Speaker 1: Now throughout history, when people get wood, they'll think of Trojans,
Speaker 1: look at them sleeping like little angels, spare.
Speaker 2: No one, and Iraq everywhere like.
Speaker 1: Such as I'm supposed to be the franchise player, and
Speaker 1: we in here talking about practice, ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 2: We got them.
Speaker 1: Our next door neighbors are foreign countries.
Speaker 2: I call upon all nations to do everything they can
Speaker 2: to stop these terrorsts killing.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Now watch his drive.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, and welcome to remember Shuffle. My name is
Speaker 2: Ben with me is always my co host Trnando March.
Speaker 1: We can't break Zeusi's jaw.
Speaker 2: Today, for the first time ever on the main feed,
Speaker 2: we are not talking about something from the two thousands,
Speaker 2: twenty something years ago. We are taking part in the
Speaker 2: cultural zeitgeist to discuss this summer's Christopher Nolan blockbuster, The Odyssey.
Speaker 2: Why are we doing this, Tordano.
Speaker 1: Well, you have a PhD in classics, You've taught courses
Speaker 1: on The Odyssey. It just seemed like a wasted opportunity
Speaker 1: for the biggest movie of the year to come out
Speaker 1: and not have you talk about it. So sorry, we're
Speaker 1: breaking format a little bit here. I get to hear
Speaker 1: Ben talk about the Odyssey all the time and it's
Speaker 1: always very fascinating, and I thought, you know, why not,
Speaker 1: let's do it and it'll be good opportunity to drive
Speaker 1: people towards the Troy episode of our podcast as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a good one behind the Patreon. Yeah, and the
Speaker 2: movie is good. It's great even I fucking loved it.
Speaker 2: I don't think it is a perfect film, but it
Speaker 2: is an exceptional film. Eat shit right wing CHUD posters
Speaker 2: who were mad about this movie weeks months before it
Speaker 2: came out. I don't think I can remember a film
Speaker 2: that had this much discourse around it before it even
Speaker 2: came out. So now we finally get to talk about
Speaker 2: it when there's something to talk about. Also, each shit me,
Speaker 2: I believe. I said on one of our recordings that
Speaker 2: I predicted it would be mid, and it is so
Speaker 2: much better than Mid. I'm eating Crow. It's incredible.
Speaker 1: I liked it. I thought it was not a perfect movie.
Speaker 1: There was some things that I thought were annoying and
Speaker 1: he was weird about for some reason, Like one, I
Speaker 1: thought the movie was very didactic. There are lines in
Speaker 1: this movie where people will say, like our age of
Speaker 1: Bronze is ending or so, it's true our civilization is collapsing.
Speaker 1: And I think he's just like really eager to tell
Speaker 1: you about the Sea People's And like the first time
Speaker 1: I heard Sea People's I was like, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: cool little reference there. But by the twentieth time, I'm like,
Speaker 1: this is probably not something that was in the original text.
Speaker 1: And this is Kris Nolan's own take on it. This
Speaker 1: is what he's adding to it. And I thought that
Speaker 1: in general it was the weakest, but you know, he
Speaker 1: took a three thousand year old story and I like
Speaker 1: what he did with it. I thought it was certainly
Speaker 1: the best movie about the Odyssey, and it's a much
Speaker 1: better movie than Troy mm hmm.
Speaker 2: People's not only are they not in the Homeric poems,
Speaker 2: they're not even in Bronze Age Greece. That turn of
Speaker 2: phrase comes from an Egyptian inscription, if I recall correctly.
Speaker 2: But yes, he wants to show off that he knows
Speaker 2: about the Bronze Age collapse and he's going to incorporate
Speaker 2: it into his Bronze Age story.
Speaker 1: Chris Nolan, he's the smartest guy at the frat House.
Speaker 1: We've done what like three episodes on him at this point,
Speaker 1: probably the most important director of the two thousands.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think if there's any place for a
Speaker 2: story with a little bit of didacticism, it's probably the Odyssey.
Speaker 2: It has a lot of folk tale elements to it,
Speaker 2: as we'll get into it, and generally the purpose of
Speaker 2: a folktale is to instill some kind of moral lesson.
Speaker 2: There's a prohibition, hey, don't do that thing, and then
Speaker 2: you do the thing, and then there's consequences. Like that's didacticism,
Speaker 2: but he's taken it to another level. He's scaled it up.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm just gonna say it up. Top Odysseus
Speaker 2: is Oppenheimer, The Trojan Horse is the atomic Bob.
Speaker 1: Okay, Yeah, maybe I didn't mean didacticism for all that,
Speaker 1: but like expository with the Bronze age collapse happening, Yeah,
Speaker 1: come on, man, like I can see you writing this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, another similar bit where it's meant to be both didactic,
Speaker 2: but it's name dropped too much. How many fucking times
Speaker 2: do we hear about Zeus's law?
Speaker 1: You know, I will say the first time I heard it,
Speaker 1: I'm like, I can't wait to fucking figure out with
Speaker 1: Zeus's Law all about dude.
Speaker 2: You should have known from the Troy episode we did
Speaker 2: it's about Zania guess host friendship.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true. I didn't remember that detail.
Speaker 2: But yes, let's get into it. So I'll tell you
Speaker 2: a little bit of quick background to the Homeric poems
Speaker 2: the Iliot in the Odyssey. We did do this on
Speaker 2: our Troy episode. So if you're a Patreon listener who
Speaker 2: has already heard this, maybe skip ahead. If you're not
Speaker 2: on the Patreon, First off, how dare you? Second off,
Speaker 2: it's fine, We're gonna get right to it. These are
Speaker 2: the first two works of Greek literature that we have
Speaker 2: written down. They're ascribed to someone named Homer, and I
Speaker 2: got bad news. Homer was not real. The Greeks thought
Speaker 2: about who he was and where he came from and
Speaker 2: what his life was like because he wasn't fucking real.
Speaker 2: They were a bunch of anonymous bards walking around dark
Speaker 2: age Greece singing these songs. And eventually, when the Greeks
Speaker 2: develop their second writing system, the Greek alphabet, they compile
Speaker 2: these texts into a form probably roughly resembling the forms
Speaker 2: that we have them. Now, that's being a little simplistic.
Speaker 2: They were probably fully codified in the library at Alexandria
Speaker 2: way later. But this is when they get written down
Speaker 2: to put some time periods on Greek history. There are
Speaker 2: three time periods that we're dealing with. You had the
Speaker 2: Greek Bronze Age, which runs throughout most of the second
Speaker 2: millennium BCE, has some advanced civilizations, the Minoans and the Maceonians,
Speaker 2: which is not what they call themselves, is what archaeologists
Speaker 2: called them. They develop, writing, monumental architecture, all that stuff.
Speaker 2: This is where the historic city of Troy was. It
Speaker 2: does get burned down and around the year eleven seventy
Speaker 2: seven BCE ish a whole bunch of these societies just collapse.
Speaker 2: It's really bad in Greece. Where population collapses, long term
Speaker 2: trade collapses, writing is forgotten, and monumental architecture disappears. So
Speaker 2: this Bronze Age is when the story is meant hypothetically
Speaker 2: to have taken place. After that, from about one thousand
Speaker 2: to seven fifty BCE is the Greek Dark Ages. Think
Speaker 2: small towns run by your local chief men, the basileus,
Speaker 2: no formalized kind of law codes, very small populations, no writing, whatsoever.
Speaker 2: This is when the poems start to be composed, and
Speaker 2: they're highly episodic. You can drop like, oh, what's the
Speaker 2: story that really hits Oh, I know, the story of
Speaker 2: Helen describing all the Greek heroes from the walls of Troy,
Speaker 2: the Typoscopeia. And then around seven to fifty BC, we're
Speaker 2: in the Greek Archaic Age. Population starts to rise again.
Speaker 2: The Greeks are living in the cities that will eventually
Speaker 2: become the city state the Polists. And this is when
Speaker 2: the texts are written down. So that middle layer, the
Speaker 2: Greek Dark Ages, is the world that the poems as
Speaker 2: we have them most reflect.
Speaker 1: Right, even though they're based in an earlier time. And
Speaker 1: you said that there's probably not like an actual blind
Speaker 1: poet named Homer who put all this together. But there
Speaker 1: are two schools of thought on how they're written, is
Speaker 1: what you mentioned, Like the analyst and the Unitarian schools.
Speaker 2: Yes, as I said, you've got two schools thought. You
Speaker 2: got your Analysts, you got your Unitarians. The Unitarians see
Speaker 2: one hand at play, if not in the composition, then
Speaker 2: at least in the final assembly of the product. Because
Speaker 2: the works just hang together too perfectly.
Speaker 1: And that would be Homer, I guess, hypothetically hypothetic write it,
Speaker 1: but he kind of put it together.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the analysts got their name from analyzing each
Speaker 2: discrete little bit, and they say, oh, a poet added
Speaker 2: something here, and added something there, and added something there.
Speaker 2: It's much more haphazard with all of the various hands
Speaker 2: putting this thing together.
Speaker 1: And you've said that they're almost certainly not written by
Speaker 1: the same guy the two poems.
Speaker 2: No, and the person who put together the Odyssey clearly
Speaker 2: knew the Iliad. We know that this is a true sequel,
Speaker 2: that one came out after the author. Okay, because the
Speaker 2: Odyssey has all of these embedded narrations of what happened before.
Speaker 2: So the Trojan Horse episode is not in the Iliad,
Speaker 2: which covers I don't know, a few dozen days on
Speaker 2: the beach in front of the plains of Troy, but
Speaker 2: is told through flashback by Helen at Sparta two Telemachus
Speaker 2: in the Odyssey. Okay, but interestingly, not one single episode
Speaker 2: from the Iliad is retold a second time in the Odyssey.
Speaker 2: So presumably whoever's putting the Odyssey together knew their Iliad
Speaker 2: really really well. It didn't want to retread the same ground.
Speaker 2: There's no Hector Achilles fight, for instance, but we do
Speaker 2: see a kill a funeral told through flashback. Right.
Speaker 1: Is there any fan service or like references the other
Speaker 1: way where somebody in the Iliad is like winking as
Speaker 1: if aware that the Odyssey will happen after this or no, no,
Speaker 1: but it does go the other way obviously.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so yes, this oral tradition is codified much later
Speaker 2: we get the Trojan Horse, and the tone between the
Speaker 2: Iliad and Odyssey is very, very different. Where Achilles is
Speaker 2: about becoming alienated from his society in a lot of ways,
Speaker 2: it's about his shame and withdrawal, and the Odyssey book
Speaker 2: less of the movie, is a story about reintegration into society.
Speaker 2: It's about his epic quest to come back to be
Speaker 2: the king, to be the husband. It's the opposite direction
Speaker 2: that Achilles is taking. Achilles is withdrawing and alienating. Odysseus
Speaker 2: is trying to get home and eventually succeeds in getting home.
Speaker 2: There's not a lot of humor in the Odyssey, but
Speaker 2: people have described it as comic in the same way
Speaker 2: that a Shakespearean comedy almost always ends with the marriage,
Speaker 2: because that's meant to be like harmony, the family society whatever.
Speaker 2: Like Odyssease and Penelope have a renewal of vow ceremony
Speaker 2: type shit. At the end of the Odyssey, you.
Speaker 1: Did mention that Zeus's law.
Speaker 2: Yes, Zeus's law. The Greek word is zenia x nia,
Speaker 2: and it is the proper comportment between guests and hosts.
Speaker 2: Very significant idea in the Homeric works. Zeus has all
Speaker 2: of these epithets, these nicknames for the things that he
Speaker 2: is god of, and one of them is Zeus Senios,
Speaker 2: Zeus of the guest host friendship. The idea is that
Speaker 2: there are reciprocal duties between guests and hosts, so you know,
Speaker 2: don't go murdering each other. You are meant to feed
Speaker 2: and provide for your travelers, and travelers are expected to
Speaker 2: provide you with stories from the road. You can see
Speaker 2: in a pre modern dark Age society, this is a
Speaker 2: way to keep everyone safe, everyone healthy. I think for
Speaker 2: the Eriskristocrats, who would be the people who travel the most,
Speaker 2: it helps them maintain their kind of networks and support
Speaker 2: one another. And it's so serious in the world of
Speaker 2: the poem that there's a scene in the Iliad when
Speaker 2: a Trojan and a Nikian adnean An argive they're not
Speaker 2: called Greeks yet. They're fighting on the plains of Troy,
Speaker 2: and they realize that their grandfathers or their ancestors had
Speaker 2: previously been host and guests to one another, and so
Speaker 2: they stop fighting. They say they'll avoid one another, and
Speaker 2: they exchange gifts in the midst of the battle. Very
Speaker 2: important holy law for these Homeric Greeks.
Speaker 1: It's interesting that you mentioned, yeah, that the Odyssey is
Speaker 1: like more of a reflection of Dark Age culture than
Speaker 1: it is Bronze Age culture, because this movie kind of
Speaker 1: takes the opposite tact, where it's saying, like, see, what
Speaker 1: made the Bronze Age so special is that they had
Speaker 1: hospitality and Zeus's law, Right, that's what makes it the
Speaker 1: Dark Age, that that's coming so bad as we got
Speaker 1: rid of Zeus's law, right, we broke Zeus's law. Whereas
Speaker 1: you're saying that the respect for Zeus's law in this
Speaker 1: is probably more of a reflection of the Dark Age,
Speaker 1: like the period in which these stories were being told,
Speaker 1: rather than when the period that it's set during.
Speaker 2: Correct.
Speaker 1: Yes, take that. Christopher Nolan And Yeah, just one more
Speaker 1: point from Troy that I wanted to bring up again
Speaker 1: is that you've mentioned that half of all Greek writing
Speaker 1: that we found anywhere in the world is Homer. Fifty
Speaker 1: percent Homer recopied, and then the other fifty percent is
Speaker 1: like everything else, all other plays, all other histories, all
Speaker 1: other shopping lists and debt records. They loved this fucking story.
Speaker 1: This was like their Bible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Alexander slept with it under his pillow. You learn
Speaker 2: to write by recopying it. You memorized it in school.
Speaker 2: It was a school text. It is truly foundational. If
Speaker 2: there's one thing to read to understand the ancient Greeks,
Speaker 2: it is Homer. So let's, as we usually do with
Speaker 2: our movie episodes, let's discuss the characters before we do
Speaker 2: a plot summary, starting with the man of the hour himself,
Speaker 2: Odysseus played by Matt Damon, Boston's favorite son. First, you
Speaker 2: gonna learn about Socrates. You're gonna be walking around saying
Speaker 2: all I know is that I know nothing. Then you're
Speaker 2: gonna come at me next week with Plato talking about
Speaker 2: the ideas of the forms.
