A Teacher's Odyssey

 

I was pleasantly surprised when some of my former Latin students posted online that they were awaiting my review of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.  My family and I had already planned to see it with one of my own former teachers, and so as the film unfolded, I began to consider what I would say for the sake of my students and friends.

A Child Running Around for Ice Cream

When we met my former teacher and one of her friends, I displayed a bit of enthusiasm as we walked to the auditorium where the film would be playing.  In her words, I was like a child running around for ice cream.

I'm not sure why she said that.  It wasn't as if I was such a fan boy that I wore the Indiana University Classical Studies t-shirt of my alma mater just for the occasion or had one of my adult children take a picture of me with the movie posters.  She was right, of course.  For a guy who has spent more than forty years in the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome, this was a movie I could not miss.

Teacher and student at the movies

It's Not PBS

This film is not a documentary on ancient warfare, Classical poetry, or ancient mythology.  It is retelling of a classic work of fiction that has some historical roots.  It serves no purpose to point out that the film does not use armor or props accurate to what we know of Bronze Age-Greece.  It is a retelling.  It is a translation, just as was Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus in 1960 and Zach Snyder's 2006 film 300, and every translation of anything, whether from one language into or another or from medium into another, will add things, omit things, and change things.  An exact, word-for-word version of Homer's Odyssey would simply be the 12,109 lines of dactylic hexameter Greek that constitute the original poem.

For this reason, the stylized armor did not bother me.  I enjoyed it as much as I did that in 300, to which the Trojan helmets bore more than a striking resemblance.

The sets and costumes gave us powerful and exciting visuals and worked well with the many action scenes of warfare and bloodshed.  In fact, they helped give it an otherworldly feel that was important to this retelling.

Is Frank Herbert the Descendant of Homer?

There is an unmistakable feeling of the Denis Villeneuve Dune movies at many points throughout Nolan's The Odyssey, and this makes sense.  The world of Dune is set in the year 10191 on the far off planet of Arrakis, and the world of The Odyssey is just as distant.  Bronze Age-Greece is five thousand years, give or take, removed from our time.  Its culture, values, traditions, rites, and methods of war are utterly alien to ours, and Nolan captures this, not only through the otherworldly feel of the sets and costumes, but also through the music.  In many places we hear metallic sounds in the background that lend an almost sci-fi effect and that sweep us into something entirely beyond ourselves.  And this is why certain language choices are discordant.

While "otherworldly" may be the term to describe much of the feel of this film, it is clearly set in the ancient Mediterranean region.  As a result, words like "mom," "dad," "party" used as a verb, and three instances of the f-word (once as a participle and twice in quick succession as an imperative) seem to stick out like a sore thumb.  Had this version of Homer's epic been set in a different time and place, much as it was in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, such contemporary colloquialisms may have worked, but here they are simply jarring.  Fortunately, such intrusions of our world into this one are few.

And the Oscar Goes To...

There are plenty of A-list names garnering attention in this cast, and most do a fine job with their characters.  This is not Matt Damon's crowning achievement, but he serves well as Odysseus.  Anne Hathaway is a strong Penelope, but top honors go to the supporting roles of Samantha Morton as Circe, Tom Holland as Telemachus, and John Leguizamo as Eumaeus.  Holland's son of Odysseus is appropriately whiny, not in the grating way of Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker, but as we have come to know him through Homer.  The true standouts, however, are Leguizamo, whose strength, loyalty, and brokenness make him a truly sympathetic character and one you want to watch, and Morton, whose portrayal of Circe as psychotic is genuinely disturbing.

