not. But if you don't know that the Sirens sing beautiful songs, you have to work quite hard at that episode to find out why Odysseus is being tied to the mast. Honestly, I think it requires some of these. Just to make sense of the episodes requires quite a lot of observation and concentration.
- [30:28]
B
There was a brilliant Blink or you'll miss it. Moment which actually I really liked, which was when Eurycleia, Odysseus, old nurse, recognizes Odysseus through the scar on his leg, which is a famous moment in the poem. But if you're coming to the movie fresh, I think you have to have eyes like a hawk's to remember that two and a half hours earlier in this movie there was an incident where Odysseus was injured by a boar and received this very important scar that is gonna enable him to be recognized. But just thinking of Calypso again, Mary, I think what you're touching on here is a massive, massive thing in this film adaptation which is that there are effectively no gods. This is a godless universe in the sense that, okay, we have Zendaya as Athena, who I don't want to talk too much about her because there is kind of a plot twist with her. But she is around giving Odysseus gentle guidance. What we don't ever have, we don't ever have these scenes like Zeus talking to Poseidon or we don't have Hermes appearing and guiding Odysseus in how to evade the witches wiles of Circe. And I think that's both. It's an incredibly understandable choice because having gods puts you in a kind of. I mean, Colm Toy Bin's really funny about this in his. He wrote a brilliant novel set in ancient Greece in this world and the world of kind of Agamemnon and Orestes. And then there are no gods in this novel. I can't remember the title. So it's just going to have to go in the show notes. And he says you can't have gods. You can't have gods walking around a novel. Jane Austen didn't put the gods in. You know, it's like gods are really awkward and it puts you in a different. It puts you in a very strange place. But. But I wonder if it is a problem. The one thing I liked about the like the cosmology of Nolan's Odyssey actually was that what was very present was this thing that was referred to all the time, which is Zeus's law. And Zeus's law is like how to treat strangers. You do not beat up strangers, you offer them hospitality. And that's such a big thing in the Odyssey. And yet it's such an unfamiliar concept. I thought actually it was rather efficiently stitched into the film so that we understood like the ethics of the poem a bit.
- [33:03]
C
I thought that though, I mean, I don't Want to take my husband's name in vain? Because he came with us and we were. We were talking about this on the way home, and he was a classicist and has read. Hasn't read the Odyssey as recently as Charlotte and I, but has he.
- [33:18]
B
Hasn't been listening to Exploring the Odyssey with Mary Beards and Charlotte Higgins? You amaze me.
- [33:23]
C
Fraidy hasn't. But he was brought up on it and he said, what do they keep doing about Zeus's Law? Thought. Now, I thought that was quite an interesting diagnostic because, you know, I said, look, it is really. It's about the absolute centrality within this cosmology of guest friendship. You know, that's Zeus's law. And he kind of said, oh, yes to that. But it hadn't landed with him, who, you know, who read classics at university. It hadn't landed like it did with me. So, you know, I'm trying to put myself sometimes in the position of people who have never read the Odyssey seeing this. And I think some of the things that I'm finding, you know, quite interesting, I think not just kind of won't be noticed, but I think might be quite irritating. Now, I'm also very happy to say, look, this is a complicated bit of literature from the deep past, and maybe we don't have to get everything. Maybe that part of the viewing experience of this is that you don't pick up all the hints. The hints are there. There's a menu of hints, and some people get some and some will get others. I think that's fine. But I wonder how far this. When you go, really, to people who said, right, okay, I'm going to go and see the Odyssey. Never read it, but here it's great work of literature, whether it. I mean, I hope it puts them on the Odyssey, not makes them think, God, don't think I can read that. Right. I hope it doesn't pop them up.
- [35:03]
B
They've got Exploring the Odyssey, but they have.
- [35:05]
C
But I think that, you know, like, Exploring Odyssey might at that point be a bit late. I didn't understand any of that. I know what I'll do. I'll go and listen to Higgins and be it.
- [35:19]
B
There's always time. There's always time. The thing about the centrality of Zeus's Law is that Nolan uses it for other purposes too, because he sort of interposes onto the film this idea that making war is somehow a. An infringement of Zeus's law, which I don't agree with, because people were always making war on each other in the ancient. In the world of the Odyssey, and in terms of the world of the Odyssey and the Iliad, it's absolutely fine. And, you know, Nolan makes it not fine, which I'm afraid, doesn't quite work for me.