Speaker 1: You like figs, how do you like them? Figs.
Speaker 2: There we go. Nailed it, got it. When Homer opens
Speaker 2: the Odyssey, he describes Odysseus as a man who is polytropos,
Speaker 2: and I fucking love this Greek word. One of my
Speaker 2: friends has it tattooed on her arm. Shut out, Katie,
Speaker 2: she's been on a few episodes. It's a really hard
Speaker 2: word to translate. The prefix polly obviously means many, like
Speaker 2: polyamory and tropos. The second part of this compact word
Speaker 2: is a turn away, a manner, a fashion, or even
Speaker 2: a guys. So he is the man of many turns,
Speaker 2: of many ways, of many guys is. And it's a
Speaker 2: pun because he's a man of many turns because he
Speaker 2: has to go on this crazy journey in voyage.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Some people have even translated a man of many sufferings.
Speaker 2: But he's also a man of many manners, many ways,
Speaker 2: because Odysseus is the ultimate liar, schemer and stratagem creator.
Speaker 2: Here's just like a few ways of people have translated
Speaker 2: the opening line of the Odyssey, Tell me about a
Speaker 2: complicated man, muse, tell me how he wandered and was
Speaker 2: lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
Speaker 2: and where he went and who he met, the pain
Speaker 2: he suffered on the sea, and how he worked to
Speaker 2: save his life and bring his men back home. As
Speaker 2: Emily Wilson. A very recent translation and apparently the one
Speaker 2: that Christopher Nolan used. Fagels said, sing to me of
Speaker 2: the man mus the man of twists and turns, right,
Speaker 2: he goes a different ways. They have complicated his twists
Speaker 2: and turns. And this guy Lombardo goes speak memory of
Speaker 2: the cunning hero. Right, So three very different translations. He's
Speaker 2: a man of twists and turns, He's cunning, he's complicated.
Speaker 2: They're all attempts to translate polytropos, and they're a pretty
Speaker 2: solid character description for the man of the hour.
Speaker 1: He's not really a liar in this movie. Mm hmmm.
Speaker 1: He is clever, sometimes he's not clever enough. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: he's not like a superhero. He doesn't always have a solution.
Speaker 1: Is that true in the books? Or is he always
Speaker 1: pretty competent?
Speaker 2: He does some lying when he gets back to Ithaca.
Speaker 2: That's like all in disguise and lying, right, All that's true, beggar? Yeah, No,
Speaker 2: I mean he blunders quite a bit in the source material.
Speaker 2: The Cyclops episode is one of the most different, but
Speaker 2: that's the most famous Odysseus blundering and costing them because
Speaker 2: he's very, very prideful, which is something I think Chris
Speaker 2: Nolan turned down a little bit. But in that episode, famously,
Speaker 2: they have a dialogue between Odysseus and the Cyclops and
Speaker 2: there's a Greek pun where the Cyclops has been blinded
Speaker 2: and he's talking and he said, who did this? Who
Speaker 2: did this? And Odysseus says is outis, which is Greek
Speaker 2: for no one. And the other cyclops come to help
Speaker 2: their buddy and they're like, hey, who blinded you? And
Speaker 2: he says, nobody blinded me. And they're like, oh, okay,
Speaker 2: story checks out. I guess because it was just an
Speaker 2: accident or whatever. But Odysseus is so so prideful that
Speaker 2: as he's sailing away, he can't help but taunt the Cyclops.
Speaker 2: He says, is not nobody who blinded you, it's me Odysseus.
Speaker 2: He doxes himself. He's like, it's me Odysseus from Ithaca.
Speaker 2: And sure enough, Paul Femus, the Cyclops is Poseidon's son.
Speaker 2: Praise to Poseidon to curse Odysseus for the rest of
Speaker 2: his journey, So a character trait that's not so much
Speaker 2: there in the movie, but in the work he's prideful
Speaker 2: as fuck, and it frequently leads to problems for him,
Speaker 2: or at least in this one big instance. Most Americ
Speaker 2: heroes are superlative, like they are the most something. Agamemnon
Speaker 2: is the kingliest, he's the most kingly, Achilles is the
Speaker 2: best fighter. Nestor he's the oldest guy, but he's also
Speaker 2: the wisest guy in that old timer kind of way. Ajax,
Speaker 2: biggest guy. I think we mentioned on our Troy episode
Speaker 2: there's a guy named Thersid's the ugliest guy at Troy.
Speaker 2: Everybody's got something, you know. And Odysseus is the clever
Speaker 2: guy at Troy in that lying, hustling stratagem kind of way.
Speaker 1: Gotcha.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I think the traits that Nolan drops or softens,
Speaker 2: I think he drops a lot of the pride because
Speaker 2: it just doesn't really jive with us. I mean, in
Speaker 2: the work, he lynches, like quite literally with a hanging
Speaker 2: a dozen of Penelope's handmaidens for sleeping with the suitors,
Speaker 2: and by sleeping with I mean being sexually assaulted by
Speaker 2: the suitors, because these are enslaved people that didn't make
Speaker 2: it in the fucking movie.
Speaker 1: You know, he's a little proud when he shoots the cyclops.
Speaker 1: I took that lesson there to be like, don't be
Speaker 1: so boastful, like don't gloat.
Speaker 2: Yes, in the work he's hornier, right. He sleeps with
Speaker 2: both Circe the Witch and Calypso the Immortal Nymph, and
Speaker 2: in the film he doesn't sleep with Circe at all,
Speaker 2: And any of the love between Calypso and him, I
Speaker 2: think is just implied. And to keep him the loyal husband,
Speaker 2: like he's only in love with Calypso when he's eating
Speaker 2: the lotus flowers. To keep Odysseus's hands a little bit clean.
Speaker 2: Despite his nickname being polytropos. He is a monogamous man
Speaker 2: in this film, a loving monogamous man. And I think
Speaker 2: the traits that Nolan adds or exaggerates is that in
Speaker 2: this film Odysseus is crippled with guilt. This is his
Speaker 2: number one emotion that he feels. He feels guilty for
Speaker 2: the very Stratagem, the Trojan horse that helped the Greeks
Speaker 2: win the Trojan War. He is Oppenheimer, and the Trojan
Speaker 2: Horse is the nuclear bomb. This is looking ahead to
Speaker 2: what we're gonna do later. But the Trojan Horse's history
Speaker 2: in the world of the film violates Zeus's law and
Speaker 2: leads to so much rage and destruction and desecration and
Speaker 2: all that that the Greeks themselves have become marauding sea
Speaker 2: people's and our age of Bronze is ending. This is
Speaker 2: in the poem a little bit. There's a scene that
Speaker 2: was cut for time, which is fine, where Odysseus is
Speaker 2: at another one of these islands. He's being hosted at
Speaker 2: a dinner party by the Fiatians, and a bard starts
Speaker 2: coming in and the bar is singing the songs of
Speaker 2: the Trojan War, like we see Travis Scott do in
Speaker 2: Ithaca in the film. And Odysseus when he hears the songs,
Speaker 2: he starts weeping and covering his face. The songs that
Speaker 2: he's hearing are all about his dead friends, and this
Speaker 2: is entertainment to all these people.
Speaker 1: That had have been a good scene.
Speaker 2: I like that, Yeah, But Christopher Nolan does something brilliant
Speaker 2: and that he cuts the scene, but he alludes to
Speaker 2: it when he's talking to Penelope through the screen. He
Speaker 2: has this acide where he says, I don't like those
Speaker 2: songs because they make me cry. Oh okay, so he
Speaker 2: has Odysseus allude to it, which I think is nice.
Speaker 1: I think that also, as a guy who has never
Speaker 1: read any Homeric work, I got the sense that Odysseus
Speaker 1: one of his character traits is pragmatism as a leader.
Speaker 1: There's plenty of lines where like his soldiers are asking
Speaker 1: him if they can move a fallen comrade's body outside
Speaker 1: of the Cyclops's cave, and Odysseus says he died trying
Speaker 1: to escape. We can on a run by escaping. Mm hm, listen,
Speaker 1: I gotta see a guy about a girl. The gods
Speaker 1: help those who help themselves. Also, when the Lystragonians are
Speaker 1: tearing apart their other ship and the men are all like,
Speaker 1: we got to go help them, and He's like, we're
Speaker 1: gonna die if we do that. We gotta just be
Speaker 1: less sentimental and power forward selfishly.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, the poem makes clear that
Speaker 2: Odysseus's soldier's death that's their fault, not his. They say
Speaker 2: that in the first lines. I get what you're saying,
Speaker 2: and I think this is probably something that Nolan increases
Speaker 2: a little bit. I was paging through rereading some sections
Speaker 2: of the Odyssey. I was rereading the bit where he's
Speaker 2: talking to the dead, and one of the first dead
Speaker 2: guys that talks to Odysseus is elpin Or. Elpinor's funnier
Speaker 2: to say it, elpin Or. But he was one of
Speaker 2: Odysseus's men who was sleeping on Circe's roof drunk, fell
Speaker 2: off and died, and they forgot to bury him, and
Speaker 2: Odysseus promises that he'll go back and bury him when
Speaker 2: he's talking to him.
Speaker 1: How important of a character is Odysseus in the Iliad,
Speaker 1: Like I know you mentioned that he's kind of there
Speaker 1: with Achilles. Is he a major character? Does he appear
Speaker 1: as often as anyone else?
Speaker 2: He's pretty significant? Where does he shine? The embassy to
Speaker 2: Achilles is a major scene in the work, and he's
Speaker 2: one of the main protagonists there. He also goes on
Speaker 2: this daring night raid late in the thing. He's definitely
Speaker 2: up there. He's not as important as Achilles or Hector
Speaker 2: or Agamemnon, i'd say for moving the dramatic action along.
Speaker 1: And there's never any fan service where someone's like, don't worry, Odysseus,
Speaker 1: you'll be home soon.
Speaker 2: No, I don't think so.
Speaker 1: Not that I recall play by Sean Bean in Troy
Speaker 1: if you recall, but he's like whittling a wooden horse
Speaker 1: in that one, and he gets his doctor House like
Speaker 1: realization moment.
Speaker 2: Yes, there were people on social media again before the
Speaker 2: thing had even come out, posting Sean Bean being like,
Speaker 2: this will always be my Odysseus. I'm like, shut the
Speaker 2: fuck up. That movie, thanks, dude.
Speaker 1: One does not simply sail back to Ithaca.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it reminds me of the rehability of the Star
Speaker 2: Wars prequels that has happened among the gen zs. I
Speaker 2: saw something on Instagram reels or whatever where the gen
Speaker 2: zs lumped us in with the boomers where they said
Speaker 2: the millennials and the boomers tricked us into the thinking
Speaker 2: that the prequels were bad or whatever, and it's like, no, man,
Speaker 2: you just got bad taste. I'm sorry. If you think
Speaker 2: that Sean Bean is the best Odysseus, you should not
Speaker 2: be allowed to vote.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess the prequels are better than like
Speaker 1: the modern ones. Yeah, so maybe that's all they have
Speaker 1: to compare it to. Mm hmm. It's like the Greek
Speaker 1: story about the shadows on the wall the cave. By
Speaker 1: play those the allegory of the cave, It's like the
Speaker 1: allegory of the cave with the shadows look at you.
Speaker 2: Penelope played by Anne Hathaway Odysseus's loyal life. She's basically
Speaker 2: just as much of a clever liar and deceiver as
Speaker 2: Odysseus is in the work She's left at home. It's
Speaker 2: been twenty years. She's under immense social press shirt to
Speaker 2: marry one of these suitors who are eating her out
Speaker 2: of house and home, eating her out bad turn of
Speaker 2: friends there. One of her ruses as a delaying tactic.
Speaker 2: She says that she can't marry any of the suitors
Speaker 2: until she finishes weaving this burial shroud. I forget if
Speaker 2: it's for her father or her father in law, because
Speaker 2: so Disease's dad is still alive. Be kind of rude
Speaker 2: to make a burial shroud for a guy who's still alive.
Speaker 2: But she weaves and weaves and weaves during the day,
Speaker 2: but then undoes all of the weaving during the night
Speaker 2: and shout out to Ann Hathaway, who was on her
Speaker 2: fucking Daniel day Lewis shit. She apparently learned to use
Speaker 2: an ancient loom so that this would be real, Like,
Speaker 2: you don't need to fucking do How many people in
Speaker 2: the audience know how ancient weaving works.
Speaker 1: I do. Like that instrument she's using. It's kind of neat.
Speaker 1: I totally missed that detailed. That's why she's undoing all
Speaker 1: the work, because she sort of said, I will marry someone.
Speaker 1: I just gotta I gotta finish the death veil first, guys,
Speaker 1: I swear as soon as I finished the burial shroude,
Speaker 1: I will I will find the new husband.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I like her setup at home. There the kind of
Speaker 1: like architecture of most of the Penelope scenes, which is
Speaker 1: she has this kind of like obscuring wall behind her
Speaker 1: weaving lounge, and it's also like elevated so she can
Speaker 1: like look down at the suitors so she can see them,
Speaker 1: but they can't see her very well. Yeah, kind of
Speaker 1: a power move at the King of Ithaca's home one
Speaker 1: hundred percent.
Speaker 2: So, Yeah, she's loyal and she's just as scheming as Odysseus.
Speaker 2: I think the traits of Nolan ads or exaggerates she
Speaker 2: doesn't have more like agency per se in that she's
Speaker 2: still locked in the same patriarchal conflict as in the work,
Speaker 2: but we get to see her character a bit more
Speaker 2: fleshed out. That scene where she berates Tom Holland for
Speaker 2: not giving her enough credit for managing Ithaca while Odysseus
Speaker 2: is away. That feels like it's more indebted to Margaret
Speaker 2: Atwood's Penalopiad, which is a great work that people should
Speaker 2: read that it is Homer's actual poem. Like her line
Speaker 2: about the entire palace down with the suitors in it
Speaker 2: goes so fucking hard when she's berating Telemachus, because yeah,
Speaker 2: the work's almost three thousand years old, it's pretty sexist.
Speaker 2: One of the first things Telemachus does in the poem
Speaker 2: is tell Penelope to shut the fuck up.
