“Odyssey” and the Search for the Epic Cinema
Paweł Mościcki is a professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the author of numerous books and a blog: pawelmoscicki.net as well as substack pawelmoscicki.substack.com
Cross-posted from Pawel’s Substack
What if the Odysseus you knew lost his way?
Odysseus
What are the conditions of possibility for the contemporary cinematic epos? Should it be equated with what is commonly referred to as “epic cinema” or cinema “on an epic scale”? A characteristic feature of the epos—emphasized from the very beginning of its theorization by Aristotle, right up to the culmination of its modern definition by Schiller, Goethe, or Hegel—has been its episodic nature, that is, a loose composition in which individual parts possess autonomous value and do not cohere too logically or seamlessly into a single, smooth narrative flow. The epos is more like a freely meandering river basin than a national river with regulated banks.
At the same time, however, this fragmented unity was meant, in the eyes of modern thinkers, to be a literary form expressing the values of the entire community. This means that society as a whole was supposed to recognize itself in this narrative. Since the mechanism of film reception is based primarily on the dialectic of projection and identification, epic cinema would thus be a successful circular movement between a society projecting its image onto the screen and then recognizing itself in that image. Finally, the subject matter of this epic narrative should rather be human actions in the external world, because in this way a person is measured not by their own standards, but by the standards of the reality surrounding them. Here, too, cinema seems to be the ideal tool for creating this kind of narrative, since—as Pasolini argued—it employs, above all, “the written language of reality.”
The epic nature of cinema, however, is a somewhat more complex matter. If only because it has always been an art form dramatically stretched between the distant and often contradictory poles of utopia and the market, a medium in which people have the chance to rediscover themselves in their universal calling (Bela Balázs’s dream) and a mechanism of cheap entertainment, in which the latest technical inventions serve only to dull collective sensitivity for the glory of investors.
This raises the question: must a cinematic epos be a blockbuster, or—on the contrary—should it stand as far removed as possible from the cheap thrills of the cinematic fairground? As far back as the history of cinema extends, there is no single definitive answer to this dilemma, and attempts to negotiate between extremes in this particular art form rarely succeed.
For does a film reduced to pure spectacle—and this is most often the case with the most expensive productions, packed with a dazzling array of special effects and an excess of events whose plausibility is hard to assess—not lose what is most essential in cinema, namely, that which lies above or beyond the images? After all, anyone who has analyzed how cinematic illusion works knows that what lies outside the frame is just as important—and sometimes even more important—than what fits within it. Spectacularity often kills cinema’s capacity for true transgression and experimentation with the forms and content available to it, and degrades the imagination.
So should epos be intimate? Personal? Low-budget? What audience will identify with such a story? If Hollywood historical blockbusters represent one extreme of this issue, the other would be the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, which sometimes show close-ups of individual actors and have them recite long passages of great poetry. While in the first case many people will see something thoroughly prosaic, in the second—only a handful of the most seasoned cinephiles will experience the poetry of the word and conceptual montage.
In the society of the spectacle, the problem of the epos resurfaces in an even more dramatic form. According to Guy Debord, the spectacle is capital that has reached such a level of accumulation that it has become an image—a spectacle. This does not necessarily make it visible, but it allows it to colonize nearly all forms of visibility, attempting to subordinate them to the logic of the commodity. Cinema today operates under increasingly predatory forms of capitalist appropriation, slowly losing the remnants of its productive, intellectual, or critical autonomy. Perhaps the cinematic epic should therefore attempt to break through this logic if it does not wish to be merely another testament to—or symptom of—contemporary alienation. In this way, it would attempt to preserve or protect something older than commodification. On the other hand, it could become a hyper-commodity, drawing the maximum amount of collective attention to itself and exerting a massive influence on audiences through a narrative that manages to become a representation of the present. In this first version, the epos would be a way of returning to the cinema from the era of spectacle. In the second case, cinema would confirm that its current condition is inseparable from the logic of the commodity and that its calling—a commodity as concentrated and refined as possible, perhaps even thought-provoking. This, however, would mean that of the two poles—utopia and the market—only the latter remains. Can the market mechanism, then, have its own epic? Does its utopia even need an epic representation, since it already reproduces itself in nearly every form of visual presentation?
