CAL 118_theodyssey_TRANSCRIPT
Naomi: We need to talk about the horse. We need to talk about the horse. Absolutely. We three went to see The Odyssey last night on the Upper West Side in stunning IMAX. 
Vinson: Ah. 
Naomi: And, uh, there we were, heading towards the theater on Broadway and 68th, when suddenly- 
Vinson: There was a big-ass horse on the Upper West Side of 
Alex: Manhattan
there was just a Trojan horse. 
Naomi: This was a full-scale replica. 
Alex: Full-scale, to match the one that's in the film. 
Naomi: Yeah. 
Alex: Which is already quite magnificent. I'm just gonna say it. 
Vinson: They did a great job with 
Naomi: the horse . 
Alex: The horse- Beautiful 
Naomi: horse ... I gotta say. The horse in the movie was great. Mm-hmm. You know, it's kind of, like, on its side, and it reminded me keenly of the scene in Planet of the Apes where the Statue of Liberty- Ah
in the destroyed world that the apes, you know, the- At the beginning ... destroyed America that the apes have raised. 
Vinson: Yeah. 
Naomi: I felt like that- I think that- ... was a direct reference. 
Vinson: Yeah. I wanna ask Nolan that. 
Alex: Get Nolan on the horn. [00:01:00] 
Naomi: Get Nolan on the horn. 
Alex: Famously, he has no smartphone, so just someone dial up that Motorola.
Vinson: Does he not? Oh, good for him. 
Alex: And that's why he's where he is.
Vinson: This is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Vinson Cunningham. 
Alex: I'm Alex Schwartz. 
Naomi: And I'm Naomi Fry. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hi, guys. Hey. 
Vinson: Hi. What's up? 
Naomi: This is an exciting week. We are heading into the opening weekend of the most anticipated movie of the summer, maybe even the most anticipated movie of the year, question mark.
Vinson: I think so. 
Naomi: And that is Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. 
Vinson: Oh, yeah. 
Naomi: Out in theaters now. 
CLIP – THE ODYSSEY TRAILER
Naomi: The hype around this movie has felt like a marathon, not a sprint. Ever since it was announced in December of 2024, people haven't been able to stop talking about it. There was so much excitement. I mean, we had Nolan's last movie was Oppenheimer, which was ... Remember, it was part of, you know, s- summer phenomenon of Barbenheimer.
Barbenheimer. 
Alex: Who could forget? The, 
Naomi: uh, cinema was back. That's right. You know, people loved it, many Oscars were won, and this is the follow-up. 
Alex: Ever since it was announced that this movie was being made, and that it would be made in IMAX, I believe the posters that we saw last night at the press screening said, "Every frame shot in IMAX."
They're not cheating us of a single frame. That's being made very clear. So ever since this whole thing was hyped up and announced- 
Vinson: Yeah ... 
Alex: IMAX screenings went on sale last year for a year hence, and those things sold out. 
Vinson: Yeah. 
Alex: Like- 
Naomi: A year hence? 
Alex: Yes. In 2025, IMAX screenings for 2026 were selling out. Um- 
Naomi: Like hotcakes
Alex: like hotcakes. And because sometimes I can be a little bit of a head-in-the-sand kind of person, these details didn't come to me in a great rush as they probably came to most people. Like, every so often I'd look up and be like, "Oh, Matt Damon has really been doing something. Oh, he's going to be Odysseus."
Like, no wonder I'm seeing shirtless pics of him looking kind of grizzled. Like, I didn't know who Zendaya was playing unt- I knew she was in this thing, and I've been following with great interest all her beautiful outfits, but I ... on the, on the, you know, the press junket and such, but I didn't know who she was playing.
I thought she was playing Calypso. I didn't know what was going on until I got in that theater. 
Vinson: Yeah. 
Naomi: Athena she was. 
Alex: Yes. 
Naomi: [00:04:00] So lots of excitement on the one hand. On the other hand, there have been some controversies, right? I hate to quote Elon Musk, but I will, because I think it’s indicative, he tweeted that Nolan is quote “pissing on Homer’s grave” and that’s part of a larger thrust. 
Alex: Whatever. Elon Musk would not know where Homer's grave was if he went around the world on a boat with his companions looking for it for 10 years. 
Vinson: Right wingers making no sense about Lupita Nyong’o can’t be Helen of Troy, Helen was famously not black. 
Alex: That’s what I was aware of, I was aware of the kind of racist Elon Musk strain of criticism which I quickly tuned out as annoying and irrelevant. I don’t know what else has there been? Oh, “dad”! Dad, in the trailer where Telemachus says “dad” to refer to Odysseus. 
Naomi: Right. So it’s not papa and it’s not father, it’s dad. But so much kind of like, this Nolan is wokefying the Odyssey, etc etc. And I think whether because whether from left or right, excitement or criticism, [00:05:00] the adaptation, what Nolan has done with this ancient, you know, classical text, what I'm gleaning from this is that- People still care, and the question is why. It's actually kind of stunning. I mean, I- Yeah ... it's, it's great, but I'm also like, "Wow, like, people really care about this, like, epic of the ancient Greek." 
Vinson: Yeah. 
Naomi: And, uh, and like wh- wh- why is that? 
Vinson: It's partially because the story itself is about civilizations and how they perpetuate themselves, you know?