Speaker 1: I have heard that, like foreign ancient work, Penelope is
Speaker 1: fleshed out a bit more than a woman normally would
Speaker 1: be in a story like She has quite a bit
Speaker 1: of parody with Odysseus in the way that they think
Speaker 1: about each other.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, she tests him even after he completes the
Speaker 2: ax trial at the end, they have this marriage bed
Speaker 2: that has four posts, and one post is a living
Speaker 2: tree that's rooted into the ground. The only people who
Speaker 2: know are her and Odysseus, and so she asks the
Speaker 2: beggar to move the bed out into the hall or
Speaker 2: something like that to see if he knows, and he's like, oh,
Speaker 2: we can't do that. It's rooted to the floor because
Speaker 2: like the only one who knows. So she's got some
Speaker 2: tricks up her sleeve as well.
Speaker 1: In that speech, you know, where she is berating Telemachus
Speaker 1: about the throne because a Telemachus, her son is like,
Speaker 1: I want to be king, and she's like kind of
Speaker 1: explaining to him, like she can't be the king of
Speaker 1: Ithaca or the queen of Ithaca even but as long
Speaker 1: as the throne is empty, she's in power. This is
Speaker 1: like a weird loophole in which like a woman can
Speaker 1: technically be in charge of Ithaca is oh, well, we're
Speaker 1: waiting for a king to come back and we're not
Speaker 1: quite sure where he is, and like my son isn't
Speaker 1: ready yet, Like this is the liminal space where the
Speaker 1: woman can sit on the throne. Effectively. The facto name
Speaker 1: is Greek phrase.
Speaker 2: They're kind of stuck because again there's no formal constitution,
Speaker 2: there's no written law in this ancient Greek world. You
Speaker 2: get to be the leader if you are the biggest
Speaker 2: guy in your village, if you are a bassi leus,
Speaker 2: And it's like, what's it mean to be a big man.
Speaker 2: It means you're like good at athletics, it means you're
Speaker 2: good at war. It means that like when there is
Speaker 2: a dispute, you can be a mediator, means you have
Speaker 2: good judgment. But there's no formalized meta rules for the
Speaker 2: rule makers, like a constitution or any of that shit.
Speaker 2: And so part of Telemachus's problem there's a scene where
Speaker 2: he calls an assembly of all of the oldest guys
Speaker 2: left in Ithaca and he tries to talk to them
Speaker 2: about the suitors. And his problem that he hits is
Speaker 2: that Antinous is able to be like, oh, we're just
Speaker 2: hanging around until she makes a call like this problem
Speaker 2: will solve itself, just wait it out. He's able to
Speaker 2: deflect blame.
Speaker 1: So part of her craftiness is she's balancing this situation
Speaker 1: for twenty years right without letting one of these jackals
Speaker 1: take control of Ithaca.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay. Next character, we got Telemachus, Tom Holland, Odysseus's son,
Speaker 2: whom he barely knows he was a baby when Odysseus
Speaker 2: is headed off to Troy. He's aging into adulthood. He
Speaker 2: is not the most sympathetic character in the work. Like
Speaker 2: I said, one of the first things he does is
Speaker 2: to tell his mother to shut the fuck up. His
Speaker 2: name means far away tel a like telephone or television
Speaker 2: battle mahos faraway battle because his dad spent his entire
Speaker 2: life in a far away battle. And the thing I'll
Speaker 2: say for Telemachus is that he's got this very strong
Speaker 2: character arc in the work where he goes from being
Speaker 2: this kind of insecure young man. He spends the first
Speaker 2: four books under Athenis mentorship. He's wandering around Greece. He's
Speaker 2: asking for stories about his dad to someone who can
Speaker 2: fight alongside Odysseus and help him meet out tremendous violence.
Speaker 2: He can call assemblies to call it the suitors. He
Speaker 2: can do some dark age king stuff. This is like,
Speaker 2: in many ways the story of Telemachus becoming a man,
Speaker 2: because he starts the work and kind of is also
Speaker 2: there at the end. There's a nice little arc there.
Speaker 2: Nolan's telemic is the pretty true to the source material.
Speaker 2: I'd say, I.
Speaker 1: Would say we got to stop putting people with smartphone
Speaker 1: face in these period pieces. It is annoying. I think
Speaker 1: sometimes we're like, this guy seems just like too.
Speaker 2: Having a skincare routine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly in a movie where like they really show
Speaker 1: people's real skin texture, Like I think there are many
Speaker 1: scenes in this movie where people are not wearing makeup.
Speaker 1: To have Tom Holland You're like, this guy's been to
Speaker 1: a dermatologist, like you know, yeah, he looks like he
Speaker 1: belongs on the Disney Channel.
Speaker 2: Second last character to discuss its antinuus played by Robert Pattinson.
Speaker 2: He is one of the many suitors of Penelope. He's
Speaker 2: kind of their leader. He's camped out in Ithaca's halls.
Speaker 2: He's eaten, he's drinking.
Speaker 1: When did the suitors first start camping out? Is it
Speaker 1: like when the other people come back from the war,
Speaker 1: or is it like day one he's gone. They're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's dead.
Speaker 2: For no, no, no, because because presumably there's messages going
Speaker 2: back during the Trojan War first ten years of the
Speaker 2: Trojan War, Free and Clear then I think there's a
Speaker 2: bit of a grace period as I wait for all
Speaker 2: the other Homeric heroes to get home. Spoiler alert, they
Speaker 2: all have a bad time getting home. This is a
Speaker 2: subgenre of Greek literature called the nostos story the homecoming story,
Speaker 2: because they're all eventful. I think the film says that
Speaker 2: been there three years, so right around year sixteen or
Speaker 2: seventeen is when they start camping out and doing this shit.
Speaker 1: Gotcha does the ugliest man from Troy make at home?
Speaker 2: Oh? I don't know if there's a myth about their societies.
Speaker 2: I don't know if he lives through the war.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: The great thing about myth is that I'm sure there
Speaker 2: is a deep cut story, probably in some lost work
Speaker 2: where someone wrote the Inceell tragedy about their societies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, societies. His wife married a suitor, like the Second
Speaker 1: Day of Troy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's a fucking villain, right, he's scheming. He plots
Speaker 2: to kill Telemachus. This is in the Odyssey, even if
Speaker 2: the details are a little bit different. And most significantly,
Speaker 2: he's a villain because he does not respect Zania the
Speaker 2: correct guest host comportment like entitledly eating and drinking for
Speaker 2: so long is breaking Zeus's law. Throwing a chair at
Speaker 2: the beggar who's actually Odysseus in disguise is also a
Speaker 2: major o BA. He's arrogant, he's cruel, he's disrespectful to
Speaker 2: the gods. Bad dude. If anything, I think Christopher Nolan's
Speaker 2: version is slightly softened because we get to see a
Speaker 2: little bit of his backstory about like that business with
Speaker 2: the lots and going to Troy or whatever.
Speaker 1: Like.
Speaker 2: I think there's a world in which he feels a
Speaker 2: little bit of shame for not going as portrayed in
Speaker 2: the world of the film.
Speaker 1: So when he says he's gonna watch over Telemachus, that's
Speaker 1: him fucking with Telemachus. I take it. Yeah, yeah, Okay.
Speaker 2: Our last character is Odysseus's crew of red shirts, right.
Speaker 2: The poem makes clear from the very first lines that
Speaker 2: the rest of Odysseus's men ain't making it back, and
Speaker 2: it even explains why. Within the first twenty lines of
Speaker 2: this poem, it says he failed to bring his men
Speaker 2: back home, and for their own mistakes, they died. They
Speaker 2: ate the sun God's cattle, and the god kept them
Speaker 2: from home. Spoiler alert All these guys ain't fucking making it.
Speaker 2: These guys are walking talking cautionary tale with death wishes.
Speaker 2: You know, they give your fucking folkdale. Hey, don't do
Speaker 2: this thing.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do this thing consequence the candy house.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Pay the guy who killed all the rats in your village.
Speaker 1: Make sure you pay him on it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, build your house out of brick.
Speaker 1: What do you do with strong?
Speaker 2: That's crazy?
Speaker 1: All right, cool, let's get into the plot of the odyssey.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that is most basic. The Odyssey is one
Speaker 2: man's epiquestic at home. Like I said, the Greeks even
Speaker 2: have a word for this type of story, the nostos.
Speaker 2: It also follows Telemachus and the loyal wife Penelope, who's
Speaker 2: left at home. Telemachus's story is about growing up, going
Speaker 2: from adolescents to manhood. Penelope story loyal, clever wife who
Speaker 2: still has the know how to test o'dasseus once he's back,
Speaker 2: to make sure he is who he says he is,
Speaker 2: and also to pass his tests as he tries to
Speaker 2: see if she's been loyal to him. Now. One of
Speaker 2: the interesting things about the Odyssey is that it is
Speaker 2: in fact toll non linearly which makes it perfect for
Speaker 2: Christopher Nolan. I knew as soon as he took this
Speaker 2: on there was no fucking way he was going to
Speaker 2: start at Troy and go forward, given the source material
Speaker 2: and given his ways.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I thought that was really interesting, because you know,
Speaker 1: it's so dynamic this movie. You're moving around through time
Speaker 1: so much, and I was wondering if that was a
Speaker 1: byproduct of him. But it's interesting that that's just in
Speaker 1: the text. It's the first story, and it has I
Speaker 1: guess what we would call a postmodern structure, which is
Speaker 1: hilarious because it kind of breaks the inherent rule that
Speaker 1: we named it after.
Speaker 2: It's pre postmodern. He chops it up even further. But
Speaker 2: there are a lot of embedded stories and even sometimes
Speaker 2: stories within stories. The Odyssey is divided into twenty four
Speaker 2: units called books because they each took up one book scroll.
Speaker 2: And I use this just to give you an idea
Speaker 2: of how the work is divided. Right, The first four
Speaker 2: books of the Odyssey actually focus on Telemachus and what's
Speaker 2: going on back at Ithaca Odisse barely in it. We
Speaker 2: see Telemachus travel first to Pylos to talk with Nestor.
Speaker 2: That's not in the movie, and then he goes to
Speaker 2: Sparta to chat with Helen and Menelaeus that is in
Speaker 2: the movie. On his travels, he's accompanied by this dude
Speaker 2: Mentor who is actually Athena in disguise, And yes, this
Speaker 2: is where we get the word mentor for mentors. Just
Speaker 2: he's wandering around, he's looking for tales his father. This
Speaker 2: is where the Trojan horse story is told in flashback.
Speaker 2: It's where the audience is caught up on what happened
Speaker 2: to Agamemnon after he got home, namely he got killed
Speaker 2: by his wife, and a lot of this makes it
Speaker 2: into the movie, but just with further splicing of what's
Speaker 2: going on with Odysseus.
Speaker 1: I thought that the scene where they're talking about Agamemnon
Speaker 1: and his wife Clytemnestra Clytemnestra stabbing him in the face
Speaker 1: the second he gets home after like ten years, because
Speaker 1: he had killed their daughter in order to get favorable
Speaker 1: wins on the way there. Yeah's like, damn, she's still
Speaker 1: mad about that. We needed the winds. M h. The
Speaker 1: wind was great, by the way, Thanks for asking.
Speaker 2: That's retold many times in Greek tragedies, and the Greeks
Speaker 2: really see this as Agamemnon's between a rock and a
Speaker 2: hard place. Right, He's got the whole army camped out
Speaker 2: at Aulis, and the winds get becalmed, and somebody in
Speaker 2: some versions accidentally shoots a stag sacred to Artemis, and
Speaker 2: so they the seers, interpret that he has to sacrifice
Speaker 2: his own daughter, and this is one of the many
Speaker 2: reasons he gets super murdered when he gets back from Troy.
Speaker 2: But the play posits like, you know, this guy did
Speaker 2: a lot of bad shit to get the gods on
Speaker 2: his bad side, Like the sack of Troy is no good.
Speaker 2: He's got this blood curse from his ancestors. He killed
Speaker 2: his own daughter, his wife cheated on him with his cousin,
Speaker 2: I think is their blood relationship, and the cousin wants
Speaker 2: to thrown. So there's lots of reasons Agamenon gets it.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I feel like for a modern audience, this
Speaker 2: conflict just does not hit where it's like, well, you
Speaker 2: gotta understand if the army can't move, you know, you's
Speaker 2: gotta kill us odaughter.
Speaker 1: Would a dark age Greece audience have thought there are
Speaker 1: situations in which a child sacrifice is appropriate.
Speaker 2: Very controversial evidence surrounding if and when and how much
Speaker 2: the Greeks may or may not have practiced human sacrifice
Speaker 2: sometime in their early early history. I think the Greek
Speaker 2: reading of it is like, damn, those gods are fucking mean,
Speaker 2: Like they are cruel and malevolent and capricious, and glad
Speaker 2: I ain't him, okay, Sticking with the plot as told
Speaker 2: in the poem, by the time we get to book five,
Speaker 2: remember there's twenty four books all in all, we catch
Speaker 2: up with Odysseus, who was on Calypso's island, the Immortal Nymph,
Speaker 2: And this is where Nolan streamlines the story a bunch,
Speaker 2: because he puts the embedded narration of Odysseus's misadventures almost
Speaker 2: entirely here. And he does this pretty clever plot device
Speaker 2: of Odysseus weaning way off of a pretty nasty lotus
Speaker 2: flower addiction to get all of his memories back. This
Speaker 2: was in the Odyssey. It was another one of these
Speaker 2: scenes where they show up to an island, they go
Speaker 2: on the island, there's bad stuff on the island. Then
Speaker 2: they eventually have to leave. But like his men eat
Speaker 2: the lotus flower, which makes you forget all of your problems.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I kept calling it Xanax Island because that's what
Speaker 1: it seemed like, where you're just like I have a family.
Speaker 1: I think I have a family.
Speaker 2: So this is where in a flashback we hear about
Speaker 2: Odysseus's straight up not great time trying to get back
Speaker 2: to Troy. In no particular order, here are some of
Speaker 2: the episodes. They're the most famous episodes from the Odyssey.
Speaker 2: He encounters the cyclops Polyphemus beside the Sun, he fucks
Speaker 2: them up, He's cursed by Poseidon. He and his men
Speaker 2: get wrecked by the Leistragonians, the cannibal giants. They end
Speaker 2: up on the witch Circe's Island, who turns all of
Speaker 2: Odysseus's men into pigs. They sort of kind of travel
Speaker 2: to the underworld, like, they don't actually go down into Hades,
Speaker 2: but they summon the spirits up there to get some advice.
