So, a Homerist, an archaeologist and a dentist walk into a bar.
Fresh from a Thursday night showing of Christopher Nolan‘s “The Odyssey,” a group of 17 spent the evening doing what scholars have done with Homer’s epic for nearly 3,000 years: arguing about it.
“We had a really robust debate,” says Joel P. Christensen, editor of “The Oxford Critical Guide to Homer’s Odyssey.” Christensen was accompanied by retired Homer scholars (often referred to as Homerists), editors, professors, historians and various public intellectuals. “And my wife is a dentist,” he adds, “so she was the red herring in the crowd.”
The conversation ranged from Nolan’s decision to make Polyphemus (the Cyclops that Matt Damon’s Odysseus stabs in the eye) nonverbal to the film’s depiction of language itself. Each intellectual was fervently dedicated to a different academic discipline, yet Homer’s “The Odyssey” is one of the few works that transcends any single field of literature or history.
“I was surprised by how many academics liked it,” Christensen says. “I had to be restrained a few times by my wife. Everybody knows that I’m the worst audience for the film.” After a long pause, he continues, “I’ve been saying to myself: ‘This is not Homer’s “Odyssey.” This is Nolan’s “Odyssey.” And it needs to be judged on different terms.’”
There’s a palpable excitement around “The Odyssey” that movie theater exhibitors have been yearning for. Beyond its colossal box office projections, it’s the first feature shot entirely with Imax cameras. Over 95% of Imax 70mm screenings (the format Nolan says the film is intended to be seen in) have already sold out for the first five weeks. The spectacle is also fueling a cultural revival for classic literature in a way that academics have rarely seen before.
“I’ve been in this business for a long time, and I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this,” says Monica Cyrino, a classics professor at the University of New Mexico who has spent decades studying ancient worlds on screen. “It’s had the impact of the OG ‘Gladiator,’ but even that didn’t have the same run-up. There’s already been hundreds of published academic articles — and the movie hasn’t even come out yet. It’s crazy!”
In the months leading up to its release, Nolan’s film has become a flashpoint for online culture-war debates. Critics have argued that the “woke” castings of Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page, along with certain production design choices, are historically inconsistent with the Mycenaean world traditionally associated with “The Odyssey.” But after Variety spoke with leading classicists and historians, it became clear those weren’t the issues driving the conversation in academic circles.
“I’m really disturbed that so much of the conversation has been about how ‘woke’ or progressive this film was going to be,” Christensen says. “I actually think it’s a very conservative film. The roles for women are constrained. The interracial casting is women of color who just get to be married to white men, which is not progressive.”
From a filmmaking perspective, literature and film experts alike will argue that no Hollywood epic portraying the ancient world has ever achieved complete historical accuracy, instead reflecting the cultural assumptions and audience preferences of the time.
“These are fictional characters,” film critic Alonso Duralde notes in his review of “The Odyssey” on the “Breakfast All Day” podcast. “There probably wasn’t actually a Helen of Troy. There probably weren’t actually a lot of these folks. And if there were, the ancient world was a lot more mixed than we think from all the Italian sword-and-sandal epics we were given in the ‘50s and ‘60s. You had people from Africa, Asia and Europe. They had boats, y’all!”
As for critiques of the film’s production design, whether it’s the polished Trojan Horse or the costumes (many fans online argued Benny Safdie’s Agamemnon looked more like a Batsuit than Bronze Age armor), Nolan has described his philosophy as: “What is the best speculation and how can I use that to create a world?” That approach didn’t seem to ruffle the feathers of classicists, many of whom have tempered their expectations for what a Hollywood blockbuster is designed for: entertainment.
“Nobody cared,” Christensen laughs, speaking for his academic cohort. “Even the head archaeologist didn’t care. Because here’s the thing: ‘The Odyssey’ is filled with anachronisms. Homeric poetry contains different historical layers. What’s important is that the depiction functions as a vehicle for the audience’s fantasy about the past.”
While the majority of classicists are embracing the spectacle of Nolan’s blockbuster, opinions start to diverge when discussing his adaptation of Homer’s language for the screenplay. As Harvard classics professor Gregory Nagy puts it, there is no single “original” version of “The Odyssey” in a modern sense — that’s because the poem emerged from an oral tradition.
“‘Homer’s Odyssey’ was already historical fiction, reimagining an ancient past when it was first composed,” says Richard P. Martin, a professor of Greek and Latin literature at Stanford. “Fellow classicists are happy with Nolan’s version because we all recognize it is a version. There is no ‘correct’ treatment, because every generation makes its own version of the poem, either by retranslation or revisualization in various media. All publicity about Homer is good publicity.”
Just as Odysseus assumes different identities to survive his arduous homecoming trek, there’s a long-standing debate over whether “Homer” was a single author — or, as Friedrich August Wolf first argued in 1795, that the poems were the product of “the whole Greek people” and were edited several times to suit changing contemporary tastes.
Famously, Alexander Pope’s 18th-century translation made “The Odyssey” into a text about polite manners and tact, while Richmond Lattimore’s 1960s translation sought to preserve the rhythms and formulas of the original Greek language. Laura Slatkin, one of the leading Homer scholars, says Lattimore’s translation often feels “archaic” for her students at New York University because the diction is too quaint and formal.
“None of them are definitive,” Slatkin says. “That tells you something about the problem of translation, but it also tells you something about ‘The Odyssey’ because it’s not simple enough for a definitive translation. You’re building on existing resources from previous songs, from previous poetic traditions, but you’re not simply repeating them or recapitulating them. You’re … assimilating them.”
More recently, Emily Wilson’s translation suggests “The Odyssey” was socially progressive for its time and “meditates on what women [and other suppressed groups, broken down by race or economic status] might be capable of.” She argues that “Homer is, and is not, our contemporary,” and that her translations (along with all the others) should be contextualized as a “text that exists in two different temporal and spatial moments at once.”
Slatkin described Nolan’s screenplay, which Variety’s chief awards editor Clayton Davis predicts will compete for best screenplay at next year’s Academy Awards, as “the newest song” in a lineage of adaptations. “The Odyssey” has always been a tale that contains multitudes — balancing realism and fantasy, moral certainty and reconciliation, strangeness and familiarity. Just as the ancient Greeks (and every civilization that followed them) used “The Odyssey” to express their own ideas about morality, Nolan is doing the same.
“The consensus I’ve heard so far is that it’s going to generate a lot of discussion in the classroom,” says Justin Arft, a fellow Homerist and associate professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “Even with all the omissions and changes, no one’s too upset about that. Honestly, we’re all curious — maybe confused, at times — but really interested in this as a piece of art. Nolan’s film is a piece of art, and Homer is a piece of art.”
Once that classroom discussion begins, academics will surely have some more words for all the creative liberties Nolan’s movie takes. Martin, Christensen and several other classicists knocked Nolan for watering down the “sophisticated” morality of Homer’s poem and devoting more narrative time to spectacle, such as the fall of Troy.
“I understand where the critics are coming from because I can speak in both registers,” Cyrino said. “What they don’t understand is the near-term and long-term benefit this has for us as a discipline. Humanities programs are being cut everywhere, especially classics programs. I’m a department chair, and I guarantee my Greek classes are going to be fuller this year!”
She concludes, “You know what Hollywood does: one thing succeeds, and 10 more follow. This is going to be great. As my husband always says, business is booming!”