And m- and every civilization wants to know where it comes from and where it's headed. And so if you have a story that's about this precisely, and a hero who adapts himself to situations to sort of, like, symbolize this precisely, I think we're always gonna be interested in what it means and how we [00:06:00] should read it.
You know, it, it, it, it has hooks for all of us to sort of dig into. 
Naomi: Yeah.
Today what we're gonna do is we're gonna weigh in with our own reactions to Nolan's film and try to make sense of this extreme investment that audiences feel the big question i want to get into today is about the art of translation itself. it's something nolan has had to grapple with as much as anyone who's ever translated or adapted the story what does this new translation of this ancient text tell us about ourselves today?
So that's today on Critics at Large, who owns The Odyssey?
Okay, guys. So we saw The Odyssey only last night. 
Vinson: Mm-hmm. 
Naomi: In a packed house. Nolan directed, of [00:07:00] course, and, and wrote. The cinematography is by Hoyte van Hoytema. I can't wait. Our listeners can't wait. What did you guys think? Where do we stand? On Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. 
Vinson: So fucking good. 
Alex: What 
Vinson: a film.
Alex: What a film. 
Vinson: It's really- honestly, it's just really good. It's so good. You know, I, I went in kind of... I was, I was hoping for it to be really good. I even said to you guys, like, "I think, you know, I'm setting up this is gonna be like a four out of five for me. It's gonna be... I'm real excited." Um, but it, it surpassed even my pretty- Wow
high expect- expectations. 
Naomi: Wow. 
Vinson: You know, there was a, you know, I, I just, I, I could maintain no cynicism before it. It, it, it bowled me over. It was a huge Hollywood spectacle on the one hand, but it was also in many ways, and sometimes we expect this of Christopher Nolan, a meditation on many things that are [00:08:00] contemporary, that are sort of- Yes
pressing against our lives today. And usually, you know what? 'Cause we mentioned the IMAX thing. Usually, I don't care about like the, the technology of how something- Yeah ... was shot. Mm-hmm. Like, I'm not, I don't ca- But man, what pictures. I couldn't b- it was just a huge spectacle that bowled me over. 
Naomi: I know. You know what it was like? I felt like I was like m- like watching like the Lumière brother... Like, it was, it was sort of like- The train was coming ... I was seeing the train The train was coming towards me. And I was like, "Ah." I mean- Yeah.
Alex: We were on, we were on the wave-dashed rocks. I just want listeners to understand something about the pod and the people in it. I know that some devoted listeners already get this. But if there's a film, here's where I'm sitting, [00:09:00] in the back. Here's where Vinson Cunningham is sitting, in the front. So, like we get to the theater- 
Naomi: We were separated.
We were torn asunder. 
Alex: We were torn asunder. I'm sorry, guys. No, it's okay. It's, no, no, don't be sorry. It's if, if we had been on Odysseus's ship, and we had passed through Scylla and Charybdis, and Scylla had reached down her monstrous fingers- Ugh ... Vinson would've just been plucked up and eaten in one second.
First one. That is how close to the screen this man was sitting. He was in it. He was ready to go into that cave and blind that cyclops. 
Vinson: Front and center. 
Alex: Yes. Wow. So that's- Yeah ... the true experience. But we also got the true experience, Naomi. Yeah, yeah. I mean- I mean, even just- When the cameras were- Yeah
rolling around on the waves, when we were climbing up the rocky cliffs of Ithaca after finally making it home, I could feel all that. Christopher Nolan, I know you went to a, I'm sure you're listening. I know you went to a lot of effort to shoot this thing in IMAX. We've heard all about it The cameras are huge.
They're IMAX cameras. They're super loud. They have to be blimped, which means they have to have, like, a special little covering. Um, the actors, they're so [00:10:00] big the actors couldn't see each other, so they used mirrors so the actors could make eye contact. Also, they're dashing around, as far as I can tell, the Grecian Isles.
Like, gorgeous scenery. 
Naomi: I believe, I believe Sicily as well. 
Alex: They're, the, the boats, the rowing, the this, the that, and the huge cameras Okay, I'm gonna give it to you, Christopher Nolan. It was worth it. 
Naomi: How, how quick can we do a synopsis of- 
Alex: We can, we 
Naomi: can do it ... Homer's The Odyssey?
Alex: The Odyssey is a story of an attempted homecoming, an eventual homecoming. Odysseus has left Ithaca, where he is king, at the point in the story, I would say maybe 17 years earlier, and after nine years of, of fruitless stalemate in the Trojan War, in the 10th year, has won the Trojan War by devising the mechanism of the Trojan Horse, and after the sack of Troy, is trying to return home with his men.
He goes on a lot of adventures on the way back, there are a lot of problems, and [00:11:00] makes every effort to get home to Ithaca, where his wife and son are waiting. His wife, Penelope, has been alone without word of him for all this time, and is being courted by many suitors who are just... They suck. They are rude, they're eating up all the food in the house, they're abusive to her son.
They just want her power, and they won't go away. Her son, Telemachus, is right on this interesting verge of coming of age. He's not a boy, not yet a man, and as Noe loves to say- He's not a boy. That's right. As Noe loves to say, he recognizes that Ithaca needs a strong leader. Yes. So he goes out to look for his father.