Speaker 2: They pass between Scilla, the technical monster and Charybdis the
Speaker 2: giant whirlpool. They go by the sirens, who sing a
Speaker 2: song so beautiful that drives men to madness, and finally
Speaker 2: they end up on the island of the Sun God,
Speaker 2: where his stupid idiot red shirt men, break the one
Speaker 2: fucking rule, eat the sun god's cattle, and guarantee that
Speaker 2: they all die. So all of these adventures in the
Speaker 2: Odyssey are told through flashbacks in books eight to eleven,
Speaker 2: So all of these iconic adventures that you know are
Speaker 2: like sixteen percent of the odyssey.
Speaker 1: Interesting, So, like the actual trip back home is a
Speaker 1: very small portion of the overall story.
Speaker 2: There's some bit before and after, like when he gets
Speaker 2: from Calypso's island to this other island where he tells
Speaker 2: his stories, and then afterwards he goes to Ithaca. A
Speaker 2: lot of it is Telemachus and his time as the
Speaker 2: beggar too. Yeah, all right, So I thought in general
Speaker 2: there was almost like a comic undertone to a lot
Speaker 2: of these situations, because it's like, yeah, he gets out
Speaker 2: of this like horrifying Cyclops cave only to be in
Speaker 2: like a far more dangerous position at like the very
Speaker 2: next stop, right and again it's like out of the
Speaker 2: true like out of the frying pan into the fire
Speaker 2: situation the entire time almost comically. So, yes, I thought
Speaker 2: the cyclops cave was good. They go into this cave
Speaker 2: and Odysseus is like ooh, cheese. Yeah, violation of guest
Speaker 2: host friendship. You need to wait for the host to
Speaker 2: offer you the cheese. Listen, this is ancient Greek stand
Speaker 2: your ground laws. Okay, your honor. He ate my cheese.
Speaker 1: His men are immediately like, I don't know, Boss, seems
Speaker 1: like a moral test. Odisseus even says like, don't worry.
Speaker 1: When the host gets back, we'll share it with him.
Speaker 1: We'll share his own cheese with him. And the Cyclops
Speaker 1: I was eating them one at a time. They eventually
Speaker 1: escaped just by yes, stabbing him in the eye and
Speaker 1: like put it hal on their back to look like
Speaker 1: the sheep that are in there.
Speaker 2: Because he's blinded. Right, They put the stick in his eye,
Speaker 2: and they put the hay on their back so that
Speaker 2: as the sheep are going and touching his fingertips, they
Speaker 2: feel they like sheep.
Speaker 1: Ah, I see, okay, God see.
Speaker 2: In the actual odyssey, they strap themselves to the underside
Speaker 2: of the sheep and they just kind of hang from
Speaker 2: the bottom like a sloth or something. And I think
Speaker 2: Christopher Nolan just thought that would look too dumb. Right,
Speaker 2: here's the thing about the whole Cyclops episode. It's pretty dumb.
Speaker 2: It's pretty stupid. They talk to one another.
Speaker 1: The Cyclops and Odysseus talk to one another.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all jokes aside. So many individual instances of this
Speaker 2: poem are about improper behavior between guests and hosts. And
Speaker 2: you can say, like, what's Odysseus in the wrong for
Speaker 2: eating the cheese without asking? Or is the Cyclops in
Speaker 2: the wrong for eating the men? I don't know who's
Speaker 2: to say. The trick is kind of silly. They also
Speaker 2: get him drunk, because the Cyclops is meant to kind
Speaker 2: of represent pre civilized human beings, right, he doesn't have alcohol,
Speaker 2: so they get him drunk. And now I forget if
Speaker 2: this is in the Odyssey or one of the later adaptations,
Speaker 2: but like he is a pastoralist, he lives alone in
Speaker 2: a cave. There's something like anti social and anti civilizational
Speaker 2: about the Cyclops, especially as he's portraying the Odyssey. But
Speaker 2: the way Nolan does it, it's just way better. He's
Speaker 2: a giant puppet. Fucks cgi. It looks cool, it looks gross.
Speaker 2: The poem doesn't say he has a twisted nose, but
Speaker 2: doesn't say that he doesn't, so like he's got one
Speaker 2: eye and the nose is twisted to the side. When
Speaker 2: he eats the men, it recalls the Goya painting of
Speaker 2: Saturn eating his son, so it's got that other illusion there,
Speaker 2: and he maintains the trick, and he maintains, like Jordana
Speaker 2: you said, the glowdiness of Odysseus when he fires off
Speaker 2: one last arrow into his eye when he's at the
Speaker 2: opening of the cave. He keeps the vibe without being
Speaker 2: slavish to the source material, which is why I think
Speaker 2: is so brilliant.
Speaker 1: Gotcha, It's horrifying watching them lose like one guy at
Speaker 1: a time, because has enough appetite for like one dude,
Speaker 1: so they can try like every day as he opens
Speaker 1: the door and closes the door on them. And then
Speaker 1: they end up at the Second Island, and it's just
Speaker 1: a gut punch because dozens of them are just immediately
Speaker 1: murdered yep, in like a hopeless situation. They end up
Speaker 1: at the Witches Island.
Speaker 2: Oh, and by this time, Odysseus's men are starting to
Speaker 2: doubt his leadership. They basically mutiny and they're like, listen, Odysseus,
Speaker 2: you've been making some bad calls out there. You watch
Speaker 2: the boats, trust us.
Speaker 1: And they show up at the Witch's house, they accept food,
Speaker 1: which I guess the lesson there is don't pig out
Speaker 1: when you're staying at someone's house, right, Yep. It's like
Speaker 1: body horror watching these guys eat this stew and they're
Speaker 1: compelled to just keep eating and eating and eating. You
Speaker 1: can tell that, like they're horrified as they do it
Speaker 1: until she massages each of them into a pig. And
Speaker 1: I gotta say it, while I was watching the scene,
Speaker 1: I was like eating popcorn, like crazy, crazy style. I
Speaker 1: was on like my second bowl and I'm watching these
Speaker 1: guys like eat themselves to death and like, I think
Speaker 1: one of the most memorable lines of the movie was
Speaker 1: like men and their appetites and it did not feel good.
Speaker 1: You mentioned in the past that he sleeps with this
Speaker 1: witch in the books.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot more sensuality in Odysseus and Circe's interactions,
Speaker 2: and she thinks she can pull the same tricks on him.
Speaker 2: But Nolan demystifies the text to a high degree. In
Speaker 2: the work. He gets advice from Hermes, so he has
Speaker 2: all the information going in in their battle of wits
Speaker 2: or whatever. But I see okay, and he lives with
Speaker 2: Circe for a year.
Speaker 1: Oh really, Yeah, so he has sex with her to
Speaker 1: like earn her trust. He's trying to fuck his way
Speaker 1: out of.
Speaker 2: A jam, of course, and no other reason.
Speaker 1: Okay, So he's on Xanax Island and he like builds
Speaker 1: a shitty raft and he just pushes it off into
Speaker 1: the ocean, and he somehow goes from like the magical
Speaker 1: world back to the real world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he like tells his whole story. He gets all
Speaker 2: his memories back, and he agrees to give up control
Speaker 2: or some shit. Honestly, I recall like somewhat therapy pill
Speaker 2: language about yielding control and like putting himself in the
Speaker 2: hands of beside it. And he washes back up on Ithaca.
Speaker 2: And just for context, a full half of the Odyssey
Speaker 2: is about what Odysseus does when he's back on Ithaca.
Speaker 2: Books twelve to twenty four of this thing are about
Speaker 2: him bumming around in disguises. He makes it back to Ithaca,
Speaker 2: he links up with Telemachus. In the film, he saves
Speaker 2: Telemachus from an ambush set by the Suitors. He rocks
Speaker 2: these clever disguises and lies so that he can get
Speaker 2: the lay of the land and test people for loyalty.
Speaker 2: You gotta remember he has been told the story of
Speaker 2: Agamemnon's homecoming when he spoke to the dead. And so
Speaker 2: he's got his old nurse Uriclea, who recognizes him from
Speaker 2: his scar. He's got the loyal swineherd Eumaeus played by
Speaker 2: John Legwiziamo, you know the guy. And he's got son Telemachus.
Speaker 2: In the poem. He reveals himself to Telemachus almost immediately,
Speaker 2: because you can always trust a son, even if you
Speaker 2: can't trust a wife. And it all comes to a
Speaker 2: head when Penelope says she's gonna hold an archery contest
Speaker 2: to see who is as good as Odysseus, and she
Speaker 2: will marry the suitor who can string Odysseus's bow and
Speaker 2: fire it through twelve axe heads. Nobody can do it
Speaker 2: except for Odysseus. This was maybe my favorite scene of
Speaker 2: the movie because the music swells and the music is
Speaker 2: all made with like reconstructions of ancient instruments. So we
Speaker 2: have this like plucky liar building up and he bends
Speaker 2: the bow, he strings it up, and he plucks the
Speaker 2: string and it just reverberates and everyone this is like
Speaker 2: this epic fucking oh shit moment as everyone recognizes it's him.
Speaker 1: You mentioned that's not in the books. He doesn't pluck
Speaker 1: the bow to warn the animals or anything.
Speaker 2: No, that's a that's a Nolan insertion. But it's a
Speaker 2: good one.
Speaker 1: I like it.
Speaker 2: It makes it more honorable. It's the opposite of the
Speaker 2: liar and the cheat and the strategists. Though right it
Speaker 2: is quite literally the opposite of Odysseus's character, where like, right,
Speaker 2: when I'm hunting, I like to give the animals a
Speaker 2: fair shot. So Odysseus reveals himself, he passes the test,
Speaker 2: and then he and Telemachus slaughter the one hundred and
Speaker 2: eight suitors and in the work they hang all of
Speaker 2: the collaborating handmaids.
Speaker 1: You know, in the movie, he takes them all like
Speaker 1: one v all where it's like, yeah, you've been plotting
Speaker 1: for this moment for so long and it was so
Speaker 1: weird to watch, like, oh, y, was this your plan
Speaker 1: to be like, and then I'm going to kill all
Speaker 1: of them single handedly? You know? Yeah, well I guess
Speaker 1: it makes sense if like he's this like veteran who's
Speaker 1: just fought through hell and they all stayed back from
Speaker 1: the Trojan war. Yeah, they were either too old when
Speaker 1: it started or too young, and he found a way
Speaker 1: to get rid of all their weapons. Right.
Speaker 2: And so the poem ends with the families of the
Speaker 2: suitors coming up to the palace and demanding vengeance. This
Speaker 2: is very different from the movie version. Athena comes down
Speaker 2: and Deus ex Machina's us out of a cycle of blood,
Speaker 2: feud and vengeance and civil war. The end, and I'm
Speaker 2: not exaggerating, these are the last lines of this giant
Speaker 2: ass poem. It's thirteen hours on audible. It's long, and
Speaker 2: it ends with this thud. But Zeus sent down a thunderbolt,
Speaker 2: which fell in front of his own daughter, Great Athena.
Speaker 2: She looked at him with steely eyes and said, Odysseus,
Speaker 2: you are adaptable. You always find solutions. Stop this war,
Speaker 2: or Zeus will be enraged at you. He was glad
Speaker 2: to obey her. Then Athena made the warring sides swear
Speaker 2: solemn oaths a peace for future times, still in her
Speaker 2: guys as mentor. The end, Poucci died on his way
Speaker 2: to his home planet.
Speaker 1: Nice happy ending.
Speaker 2: M Yeah.
Speaker 1: In the movie Odysseus and his wife get on a
Speaker 1: boat and travel west. They plan to go as far
Speaker 1: west as anyone has ever gone to escape the incoming
Speaker 1: civilizational fall. I can't remember the exact line, if you do,
Speaker 1: remember a throat in the comments, but it's something like
Speaker 1: go west, A civilization will rise again and will not
Speaker 1: be forgotten. Like I think. It was like a little
Speaker 1: bit of Christopher Nolan doing his best to put in
Speaker 1: some allusion to this text being the first of Western civilization.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. Again, maybe one of those moments where it
Speaker 1: was just like not as good because he was trying
Speaker 1: to put his own spin on it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he couldn't help himself.
Speaker 1: Around like its place in Western civilization.
Speaker 2: Mm hmmm.
Speaker 1: All right, let's talk about the style and structure of
Speaker 1: the movie. A lot to talk about here.
Speaker 2: It looks fucking sick.
Speaker 1: Jrudello.
Speaker 2: Did you see it on like the super duper turbo
Speaker 2: Imax seventy milimeter?
Speaker 1: I actually don't know what format I saw it in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: neither do I.
Speaker 2: It's the first film to be shot entirely on Imax,
Speaker 2: which I learned you can only film three minutes at
Speaker 2: a time before you need to change the tape. Question
Speaker 2: mark changed something in the camera, and some of these
Speaker 2: scenes are more than three minutes, so actors would be
Speaker 2: in the middle of a scene highly intense, dramatic, and
Speaker 2: they just have to hold it as they like swapped
Speaker 2: out the I don't know, Spool, I really don't know
Speaker 2: how IVAX works. Yeah, it's shot on location. You got
Speaker 2: a ton of extras, a ton of practical effects. The
Speaker 2: scene where the dead come up out of the ground
Speaker 2: and chase in the scene where they're talking to the dead,
Speaker 2: they actually buried people in dirt and gave them snorkels.
Speaker 2: So fucking sick, dude. I love the feel of how
Speaker 2: things work. The palace at Ithaca. It doesn't look like
Speaker 2: the fucking Parthenon or any of the gleaming white columns
Speaker 2: you associated with classical grease. I think it recalls a
Speaker 2: lot of Bronze Age architecture to the extent that we
Speaker 2: can reconstruct from whatever foundations are left. There is a
Speaker 2: ton of embedded narration, right, So chrisy Nolan took this
Speaker 2: tech that already had a bunch of embedded narration as
Speaker 2: part of its storytelling structure and used it to great effect.
Speaker 2: Like Jordana you said, it's dynamic. I just wrote the
Speaker 2: story just keeps galloping along and is interesting and we
Speaker 2: get these different perspectives. So in the opening scene, the
Speaker 2: bard Travis Scott starts to tell the Trojan Horse episode.
Speaker 2: He has the first lines in the movie. He's pounding
Speaker 2: his staff and he's doing his hip hop stylings of
Speaker 2: rap poetry, and he gets cut off. Then we get
Speaker 2: Menilaeus telling his version of the Trojan Horse story to Telemachus.
Speaker 2: Then later in the film we get Odysseus telling it
Speaker 2: to Calypso slash himself as his memories are coming back.
Speaker 2: Then we get Odysseus telling about the sack of Troy
Speaker 2: to Penelope. So even as we are proceeding forward throughout
Speaker 2: the movie, we keep coming back to Troy in this
Speaker 2: interesting way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I found it was very dynamic because it's not linear.