Beyond Homer

There is an entire body of ancient literature beyond Homer's two epic poems Iliad and Odyssey that touches on the Trojan War, and Nolan's film draws on them to good effect.  The story of the Trojan Horse is famously told in Book II of Vergil's Latin epic Aeneid.  Vergil gives us the all-important key to making the whole trick work through the character of Sinon, who lies to the Trojans about the horse's true purpose, thus prompting them to take it into the city.  Sinon has a more significant role in the film than in Vergil's poem, but I will say more on this below.  In Wolfgang Petersen's 2004 film Troy, the Trojans arrive at the conclusion on their own that the horse is a gift to the gods, so the inclusion of Sinon here is helpful in making it more reasonable that they would have taken it into the city.

In the fifth century B.C., Aeschylus wrote his Oresteia, a trilogy of plays dealing with the homecoming of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek expedition to Troy.  He had sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia before leaving in order to obtain fair winds for sailing, and that was a bridge too far for his wife Clytemnestra.  She took a lover after his departure and spent the years plotting her revenge.  Upon his return, he is stabbed in the bath, and this leads to Orestes, his son, planning and executing revenge for his father by killing his mother.

Menelaus and Helen

Nolan brings all this into his story, again to good effect.  It is first mentioned by Helen when Telemachus visits Menelaus.  She does not go into detail, but Agamemnon does when he returns from the underworld to talk with Odysseus.  Nolan uses this bit in a powerful away, but once again, I will touch on that below, and in a flashback to Telemachus's visit to the Spartan king, Menelaus tells him that Orestes killed his own mother.

Han Shot First

In Homer's poem only Odysseus can string and shoot his bow, and Penelope uses this as a test for the suitors seeking to marry her, challenging them to string and to shoot it through twelve axes as her husband used to do.  No one can do it, and Nolan was faced with a similarly impossible task.  This is a story that has been known and loved around the world for three thousand years.  Countless high school freshman read selections from it every year in English class.  There was no way this film would satisfy everyone.  As I said at the beginning, this film is a translation.  It leaves things out, it puts things in, and it changes elements.  For some, none of this will matter.  For others, it matters a great deal.  In the retelling of a tale as famous as Homer's Odyssey, there are certain bits we expect.  When George Lucas re-released the original Star Wars, he changed the scene in the cantina to show Greedo shooting first at Han Solo, but everyone who saw the film in 1977 knew it was the other way around.  Just Google that one for a fun diversion.  Here are a few of the omissions and changes and that were the most striking.

When Odysseus and his men enter the cave of the cyclops Polyphemus, the creature asks Odysseus his name, and he famously answers "Nobody."  After the men have run the stake into his eye, Polyphemus runs from his cave shouting, "Nobody has blinded me," and the other cyclopes tell him to shut up.  This is missing, and it is a mistake.  Nolan says he was not able to work it in.  But anyone familiar with the story only through that freshman English class would have looked for it, and it is strange not to have it.

The cyclops Polyphemus

Other omissions include Hermes giving moly to Odysseus to protect him from Circe's spell, which likely would go unnoticed by any but those most familiar with the poem.  Many, however, will likely recall that Aeolus gives Odysseus all the winds that would harm him bound in a bag, with only one left on the waters to blow his ships home.  His men untie the bag, and the other winds blow them off course, yet this makes no appearance in the film.  Odysseus does not land in Phaeacia, meet the daughter of King Alcinous, or receive the ship from the king that finally takes him to Ithaca.  Gone is the care he shows for his wife when, after the slaughter of the suitors, he tells Telemachus that the room must be cleansed before Penelope can lay eyes upon it, and missing, too, is the famous part about the bed he had made out of a tree.

We did get the episode with the Laestrygonians, although they went unnamed, Scylla and Charybdis, the theft of the sun god's cattle, the Sirens, the suitors attempting to string Odysseus's bow and shoot through the axes, Odysseus's old nurse recognizing his scar, and, in one of the most touching scenes in all of literature, the death of Argus, the dog who waited twenty years for his master to come home.  The episode with the lotus-eaters was transferred to the scenes with Calypso, and that worked well, and there is a nod to the desecration of the Palladium from the Iliad.

