John Daniel Davidson writes for the Federalist about the latest example of efforts to undermine our cultural heritage.
It was difficult to peruse social media last week without seeing a steady stream of reactions and reviews of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey — a film that had already prompted, weeks before its premiere, mountains of derisive commentary for its purportedly woke casting choices, strangely modern costumes, American accents, and flat color palette.
But now that the film is out, reviews have been largely positive. Fears of a wokeified epic mocking the heroic age of the West turned out to have been overblown, we’re told. …
… And yet, even reading the positive reviews, one senses that Nolan’s film is not primarily an act of cultural transmission, of re-telling an ancient epic for a modern audience, but of cultural destruction. Spencer Klavan, a classicist and very smart guy, raved about the film for The Washington Post, calling it “a gorgeous rendition of a story that never gets old.” But even Klavan notices that some of Nolan’s thematic changes depart dramatically from Homer. Nolan’s Odysseus, writes Klavan, “is racked with remorse over his role in the Trojan War, whereas Homer’s story is more about the savage but righteous fury of the warrior who must tame that anger and reintegrate himself into domestic life.”
Other, less enthusiastic reviewers have more deeply analyzed these deviations from Nolan’s source material and exposed them for what they are. Writing for Compact Magazine, John Byron Kuhner concedes that the material is Homeric, but “the connective tissue and the overall shading suggests guilt, and in particular an imperial, tonally British version of white guilt. Think of it as the ghost of Kipling’s White Man’s Burden taking up his abode in the conscience of a Bronze Age Greek.”
This is not to say that giving Odysseus survivor’s guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder isn’t a plausible, if hopelessly modern, interpretation of Homer’s poem, and Kuhner concedes as much. But it’s not how Homer told the story.