Speaker 1: You're not just starting with the Trojan Horse and then
Speaker 1: going to the end of the Suitors, right, And I
Speaker 1: was shocked to find out, Like I said, that this
Speaker 1: is partly due to the Odyssey and then partly due
Speaker 1: to Christopher Nolan's own stylings. But there are flashbacks within flashbacks,
Speaker 1: and he keeps them straight where for example, if you
Speaker 1: want to go from like a story of Odysseus, you know,
Speaker 1: with the Cyclops, back to Telemachus, they'll have to take
Speaker 1: you first to Odysseus on the island with Calypso, and
Speaker 1: then you can go back because we're in a flashback
Speaker 1: within a flashback, and then we can go back to Telemicus.
Speaker 1: We did the prestige on this podcast. There's there's all
Speaker 1: these different tracks that you can have for reading.
Speaker 2: A fucking book within a book in that one, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's so brilliant because it solves a problem of adapting
Speaker 2: the Odyssey, and it's also similar to a Homeric story structure,
Speaker 2: and you can characterize your characters like how do you
Speaker 2: tell the story when you hear menilais tell the story
Speaker 2: about what it looked like inside that fucking horse. It
Speaker 2: ain't fun, right, Whereas when Bard Travis Scott starts the story,
Speaker 2: it's about a great victory and you can see it like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: this Bard who stayed at home, it's all happy times
Speaker 2: and glory. Its victory and the guy who was actually
Speaker 2: there talks about watching a guy slowly drown in the
Speaker 2: tides at the bottom of the horse.
Speaker 1: Very nice for like a story that isn't an oral
Speaker 1: tradition to have so much of the story be in
Speaker 1: the form of people retelling others in the story itself,
Speaker 1: whether it's people Telemachus is interviewing or through Odysseus telling
Speaker 1: Lipso yeah, and because they can move around the time
Speaker 1: like this, like the actual battle of Troy or the
Speaker 1: Siege of Troy happens at the end of the movie.
Speaker 1: Even though it's technically something that happens like chronologically at
Speaker 1: the beginning of the story, it's occurring at the end
Speaker 1: of the movie, which is like the natural place for
Speaker 1: this kind of like climactic battle. It fits. Well, there,
Speaker 1: I don't think you actually see Achilles in this movie.
Speaker 2: You don't.
Speaker 1: It would have been funny if there was a guy
Speaker 1: in the background who was like, my heal, that's a
Speaker 1: great bit.
Speaker 2: Sadly, Achilles dies before the Trojan Horse episode. So okay,
Speaker 2: so that's a lie from the Troy movie that it
Speaker 2: happens during the Battle of Troy. Interesting, My secret desire
Speaker 2: is that the reason we don't have Achilles because there's
Speaker 2: more parts where we should have seen an Achilles. Achilles
Speaker 2: famously talks to Odysseus in the underworld and talks about
Speaker 2: how much worse it is to be dead than alive.
Speaker 1: Hates it down there, so he'd rather be.
Speaker 2: Alive and a slave up there than be the most
Speaker 2: famous dead guy, because this shit fucking sucks. My secret
Speaker 2: desire is that Nolan will one day do an Iliad movie.
Speaker 2: And he didn't want to cast his Achilles just yet.
Speaker 1: It's interesting. Yeah, he was supposed to do Troy. Originally
Speaker 1: he was like actually signed on to be the director,
Speaker 1: but then at the last moment Wolfgang Peterson lost Batman
Speaker 1: Verus Superman and he had produced Troy. He's like, actually
Speaker 1: I want to make it. Sorry, Nolan, get out of here.
Speaker 2: Oh so we lost two great movies. Wolfgang Peterson, Rip,
Speaker 2: you got a lot to answer for.
Speaker 1: Nolan ended up going to do Batman. Begins his Oppenheimer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: his nuclear bomb and a great detail for this next
Speaker 1: point about the sort of grounded realism of this movie.
Speaker 1: And I don't necessarily mean the gods stuff, but I
Speaker 1: just find like a lot of the presentation seemed very grounded, right,
Speaker 1: Like I mentioned their skin texture earlier, but like you
Speaker 1: see people's pores in this movie in a way that
Speaker 1: you're like Oh, it's been a while since I saw
Speaker 1: people's pores in a movie, but like makes a sayba
Speaker 1: makes sense for a situation three thousand years ago. Like
Speaker 1: Matt Damon looks like a dad in this movie. I
Speaker 1: mean he's got big arms, but like he's got a
Speaker 1: lot of moles on his skin, and like he doesn't
Speaker 1: look like the movie ten thousand BC or whatever, like
Speaker 1: where they had, you know, sort of perfect everything. The
Speaker 1: Trojan Horse itself much more realistic. Every time I had
Speaker 1: seen the Trojan Horse in like a comic book or
Speaker 1: a cartoon or Troy, it's always the horse on the wheels,
Speaker 1: you know, classic. It was much more metal version, sort
Speaker 1: of grounded. It looks like it could actually be more
Speaker 1: of an idol in this one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which was the whole trick is like we built
Speaker 2: this thing for the gods as we are leaving, right.
Speaker 2: I love how it looks because the horse is rearing
Speaker 2: off and it's on the beach, is half buried, and
Speaker 2: others have pointed this out. It looks like the Statue
Speaker 2: of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes,
Speaker 2: as this thing that marks the end of a particular world,
Speaker 2: as the end of some apocalypse which we are going
Speaker 2: to talk about more in our themes momentarily. But this
Speaker 2: is Christopher Nolan's whole thing is that this is the
Speaker 2: apocalyptic end of the Bronze Age, as kicked off by
Speaker 2: the Sack of Troy, and we mark it with the
Speaker 2: Trojan horse looking like one of our most famous apocalypse
Speaker 2: images from film.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the scene of them moving the Trojan horse back
Speaker 1: into the city of Troy isn't a scene that I
Speaker 1: had ever thought I would want to see in a movie,
Speaker 1: but it's so compelling. In this one, hundreds of guys
Speaker 1: are pulling it. You know, it's on a bunch of logs,
Speaker 1: so they can get it like foot by foot back
Speaker 1: into the city. Meanwhile, everybody who's in the horse, you
Speaker 1: see how uncomfortable it is in there. They mentioned that
Speaker 1: many of them have died from the tides, and they're
Speaker 1: shitting and pissing on each other. It really becomes like
Speaker 1: a horrifying and marvelous scene to watch them move this
Speaker 1: horse back into the city.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one guy gets stabbed through the thing and they
Speaker 2: got to cover his mouth lest their mission become compromised.
Speaker 2: It's like, Eh, it's on the edge of my seat.
Speaker 2: It's better than the fucking hurt Locker for a portrayal
Speaker 2: of war and the intensity of it.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. On the point of realism, I also thought
Speaker 1: there was this assumption that you were familiar with the text, right,
Speaker 1: So like when Odysseus says he's gonna put wax in
Speaker 1: his men's ears so they don't hear the sirens, it's
Speaker 1: not like this sort of climactic realization that he has
Speaker 1: in a plan. It's almost downplayed where he's like, the audience,
Speaker 1: you already know this detail, so I'm just gonna breeze
Speaker 1: by it, right. It's not like he's playing with wax
Speaker 1: and is like whoa, whoa.
Speaker 2: You know, if I can tell one quick story from
Speaker 2: the Odyssey to illustrate what I mean by embedded narration.
Speaker 2: Before we hopped on the call, I was showing off Toordano,
Speaker 2: I was hitting the books in the Odyssey. And there's
Speaker 2: a classic work of literary criticism called Mymesis by one
Speaker 2: Eric Auerbach, introduced by Edward say Nice. This book is
Speaker 2: a study on how authors portray reality across literature, like
Speaker 2: realism or what have you. And his first chapter is
Speaker 2: called Odysseus's Scar and it's an incredible chapter, way better
Speaker 2: than the rest of the book. Let me tell you,
Speaker 2: this chapter is a fucking masterclass and everyone should read it.
Speaker 2: But he compares how the Odyssey describes reality and also
Speaker 2: the divine with how the Book of Genesis describes the
Speaker 2: sacrifice of Isaac. And basically his point is that the
Speaker 2: Homeric poets never have you fill in any blanks yourself.
Speaker 2: Everything is laid out. The narrative voice moves there and
Speaker 2: will tell you, oh, Zeus was away feacing with the
Speaker 2: Ethiopians or whatever. Like there's there's very little left open
Speaker 2: in the way that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, they get a shout out.
Speaker 2: And yeah, the most beautiful people on earth.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, awesome. That is my theory.
Speaker 2: This is an aside. That is my theory of why
Speaker 2: they cast a black actress for Helen of Troy, because
Speaker 2: there are two claims that you can make that both
Speaker 2: appear in the Odyssey that or the Iliad or whatever.
Speaker 2: In ancient Greek literature, Helen was the most beautiful woman
Speaker 2: face launching in one thousand ships. Also, the mythical Ethiopians
Speaker 2: were said to be the most beautiful people of them all,
Speaker 2: so surely Helen must have beam.
Speaker 1: Ah African take that right wing chugs.
Speaker 2: But back to Auerbach, the point is there's a scene
Speaker 2: in book nineteen of the Odyssey where Odysseus is back
Speaker 2: on Ithaca and the nurse Euryclea is washing him and
Speaker 2: she sees the scar on his thigh and instantly, rather
Speaker 2: than describe her reaction, the poets like, this was a
Speaker 2: scar that Odysseus got on this hunting exercise, and there's
Speaker 2: this long, I don't know, ten twenty line description of
Speaker 2: Odysseus's hunt and how he got this scar before we
Speaker 2: return to the main action. They love these types of
Speaker 2: embedded stories. And what I love about it is that
Speaker 2: Christopher Nolan, it'll work where he needs to cut a
Speaker 2: twelve hour audiobook to a three hour movie, he keeps
Speaker 2: both a flashback of Odysseus getting the scar early on
Speaker 2: in the film, and he keeps the Uruclea scene. It's
Speaker 2: so good. I think it's a reference to Eric Auerbox. Mymesis.
Speaker 2: I think he knows the canon of scholarship as well,
Speaker 2: because you really don't need it, but he kept it.
Speaker 2: I like to read just a short passage from Eric
Speaker 2: Auerbox chapter on Odysseus's scar, because it kind of illustrates
Speaker 2: what he is getting at the interruption, which comes just
Speaker 2: at the point when the housekeeper recognizes the scar, that
Speaker 2: is at the moment of crisis, describes the origin of
Speaker 2: the scar, a hunting accident which occurred in Odysseus's boyhood
Speaker 2: at a boar hunt during the time of his visit
Speaker 2: to his grandfather Autolicus. This first affords an opportunity to
Speaker 2: inform the reader about Autolicus, his house, the precise degree
Speaker 2: of the kinship, his character, and no less exhaustively than
Speaker 2: touchingly his behavior after the birth of his grandson. Then
Speaker 2: follows the visit of odia Phisius, now grown to be
Speaker 2: a youth, the exchange of greetings, the banquet with which
Speaker 2: he is welcomed, sleep and waking, the early start for
Speaker 2: the hunt, the tracking of the beast, the struggle Odysseus
Speaker 2: is being wounded by the boar's tusk, his recovery, his
Speaker 2: return to Ithaca, his parents' anxious questions. All is narrated
Speaker 2: again with such a complete externalization of all the elements
Speaker 2: of the story and of their interconnections as to leave
Speaker 2: nothing in obscurity. Not until then does the narrator return
Speaker 2: to Penelope's chamber. Not until then, the digression having run
Speaker 2: its course, does Euryclea, who had recognized the scar before
Speaker 2: the digression began, let Odysseus's foot fall back into the basin.
Speaker 2: And Auerbach goes on to explain that some modern readers
Speaker 2: think that this is a device to increase suspense, but
Speaker 2: he says, even if that is not wholly wrong, it's
Speaker 2: not the essential explanation of a Homeric procedure. Rather, he says,
Speaker 2: quoting again, the crisis and the suspense must continue, must
Speaker 2: remain vibrant in the background. But Homer, and to this
Speaker 2: we shall return later, knows no background. What he narrates
Speaker 2: is for the time being, the only present, and fills
Speaker 2: both the stage and the reader's mind completely. So that's
Speaker 2: the kind of stuff that Homer is doing that I
Speaker 2: think Christopher Nolan picks up on in an interesting way.
Speaker 1: Sweet, all right, let's move on to themes.
Speaker 2: Yes, and I think we need to begin with Zenia
Speaker 2: aka Zeus's law. I already said in the intro fantastically
Speaker 2: important concept for the ancient Greeks. The whole Trojan War
Speaker 2: started as a campaign to write someone violating the rules
Speaker 2: of Zenia, with Paris kidnapping Helen Slash, maybe her going
Speaker 2: of her own volition. In the Greek mind, if you
Speaker 2: violate guest home friendship, there will be divine retribution. And
Speaker 2: this is all over the film, right the Cyclops story,
Speaker 2: the suitors constantly violating Zenia, overstaying they're welcome to respecting
Speaker 2: the house, plotting to kill Telemachus. It's all over. It's
Speaker 2: reinforced by their mythology because there's plenty of stories involving
Speaker 2: a god disguising themselves as a beggar or an old
Speaker 2: person and testing humans, which we see on multiple occasions
Speaker 2: in the film. When Odysseus is dressed as a beggar,
Speaker 2: someone says, oh, you know, that could be a god. Right.
Speaker 2: It is a foundational law of the ancient Greeks, which
Speaker 2: Christopher Nolan turns into the foundational law for the ancient Greeks.
Speaker 1: The ancient Greeks wrote, what if God was one of us?
Speaker 1: There you go, just a beggar on the Deaos.
Speaker 2: But what Nolan does with this thing is pretty interesting
Speaker 2: because he makes the Trojan horse itself the instigating event
Speaker 2: of all of this action. For Odes's journey Home and
Speaker 2: one of the most iconic episodes in Greek mythology. He
Speaker 2: changes this or interprets it as a violation of Zeus's
Speaker 2: law aka Zanea.
Speaker 1: Yeah this was weird.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no one in the ancient world would have viewed
Speaker 2: it this way. Right. The Achaeans were an invading army.
Speaker 2: They were not guests of the Trojans.
Speaker 1: We broke a gift law. You know, gifts are always
Speaker 1: supposed to be made in good faith. Yeah, you're not
Speaker 1: supposed to break gifting law.
Speaker 2: We regifted something it was not good.
Speaker 1: Definitely one of the lesser gods that has a purview
Speaker 1: over gifts and gift etiquette.
