On July 17, director Christopher Nolan’s star-studded interpretation of Odysseus’ journey home to Ithaca was released to packed theaters around the world.
Nolan’s take on the epic tale has prompted conversation, with lively debate over everything from anachronisms of language (Telemachus calls Penelope “mom”) to Bronze Age armor inaccuracies to whether Matt Damon—cinema’s relatable everyman—passes muster as the cunning, complex trickster at the core of the story.
We reached out to two of our Classics faculty—Associate Professor Benjamin Keim and Professor Christopher Chinn—to learn why the 3,000-year-old poem remains relevant, the perils and promise of adapting ancient classics and whether The Odyssey is, in fact, the ultimate dad story.
Why does The Odyssey continue to speak to us? What themes still resonate?
Christopher Chinn: Identity. The poem constantly asks, “Who is Odysseus?” In the Cyclops episode he tells the giant his name is “Nobody” to trick him, then, for reasons of heroic pride, proclaims his name after escaping. The Phaeacian episode is in many ways a long revelation of Odysseus’ identity. Back in Ithaca he must achieve recognition by his friends, family and subjects.
Benjamin Keim: Yes, questions about identities and their implications are common themes throughout Greek literature. And then there’s that enduring question—can you go home again?
Works such as The Odyssey continue to resonate because they speak to these and other universal human experiences that are then understood and played out in a variety of different ways across cultures and centuries.
Through these narratives, we as listeners, readers, or viewers are regularly inspired to ask questions about these characters and about ourselves. Besides the famous (and influential) images and episodes found across The Odyssey and other ancient works, their engagement with existential questions such as “What (or who) are we living for? What might we be willing to die for?” are important reasons for the endurance of the narratives and the power of their many reinterpretations and receptions.
Do you look forward to adaptations of ancient classics, or do you dread them?
Chinn: I like all the adaptations. There are two poles. You can do it as a completely new interpretation, where it’s only vaguely recognizable as the original. For example, I teach students about a theatrical version of Medea that’s about immigration and is set in various cities (depending on where it’s being performed) including L.A.
Nolan’s film tries to reproduce something authentic, but any movie adaptation of The Odyssey is already an intermedial translation. You’re not only translating language, but you’re translating the medium, so it’s never going to be the same.
Keim: I think that’s how Nolan’s Odyssey needs to be understood, as a film, standing on its own. Let’s judge it not by the degree to which it captures some supposed essence of a Homeric ideal, but as the latest in a millennia-long series of receptions of that epic narrative.
If you look at Nolan as the newest member of the Homeridae, as one of “the sons of Homer” who happens to be presenting this epic in a 21st-century IMAX manner, I think such an approach will lead to a more positive appreciation of what this interpretation might have achieved, rather than nitpicking about all the ways in which Matt Damon’s panoply might have better approximated the Dendra panoply.
Chinn: What’s interesting about the Homeric poems is that they were already being reinterpreted very early on by different singers, while still recognizably being the same work. There’s an apocryphal quote attributed to Aeschylus, who says that all tragedies are “slices from the great banquet of Homer,” meaning that tragedy is already reinterpreting Homer.
Keim: That’s right. The Homeric epics, the 24 books of The Iliad and the 24 books of The Odyssey, were themselves works that derived from centuries of early oral storytelling and that have inspired centuries of Greek, Roman and more modern creations. People will argue about any number of Nolan’s choices but looking at his film as an interpretation of this ancient story in this modern medium, created at this moment and in this culture, is not unusual—it’s how these narratives have remained influential and inspiring for the better part of three millennia.
In Nolan’s film, Odysseus rues the sacking of Troy, seeing it as an abuse of Zeus’s Law. Is that a modern take on the story?
Chinn: I think what they’re talking about is xenia, or reciprocal hospitality. Matt Damon’s Odysseus is traumatized by the violence of the fall of Troy and Nolan connects this with xenia. I don’t think Homer’s Odyssey gives much of a sense that the sack of Troy was a violation of xenia, but it’s an interesting idea—since xenia is very much a theme in the text—to extend it to the world of warfare.
Keim: Once our students have seen the movie and we’re all back in the classroom this autumn, I’m sure we’ll talk about how the modern 21st-century values do and don’t align with eighth-century BCE Greek values. We need to understand both the similarities and also the potentially very profound differences that come up in matters of war, or life and death, or the objectification of women or slavery, to give just the most obvious examples.
Some have called The Odyssey—with its war-weary veteran trying to get back to his family and reconnect with his son—the ultimate dad story. Is it?
Chinn: Coming of age is certainly a big part of The Odyssey. The first four books are all about Telemachus looking for his father. He both needs his father and also needs to grow up. But the issue of fathers and sons is there more from the perspective of those who are missing Odysseus.
Odysseus himself misses his wife, but he doesn’t talk about his son that much—he talks about being home, and he clearly cares about his property. So, I would call it more of a Bildungsroman or coming of age story than a dad story.