In Search of The Lost Totality
György Lukács wrote in The Theory of the Novel that “the question from which the epos emerges as a creative answer is this: how can life attain its deepest dimension, in which its essence would be revealed?” The epos, then, belongs to an era in which answers replaced questions that did not even need to be formulated. They are reconstructed only post factum, in a time of questions to which there are no longer unambiguous answers. Others include: “How can life attain its deepest dimension, in which its essence would be revealed?” or “How can the essence of life itself become something living?” In Lukács’s theoretical discourse, the epic occupies the place of literature that expresses the whole—a world that can be encompassed in a single coherent representation, which is, in fact, an emanation. Modernity—and with it the novel—belong to an era in which the world has become too vast and complex for such a thing to be possible. Hence, at the moment of “the end of the spontaneous totality of being”, the epos will always be nothing more than a “hypostasis” created afterwords (nachträglich, as Freud would put it).
To put it another way, for modernity, the epos is a projection into the past of our present-day conception of grandeur, archaism, origins, the totality of being, and so on. The theory of the epic, in turn, is a symptom of what a given era seeks to recognize as its beginning. Cinema is also based on projection; that is, it derives its greatness from the ability to produce an enlarged image of our own desires, thoughts, or memories. From the perspective of the era of the integrated spectacle, cinema as a distinct medium—as a pursuit of a utopia that cannot be reduced to a visual commodity—itself seems as old as the epic, belonging to an era with which it is now difficult to find a common language. That is why modern epic cinema should likely take the form of a search for the origins of cinema—a search for a form in which it can remind us of its utopian dimension.
Take Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), undoubtedly the most epic—in the colloquial sense of the word—of his films. It is a story about the end of cinema, about the impossibility of raising it to epic heights. The main character is Paul, a playwright who supplements his income by writing screenplays, whom an American film producer working on a modernized version of The Odyssey tries to hire. The problem is that the producer has hired Fritz Lang, a veteran of the Golden Age of cinema, as director, and Lang’s vision for this adaptation is diametrically opposed to that of the producer, who thinks in purely commercial terms.
The film’s central focus, however, is not the adaptation itself, but rather how its preparation intrudes on the lives of Paul and his wife, Camille. Their fates, intertwined with successive production meetings and then the film set in Capri, begin to take on the form of an adaptation of Homer’s epic. Here, however, the husband will not return to his wife to rebuild the home they lost many years ago; on the contrary—the couple will break up, and the protagonist will lose out to the most primitive of suitors (the producer). The force that tears this couple apart turns out to be Camille’s titular contempt for Paul, born of an unspoken word or a minor gesture that grew to epic proportions as the husband made matters worse by trying to explain himself.
This is a film about how cinema ceases to exist as a culture and is replaced by the mere spectacle. The Odyssey functions here as a figure of an unfeasible adaptation, a marker of an insurmountable boundary for cinema—a monumental past that cannot be tamed. But Godard manages here to transcend the level of family drama, as the vicissitudes of a couple falling apart are projected onto the problem of adapting the Homeric epic and thus acquire a surprising monumentality. There is a return of the epic in a modern guise, in images that constantly criticise and comment on themselves, heralding the beginning of Godard’s adventure with the tradition of epic theater in the vein of Bertolt Brecht. Contempt, at first barely perceptible and impossible to express in the increasingly stifling drama of a love affair coming to an end, becomes before our very eyes a new epic emotion, much like the wrath of Achilles celebrated in the Iliad.
The formula of epic cinema here consists of a creative critique of cinema itself, which in turn becomes a critique of contemporary morality and the crisis of a culture subjected to capitalist colonization. Instead of an invocation to the muses, the film opens with a shot showing the camera lens gazing at us like a Cyclops, while the director reads off-screen the words of André Bazin, reminding us that “cinema replaces our gaze with a view of the world that conforms to our desires.” We thus have cinema as a kind of collision, through which images, paradoxically, gain greater power.
In Nostos – Il ritorno (1989), Franco Piavoli adopted a different strategy. He recounts the story of Odysseus while stripping it of any particular historical context. The film makes use of archaic props, but the setting is just as undefined as if it were a science-fiction story. There is virtually no dialogue here, and when it does appear, it consists mainly of spoken passages—recitative-like lines delivered in a dialect created specifically for this work from a mixture of various existing languages of the Mediterranean basin.