Speaker 2: And so what pissed the gods off to no end
Speaker 2: was what the Greeks did after they got into the city.
Speaker 2: It wasn't how they got into the city that was
Speaker 2: the problem. It was what they did once they got
Speaker 2: in there. Right. It is a brutal sack, a lot
Speaker 2: of murder, a lot of enslaving, a lot of sexual violence.
Speaker 2: Most famously, the prophetesque Cassandra is sexually assaulted by Ajax,
Speaker 2: the lesser One. Ajax is the tallest guy in Troy.
Speaker 2: We need to be clear. It is the shorter Ajax
Speaker 2: who committed this act of hate and sexual violence as
Speaker 2: she high for sanctuary in Athenis Temple, which puts a
Speaker 2: big target on the Greek hero's back as they travel
Speaker 2: back to Greece.
Speaker 1: You've mentioned Cassandra as a stand in word for someone
Speaker 1: who's prophetic. I guess this is the Cassandra they're referring to.
Speaker 2: Is the very one? Yeah, And so the Greeks themselves
Speaker 2: did recognize that what their ancestors had done to Troy
Speaker 2: was a profound moral wrong. There's a bunch of plays
Speaker 2: about this, you can see. Euripides and Seneca both wrote
Speaker 2: plays called the Women of Troy, which is a tragedy
Speaker 2: told from the perspective of the women who are about
Speaker 2: to be sold into slavery, and Eschylus's Aristea describes the
Speaker 2: slaughter in some detail and says it may have been
Speaker 2: one of the causes of Agamemnon's death. Right. So Christopher
Speaker 2: Nolan takes this thing that is there in the text
Speaker 2: and he applies it to the Trojan Horse, which will
Speaker 2: lead directly to our second theme, the end of the world.
Speaker 2: And this is what Christopher Nolan has decided to center
Speaker 2: his odyssey on This is a very twenty twenty six
Speaker 2: ass take here. It's the end of the world, it's
Speaker 2: the apocalypse. You know, I couldn't help but notice that
Speaker 2: one of those Trojan towers fell exactly like a nine
Speaker 2: to eleven tower and pancaked straight down right. Jet fuel
Speaker 2: can't melt bronze beams. You know.
Speaker 1: The second Troy was an inside jump. I mean you've
Speaker 1: just mentioned that, like Seneca is writing his own version
Speaker 1: of Troy, so it seems like it is kind of
Speaker 1: in the tradition of these Homeric works to put your
Speaker 1: own spin on it in a later retelling.
Speaker 2: Oh of course you're supposed to any one of these
Speaker 2: people who get butt hurt over the fact that, like
Speaker 2: Agamemnon is dressed up like Darth Vader, and that's not
Speaker 2: period accurate. He's a batman Darth Vader BDSM Hoplight. You
Speaker 2: want to know how fifth century Greeks portrayed Odysseus as
Speaker 2: a fifth century Greek hoplight. I didn't portray him with
Speaker 2: the boar tusk helmet that Homer describes, or in like
Speaker 2: the actual Bronze Age armor that we might know from engravings.
Speaker 2: Of the ancient Nearies. Degen Athenians didn't know what that
Speaker 2: fucking looked like, so they portrayed him in their clothes.
Speaker 2: I think a lot of ancient people would actually be
Speaker 2: pretty mortified with this obsession with fidelity, considering how they
Speaker 2: are always adapting it to suit whatever needs they want.
Speaker 1: I remember when the original like stills came out of
Speaker 1: this movie of like Matt Damon in the clearly poplight
Speaker 1: armor from like Alexander's Day basically, and there was like
Speaker 1: a lot of uproar about that, where were like, nah,
Speaker 1: that's not right, But seeing it in the movie, you're like, aesthetically,
Speaker 1: it's the coolest Greek armor. It's so fucking sick.
Speaker 2: The mohawk.
Speaker 1: They were really cooking on, like the aesthetics of the
Speaker 1: look in the classical period. I'm not sure that really
Speaker 1: would have been the case in the Bronze Age period.
Speaker 1: I'm going to Minoa for a wedding out over, I'll
Speaker 1: look at some of the armor and report back.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna put something in the chat. This is what
Speaker 2: Bronze Age armor looked like in the Greek world. It's
Speaker 2: called the dendra panople. If you're listening, open up your smartphone,
Speaker 2: go to Wikipedia to look up the Dendra Panople and
Speaker 2: look at how fucking goofy this looks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this looks stupid as hell. The Greek armor we
Speaker 1: know of is just it looks great. It looks cool.
Speaker 1: You can't beat it. It looks better than legionary armor.
Speaker 2: Even whoa, whoa, those are big words. It literally has
Speaker 2: skirts of overlapping bronze plates. It's very round, it's very cylindrical.
Speaker 2: It does not look cool. But let's get back to
Speaker 2: our theme here, the end of the World. Okay, this
Speaker 2: is kind of one of the worst bits of the
Speaker 2: film because Chris Nolan is trying to show off that
Speaker 2: he knows about the Bronze Age collapse significantly. It is
Speaker 2: not anywhere in the Iliad or Odyssey. There's no c peoples.
Speaker 2: The poets of the Dark Ages knew so little about
Speaker 2: the Greek Bronze Age. They had vague notions from their
Speaker 2: you know, handed down oral tradition. The most famous example
Speaker 2: in the Iliad, the heroes use chariots, classic Bronze Age maneuver.
Speaker 2: Battle of Kadesh between the Hittites and the Egyptians, the
Speaker 2: largest chariot battle of all time, but the poets of
Speaker 2: the Dark Age don't know how chariots work. So the
Speaker 2: Homerican trojan heroes ride on the chariots. They don't fight
Speaker 2: from them. They ride up and then they hop off
Speaker 2: and they have a one v one fight on the battlefield,
Speaker 2: like there aren't even phalanxes in Homeric warfare is just
Speaker 2: one v one little Homeric duels. Because that's probably what
Speaker 2: this fucking Dark Ages, Greek almost Viking like society would
Speaker 2: have looked like, given that they don't even understand what
Speaker 2: the world looked like, they certainly weren't aware of how
Speaker 2: it ended and don't describe that at all. Like I
Speaker 2: said up top, the poems reflect the Greek Dark Ages,
Speaker 2: So even if there was a Troy that burned down,
Speaker 2: the world that the poems described looks nothing like the
Speaker 2: Bronze Age that we dig up through our chaeology. Here's
Speaker 2: another example for good measure. The Greek Bronze Age had
Speaker 2: a system of writing called linear b which people were
Speaker 2: able to translate only in the nineteen fifties relatively recently,
Speaker 2: and what they discovered was not literature, was not lines
Speaker 2: of homer or poetry. They found inventory lists in a palace,
Speaker 2: redistributive economy. It looked nothing like the worlds of the poems.
Speaker 2: And you know what you don't see anywhere in the
Speaker 2: Homeric poems, fucking writing. There is actually one instance of
Speaker 2: writing written symbols in the Homeric text, and it is
Speaker 2: from book six of the Iliad. In unembedded story, a
Speaker 2: character named Bellerophon is given tokens, which are called murderous
Speaker 2: signs in the Fagals translation scratched into a folded tablet,
Speaker 2: and many of them too enough to kill a man.
Speaker 2: He was told to show them to Antea's father, and
Speaker 2: that would mean his death. So the only writing we
Speaker 2: see described in these texts ostensibly about the Greek Bronze Age,
Speaker 2: in which there was a great deal of writing, is
Speaker 2: this one instance where it's some kind of magic murderous
Speaker 2: signs of some kind. So the movie finds a way
Speaker 2: to work in the Bronze Age collapse into the Odyssey.
Speaker 2: So many characters name drop the sea peoples, and they
Speaker 2: find a way to work it into every aspect of
Speaker 2: the story.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: It affects Telemachus and Penelope because the search for Ithacus
Speaker 2: new King is that much more dire we need a
Speaker 2: king to raise an army and motivate the people to
Speaker 2: fight the Sea People's. It affects Menelais because he says
Speaker 2: he can't send men to help Telemachus out because of
Speaker 2: the Sea Peoples. And then there's the big reveal at
Speaker 2: the end of the story that the Sea Peoples were
Speaker 2: the Greeks who knocked over Troy. Right. I read this
Speaker 2: line as a big I Am Legend style twist in
Speaker 2: the same way that will Smith was the monster to
Speaker 2: the Vampire's spoiler alert, the Greeks who are so afraid
Speaker 2: of the sea people's ten years on from the Trojan
Speaker 2: War have not yet realized that they are in fact
Speaker 2: the seed People's.
Speaker 1: So yeah, you read this is basically like they do Troy,
Speaker 1: and on the way home they've done a bunch of
Speaker 1: destruction in their boats and essentially like the stories that
Speaker 1: they're hearing are of the Trojan heroes returning.
Speaker 2: I think that's part of it. I think the film
Speaker 2: is trying to say that once Odysseus has let the
Speaker 2: genie out of the bottle with the trick of the
Speaker 2: Trojan War by violating Zeus's law in the world of
Speaker 2: the film, then everyone is going to feel that way.
Speaker 2: It's going to become a crueler, less law bound, more
Speaker 2: barbarous worlds. That's basically how I read it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that a combination of you know, you've broken Zeus's
Speaker 1: law and now sort of like fragile etiquette that our
Speaker 1: society survives on is gone, and now we're going to
Speaker 1: descend into a dark age, or the concept of like
Speaker 1: you've cursed us all by breaking Zeus's law, that like
Speaker 1: things are just gonna continue to get worse for us,
Speaker 1: which I thought was an interesting take. I think you
Speaker 1: get the sense that like these Greeks, like they live
Speaker 1: on these rocky islands, and they need trade and like
Speaker 1: maritime travel to survive, and if you take away this
Speaker 1: guest host etiquette, then like the whole system falls apart,
Speaker 1: like you don't have the farming infrastructure to support the society.
Speaker 1: And I found that he alluded to it too directly
Speaker 1: and too often.
Speaker 2: He's trying to link everything together. He's trying to link
Speaker 2: together the fixation with proper guest host etiquette with his
Speaker 2: knowledge of the Bronze Age collapse, while also making Odysseus
Speaker 2: into Oppenheimer who feels guilt at having changed the words
Speaker 2: in this irrevocable way. I'll just read this quote that
Speaker 2: I got. It's gonna be hard to find drops for
Speaker 2: this one because the thing's still in theater, so I'll
Speaker 2: just read this. This is when Odysseus is talking to
Speaker 2: Penelope as a beggar, and this really does put the
Speaker 2: whole bow on what Christopher Nolan's Odyssey film is about.
Speaker 2: He says, what if the Odysseus you knew, lost his way?
Speaker 2: What if one night in a strange city, he saw
Speaker 2: things that made him think the home he knew couldn't
Speaker 2: possibly be there anymore. What if when he left the
Speaker 2: belly of the horse, it opened the gates of Troy.
Speaker 2: He saw ten years of rage pour into that city
Speaker 2: in one night. We left them a gift on offering
Speaker 2: of peace that they took into their home. We violated
Speaker 2: all that's ever been sacred between people. It turned a
Speaker 2: fight into a hunt. To burn the walls of Troy
Speaker 2: was to burn the world entire. I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 2: That line did give me chills.
Speaker 1: Mm HM. Reminded me.
Speaker 2: There's that line from the Koran that's like he who
Speaker 2: ends a life ends ten thousand or something. Like that right,
Speaker 2: like to burn the walls of Troy was to burn
Speaker 2: the world entire, including his home. What if he knew
Speaker 2: that very night as he walked through fires, anarchy, and pain,
Speaker 2: and in the daze of sweaty celebrations that follow, what
Speaker 2: if he knew exactly what he done? And Penelope says,
Speaker 2: what all of you had done? He responds, one man's idea,
Speaker 2: one man's trick to break Zeus's law forever. We lived
Speaker 2: in a world of palaces and trade language, blind to
Speaker 2: its beauty until we broke it. That's the line that
Speaker 2: loses me. Right. I went from chills at the moral
Speaker 2: reckoning of by burning Troy, we burn the entire world
Speaker 2: to like, shut the fuck up, Christopher Nolan, like we
Speaker 2: lived in a word of language. I haven't seen anyone
Speaker 2: write or read. Penelope, you are the people from the sea, yes,
Speaker 2: my queen. The breaking of Zeus's law spreading like plague.
Speaker 2: Our age of Bronze is collapsing, and maybe he couldn't
Speaker 2: bear to see the ruins of what he'd done anywhere,
Speaker 2: least of all his home. That is the film in
Speaker 2: a nutshell, because that monologue is delivered as we see
Speaker 2: images of the sack of Troy, and it is simultaneously
Speaker 2: so fucking powerful in so many ways and also so
Speaker 2: goddamn lame. When he mentions the Bronze Age collapse, it
Speaker 2: just has to weave that in there you don't need it.
Speaker 1: And has to say it so directly.
Speaker 2: M hmm, right, the worst lines of the film. And
Speaker 2: it's funny that like Nolan actually can't help but undercut
Speaker 2: himself where we don't see anyone write anything in the film,
Speaker 2: but you know what we do see instead, we see
Speaker 2: Bard Travis Scott. He is the opening lines of the
Speaker 2: film is the Bard in the hall telling the poems
Speaker 2: of Troy. He can't help but accidentally recreate the Greek
Speaker 2: dark Ages. It is retelling. Okay. Third theme and these
Speaker 2: are all kind of interconnected here, which is nice is
Speaker 2: trauma and guilt. Like you saw from that monologue I read,
Speaker 2: Odysseus is traumatized from what he's done and he feels guilty.
Speaker 2: One of the only Greek gods or goddesses who make
Speaker 2: an on screen appearance in the film is Zendiah's Athena,
Speaker 2: but is played brilliantly ambiguously where she appears to him,
Speaker 2: she never really comes out and says, I am Athena.
Speaker 2: And it's only revealed at the very end that the
Speaker 2: priestess who sacrificed right on the altar of Athena before
Speaker 2: the Athena statue's head is cut off, is Zendia. So
Speaker 2: his guilt is manifesting as this apparition of Athena, who
Speaker 2: is the priestess who is murdered in the sack of
Speaker 2: Troy that he helped enable, and the guilt and trauma
Speaker 2: of Odysseus informs the entire frame device. So why was
Speaker 2: he crushing the Xanax flower on Xanadu Island is because
Speaker 2: midway through the film is revealed that when he landed
Speaker 2: on Calypso's island, she was able to heal his body,
Speaker 2: but not his mind. He was having night terrors, just screaming,
Speaker 2: and so she had to feed him the lotus flower
Speaker 2: to give him the memory erasing amnesia stuff. And the
Speaker 2: storytelling him retelling his story is him trying to process
Speaker 2: the grief and the trauma that he suffered.