Odysseus vs. Laestrygonians

As for significant changes, there is ongoing discussion in the film of how Odysseus lied to Sinon so he would be more credible in telling the Trojans that the horse was a gift to the gods.  Only those familiar with Vergil's Aeneid will know that Sinon was fully aware of the plot and concocted an elaborate lie to deceive the Trojans.   Some will remember the trip Odysseus makes to Hades, but in the film the dead come to him, and it is here that one of the changes works quite well.  As Agamemnon tells Odysseus of his murder at the hands of his wife, he advises the Ithacan king to disguise himself when he gets home.  In Homer's tale, the disguise of a beggar for Odysseus is wrought by Athena, but this works nicely in the context Nolan has constructed.  The general narration of the poem is split across Odysseus's recounting of his adventures to Calypso and Telemachus's discussions with Menelaus, and this is quite effective.

Odyssey Plus

When it comes to additions to the film not found in the poem, three are worth noting.  There is a running focus on the fact that Odysseus did not allow Antinous, who would grow up to become one of the suitors of Penelope, to go with him to Troy.  In this version, Sinon took his place, eventually asking Odysseus to obtain vengeance for him after he has died.  This works dramatically, and although it is not strictly necessary to advance the plot, it does add an interesting element.  What is utterly unnecessary, however, is the sequence in which some of the suitors seek to murder Telemachus as he stops at Pylos on his return home from visiting Menelaus.  In the poem this is his first stop on the way to Menelaus, but it is not the change of order that is bothersome.  There is simply no need for the revised portrayal of the attempt on his life, which in the poem happens upon his return to Ithaca.  It works in the film, but no better than what Homer wrote, which leaves us wondering why the addition.

The other addition is the mindset of Odysseus.  He is known for his hubris, and this is well depicted in his line, "The gods help those who help themselves."  Yet when he is asked what he hears in the Sirens' song, he says it was the realization that he does not really want to go home.  This is a significant addition and change to the motivation of Homer's character, as is his level of self-reflection upon reuniting with his wife Penelope, a scene that necessitates another extended flashback to the Trojan War.  If I may invoke Star Wars once again, a remake of that saga in which Luke Skywalker is driven by thoughts of profit and Han Solo by desire to help the oppressed would cause audiences to howl.

The Final Grade

I am not a great fan of letter grades and will not assign one to this film.  Overall, it is good, and I enjoyed it.  Will I purchase it when it becomes available?  I will, and not only because as a Latin teacher I own most Greco-Roman based films.  Will I show clips to my students to illustrate aspects of the story?  I certainly will and would encourage English teachers to do the same.

The perceptive reader may note a certain underlying condemnation brought about by faint praise, and such a reader may be right.  It is impossible for me to see this film other than through the lens of the poem.  I am sure one unfamiliar with Homer will have an entirely different experience of it.  Still, for all the stunning visuals and sound we have come to expect from a Christopher Nolan work and indeed from most modern films, the script itself pales with those of yesteryear.  This is no Spartacus.  It is not even Gladiator.  In the end, I enjoyed it, but was most pleased with the desire it ignited within me to read the original once again.

The Return of Literature to the Public Square

 

How is it that a new telling of a story dating back sixteen centuries is garnering such attention these days?  Forget asking how it is possible.  How is it even conceivable that a story told as a poem is lighting up the Internet?  It may just be that the author is on to something.

The Story

Malcolm Guite is, according to his Wikipedia entry, a poet, a singer-songwriter, an Anglican priest, and an academic.  The pipe-smoking man of letters has nearly two hundred thousand subscribers on his YouTube channel, which is quite something, since his videos are mostly about the true, the good, and the beautiful, a trinity we seem committed to doing our dead level best to live without these days.  In what will be an epic retelling of the King Arthur story in four volumes, an Arthuriad, Guite has set about to bring the tales of valor into the modern world, and in the first volume, Galahad and the Grail, he launches his epic in a way sure to seize and hold the attention of all readers.