Piavoli’s ambition seems to be to create a series of images so deeply metaphorical that they almost lose touch with the literary original, or else blend it so thoroughly into its surroundings that it becomes like the ruins of an ancient temple overgrown with grass. It is also about separating the journey from the destination, so that it becomes pure wandering—a confrontation, captured in the image, with the resistance of reality in its most elemental dimensions. As Odysseus swims across the sea (a scene in itself quite detached from “reality”), the sounds of battle clamour can be heard in the background, reminding the hero of the sheer magnitude of the violence in which he had participated. In such an ascetic composition, however, it seems as though the sea itself is roaring with these sounds of war, and the hero is literally swimming through the element of suffering he has endured or inflicted.
The formula for epic grandeur here lies in the image of the restoration of man’s connection with nature, which ceases to be merely a backdrop for Odysseus’s adventures and instead becomes his primary antagonist. The film seems here to shed its narrative obligations, freeing itself from them in favor of a more organic or “synchronic” whole. Cinema—far removed from the props of modernity and the inventions of film technology—finds its source in nature, to which it simultaneously restores the right to opacity, density, and autonomy from narrative techniques that would inevitably reduce it to the role of a backdrop. This film is as much about the protagonist returning home as it is about the wind, the sun, or the rushing current of a river.
The situation is different with Theo Angelopoulos’s 1995 film Ulysses’ Gaze. The film tells the story of a Greek film director who, after years spent in the United States, returns to his homeland and then embarks on a journey deep into the Balkans in search of the undeveloped film reels of the Manakis brothers, pioneers of early 20th-century cinema. The journey takes place during the First Yugoslav War and ends in besieged Sarajevo. It is thus both a journey to the origins of cinema and a journey into the dark heart of a present-day world plunged into chaos and violence. A modern-day Odysseus returns from America—the place of cinema’s exile (though he is played by an American actor, Harvey Keitel)—to regain the innocence of his gaze through the discovery of century-old films hidden amid the conflagration of war on the Old Continent.
This cinematic epic is here an attempt to subordinate images to the overarching emotion of nostalgia. It is, in fact, nostalgia not so much for one’s homeland as for cinema itself, for its lost power to renew the human gaze. Formally, this is achieved through majestic and aesthetically refined sequence shots combined with solemn music and the almost dignified movement of characters within the frame. Here, the epic quality lies in a slowing down that reveals the significance of human destinies. Characters from the modern world freeze in hieratic poses to tell a story that is almost beyond history. Nostalgia for cinema is thus nostalgia for a utopian land where images could provide refuge for a universal truth.
The Epic for Our Times?
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a film of truly global scope that has sparked worldwide discussion not only about the film itself, but also debates about Homer, the modern world’s relationship to antiquity, translation, adaptation, and so on. In terms of capturing the collective attention of the public, it has perhaps come closest to the kind of totality that the epic was meant to achieve in archaic Greece. Is his film, then, truly a modern-day version of the epic?
The director also made every effort to restore cinema to favor—at least in technical and social terms—in an era when it is, at best, the subject of nostalgic projection. The Odyssey was produced in the IMAX format precisely to reclaim the dimension of cinema as projection, a dimension that is fading in the digital age. Today, cinema—displayed on laptop screens—is more a kind of portable, personalized television than cinema in the traditional sense, when it required a collective gathering around a single beam of light and images. That cinema is to today’s culture what the epic recited or sung by the aoidos was to the era of mass-printed novels.
Reviews of Nolan’s film often repeat the notion that Odyssey itself is a Trojan horse, a kind of charade in which the director has entangled global audiences and critics alike. The only question is, who are the Greeks hidden inside the wooden figure, and who is Athena, for whom it was supposedly created? Is it in the form of a big-budget spectacle that the ambitions of a contemporary epic are being smuggled in here, or is it the other way around: under the guise of epic cinema, is traditional action and spectacle cinema being produced?
In today’s world of mainstream blockbusters, Christopher Nolan is perhaps the closest thing to an auteur. It is impossible to achieve greater artistic ambition than what is present in his films given such budgets. In his earlier works, he established himself as a virtuoso of complex narrative structures, in which he freely—and often successfully—juggled temporal dimensions and multilayered dramatic puzzles. He sought to combine the grand scale of spectacle with twist-filled mind games. He has one film to his credit that borders on greatness—Dunkirk (2017)—in which he subordinated war cinema to a daring narrative concept, with serious philosophical undertones.