Speaker 1: Interested I'd say a good take, and it's.
Speaker 2: Also one that's grounded in scholarship. So another book, very
Speaker 2: famous book is Jonathan Shay's Achilles in Vietnam from nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety four, and it argued that Achilles in the Iliade
Speaker 2: shows many of the symptoms of what we would now
Speaker 2: call post traumatic stress disorder. Jonathan Say has both an
Speaker 2: MD and a PhD. Is one of those books you
Speaker 2: don't really need to read. You need to read about
Speaker 2: ten pages of it to be like, ye, yeah, I
Speaker 2: get it. But there's been a lot of really good
Speaker 2: work since then that basically argued that before formalized psychiatry
Speaker 2: or psychology, Greeks used literature, in particularly theater, to articulate
Speaker 2: and process feelings around post traumatic stress. And if this
Speaker 2: sounds a little woo woo for you, I would remind
Speaker 2: you that in order to sit in the Athenian Theater,
Speaker 2: you had to be a citizen, and to be a citizen,
Speaker 2: you had to serve in the military. And so everyone there, actors, rectors, performers,
Speaker 2: audience members. They were all veterans who had seen combat,
Speaker 2: and a lot of their plays are about returning from combat,
Speaker 2: and like coming back into society are about martial things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Odysseus, he's got a hard time coming back into society.
Speaker 1: In his movie, he even says it out loud. At
Speaker 1: one point, He's like, I'm back here, and I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's like just to trick you guys, or
Speaker 1: if I'm actually just having a hard time reintegrating myself.
Speaker 2: Sou that was kind of lame when he looked directly
Speaker 2: at the camerons and you know, the body keeps the score.
Speaker 2: I thought that was kind of lame. But yeah, like
Speaker 2: Jonathan Shane his book pointed out that Achilles in the
Speaker 2: Iliot has a bunch of the symptoms of PTSD.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: He has emotional withdrawal, He is the inability to trust leadership.
Speaker 2: He has survivor's guilt after Petrocolus dies. He has uncontrollable rage,
Speaker 2: he does emotional numbing, He has an obsession with revenge,
Speaker 2: and an inability to return to normal human relationships. I
Speaker 2: think a lot of those would equally apply to Odysseus
Speaker 2: in this film, right, Yeah, emotional withdrawal, survival guilt, a
Speaker 2: little bit of uncontrollable rage, only some numbing, inability to
Speaker 2: return to normal human relationships. So yeah, even his over
Speaker 2: the top violence at the end is kind of like
Speaker 2: a PDSD going berserk there, right. Chrispher Nolan has chosen
Speaker 2: this one particular element to really crank the fuck up.
Speaker 2: Odysseus in the Odyssey is not nearly this sad and
Speaker 2: guilt ridden, but I think it works for the story
Speaker 2: that he is trying to tell, which is, once again,
Speaker 2: can't stress this enough. He's Oppenheimer and the Trojan Horse
Speaker 2: is the atomic bombit he feels.
Speaker 1: Our next theme is I guess the concept of like
Speaker 1: greed or desire at all, right, desire of any kind
Speaker 1: for money, for food, horniness less so in this movie,
Speaker 1: but like I walked away from this movie thinking he
Speaker 1: was very much like a moral lesson where you break
Speaker 1: some kind of like moral rule where you want something
Speaker 1: and you're punished for it. Them getting turned into pigs
Speaker 1: was the clearest example where it's like, yeah, you're eating
Speaker 1: too much, you're being gluttonous, you know, and you're going
Speaker 1: to turn into a pig as a result of it.
Speaker 2: When she turned them back and was like back into
Speaker 2: your disguises, I was like, fucking bars, y know, the
Speaker 2: real costume is the man flesh. We're all fucking pigs
Speaker 2: on the inside.
Speaker 1: Men and their desires. You know, they took the cyclops food,
Speaker 1: they're punished for it, even when he's trying to hear
Speaker 1: the sirens song. You know, like at first it's pleasurable
Speaker 1: for him, but like very quickly is like a horrifying
Speaker 1: scene and they ask him what it's like, and he says,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like finding out there's an itch that
Speaker 1: you've never been able to scratch.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's heartbreaking what he says. He's like, it is
Speaker 2: the thing that you want most but you can't have,
Speaker 2: and the reason that you can't have it is that
Speaker 2: you used to have it and now it's gone where
Speaker 2: it's like, yeah, man, remember that first time you were
Speaker 2: in love. That's the siren song. Remember when you back
Speaker 2: didn't hurt all the time? Siren song? Baby. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There was just like so much of this moral lesson
Speaker 1: where you know he has to learn something to grow
Speaker 1: and like become better, but then also he just doesn't
Speaker 1: internalize the lessons often, like it kind of a story
Speaker 1: about him indulging himself and paying the price for it,
Speaker 1: even with the suitors at the end, you know, you
Speaker 1: get the sense that like he could have probably done
Speaker 1: this without killing all the suitors, because at one point
Speaker 1: he tells Telemachus to tell Penelope like, just pick a
Speaker 1: suitor so they can all go home. We can just
Speaker 1: deal with one of them. And he doesn't follow that plan.
Speaker 1: He decides to kill a lot of them. And the
Speaker 1: point of the original plan was so that their families
Speaker 1: don't all come here looking for revenge. And it's like, well,
Speaker 1: what happened to that plan? You just couldn't help yourself,
Speaker 1: could you. Odysseus, you know, he never internalized this lesson
Speaker 1: and as a result he's exiled for it. Yet half
Speaker 1: it's a little bit of a you can't fire me
Speaker 1: because I quit the situation with the exile, you know
Speaker 1: where He's like, well, actually I always wanted to go
Speaker 1: away and never come back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Telemachus could be king now I killed all the competition.
Speaker 1: Second last theme, fate and predestination and hubris. Yes.
Speaker 2: One thing that's kind of unique for Greek mythology, especially
Speaker 2: compared to say like Christian, Abrahamic whatever religion, is that
Speaker 2: they have this meta divine thing called fate. There's a
Speaker 2: scene in the Iliad where Zeus sees that one of
Speaker 2: his sons, dude named Sarpedon, a trojan. I've always said
Speaker 2: Sarpedon because I think it's funnier that way is about
Speaker 2: to eat it on the battlefield, and Zeus's reaction is like, damn,
Speaker 2: that sucks because he's faded to die. And even Zeus,
Speaker 2: the absolute top tier god mode god, can't fuck around
Speaker 2: with that. So there are certain things that are going
Speaker 2: to happen, have to happen, are written in the Fates
Speaker 2: and Stars. The one Christian God is not bound by
Speaker 2: this meta divine thing called fate in the Christian view. Interestingly,
Speaker 2: the Odyssey text is actually way less in on fate.
Speaker 2: Like I read you those opening lines where it said
Speaker 2: his men didn't get home because of their own decisions,
Speaker 2: because the Odyssey is so much more folkloric. What happens
Speaker 2: to you are the result of your choices. It's consequences
Speaker 2: for your actions, because so many of these stories have
Speaker 2: this moralizing bent. But I think Christopher Nolan takes a
Speaker 2: little bit of that kind of fate angle from the
Speaker 2: I and implants it into the Odyssey. You also have
Speaker 2: this different notion of hubris, this like arrogant transgression against
Speaker 2: the gods. Right, gods can't go against fate. Humans can't
Speaker 2: go against gods. That's hubris. Most famously figures like Tantalus
Speaker 2: or Icarus or Sisiphus, or Phyton or Arachne. You think
Speaker 2: you're better than the gods, you will get your just
Speaker 2: fucking desserts. It's the boundary for mortals that can't be crossed.
Speaker 2: And crafty Odysseus is always walking right up to the
Speaker 2: line of hubris in myth and he's trying to cheat
Speaker 2: the rules in some way, shape or form. And in
Speaker 2: our contemporary world, and even in like the modern world
Speaker 2: of the late nineteenth century, we don't like this shit,
Speaker 2: especially Americans. We don't like limits. We did a whole
Speaker 2: thing on our Neo Westerns episode, but the frontier in
Speaker 2: the limit that we don't like. So in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 2: in modernity, Odysseus becomes a figure that's associated with adventure
Speaker 2: and pushing limits.
Speaker 1: Crafty Teddy Roosevelt found out that you could move the
Speaker 1: frontier to Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and then you.
Speaker 2: Can get all the molasses you wanted all year round.
Speaker 2: I can't remember if I read some of this poem
Speaker 2: on our Oh Brother, We're art that episode or not
Speaker 2: on the Patreon whatever. I'm doing it again. This is
Speaker 2: a few lines from Tennyson's poem Ulysses, where he writes, come,
Speaker 2: my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Speaker 2: Push off and sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows.
Speaker 2: For my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and
Speaker 2: the baths of all the western stars until I die.
Speaker 2: It may be that gulfs will wash us down. It
Speaker 2: may be that we touch the happy aisles and see
Speaker 2: the great Achilles whom we knew. Though much is taken,
Speaker 2: much abides. And though we are not now that strength
Speaker 2: which in old days moved earth in heaven that which
Speaker 2: we are we are one equal temper of heroic hearts,
Speaker 2: made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
Speaker 2: to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Speaker 2: In the nineteenth century, Odysseus is a Victorian imperialist explorer.
Speaker 2: This guy who goes on all these horrible voyages is
Speaker 2: a sign of the curious the adventurous, which is all
Speaker 2: the more ironic because all he wanted to do was
Speaker 2: get fucking home. The Victorians wanted to get away from
Speaker 2: their shady, rainy island. And this movie right, talking about
Speaker 2: fate and hubris and all this shit has many instances
Speaker 2: in which Odysseus or some other character quite literally talks
Speaker 2: about going against the gods or proving the gods wrong.
Speaker 2: Odysseus is told like, listen, your men ain't gonna make it. It's
Speaker 2: like I can make him make it. I can fix it. Right,
Speaker 2: He's constantly resisting these boundaries that are set by fate
Speaker 2: or the gods, because that's the Odysseus that we fucking like.
Speaker 2: And what I think is particularly modern about it is
Speaker 2: that even though Odysseus largely fails, right, try as he
Speaker 2: might to go against the gods save his men, he can't,
Speaker 2: we are meant to see the struggle itself as valiant
Speaker 2: and right. A Greek would not read it this way.
Speaker 2: It's also there and how he changes the ending of
Speaker 2: the film too, Right, he's gonna sail off to the
Speaker 2: Great West. He's gonna keep exploring. Nolan's Odysseus, I feel
Speaker 2: is almost as indebted to Tennyson, that poet of Empire,
Speaker 2: as it is to Homer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a little bit more on fate. I also thought
Speaker 1: it was interesting, like his men find out at one
Speaker 1: point that they're not gonna make it. They're like, hmm,
Speaker 1: it seems like Odysseus comes back and he's like, Okay, guys,
Speaker 1: I have good news that I have bet news. The
Speaker 1: good news is I'm going to make it home. And
Speaker 1: his men seem to be like, why are we continuing
Speaker 1: to do this? Mm hmm. It seems like the answer
Speaker 1: is just like, well, what else are you gonna do?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Why should we row to another scary island with
Speaker 2: some fresh new horror for us?
Speaker 1: All right, let's move on to our last theme, human
Speaker 1: divine relations.
Speaker 2: Yes, just like how the film portrays magic in the
Speaker 2: gods right on our pageun episode about Troy. One of
Speaker 2: our biggest complaints was how completely demystified it was zero
Speaker 2: gods and goddesses in the film, and it suffers for
Speaker 2: it zero magic. But Christopher Nolan does something fucking brilliant.
Speaker 2: He keeps all the magic so like Circe turning men
Speaker 2: into pigs, he keeps the monsters in the form of
Speaker 2: the cyclops Lystergroonian sirens, but he treats the Greek gods
Speaker 2: and goddesses like a dimmer switch. It's not all the
Speaker 2: way off, but we've turned it down to low. There's
Speaker 2: no Hermes, no zeus, no Poseidon, and Athena's role is
Speaker 2: way cut down, like she has long dialogues with Telemachus
Speaker 2: and Penelope and Odysseus in the poem Zandia has something
Speaker 2: like five minutes of screen time in this film. What
Speaker 2: he does do is he has the characters talk about
Speaker 2: the gods and what they want and what they expect,
Speaker 2: and then he uses the vibes to imply their existence.
Speaker 2: So whether that storms or becalmed winds when you don't
Speaker 2: want them, it's the natural world. Are the gods? Who
Speaker 2: gives a shit? Because they feel real to these people? Right?
Speaker 2: You hurt Poseidon's son, and now the seas are fucked
Speaker 2: Fuck it. Poseidon might as well be real at that point.
Speaker 2: He uses the world in the environment to make them
Speaker 2: feel real to the viewer, just like they are to
Speaker 2: the characters. It's a great immersive way of putting the
Speaker 2: viewer in the world of the protagonist. And it reminds
Speaker 2: me in a good way of the Northmen by Eggers. Right,
Speaker 2: our Valkyrie is real. Who gives a shit? Feel real?
Speaker 1: They're real? Yeah, exactly. One of my complaints about the movie,
Speaker 1: Troy was when Hector says bird signs, we're basing our
Speaker 1: battle plans off bird signs, right, like making fun of omens,
Speaker 1: And it's like someone from the era would not have
Speaker 1: thought that was as ridiculous as Hector does in this scene. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're ridiculous, but to these people, they're real.
Speaker 2: It literally decided whether Rome would be Rome or Reem.
Speaker 2: It's how Romulus and Remus chose.
Speaker 1: Right, seven birds now or fourteen birds later.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I'm kidding it would have been called Remorra.
Speaker 2: That was the actual name. It's not realm Reim just
Speaker 2: sounds funny, Okay, I don't want some petant in the
Speaker 2: comments getting after me and telling me that Avid said
Speaker 2: it would have been called Remorra.
Speaker 1: In this movie, there also is sort of two worlds
Speaker 1: where it's like there's the magic world where they're going
Speaker 1: from island to island, and then there's also the real world.
Speaker 1: And for me, like the visual cue that kind of
Speaker 1: reminded me of when they switched to the real world
Speaker 1: was at one point, Odysseus like washes up on the
Speaker 1: shore of Ithica and when he stands up, he has
Speaker 1: all of these like leaves sticking to his back and
Speaker 1: it's just sort of this like annoying, ugly problem that
Speaker 1: you suddenly become aware of that would not have happened
Speaker 1: in a prior scene, Like you wouldn't have seen like
Speaker 1: dirt stick to someone in quite such a realistic way.