And so, in a very interesting way, and this is already cinematic, and I think Christopher Nolan does an amazing thing with this, there are two journeys happening in The Odyssey at the same time. One is a homecoming, and one is an outward bound journey- Mm-hmm ... for a kid who's only ever been at home, to try to go out in the world and figure out what has happened to his father, and also what his role as a man should be.[00:12:00] 
Vinson: Yes. 
Naomi: Masterful. 
Alex: Thank you. 
Naomi: As usual. 
Alex: Well, thank you so much. 
Naomi: I do have to say, you know, so many movies now, w- you know, superhero movies of course, but even sort of, like, historical, like, even Troy, you know what I mean? 2004's Troy. 
Alex: I just wanna note that I reviewed Troy for my high school newspaper- No ... and that was maybe my first work of criticism.
Naomi: Really? Whoa. Yeah. And what did you say? 
Alex: I remember, uh, coming up with a line I felt really proud of about, um, wanting to throw popcorn at Brad Pitt's Achilles heel- Oh, my God ... 'cause I really thought it was bad. That's hilarious. As, like, a 15-year-old. 
Naomi: Amazing. Amazing. Sorry, Noe. Go ahead. Amazing. So- 
Vinson: That's incredible
Naomi: there, there is a slickness there that, of course, is... Of course, CGI was used here in certain ep- But I think from what I've read and understand about Nolan's filmmaking, he tried to Be as analog as possible. Like, they, they literal- They [00:13:00] did climb, like, the blood, sweat, and tears of shooting in these, like, very harsh conditions, the rocks, the, the water, the, the, the, the caves, the, um...
It really makes a difference 
Alex: Yeah, it's gorgeous. 
Naomi: It's gorgeous. It comes across on screen, and for me, that made the movie. 
Alex: Yeah. I mean, I, I love to see something that we never see in movies. Like, I love to see real sweat. I always love when there are flies, which there never are anymore, but, like, if you see a movie from the '60s- Yeah
and it's a little bit low budget, and there's just kind of a fly. No one could deal with that, and it was hot outside, and- And, 
Naomi: like, the teeth are bad. 
Alex: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like, that's ... So you're going to this physical world. The Odyssey is about physical and intellectual struggle, um, among many other things.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But Odysseus as a hero embodies both. He embodies this physical ruggedness and, at certain points, exhaustion, um, and also cleverness, wiliness, all of the things that he's known for, the wily Odysseus, all of the epithets that go with him. So the [00:14:00] physicality of this world is extremely important.
You have the suitors at Odysseus' palace in Ithaca who are courting his wife, Penelope, and they're eating up all of his stuff. And I think, like, one of the things that seems so weird for a modern reader to read about in The Odyssey is like, "Wait, you can just go into this person's house and eat his stuff?"
“And his wife and his son can't really do anything about it, and you just feast all the time?" Like, yes, that is- 
Naomi: Listen, it's Zeus's law. 
Alex: It's ... Well- Or- It's a total perversion of Zeus's law. Yes. Well, 
Naomi: of course. In my opinion. But, but that is- 
Alex: My God. 
Vinson: This idea that runs through the whole movie, an ancient Greek idea that Nolan sort of super invests in is this idea, they call it Zeus’s law, the Greeks call it Xenia. The truth that you have to not just greet the stranger, not just like OK sure you can come in but that there’s a ritualized friendship that has to bloom from our meeting with one another. 
Alex: Did you guys catch the really funny moment in the movie when it was given a Christian gloss? I think Penelope's like- Do unto others
"Do unto others as they would do unto you." Yeah. It's like, I'm pretty sure that came later, and that's- Yeah. ... something else. Um- 
Naomi: [00:15:00] Turn the other cheek. 
Alex: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it, so it was a different, very interesting historical character who came up with that idea. Yeah. But I just mean that the physicality of this world, the exhaustion of the soldiers, the exhaustion of the sailors, the satisfaction of eating and drinking, um, and of sexual pleasure, something that is totally missing from this movie interestingly.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Those things are right there in The Odyssey, in the text of The Odyssey. And so, yes, putting visual value on physicality, beauty, harshness pays off in a huge way here. 
Vinson: Yeah. 
Naomi: Yeah.
In a minute, we go from Christopher Nolan to Emily Wilson. Critics at Large from The New Yorker will be right back
::MIDROLL::
Obviously, as we've [00:16:00] said, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey isn't the first adaptation of The Odyssey. Our colleague David Denby wrote a great piece in The New Yorker recently, and it was titled Why The Odyssey Keeps Defeating Filmmakers. And, you know, he kind of runs down a long list of reasons that make the story notoriously hard to get right in film.
What are, what are some of the reasons, either by Denby's lights or y- your own? 
Alex: Well, one that stuck out to me was the problem of the gods. When you read The Odyssey, you really realize this is a religious text. This is about the way that the gods control the lives of people, and that people react to the gods and curry favor with them or don't.
It's, it's, so much of it is about the relationship between people and the gods. It's, it's, it's a religious book. So that's really hard when you have a bunch of gods just, like, talking about... Like, there's a whole scene in The Odyssey where, um, Poseidon, the sea god, is really pissed off [00:17:00] because he's mad. The Cyclops is his son.
Odysseus blinded him. He's mad, and he goes to the other gods, and he's basically like, "Okay, so what do you want me to do about it?" Like, "I hate this man, and you want him to get home. No one's gonna help me here?" Like, there's a whole thing going on with the gods- Yeah ... being annoyed with each other and dealing- Yeah
with their own shit. 