For this reason, many reviewers note that Nolan seems predestined to direct Odyssey, that it is the perfect adaptation material for him. However, I am by no means certain of this supposedly natural affinity between Nolan’s sensibility and The Odyssey. The original novel is anything but a fast-paced narrative that builds tension and revolves around dramatic climaxes. It is a patchwork of stories, each contained within the other, entangled in knots of memory, ritual, and mythology. The “action” is almost always merely what is being recounted here, rather than what drives the story forward or governs the entire narrative. Nolan’s skill in utilizing the narrative conventions of action cinema to elevate them strikes me as more of a liability than an asset when pitted against Homer.
One of the most interesting Polish translators of The Odyssey, Józef Wittlin, in explaining the first version of his translation (he produced as many as three), pointed out that he did not attempt to create a Polish equivalent of the Greek meter. His aim was a “dynamic, not automatic, rhythm”—which, in his view, is what a forced Polish hexameter would be, thereby transformed from a living poetic style into a lifeless “template.” Instead, his translation features “a rhythm dependent on the temperament of the plot and the scene. In places where haste and movement are expressed—the rhythm gallops. In slow-paced narratives, the rhythm trots. In outbursts of passion, the rhythm follows suit, sobbing and raging.”
Wittlin’s reflections seem to me a good starting point for a critical look at Nolan’s Odyssey. For the director has subordinated his cinematic narrative to a ruthlessly applied rhythm, whose pace is taken directly from action cinema, just as in the earlier Batman films. Meanwhile, Odysseus may be a hero, but he is not a superhero; therefore, his on-screen adventures would benefit from greater—or at least some—variety in pace, one determined by the internal logic of the sequences rather than an imposed action rhythm. In this way, the story reveals that it is governed not by the nature of the narrative itself, but by an imposed template tied solely to the requirements of an abstractly understood “entertainment value.” If this is an epic narrative, it is indeed on par with computer games and the era of music videos.
Battle scenes—and group scenes in general—exhibit a similar weakness. In line with a growing trend in contemporary cinema—especially action cinema—the human collective is merely what Siegfried Kracauer called “the mass ornament,” a kind of perfectly tuned mechanism in which nothing transcends the imposed choreographic pattern. It would be futile to look for an equivalent in Nolan’s work to the magnificent (perhaps driven by cinematic nostalgia) opening sequence of Michael Cacoyannis’s Iphigenia (1977), in which we see the demobilized, distracted Achaean army lazily waiting on the beach for the opportunity to set sail for Troy. In Nolan’s version, everyone runs, moves, and freezes in unison, leaving no room for any deviation from convention.
The problem may be that, when confronted with material as dense as Homer’s work, Nolan reveals the limitations and weaknesses of his craft more clearly than when, for example, he elevates the superhero story of Batman to a higher level of cinematic spectacle. Nolan’s imagination proves to be quite narrow, confined within the conventions of a cinema where spectacular explosions, battle scenes, or adventurous climaxes take center stage. There is no room for metaphor, understatement, or even a hint of irony—which modern poets, incidentally, regarded as a characteristic feature of the epic. This is painfully evident in the sequence with the Cyclops, from which everything disappears except for action that at times resembles an animated film.
Robert Rubsam pointed out this problem emphatically when he wrote: “Nothing that happens bears any particular moral or narrative relation to anything else. Nor are these episodes developed into a consistent psychological theme. This results in a plot composed primarily of mere incident, of one thing after another without meaning or emphasis or grandeur, and crammed into the straitjacket of modern Hollywood plotting.” This is why Nolan’s Odyssey strikes him as resembling a Trojan horse—that is, something “massive, imposing, and mostly hollow.”
In an epic based on an episodic structure, each sequence constitutes a separate story with its own payoff, whereas “incidents” are merely abstract units of a certain structure that derives no benefit whatsoever from the distinctiveness of its constituent parts. This is a variation on the problem with rhythm that I pointed out above. Even the best scenes—and I consider “The Sirens” and “Hades” to be such, where Nolan goes to great lengths to achieve a sense of freshness and an original style—simply do not have time to resonate here; they have no consequences for the narrative, which races onward as if participating in a competition that can only be won by ignoring the meaning and significance of its intermediate stages.