Speaker 1: But as soon as I saw that, like I think subconsciously,
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, he's back in it, Like he's
Speaker 1: back in the real world. He's no longer in like
Speaker 1: a magical realm just because he's dirty in like a
Speaker 1: real way.
Speaker 2: It's earthier.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: Oh and how did I forget to mention the afterlife
Speaker 2: exists if you want to talk about like magic in
Speaker 2: the world. Right, So few miscellaneous things some things I
Speaker 2: think make this adaptation so great. Nolan had to cut
Speaker 2: a hell of a lot from the source material to
Speaker 2: make the film work as a film, But the way
Speaker 2: that he can allude to famous episodes or incorporate them
Speaker 2: in interesting ways, this is the real like if you know,
Speaker 2: you know, I guess, But like we cut the whole
Speaker 2: Lotus Eaters scene because it would have been repetitive with
Speaker 2: another spooky island that we sailed to and then sail
Speaker 2: away from, but we incorporate it into Odysseus's frame story,
Speaker 2: which also ties into the theme of grief and trauma, right, brilliant.
Speaker 2: A lesser one like Athena disguising herself as Mentor and
Speaker 2: guiding Telemachus to go out is alluded to where Telemachus
Speaker 2: says to Mentor, you have wise eyes like Athena's eyes. Ahh,
Speaker 2: you see, like Athena's epithet is gray eyed Athena. So
Speaker 2: it's referencing the thing. And like I already said, Odysseus
Speaker 2: saying those songs make me cry is referencing a cut
Speaker 2: scene at the Fiatian's dinner party. Right. He did such
Speaker 2: a brilliant job of moving stuff around, keeping what matters,
Speaker 2: having these clever allusions to the things that get lost,
Speaker 2: while still like keeping his eye on the prize of
Speaker 2: the version of the story that he wanted to tell.
Speaker 2: I don't know, I think it's fucking incredible. I've seen
Speaker 2: a few people be mad about it, but they suck.
Speaker 2: They're bad, they're wrong.
Speaker 1: I like that he kept the dog story in His
Speaker 1: dog stays alive just long enough for like a single
Speaker 1: visit and then he dies. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oot, there are some big things that are missing, like
Speaker 2: not everything. Not everything is alluded to cleverly like. One
Speaker 2: of the most famous scenes in the Odyssey is when
Speaker 2: Odysseus chats with the dead. It is a long scene
Speaker 2: in the poem, it's a full book. It's one twenty
Speaker 2: fourth of the thing. So the movie heat chats with Tyresius,
Speaker 2: the seer sign on the Elliott Page character who isn't
Speaker 2: in the Odyssey but is in Virgil's Aneia, and Agamemnon
Speaker 2: in the poem. Is a long fucking list. So he
Speaker 2: talks to elpinor the guy Menchu who drunkenly fell off
Speaker 2: the house and died. He talks to his own mother,
Speaker 2: who died of a broken heart while he was away.
Speaker 2: Heartbreaking stuff. He talks to a bunch of famous wives
Speaker 2: and women from myths, you know, some real woke nonsense
Speaker 2: from Homer. Here Agamemnon Achilles is the most famous one
Speaker 2: who got cut. He talks to Ajax, he talks to Heracles.
Speaker 2: In this actual scene acts as a kind of catalog
Speaker 2: of myths. Remember I said the ili is very episodic,
Speaker 2: so if you're singing one particular episode, this would have
Speaker 2: been a great way to get all of the greatest
Speaker 2: hits of mythology. In the afterlife telling their life stories like,
Speaker 2: for one example, is the earliest brief description of the
Speaker 2: story of Oedipus, right, his mother is one of the
Speaker 2: famous wives slash mothers from myths. But there's also a
Speaker 2: lot of stuff to cut here. Sure, I was just
Speaker 2: kind of hoping we'd get Achilles talk about how much
Speaker 2: better it is to be alive than dead, because it's
Speaker 2: one of my favorite scenes in the Odyssey. But what
Speaker 2: are you gonna do? Odysseus's dad, Laertes gets cut. They
Speaker 2: have a nice reunion in Ithaca. He's like a broken
Speaker 2: old man when he gets there. And like I already said,
Speaker 2: most of the face to face interaction with the gods
Speaker 2: gets cut, and the whole other island with the facians
Speaker 2: that gets cut. The Fightian lovers are in absolute shambles.
Speaker 2: The bag of winds, the bag of winds gets cut.
Speaker 2: Another magic bag of wind It's exactly what sounds like
Speaker 2: a magic bag full of winds that one of his
Speaker 2: idiot crewmen opens at an inopportune time.
Speaker 1: I had a couple of miscellaneous questions for you. Sure, Okay,
Speaker 1: So someone early on in this movie says, well, you know,
Speaker 1: the Trojan War wasn't really about Hell, and it was
Speaker 1: about trade routes, almost like a rock war style, like
Speaker 1: you know, the Trojan War was really actually all about
Speaker 1: olive oil.
Speaker 2: I fucking hate that. Like, yes, there was a historic
Speaker 2: city on the site of Troy. Yes there is a
Speaker 2: destruction layer. You can say that safely, Like that's kind
Speaker 2: of the limit of what you can say. I don't
Speaker 2: think you can get into any reason why it was
Speaker 2: burned or even safely say who burned it down.
Speaker 1: In the Iliad itself, there are no references to like
Speaker 1: well Agamenmon or menilais like they were just doing this
Speaker 1: as a pretext, like Helen was a pretext for something
Speaker 1: they wanted to do anyway, No.
Speaker 2: Because they leave, right, they take her back and they leave,
Speaker 2: they take a bunch of plunder and slaves and women.
Speaker 2: But like Troy did this as well, where it's like, oh,
Speaker 2: they want to add Troy to their empire, and it's
Speaker 2: like it's a dark aged poem. There wasn't empire building yet.
Speaker 2: You go and you get your loot and you come
Speaker 2: back and you're a big guy with the fucking war
Speaker 2: on your resume. I hate this word because it is
Speaker 2: real pedance court of shit but this is like highly anachronistic.
Speaker 2: I laughed out loud so hard in the movie theater,
Speaker 2: as did my friends. When there's a scene all the
Speaker 2: suitors are trying to string the bow and the beggar
Speaker 2: steps up to try. I think Edward Colin is like, no,
Speaker 2: you can't, and then someone from the crowd yells he's
Speaker 2: got a right to try. We were like, is that
Speaker 2: like another beggar who's like, all so trying to fuck
Speaker 2: to the queen? What is the right to try? Everyone
Speaker 2: gets a shot at the challenge the contest. It wouldn't
Speaker 2: be fair otherwise.
Speaker 1: Another great line, almost kind of winking at the audience,
Speaker 1: is someone says the line We'll be glad to have
Speaker 1: brought a bard if we run into trouble.
Speaker 2: I don't remember that line. When is that.
Speaker 1: I think it's when he goes to visit Agamemmon potentially,
Speaker 1: or when he's going with Mentor. I think they decide
Speaker 1: to bring a bard, and maybe Mentor says like, we'll
Speaker 1: be glad to have brought a bard if we run
Speaker 1: into trouble. I just love the pretext of being like, well,
Speaker 1: if you know we're in like a tight spot, we
Speaker 1: can always be like, hey, you don't want to kill us.
Speaker 1: We've got a guy who goes to the epic stories. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can entertain you. It's like the guest right thing,
Speaker 1: Like you better show up with some stories too, if
Speaker 1: you show up at someone's house.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I was also concerned too, Like, okay, so one of
Speaker 1: the very first scenes of this movie, if not it's
Speaker 1: maybe the second scene is Elliott Page getting stabbed through
Speaker 1: the chest with a spear. I was wondering if this
Speaker 1: was Christopher Nolan at first, being like, oh, yeah, I
Speaker 1: have one transactor in this movie and I'm going to
Speaker 1: stab them in the first scene. But Elliot Page actually
Speaker 1: has a pretty big role in this movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a character who's in virgils in the end.
Speaker 2: It's the character who needs to be left behind to
Speaker 2: make the ruse stick sign on, And in order to
Speaker 2: make the ruse stick sign on, is himself betrayed by
Speaker 2: the Greeks where they don't tell him about the whole trick,
Speaker 2: so he thinks that it's real, right, lies all the
Speaker 2: way down.
Speaker 1: Last question, did they really row those big ass boats?
Speaker 1: They had oars? They can make those boats move with
Speaker 1: human power?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Really?
Speaker 1: Wow? Incredible.
Speaker 2: There is a Bronze Age shipwreck, the Ulu Bu Run shipwreck,
Speaker 2: late fourteenth century BCE. It's got a sail in the model.
Speaker 2: I'm not an expert on fucking Bronze Age boats or
Speaker 2: what have you. This may be another instance of anachronism.
Speaker 2: I know, by the time you get to the Classical age,
Speaker 2: there's a mix of sail power and rowing power, like
Speaker 2: people famously remember like the Greek trirem from the classical
Speaker 2: era where they got the three rows of them. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I think they'd use yours to get around when the
Speaker 2: wind's not going your way.
Speaker 1: Okay, cool. Closing thoughts on the Odyssey.
Speaker 2: I fucking loved it. We've talked about what makes a
Speaker 2: historical adaptation good a lot on this pod because we've
Speaker 2: now done so many fucking period pieces, not just Classical
Speaker 2: but other and the most important thing is the vibes,
Speaker 2: not the accuracy. And Christopher Nolan, I think absolutely fucking
Speaker 2: crushes the vibes, at least for the version of the
Speaker 2: story that he wants to tell. Does it perfectly capture
Speaker 2: the vibes of the Homeric poem, No, but all of
Speaker 2: the vibes that he has chosen to accentuate are present
Speaker 2: in some way, shape or form in the poem. If
Speaker 2: I have a criticism, it's that his cleverness is something
Speaker 2: of a double edged sword. Sometimes. The guy's British. He
Speaker 2: went to a private boarding school called the Haileybury and
Speaker 2: Imperial Service College, where I'm sure they absolutely fucking worshiped
Speaker 2: the classics and the you know, quote unquote canon of
Speaker 2: Western literature. Tea. I'm pretty sure he's well read on
Speaker 2: Homer and the stuff around Homer.
Speaker 1: Hmm.
Speaker 2: I'm ninety nine percent sure that the inclusion of Odysseus's
Speaker 2: scar scenes are there for the people who really know
Speaker 2: Eric auerbox my misis super well, and he interweaves various
Speaker 2: retellings of Odysseus into his own composite thing, which is cool,
Speaker 2: like a little bit of that Tennyson Odysseus getting in there.
Speaker 2: But the cleverness of the double edged sword because it
Speaker 2: led him to the acid nine fall of the Bronze
Speaker 2: Age stuff that we have complained about, which is a
Speaker 2: little too didactic and expository. But yeah, check out our
Speaker 2: Troy episode for more on this, particularly what makes a
Speaker 2: bad adaptation And oh, brother art thou as well?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Ben goes through a lot of the Iliad on
Speaker 1: Troy and Oh Brother art Thou is like a two
Speaker 1: thousand's version of the Odyssey, you could say, And so
Speaker 1: we get into it in the historical setting a lot
Speaker 1: on those episodes because we didn't know. Actually we talk
Speaker 1: about this movie coming out later on Oh Brother Worarth Yeah,
Speaker 1: and just yeah, Troy, it gets a lot of the
Speaker 1: themes wrong. It's a lot about like glory and Greek nationalism,
Speaker 1: and it just like doesn't come out quite right.
Speaker 2: M hmm.
Speaker 1: Also a little pedance corner for me, remember shuffle pedance corner.
Speaker 1: You said this was our first episode, not on the
Speaker 1: two thousands. I'll have to remind you about our Soviet
Speaker 1: history episode, which we've also done on the Patreon.
Speaker 2: I said, on the main feed. But yes, on the
Speaker 2: main feed. Oh I see.
Speaker 1: Okay, Yeah, so Troy and O Brother Arthou on the
Speaker 1: Patreon go check those out, Okay, Ben, I got to
Speaker 1: ask you who you got Iliad or Odyssey? You got
Speaker 1: to keep one on the Desert Island on Calypso's Island.
Speaker 1: Which one you're going with?
Speaker 2: I am going Iliod? I'm sorry, Yeah, I find that
Speaker 2: the Telemachus bits. Really lag took me a really long
Speaker 2: time to sit down and just fucking read the Odyssey.
Speaker 2: The Iliod's great because it's an anti war work. It's
Speaker 2: about how war turns human beings into meat. I think
Speaker 2: Achilles is the first character in literature or European literature.
Speaker 2: Let's say we got a really strong care character. It
Speaker 2: is a meditation on death, which is a universal human experience.
Speaker 2: I don't know if the poetry is more beautiful, but
Speaker 2: it's got some really beautiful fucking poetry. I will say
Speaker 2: that the Odyssey has some really fucking high highs. The
Speaker 2: adventure shit, these are iconic scenes. These are some of
Speaker 2: the scenes that are most people's first interaction with Greek mythology.
Speaker 2: If you read some of these children's books like Edith
Speaker 2: Hamilton or Dolaire's Greek Myths or whatever, the stuff that's
Speaker 2: adapted for children, like, you're gonna read about the fucking cyclops, right,
Speaker 2: So it's really hard to divorce it from that. But
Speaker 2: I've spent a lot more time with the Iliad, teaching it,
Speaker 2: reading it in English and in Greek. It's one that
Speaker 2: I really like. It's about rage, It's about getting rid
Speaker 2: of rage or It's about how rage will destroy you
Speaker 2: and those around you, and it needs to be wrestled.
Speaker 1: With sweet Well, check out the Try episode for more
Speaker 1: on that. And yeah, we'll see you later. Hopefully you
Speaker 1: didn't have wax and years for this one, you know.
Speaker 1: Tie me to the mast while I listen or remember shuffle.
Speaker 2: As always, Please like, subscribe, write us a comment, call
Speaker 2: me out if I got something wrong. I don't believe
Speaker 2: in pure credentialism. It's been a while since I've been
Speaker 2: in grad school. I've been on the Calypso's island of
Speaker 2: the real world, not reading ancient Greek anymore. So non
Speaker 2: zero chance I got something wrong. Call me out respectfully
Speaker 2: and check out our Patreon. We got shit, man. We
Speaker 2: must be at sixteen episodes there now, there's some great stuff,
Speaker 2: including some Homer stuff there.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, see you later.
Speaker 2: Touch out all