Naomi: Yeah. Denby in, in his, in his piece talks about this, like, eight, uh, eight-part Italian TV miniseries, L'Odissea- Mm-hmm ... from 1968, where apparently the kind of like, the words of, of, uh, you know, Zeus and the other gods, conversations among them were kind of, like, heavily intoned, he says, off-screen
        CLIP: L’Odissea (1968) 
while the camera zoomed into, like, statues of, of gods.
Mm-hmm. Right? In a kind of very, um, kind of arti- an artificial, very s- highly stylized- Yeah ... uh, uh, uh, kind of effect. And this is the opposite of that, obviously. 
Alex: And I think, I think Christopher Nolan deals with that by essentially not [00:18:00] having gods very visible. But I was a little bit feeling like, "Where are the gods, Christopher Nolan?
Where are the gods?" Athena's around, and she's played by Zendaya, who- 
Naomi: It's a very small role. 
Alex: It's a very small role, and it's a very sober role. Mm-hmm. She's, Athena in, and this is... If I were to quibble- Mm-hmm ... with this Odyssey There's not a ton of humor in here, and- Yeah ... there could be some more. There could be a little more.
Yeah. Athena's a really funny character. Athena loves to change shape. She could appear as a young man, she can appear as whoever, and she loves to kinda, like, poke fun at Odysseus and be like, "Not so fast." Or, like, often in The Odyssey she'll kind of be like, "Yeah, I thought of that. You're wondering how to kill all the suitors by yourself?
Guess what?" Mm-hmm. "I also have been thinking about this." Yeah. And that note is missing, so that was one, um, potential pitfall- Mm-hmm ... that Christopher Nolan, I don't know how you guys feel about that, if you miss the gods or if you were just fine. Yeah. 
Vinson: We see the, we kinda see the effects of the gods, you know?
We see- 
Alex: Yeah ... 
Vinson: you did something wrong, here's a great big [00:19:00] storm. 
Alex: Right. 
Vinson: the, the relationship between man and the gods, or in this case, specifically Odysseus and the gods, becomes largely psychological. It sort of, it try, it, it almost, like, r- brings us back to the Bronze Age and, and reminds us that, like, you know, in many ways this is still a very dangerous world, and s- therefore the man is trying to propitiate the gods in order to just m- make it home.
It's never the god coming down and being like, "You're fucked." It's just like, "And then a great big storm came," or- Mm-hmm. Yeah ... "The right winds never came." Um, and sometimes Odysseus looks to the left or the right, and there is- 
Naomi: Mm-hmm ... 
Vinson: Athena, and nobody else is seeing her, you know? Right. So it becomes this negotiation of, like, w- well, what is fate?
Uh, and, and who- Is its author? Is it a matter of rep- retribution for one's actions? Is it a matter of the capriciousness [00:20:00] of the gods and by association of nature? Um, all these things, you know, every time we look at The Odyssey and we look back at it, I was wondering, you know, we, we inject it with, um, things that we know already, like, you know, cultural phenomena that we know.
Mm-hmm. And r- this Odyssey reminded me so much of Eugene O'Neill because- 
Naomi: Oh, wow. Say, say more about that ... 
Vinson: it, you know, in so many of his plays, you know, he has all of these, you know, interesting seafaring plays where the m- the, you're on the ship, and the waves and the moon play tricks on you. Sailors lose- Mm
their mind by this like, you know, y- howls from, that they can hear from the shore, that sort of tidal- Yeah ... psychological pull of the moon. Um, and that to me seemed, it just like the v- the, the danger of voyages and the lure of the sea, it almost like that was- Yes ... that became the figure of the gods in this, in this [00:21:00] Odyssey.
I, I was really interested in, in like, yeah. And I thought, I thought it was a really good handling
Naomi: One thing I think that's important to note, and we've touched on this a little bit before, is that Nolan's isn't the first adaptation. It's, it's n- you know, there have been many adaptations, many translations, notably Emily Wilson's 2017 translation of The Odyssey that I think raised a lot of responses.
Mm-hmm. Alex, do you wanna s- speak to it a little? 
Alex: Definitely. I mean, Emily Wilson's translation is so wonderful. I really, really recommend it. Um, it, you're not hearing it here first, obviously. But what's kind of amazing about this translation is it reads so easily, and I think there is, with an ancient text, of course, even one as famous as The Odyssey, there's definitely this idea going in, like I had last read The Odyssey many years before.
I'm not a classicist. Definitely, you know, I, I must own to this. And so while, [00:22:00] again, re-engaging with The Odyssey, s- for thought, "Ugh, okay, here we go," and then you're just swept up in a way in this Emily Wilson translation, and there are a few reasons for that. One reason is that she decided to match the verse count in Homer, so rather than making it more verbose or adding extra words in, she decided to keep each line in the Homer as a line in the English translation.
Vinson: Mm-hmm. 
Alex: She used iambic pentameter, which is not the heck- tel- pentameter that Homer uses, obviously, but is our own English poetic version of speech. Um, and she used a really plain spoken language that returns The Odyssey to It, it just brings it down a notch from the sense of great literature- Mm-hmm ... um, and into the world.
Um- 
Vinson: Her first line is, "Tell me about a complicated man." "
Alex: Tell me about a complicated man." Um, and- Muse, 
Naomi: tell me how he wandered and was lost. 