malcolmguite.com

My wife and I both love Vergil's Aeneid, the Latin epic poem of the first century B.C. that tells the tale of Aeneas, the refugee from the Trojan War who labors against gods and men to found a new home in Italy for his fellow Trojans.  Part of what we love about it and a key feature we try each year to help our high school Latin students discover and love with us is the story, and in Vergil it is a rollicking, good one.  Too often the academic study of literature in school settings kills our joy of reading.  No author crafted a story merely as an exercise to demonstrate alliteration or allusion.  While we touch on such things only insofar as they illuminate the story, it is the story itself that matters, and it is in storytelling that Guite excels.

In her foreward, Susanna Clarke writes of this first volume, "It is full of jewel-like colours.  The knights and ladies pass from the emerald-green of woods to the peridot-green of meadows, from grey-walled hermit's cells to the white walls of castles and abbeys, from yellow strand to sparkling blue sea.  The whole poem has the mesmerising brilliance of the little paintings in the margins of illuminated manuscripts -- and that is before we even get to all the banners and heraldry."  A good story is not merely a series of actions, although there are great and powerful actions throughout Guite's poem.  Yet think of the films that have moved you the most.  Quite often it was because, in addition to the actions, the activities of the characters, the scenes were filmed in a particular way.  You don't think about lighting and camera angles and costuming while watching the film, but they work together to create a feeling, and Guite is master of all of it, from portraying the actions of the characters, such as

                                                But Lionel was like one possessed

                                                by hatred and disdain,

                                                and rode his charger at Sir Bors

                                                and smote him down with heavy force

                                                and trampled him beneath his horse --

                                                he fainted with the pain.

Book Two, Stave V, 323-328

to showing us the setting of it all, as in this scene.

                                                At length they saw her place of prayer

                                                built up from mossy stone --

                                                the holy hermit's humble cell

                                                where she had long been wont to dwell

                                                with garden green and deep clear well,

                                                guarded by many a prayer and spell.

                                                Yet in her vigils in that vale

                                                she never prayed alone.

Book Three, Stave I, 226-233

The Poetry

Malcolm Guite is also the musical director of this epic story, for he has chosen to sing it in ballad stanza.  Many of us think of ballad strictly hewing to the form of something like "Sir Patrick Spens," with its stanzas of a four-foot line, followed by a three, then a four, and then a three, and in a rhyme scheme of A-B-C-B.

                                            The king sits in Dumferling toune,

                                            Drinking the blude-reid wine:

                                            "O whar will I get a guid sailor,

                                            To sail this schip of mine?"

What Malcolm Guite has done in his Galahad and the Grail is to expand that and play with it. Consider these three consecutive bits from Book Two, Stave IV.

                                                They saw within the glade a cell

                                                all roughly hewn of stone --

                                                the cell maybe of some recluse

                                                who lived and prayed alone.

These lines, 92-95, follow the Patrick Spens model with the A-B-C-B rhyme scheme.

                                                But ere the two knights could dismount,

                                                they heard a sudden sound

                                                of bridle reins all ringing out

                                                and hoofbeats on the ground.

Lines 96-99 maintain the Patrick Spens meter. The rhyme scheme, however, borders on A-A-A-A, but for the final consonant sound of "t" in lines 96 and 98 and the final consonant sound of "d" in 97 and 99 leading it toward A-B-A-B.

                                                And even as a hermitess

                                                stepped out to greet them there,

                                                a third knight rode into the glade

                                                and cried out, bold and unafraid:

                                                "No man rides past me here!" (lines 100-104)

These last five lines expand the form and call to mind Thomas Babington Macaulay's "Horatius."

                                                By the Nine Gods he swore it,

                                                And named a trysting day,

                                                And bade his messengers ride forth,

                                                East and West and South and North,

                                                To summon his array. (lines 3-6)

The rhythms rise and fall to support and add atmosphere to the story, and with such variations he is able to create genuine music and not a monotonous soundtrack. And as for the rhymes, let us say a bit more about the sonorous versus the monotonous.