This atrophy of the imagination is, in fact, characteristic of contemporary cinema, where literalism is cemented by TV series formats and corporate-style creativity replacing any sense of poetry. It is also a reflection of the distinctive place this culture occupies—Hollywood, the Mecca of American imperialism’s storytelling. The current, late, and declining phase of this imperialism is characterized precisely by an increasingly brutal language and the literalization of everything to the point of caricature. The culture wars dominating the imperial center—which The Odyssey also touches upon, more or less intentionally—are based on this chronic literalization and brutalization of the relationship to symbols. Subtext has replaced metaphor here, which is why any sense of grandeur turns into a fleeting effect. Everything must be shown, which is why the images become flat despite all the power Nolan tries to cram into them.
Odyssey also suffers from a structural fracture characteristic of large-scale historical cinema, which makes the search for an epic whole all the more futile. This was also evident in films such as Gladiator, Alexander, and Troy: the fracture between the level of spectacle and the level of drama. Breathtaking scenes of battle, invasion, navigation, and siege—often created in a studio—coexist here with very meager, and at times even extremely clumsy, dialogue scenes. The latter are also marred by a glaring didacticism, sentimentality, and intellectual and literary emptiness.
This kind of disconnect in the film’s material points to a deeper decline of the epic element, and perhaps even constitutes a kind of distant symptom of the crumbling representation of the social realm. It’s the same with Nolan, and not just in Odyssey. His shortcomings in staging scenes that demand greater psychological depth and complexity were already brutally exposed in Oppenheimer, where academic inquiries were filmed at all costs in the same way as chases through the streets of Gotham.
We Are All Suitors
However, there is a crucial element in Nolan’s film that could potentially have made it a fully accomplished epos. Paradoxically, this is the moment when the director strayed furthest from Homer’s text, introducing his own radical reinterpretation of the story of Odysseus. It is a scene in which—as in many earlier films by the director of Inception—the entire narrative is revisited, casting previously familiar elements in a new light. Our hero finally arrives in Ithaca and even stands before Penelope, introducing himself as a comrade of Odysseus who fought alongside him at Troy. We’re still following Homer here. But in this story, he indirectly admits that he returned from the war with a powerful, all-consuming sense of guilt, because it was his ruse with the Trojan Horse—which made him famous—that led to the slaughter of all of Troy.
Witnessing the outburst of cruelty from his companions—who did not hesitate to destroy the entire city and ruthlessly massacre its inhabitants—Odysseus seems to lose not only his sense of the purpose of his mission (in which he never had much faith to begin with), but also his entire conception of the world in which he was raised. An entire culture was discredited in Troy. Moreover, the figure of Athena—who had accompanied him and at times aided him on his journey (as stated in the original)—turns out to be a priestess from the conquered city, brutally murdered before his very eyes. Thus, this haunting figure embodies a vision, a pang of conscience, and the nightmare of wartime carnage.
Odysseus presents the ruse with the Trojan Horse as a violation of all rules and laws of war, as well as the laws of hospitality, xenia, guaranteed by Zeus. A temple offering, a sign of peace, turned out to be a means of annihilating the enemy. “We have broken whatever was sacred among people,” says the moved hero, looking into the eyes of the apparition fading into nothingness; that is why “the burning of Troy was the burning of the entire world, including Ithaca.” There is nothing to return to; there is no home, for cruelty toward strangers has called into question the very idea of a home.
The weaving of anti-war and even anti-imperialist themes into The Odyssey means that a story from the very heart of the Hollywood machine begins to speak of something that undermines its very foundations. After all, the eternal innocence of American imperialism lies in the fact that, no matter how many wars it starts to subjugate other countries, governments, or cultures, back home it remains an untainted and perfect embodiment of the highest principles and values. A truly epic moment in Nolan’s film is when this belief is called into question, along with the conventional version of the Homeric tale and our expectations of it.
At various points in the film, it is mentioned that the inhabitants of the Greek islands are concerned about a possible invasion by the people of the sea who do not respect shared rules and rituals. Odysseus’s speech before Penelope reveals that these barbarians, who strike fear into the Greeks, are in fact their own heroes returning from the Trojan War. Nolan says: we are the barbarians; we are the ones who have broken every possible rule, pact, and agreement—every code of loyalty, trust, and moderation. We have no right to a safe home, for we ourselves have sown destruction wherever we have gone. Here, at the very heart of this adaptation—which at times resembles a video game—comes a powerful epochal gesture: a suspension of the narrative that evokes the alienation effect commensurate with the drama of our times—the siege and extermination of Gaza, the bombings of Iran, the blockade of Cuba, and the endlessly escalating war in Ukraine.