Alex: That's it. Thanks. Yeah. So, you know, people got very worked [00:23:00] up about this translation in both directions. People were very excited about it for the reasons that I got excited about it and that I've described.
It's a beautiful thing to read, and it really gives this very fresh and immediate gloss on this, um, this ancient tale. And then people got worked up. Why does it sound like that? Why, uh, why is its language too colloquial? Um, there was a bit made about a woman translating it, which I think is just kind of dumb.
Um, there were other choices that were interesting that Emily Wilson made that she's talked about quite a bit, like, um, late in The Odyssey, spoiler alert, Odysseus comes back, and he's not happy. 
Vinson: Mm-hmm. 
Alex: And after a great deal of bloodshed, he also kills the slave girls at the palace- Mm-hmm ... who've been sleeping with the suitors.
And in earlier translations, they've been called sluts or whores. Or whores, 
Vinson: yeah. 
Alex: And that's not what's in the Greek. In the Greek, it's slave girls or serving girls, and that's [00:24:00] what she does. So she has engaged in a kind of stripping away that I think people, because most people are reading this, yes, they're classicists, but many people, it's coming to them in their own language, reading a translation that they've associated with this text.
Naomi: How do you think the Wilson translation, uh, relates to the Nolan movie? In the sense of do, do you kind of- 
Vinson: Yeah ... 
Naomi: see a similarity there, like an attitude, let's say- Yeah ... if not an exact language? 
Vinson: N- Nolan, you know, himself has cited that translation as a, as an inspiration for his screenplay, and you can, uh, the famous dad that we spoked about- Mm-hmm
uh, with which Telemachus and, and the other, like, sort of chief suitor played by- Mm-hmm ... uh, Pattinson both use, I think is in the, maybe in the spirit of the, of the Wilson. the flexibility of the screenplay, I would say owes something to, to Wilson. one of the more discussed choices in the Wilson, too, I think it's so important about- The character of Odysseus, is that word complicated?
You know? 
Naomi: Mm-hmm. 
Vinson: This, like, very much contested word, polytropos, is the, is what's being translated there. I was raised on the Fa- the Robert Fagles translation, which, puts polytropos as the man of twists and turns. 
Naomi: Mm. 
Vinson: And, and, and it's an interesting way of sort of making double-sided this epithet.
Yeah, he's, [00:26:00] inside he's got many, he's, he's resourceful, he's crafty, wily, all these things, but also he's gone through many twists and turns. So trying to find the epithet that matches the inside to the outside. Um, complicated man sounds like, to me it sounds like the theme song to Shaft, you know? He's a complicated man.
So I'm, I, I- Shaft ... I'm sure Emily Wilson has, had contemplated that, like, Blaxploitation angle o- on Odysseus, I don't know. Yes. Um, uh, Daniel Mendelsohn's, uh, uh, translation has, "Who had so many roundabout ways." you know, but this idea is so important to the text.
Like, what kind of guy are we talking about? There are times w- in the, in the Wilson where she, she has, like... sometimes she'll be like, I think there's a line where it's, she translates the epithet as lying Odysseus says, "I'll tell you the truth."
Mm. She does these, like, [00:27:00] little ironic moments that, that kind of, like- Yeah ... really trouble our idea of Odysseus. And we see, you know, in the Nolan, he talks a, he, there are a lot of times whereas men are like, "He lied to us," you know? Yes. And so that, um, and Nolan, who is obsessed with leadership. 
Naomi: Mm. 
Vinson: You know?
And I think that comes through in m- in, in this movie. Um, okay, so what i- what happens if the leader isn't just, like, straightforwardly good and noble? What happens if you have a cunning person- Mm ... who, you know, governs or leads by hook or crook? It's a really interesting aspect, I think, of every sort of translation of this text, and really calls into question what kind of guy are we dealing with, and what kind of person Can win the favor of the gods, can be thought of as like, you know, special.
Alex: Mm-hmm. 
Vinson: Yeah. 
Alex: Yeah, there's, there's another tendency I think about now that is less literal and it's more imaginative that I think Nolan is working with also, which is there, there has been for a long [00:28:00] time this kind of feminist re-envisioning of The Odyssey and the world of The Odyssey and The Iliad as well, and it's not hard to understand why.
These are men's stories in a men's world where men determine the fate of everybody. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And yes, you have very strong and determined women. Some of them are evil, like Clytemnestra, who waits for Agamemnon to return from war and kills him with her lover. Um, and some you just kind of puzzle over, like Helen, what was going on there?
Naomi: Mm-hmm. 
Alex: What was going on behind that beautiful face? What was the deal? So I'm thinking of things like Pat Barker, the English writer Pat Barker's Women of Troy- Mm-hmm ... trilogy, which reimagines the Homeric epics from that kind of female point of view. I'm thinking of Circe, um, by, uh, by- Madeleine Miller.
Yeah, Madeleine Miller, exactly. So there are interesting moments in the Nolan where you can see that he is very alive to this strain of reimagining [00:29:00] And that was interesting to me because, for instance, let's talk about sex. when you meet Odysseus in The Odyssey, he's been living with Calypso on her island and having great sex with her for seven years.