In Book Two, Stave VI, lines 174-179, we find this.

                                                And lo! as he sank back in pain

                                                the chapel filled with light.

                                                Lancelot saw a shimmering door

                                                which he had not perceived before,

                                                and as he gazed in fear and awe

                                                it opened on the night.

Alexander Pope was famous for his tightly controlled iambic couplets, which I love, and he rarely admitted any metrical substitutions. Milton, on the other hand, did, and this leant variety to his basically iambic meter much as spondaic substitutions allowed the music to swell and fade in Homer’s and Vergil’s dactylic verse.

The third line of the stanza above opens with a trochee, which Guite not infrequently employs, but the truly interesting part is the anapest of “…mering door,” whose rhythm beautifully captures the movement of the light-filled door.

Yet even more fascinating is his rhyming of “awe” with “door” and “before.” I doubt many would have thought of a rhyme like this, but pay attention to the position of your lips as you say each of those words aloud slowly. You will notice that your mouth forms the same way for each word. They are rhymes, but not as one might expect.

The Faith

In Appendix A, Malcolm Guite tells us how he came to love the legends of Arthur from the telling of his mother when he was a boy.  He writes that the stories that first moved him "were not some sanitised Hollywood version, but the real thing:  haunting, numinous, continuously suggestive of the holy and beautiful reality of God and His saints and angels shimmering through the fabric of the stories of the knights with all their aspirations and all their human flaws.  At the heart of those early versions of the stories is the Holy Grail itself:  the presence of Christ and His gospel, moving as an unbearably beautiful light through the mists and magic of pre-Christian Celtic Britain, drawing even the wizards and faery folk towards Himself, baptising the imagination of our ancestors, fulfilling and disclosing the true meaning of our earliest stories."

As with the rising and falling rhythms of this poem and the variegated landscapes he describes, Malcolm Guite weaves both bold and subtle Christian elements throughout the work.  There are hints toward biblical stories that will only be grasped by those who know the Scriptures, there are references to key moments in the liturgical year and to various aspects of orthodox Christian theology, and there are appearances of Jesus Christ Himself as He actively takes part in this story of kings and knights and maidens.  It is possible that in a world that seems ever more biblically illiterate, such Christian elements may be jarring to some.  The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have not known quite what to do with the divine in their most common form of storytelling, the cinematic film.  There are, of course, depictions of the Norse gods in the Marvel Comics movies, but these are superheroes at best, and there is certainly nothing in those films of the haunting and the numinous that formed the fabric of the Arthurian tales.  Other movies set in the ancient world are largely content to ignore the gods entirely, which is akin to operating a school with blank-faced clocks and books without a table of contents because you have chosen to pretend that numbers do not exist.  Guite is not so pretentious as to pretend such things, but, as one who painstakingly restores masterworks of art, he gives us back a mythical reality filled with Christ and His "unbearably beautiful light."

Awakening Remembrance

How, then, is it possible for a book like this to be garnering so much praise and attention and, by all indications in reviews and fan sites, actual reading of the thing in an age in which evidence and anecdotes suggest that we do not read serious literature and would be incapable of doing so even if we desired to do it?  In Appendix A, Malcolm Guite explains how, when at Cambridge he rediscovered the original sources, he "became aware of how so many modern versions of them seemed to marginalise or even erase the deep Christian impluse that had formed their original telling, and as a poet I longed to restore that lost element in the hope that a new telling might baptise the imagination of the growing generation brought up in a secular world, trapped in 'the immanent frame' and deprived of their inheritance in the gospel."  As I said at the beginning, the author is on to something.  He has sensed that in our dehumanized and dehumanizing world there is still a flicker of light, a trickle of living water beneath the surface of our lives, and rather than wring his hands and decry our sad state, he has simply lit his pipe and set to work in order to present the true, the good, and the beautiful.  In the preface to his 1881 translation of Thucydides, Benjamin Jowett wrote, "[I]f Greek literature is not to pass away, it seems to be necessary that in every age some one who has drunk deeply from the original fountain should renew the love of it in the world, and once more present that old life, with its great ideas and great actions..., like the distant remembrance of youth before the delighted eyes of mankind."  Guite does this with his Galahad and the Grail, and people are eagerly responding because they are finding what they did not realize was missing.