In this single moment, The Odyssey becomes the epic of a culture becoming aware of its own moral degradation. This critical epic is no longer based on nostalgia, but on atonement, which compels us to take an unflinching look at the legacy that a collapsing empire will leave behind. The Odyssey would then be the last epic of this culture, the last song of the barbarians who until now considered themselves the founders and guardians of civilization. Now, listening to their oldest hero, they realize with horror that they themselves are their greatest enemy.
Proof of the accuracy of this epic reinterpretation lies in some of the reactions to Nolan’s film. There are still those, like Peter Swallow, who saw in this work a plea to uphold the rules-based international order, which guarantees the protection of the values of multilateralism in international politics. This is a perfect example of imperialist ignorance, for this is the only way to explain the inability to understand that the rules-based order is a Trojan horse of American hegemony, devised solely to circumvent and discredit any calls for genuine multilateralism.
The problem revealed by Odysseus’ revision is epic in nature, because it relates not so much to the fragility of a specific part, but to the condition of our culture as a whole, as well as cinema’s role in shaping it. And what is the most general whole that we can delineate for our world today? It is the very same whole from which Nolan’s cinematic spectacle also springs. It is an increasingly authoritarian and brutal form of capitalism, incapable of reproducing itself except through ever more ruthless forms of exploitation and war. This very mechanism is today pure barbarism, which still desperately seeks to pass itself off as civilization. Meanwhile, some critics act as if the problem could be reduced to Trump, the MAGA movement, or other “sea peoples” of the moment. Yet Odysseus, in his epic speech, does not place the blame on Agamemnon, Achilles, or anyone else; rather, he sees it first and foremost in himself, and then extends it to the entire undertaking in which, willingly or not, he took an active part.
And here lies the greatest problem and the most glaring failure of Nolan’s adaptation, one that matches the gravity of the epic culmination. It turns out that the film simply carries on as if nothing had happened, following the fates of the main characters as more or less precisely recorded by Homer.
The very end does indeed signify, contrary to the original, Odysseus’s exile from Ithaca, but it’s hard not to see it as a kind of reward—the fulfillment of Penelope’s dream of leaving behind the hardships of ruling. And so, despite the dramatic cliffhanger and the brutal reimagining of the myth, we continue toward a happy ending and the “production of a couple”, obligatory in Hollywood cinema. The show must go on, even if its main landmarks and direction have just been called into question.
After Odysseus’s speech, who still cares about restoring order in Ithaca? Who is still rooting for the family’s reunion against the suitors? These are domestic matters, and yet there is no home left. In this jarring inconsistency, Nolan highlights even more forcefully the problem he tried to articulate directly through his hero’s words. One might lament the breaking of “Zeus’s law,” but it turns out there are principles that stand even higher than that. These are the laws of narrative format, which the finale will respect even when the film’s actual climax shatters this entire naive schema, revealing it to be part of the hypocrisy inherent in the cruelty of our culture.
In this way, the possibility of yet another reevaluation—one that loomed on the horizon during Odysseus’s speech—fades away. Since it is possible to view Odysseus as a war criminal (though, of course, Nolan—again in accordance with the naive laws of Hollywood—portrays him more as a witness than as a perpetrator), why shouldn’t the viewer identify with the suitors? After all, who are these suitors, whom we are shown as cowards, conspirators, and scoundrels? They are the ones who did not go to war, who did not take part in the ritual of killing. Not, however, because they are opposed to violence, but because, thanks to this war, they can eat, drink, and feast on credit in other people’s homes. They count on the fact that the consequences of the slaughter carried out far from home by its rightful owners will never reach back to the household.
Haven’t Westerners been living on credit for years, taking advantage of the double standards ingrained in our culture? Aren’t the viewers of Nolan’s film, engrossed in this story, their counterparts? After all, it is the suitors who are the first to listento the modern-day version of the aoidos (Travis Scott) as he recounts the tale of Odysseus, the war, and the journey home. And surely, as they listened to it—just as we do when watching yet another war movie—they thought that, as if by magic, simply hearing the story would shield them from its content. That was the case, until recently, in the safe homes of the imperial center and its allied vassals. Nolan’s Odyssey heralds the end of this era, even as it immediately denies this fact. Here, perhaps, is the best epic our times can muster: an epic of evasion.
__________________________________________________________________________
Be the first to comment