With Circe, Circe turns all these dudes into pigs. Then Odysseus comes and is like, "Eh, you know what, Circe? I'll sleep with you. Turn them into men again. Like, we'll hang out." And she's like, "Okay." They just stay for a year. She's ... He's sleeping with her. He's having sex with her. Like, everything is great. It's beautiful.
And meanwhile, of course, at home, Penelope has to remain chaste. Everything depends upon that. The entire political and moral order depends on that. So these are obvious imbalances. And so what Christopher Nolan has done intriguingly to me is, [00:30:00] first of all, eliminate sex from this movie. Y- yes, you can understand, like, if Charlize Theron was alone on an island and, like, was really into you, what would happen?
I think we can gather what's been going on there. But they're not physically intimate. Circe, who is, uh ... Samantha Morton gives a really interesting performance, but Circe is a really aggrieved person who points out the danger that a bunch of men would pose to her. And the most significant one is Helen of Troy, What's very interesting in the movie itself is that when Telemachus, Odysseus' son, goes to visit Menelaus, who is Helen's husband, and Helen to try to get word of his dad- Mm-hmm
Helen turns her face, and Jon Bernthal, Menelaus, says, "Ah, it's the face that launched 1,000 ships. Maybe just [00:31:00] 500 now." And she turns her face, and you see that part of her face has become scarred. Mm-hmm. He's obviously disfigured her. In the text of The Odyssey, Helen and Menelaus get along great. 
Vinson: Yeah. 
Alex: And I do think Christopher Nolan is interested in a more modern take where, just think for a second about what that would've been like and what a man in this world might have done to his wife in this situation.
Mm-hmm. Probably not, not great. And- Is part of it about appealing to modern audiences? Maybe, but I actually think he doesn't care so much about that. I think Christopher Nolan is, like, trying to work out his own vision of the text and his own truth of the characters. Yeah. He's definitely gotten criticized over the years for thin female characters, and that was a problem I had with Oppenheimer.
I did not love the women in Oppenheimer. Yeah. Oppenheimer is not my favorite of his movies. So yeah, I don't know what you guys make of that, but I thought that was an interesting choice to kind of eliminate pleasure from this world. 
Naomi: I think, I, I, I do think that having Odysseus be this kind of, like, [00:32:00] relatively chaste, you know, I mean, sex is implied, as you say, with Calypso, but you don't see him, you know, cheating on Penelope as he does, you know, with n- with no problem in- Mm-hmm
in the original text. It also connects to me to him being played by Matt Damon, who's this, like, quintessential good guy. Like, when I- 
Alex: Have we ever seen a sex scene with Matt Damon? 
Naomi: Well, he's a very much like, maybe it's in life, too, he's kind of like a wife guy. He's not Affleck, right? It's 
Alex: the- He certainly is not. No, no, 
Naomi: no. It's the yin and the yang, right?
Oh. So if Affleck was Odysseus, we would get a very different Odysseus. 
Alex: I don't think I can handle that- 
Naomi: No, but- ... version ... do you know what I'm saying? Yes. So because- I 
Alex: know exactly 
Naomi: what you're saying- So to me, so- ... and I'm 
Alex: chilled by 
Naomi: it ... so to me- ... the choice of him dovetails with this kind of interpretation of the character as kind of like, ultimately, yeah, he's complicated.
Obviously, he's shown to do many bad things over the course of the movie, but, but it, it's not, it doesn't seem to come from a love of kind of like slyness. And I think that aligns with his chaste sexuality. 
Vinson: He, it's like, w- here's the thing. It, this, here's where the movie dovetails with our modern notions of trauma, though, because the Calypso episode at, is [00:34:00] refigured.
She's fe- feeding him these lotus flowers, and- Yes, which 
Alex: is not part 
Vinson: of the deal ... is not part of the deal in The Odyssey. And she says over and over to him, like, "No, I didn't just keep you here out of, like..." It seems much more sort of forced and horrible in the actual Odyssey. Here, it's like we've had a good time together, let me tell you.
Again, the implication is sex. But she says, "Hey, you had to take these seven years, because if you had remembered before, it probably would've killed you. And so what sounds like a beautiful island spa vacation to the rest of us, has actually been a period of preparation so that you could finish the journey.
Because you've seen too much, and if you could remember all of it" A lot of the episodes of Odysse- Odysseus and His Men are told to us almost retrospectively. It's her [00:35:00] coaxing him- By her, right ... to remember- 
Alex: Mm-hmm ... 
Vinson: what happened, and then he tells us, and then we see it.
It's the talking 
Naomi: cure. 
Vinson: Yeah, it's the talking cure. 
Alex: Whereas of course- Exactly ... well, whereas of course in The Odyssey itself, it is Odysseus recounting those episodes, um, himself. He recounts them. It, it's not, yeah, he doesn't, he doesn't need much spurring. Yeah, that, there is something very modern, I think- Yeah
about this idea of you need to be rehabbed now. Yeah. You have had a very hard time, and we've gotta get you ready to go back into society and to confront all of that. 
Vinson: Yeah
Naomi: In a minute, what does this new translation of this ancient text tell us about ourselves today? 
Alex: I think something's going on with Matt Damon. I think, I think he's- What do 
Naomi: you mean something's going on? 
Alex: I think that he- I think he has a no sex scenes policy. I think that, like- 
Naomi: Maybe his wife is jealous. 
Alex: I mean, I, I don't know what, what it is, but isn't this fascinating?