AI Aristotle

 

Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of AI
Created by Google Gemini in imitation of Rembrandt

A friend emailed me a blog post from tech CEO Matt Shumer titled "Something Big Is Happening."  If more than 82 million views on X means that something has gone viral, then this post has gone viral.  Based on the recent ability of artificial intelligence to write its own code, in other words, for AI to start producing AI, Shumer argues that a seismic shift in how humans work is coming sooner rather than later, and he is not talking about getting ChatGPT to write your history paper.  He outlines fundamental shifts in the fields of law, medicine, and more.  You really should read his post.  In this post, however, I want to share what I replied to my friend and go a bit further.  To my friend, I wrote,

What I want to say is that we must resist this at all costs, but that is ridiculous.  The horse is already out of the barn.  We have given birth to this, just as we did to writing, electronics, and atomic energy.  We have to learn what do with it.  We must learn from our mistakes with many of our past advancements, among which is not to use faith and philosophy, history and literature and music and art to grapple with ethical issues.  Perhaps the most important acknowledgment by Jonathan Haidt in his book The Anxious Generation was that we sallied forth into smartphones and social media with not a care in the world.  We simply never took the time to consider the effects on children, including their social and emotional development, their patterns of behavior, their intellectual development, and more.  Can we learn from the disaster that is the current intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual landscape of far too many of our young people?  This is a time for philosophers and psychologists and sociologists.  It is a time for theologians.  It is a time for church leaders.  We need deep thinkers now as never before.  We need the age of when the university was a branch of the Church, when theology was called the queen of the sciences.  We need a Plato, an Aristotle, an Augustine, and an Aquinas as never before.  Let this article be inspiration for churches and schools, especially those schools grounded in the liberal arts and Classical learning, to equip those new thinkers that God even now is raising up among us.

I have used AI, even for the creative acts that I so often say are the special province of the human heart and mind.  For example, I have begun using Suno to create the music for song lyrics I have written.  Would I prefer to be in band or at least to run in the circles of musicians who could record my songs?  I most certainly would, but that is not my world at the moment, and I am, perhaps naively, convinced that my songs can touch people and encourage them in their faith.  And so I have resorted to AI for the music.

What I want to start here is a different conversation.  I can envision a course for high school students in which they read selections from Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Montaigne, along with works by Homer, Vergil, Dante, and Milton.  It would be a course that would involve Michelangelo and Mozart, and of course, all these names are but a start, an indication of what the foundation for such a course would be.  And the bedrock of that foundation would be the Bible, the printed word God has graciously given the world.  From their reading and engagement with such authors and works, the students would explore how to think about what should and should not be in the worlds of technology, including but not limited to AI, medicine, government, economics, education, and more.  It would be a course first to introduce young minds to the idea that there are various ways to consider what should and should not be and how to develop and use the things that should.  It would help them explore the best, the time-tested and proven, approaches that we have used throughout the centuries.  It would give them a chance to begin applying those approaches as well as their own based upon and drawn from those lines of thinking to contemporary issues.

There is much talk by parents, educators, and legislators about personal devices and the use of AI in schools, but we are at a wonderful moment in history when can go beyond that discussion.  With carefully considered intention and purpose, we can take seriously the admonition to "train up a child in the way he should go" (Proverbs 22:6, KJV) and help produce not employees or those whose aim is a fulfilling and high-paying job, but the great and deep thinkers that we need.  Perhaps the next Aristotle is a student in a school near you.