- [36:01]
C
I cut my story short because therefore didn't give my husband his last word, which is, say it isn't always about guest friendship wider than that. And I think that's true. And I think it. I mean, I think that is part and parcel of an overarching theme which seemed to me very kind of American Hollywood imposition on the Odyssey, which is
- [36:33]
B
that
- [36:36]
C
the characters pretty explicitly recognize that then they call it at one point, the Age of Bronze is going to end.
- [36:45]
B
Yeah, I couldn't bear that. I'm sorry, but being self conscious about the Bronze Age, something that was invented as a term in the late 19th century, if I'm not wrong. Just. No, no.
- [36:57]
C
And they also refer. They don't kind of. They don't bang on about the Bronze Age, but they repeatedly bang on about the threats they perceive to their particular version of civilization, which we would call probably the Bronze Age. And they repeatedly refer to the danger of the peoples, the people from the sea, who are kind of a shadowy, hostile presence hanging over their world. Right. And the people of the sea. If you've done a little bit about prehistoric archaeology in the Mediterranean around 1200 plus or minus 150 years, it's clear from documents both in Egypt and in the near east that there was a hostile or a perceived danger in these people, who are translated as the people of the sea. And one explanation for why the Bronze Age culture that we know it, Minoan, Mycenaean culture, why it collapsed, was that they were basically conquered by the sea peoples, the people from the sea. Now, I think there are very few modern archaeologists who think that that is why the Bronze Age civilization collapsed. I think that you'd find you'd finally see peoples that keep being mentioned. Very puzzling. If you didn't kind of have the tiniest grip on the history of the late Bronze Age going into the Dark Ages.
- [38:54]
B
No, I don't know. I don't think I agree with that because I think, you know, you could understand that as a kind of external threat without knowing that there was any kind of archaeological basis to it, except we've seen the sea all the time. I can say that from personal experience because I had sort of basically forgotten that that was the case. And there is a sort of twist. There is a sort of twist that turns that around, which I will not utter here because I don't want to ruin it for people who are going to go and see it. I did, I mean, vaguely connected to that. I did like the look of the, I liked the interior of Odysseus's palace, which was very, which was very Knossos coded, but without going over the top in that direction. So, so it was so. So he sort of put it in the Minoan Bronze age. Yes. Like 1500 BCE type thing, 1200 BCE type, that kind of zone.
- [39:47]
C
But even, you know, why would we think about the sea people? And I say, you know, we've seen the sea the whole time. They're beautiful shots of the sea. I have to say, person sitting next to me on the other side, when, when the, when there were some of Odysseus's boats on the sea, he just said, wow, right? That's amazing.
- [40:06]
B
Was that famous podcaster Dan Snow?
- [40:09]
C
It was, I'm afraid, but I didn't want to mention that.
- [40:12]
B
Oh, I think we can afford to give Dan Snow a bit of a name drop.
- [40:16]
C
But, but whatever you think about the specificity this was, I thought, oh hell, this is yet another movie about civilization in inverted commas. Our culture under threat, right? This is the turbulent times of the late Bronze Age. And Nolan in some ways gives a, gives an explanation of that, you know, but he, that goes right back to the criminality as he sees it, of the Trojan War. So they are, you know, Bronze Age civilization is going to pay the price for its war times.
- [40:59]
B
I was not here for that interpretation at all. It's a kind of Judeo Christianized, you know, retribution will follow sin situation that I just didn't, I didn't buy it,
- [41:12]
C
I'm afraid I hated myself in a way for not buying it because I. Then again, this is back in, musing in the car on the way back, I, I thought, well, look, actually that isn't a million miles away from what some ancient writers did. You know, if you look at Euripides mid 5th century play, the Trojan Women, and in a sense the war crimes of the final end and mopping up after the Trojan War,
- [41:50]
A
if you look
- [41:50]
C
at that, it's not hard to read the Trojan women as saying something similar to what Nolan is saying. And in fact, you know, at the beginning of the 20th century, you know, Gilbert Murray, famous British classicist, put on the Trojan Women, Euripides, Trojan Women as an anti war play. You know, it was part of the propaganda against the war. And so I think, why is it that I feel uncomfortable with the Nolan version when that sort of use of the Trojan War as illegitimate, cruel, et cetera, et cetera is. Or, you know, has been there for 2,000 years.
- [42:33]
B
And I think, because it's different. I think it's. Because it's different.
- [42:36]
C
I think it's sanctimonious.
- [42:37]
B
I'm afraid it's sanctum, yeah, the Trojan for me, the Trojan Women, this amazing Euripides play. You know, if you want to do a kind of very, very blunt one sentence version of that play, it's like war is terrible and horrible. It's not. War is morally wrong and you'll be punished for pursuing it. And I do think that whereas that is kind of what. That is kind of what Christopher Nolan is doing. And that, you know, is an interesting interpretation he can do. You know, he's allowed to do that. We don't mind people messing around, but it's not actually what the poem does. And I think it sort of didn't sit quite right with me.