That would, I don't know. Think about it
::MIDROLL::
Naomi: So guys, obviously we've established that many, many people still care about Homer, still care about The Odyssey, are very excited for this movie, and the question is why? Why now? What is the relevance of this story? What is the relevance of this character, of Odysseus, to our lives as they stand? What do you guys think?
Vinson: It, it seems to me that certainly Christopher Nolan has answers to this question, you know? Uh, because yes, it's a war text, The Odyssey, and it's a war film, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. Um, but it's [00:37:00] also, I think, it takes war as an opportunity to talk about the connections between people. 
Naomi: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Vinson: And how civilization depends on a kind of openness and congeniality between people that is not necessarily natural, but is the product of generations of work, and therefore can be shattered, you know? Um, this whole thing we've been talking about the, uh, all episode, the law of Zeus, Xenia, the welcoming the stranger.
I, I can't imagine that Nolan emphasized that so much without thinking about today's, uh, questions about immigration- 
Naomi: Mm-hmm ... 
Vinson: pluralism, trade between countries and nations. Uh, there's a moment toward the end of the film where, uh, Penelope, and this is like a total Nolan invention, I believe, says, "You know, we [00:38:00] had this beautiful world of palaces and trade."
She says trade, you know? And, and, and it's, it's almost like the, the fall of the sort of preexisting Bronze Age, which Odysseus really blames on himse- he doesn't like the whole Trojan Horse thing. He remembers it as when we kind of broke the world. 
Naomi: Yeah. 
Vinson: You know? Um, and he says, you know, "People are gonna forget these lessons and they're gonna do this again."
Uh, this is, to me, the whole sort of like, this is Nolan really like writing his essay in the middle of the film. 
Naomi: Mm-hmm. 
Vinson: And I think it has everything to do with, uh, the sort of right populist- world that has emerged that we all understand, and how, I think Nolan, to me, it has always seemed like a sort of, you know, post-World War II center right.
I mean, people have talked a lot about the sort of The Dark Knight as a sort of post [00:39:00] 9/11, uh, sort of George W. Bush-ian, uh, contemplation on leadership and warning against various forms of, you know, radical socialism, et cetera. And here he's kind of looking from that same vantage point at the contemporary right, it seems, and saying, "You're closing the world. You're cutting off pathways of congenial behavior that took decades and decades, uh, really a century to build, and you're destroying it, and you don't build these things as quickly as you can destroy them."
And so it's this really civilizational m- warning, I think. And so it, it's... He's, he's really wor- I think he's working out some really contemporary stuff in this film, and I think it's really- 
Naomi: Yeah ... 
Vinson: some of the most thrilling stuff in it. 
Naomi: I, I, I think, I, I think that's [00:40:00] really smart, Vinson, and the idea that we're talking about civilization.
Like, how quickly we can shatter- 
Vinson: Mm-hmm ... 
Naomi: you know, mores, customs, ways of behavior that m- made things, uh, you know, possible. 
Vinson: Yeah. 
Naomi: But I think it's also about individual psychology and the effects that the shattering of a world has on a person's life, emotion- Yeah ... you know, psyche. Um, in some ways, you know, it's, it's really a movie about PTSD, you know?
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Kind of, and you see it, o- obviously, you see all the horrible things, horrible and thrilling to us as viewers, but mostly horrible for Odysseus and his men, the absolute carnage, just like an [00:41:00] inescapable, um, horror. Yeah. Right? And towards the end, after we've been through the wringer with this man, went literally to hell and back- 
Vinson: Yeah 
Naomi: When he comes home and he has that conversation that you alluded to with Penelope, and he talks about the trick of the horse, and yeah, how he was against it, and because it, it, that was like, it was an underhanded, which is also funny because we know he's an underhanded hero- Yeah, yeah
you know, in, in, in the original text. But here, and that has to do with the kind of Damon-esque bent of his, uh- ... of his, of his character, he's like, "That's the moment when things went wrong." Like, "I regret that. They thought we were giving them a gift." Like, they were open-hearted. We burst out of [00:42:00] that horse, and it was like Pandora's box or something. You know, like every which way horror kind of like visited upon Troy. And, uh, you s- and you see this. It's kind of a flashback. You see him coming into Troy, and you see all the warriors around him, yeah, raping, pillaging.
Um, and, uh, and you're experiencing this with him, and you, you feel the sense of loss. You know? You feel the sense of like the world breaking- Mm-hmm ... and how it happens on the, the broad level, as you suggested, but it also happens to a person. And, um, that was very effective, I thought. Yeah. And felt very contemporary and very relevant to things, you know, whether we are, ourselves are experiencing or things we're seeing other people [00:43:00] experiencing.
Yeah. You know? It's constant, and, and it's, it's like, it's, it's that like pinpoint into the individual of like, "This is what it does," even when you're the perpetrator- 
Vinson: Yeah ... 
Naomi: often. 
Vinson: And perhaps espe- especially when you- 
Naomi: Yeah ... 
Vinson: yeah. 
Alex: I think The Odyssey endures for a lot of reasons, and some are complicated and some are like Odysseus, and some are simple.
The simple one is I don't think anything can endure, uh, and retain its cultural prominence without giving pleasure. And The Odyssey gives an enormous amount of pleasure. It's so fun. 
Vinson: Mm-hmm. 
Alex: It's so, um, it's so beautiful and fun and interesting and scary, and all these magical, weird things happen in it. All these crazy monsters come out, and humans have to make decisions about what to do when confronted with this magical, unpredictable world. those things, the shock of them feeling fresh, it's hard to get over that.
And so part of it is just how beautiful and enjoyable it is. And Nomi, I think you're right that that's for very psychological reasons. I also think there's the coming-of-age aspect, which we haven't touched on quite as much- Hmm ... but is, um, I think maybe a little bit also at the heart of the weird right-wing response to The Odyssey.
Naomi: Mm-hmm. 
Alex: Um, because Telemachus is trying to figure out what it is to be a man, and I think when... We've, we've hinted at it, but we can say explicitly, like, I think a lot of the right-wing- Um, focus on the Homeric epics is this idea that this is the foundation of Western culture Mm-hmm ... that Greece is the foundation of Western culture, and these are these essential texts of ancient Greece, and they show what it is to be a man, to go to war, to fight.
And we get a big version of that in the Nolan [00:45:00] movie. It's such a fight-heavy movie Mm-hmm ... and I think he does those things brilliantly. But in the middle of this, you have Telemachus, who doesn't yet know how to do any of that stuff, trying to figure out what he is. And, like, Telemachus is, he's very contemporary in that way also.
Who do I look to? Who's my dad? Where's my dad? Yeah. I need to know what to do and what it is to be a man. Emily Wilson has a great note about this in the introduction to her text. She points out a couple of places where Telemachus tells his mom what to do, and he says, "Go get dressed and wash your face.
You've been crying so much, no one wants to look at you." 
Naomi: Mm. 
Alex: He's kind of assuming this role that's totally inappropriate for a young son of telling his mother how to make herself beautiful and how to conduct herself because that's what he thinks he's- she's trying it out. That's what he's supposed to do.
And when Odysseus comes back and again is ready to reclaim his position, but not quite, there's such a weird, odd moment, both in The Odyssey, and I think Nolan dealt with this really well in the movie, where Odysseus is back and it's not a hero's [00:46:00] homecoming. Like, this is not Marvel. This is not like, whoosh, now I swoop in and kill all these guys.
This is still like, "Oh, God, what do I... I have to figure this out. I've got to trick them. I've got to pretend to be an old beggar to even get in the palace doors- Mm-hmm ... otherwise I'm dead." So I think so much of this text is foundational to our society, but not in the ways of, like, what it means to be a man is to go to war and be glorious.
I think it's foundational because of those questions and because of that asking and that confusion. And I also think it's foundational because this is a society that we read about, um, that had real morals and honor. And, like, we look around us, and it's not hard to feel like we're living in a version of Ithaca where the suitors are in the palace- Mm-hmm
where corruption- Absolutely ... reigns rampant, and the worst are rewarded with the most, and so much of it is about self-enrichment. And I think there's a lot of appeal and a lot of reclamation that can be done of The Odyssey- Yeah ... which is about how do you [00:47:00] restore order in the world? 
Vinson: Yeah. It's also, you know, and- A lot of that in this, when we talk about the sort of, um, feminist overtones of, of this Odyssey, a lot of that resides with Christopher Nolan in the figure of Penelope, who does seem to me to, on a certain level, the way the suitors speak to her, there's one, uh, scene between her and Robert Pattinson where she's like, he's just like, "Get over it."
It's like it's, "Come on," like, "You gotta move on." It's almost like she's kind of a Hamlet. 
Naomi: Yes. 
Vinson: But she's a Hamlet of the old order, and everybody is telling her, "It's done," you know? 
Naomi: Even- But it's not. 
Vinson: Well, here's the thing. O- even Odysseus, when he comes back, he says, "What if I told you that," like, when, before he admits that he's Odysseus.
"What if- Yes ... I told you that he realized that there was no going back?" You know, what he saw in Troy changes the... So even Odysseus in this telling says, "Yeah, um, maybe we can restore order, but it won't be the same as it was." 
Alex: Yeah. 
Vinson: And this endless [00:48:00] pining over what- however we idealize the, the, the liberal order or something like that, you know?
It's over. And so- 
Alex: He says, I think they say, "The age of bronze 
Vinson: is passing." The age of, age of bronze. You know, and so, and, and, you know, one reason that The Odyssey persists is because the world does keep on sort of evanescing behind us, and it, the question of, like, how to move on is always, always fresh. 
Alex: Yeah, it is fascinating to get this thing that is one half totally contemporary feeling, the struggle of Odysseus, and the other half is involved with gods who we no longer believe in, who have, um- Speak for yourself.
Yeah, exactly. I was a little bit like, "I'm kind of ready- Yeah ... to, um, take Athena up again." Like, kinda ready for that. I'm a little bit ready to engage with Zeus directly. Yeah. Makes total sense to me, um, especially in this time of, like, rampant climate change while the- Yeah ... forest out the Paris is burning.
Naomi: Gotta respect 
Alex: nature. Zeus has sent lightning. You must respect this. I know. We are angering the [00:49:00] gods. 
Naomi: We really are.
This has been Critics at Large. Alex Barasch is our consulting editor, and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Our show is mixed by Mike Kutchman, and we had engineering help today from Vince Fairchild, with music by Alexis Cuadrado. You can listen to all of our episodes anytime at newyorker.com/critics
​