- [43:17]
C
It's also, for my taste, far too self righteous. It also acts as an alibi for the kind of fight club aspects of the movie. I mean, there is an awful lot of nasty fighting and violence in this movie, far more than there is actually in the Odyssey itself. And somehow I thought that the line that this was what had caused the collapse of, or was about to cause the collapse of Bronze Age civilization, that line gave an alibi to us sitting and watching some stuff that was, you know, in terms of violence for people who want to know, it kind of fell. It fell somewhere between Gladiator 1 and Gladiator 2 in violence levels. I quite liked it and I hate.
- [44:10]
B
I think we'll get. There's a lot of stuff that I know that we're going to be talking about next week, where we get a bit more into the actual weeds and when a lot more of our listeners will actually have, and viewers will have actually have seen the movie. But I mean, talking of when he comes home, which is when a lot of this violence occurs, I enjoyed his relationship with Penelope. I did not enjoy the final scene, but I don't think we want to talk about that. I did think, you know, if you take it on in its broadest possible terms without getting into the details of exactly what happens to the character of Telemachus, played by Tom Holland, as a consequence of what we've just described in terms of like the ethics of war in this film, if you just remove that part of it for a moment and think about this is about A man coming home and recognizing his wife, being recognized by his wife, you know, ditto his son. I thought that was very well done. And I tell you what else I thought. I thought that a thing that we've been banging on about so much in exploring the Odyssey is the example of Agamemnon's homecoming and how we're shown in the Odyssey, Agamemnon's homecoming, as a prime example of how not to. And I was really pleased to see that. That was in the film. That was. And we saw it. We saw it. And with this rather elegant thing of Lupita Nyong' o playing both Helen and her half sister or twin sister, as inaccurately says in the film Clytemnestra. Although, again, I just think we have. We talked about the lack of wit and sexiness in the women. Again, Lupita Nyong' o was not quite the Helen. She wasn't given the role of the extraordinary character that's built in the poem, which is this kind of poised in control, knows everything, deeply sexy, in charge of the household. You know, she's the hostess with the mostess. None of that came through, really. She was rather put upon and beaten up.
- [46:30]
C
The scarred face. And, you know, I can see the temptation to say, look, it's going to be the most beautiful woman in the world. And she's got a scarred face. But the. One of the big surprises that the Odyssey pulls is that Helen is not there being like Lupita Nyong' o was, you know, being pretty resentful of everything. Helen is actually unlike the rather dim Menelaus who she's got, who she's hitched back up with. She is the one in control. And it's. It. You might say, look, okay, you've got a. You have got a Penelope figure here who's. And Calypso and Circe. But I really missed those women with agency that the Odyssey repeatedly.
- [47:25]
B
Cersei had agency. But I think Christopher Nolan would be horrified if he heard us saying that these women didn't have agency. But they.
- [47:34]
C
Well, they don't when you take them out of the.
- [47:35]
B
I would urge anyone who thinks. Anyone who thinks that these are amazing scripted characters, female characters, should go back to the poem because you'll find kind of sort of depth and richness that I don't think was. I'm afraid, there.
- [47:55]
C
I think that that's our message, isn't it, that.
- [47:58]
B
Read the poem.
- [47:59]
C
Read the poem. I mean, as I said in the beginning, I didn't rate it as highly as you rated it. But I still thought go and see this because it raises so many issues, then you find the poem can deliver on in a different way. And so I think messages. Read the poem.
- [48:19]
B
Yeah, I mean definitely go and see the film. Look for all, you know, of course we're having. It's as if we're in the pub except we're slightly in different houses, Mary and I at this moment. But yeah, this is, this is the sort of hour long pub chat version of this. But you know, I really enjoyed, I would absolutely recommend going to see it and then please come and read the poem because the poem is just the most amazing thing and if this film nudges you towards the poem, it will have done a brilliant job as far as I'm concerned. But next week, Mary, I'm quite looking forward to just like I've got a list of quibbles and also a list of some things like details that I thought were really good and you know, part two will be upon us soon and I'm looking forward to it. In fact, part three of our little Odyssey miniseries but part two of our reaction to the film. As ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions and so if you have them, please do send them to us@instantclassicspodmail.com or on our social media at stantclassicspod.
- [49:35]
C
Bye bye.
- [49:43]
A
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