The Odyssey is a sequel to Oppenheimer

 

 

 Jeffrey St. Clair > 

A genocide has taken place. A city has been burnt to the ground by an invading force. All of its men have been killed, even the boys. Its women have been raped. Some of them have been taken back in cages as property of the killers. A man is adrift on a makeshift raft in the Mediterranean, fleeing the war zone, a refuge of sorts, looking for a homeland. Who is this man? Where is he going? What does he want?

He’s a killer. He’s a conman. He is a liar, a thief, a plunderer. He’s a rapist, an adulterer, a child killer, and a blasphemer. He’s committed genocide. He’s a head case. He’s haunted by the past. Wracked by the things he’s done and the travails he’s endured trying to get home, if home is really where he wants to get. He’s the earliest case of PTSD in literature. He’s Odysseus!

These are the elements of a story that speaks across the ages to our own moment of genocide, plunder, tyranny, exile and refugees. But Nolan’s film doesn’t. In fact, it’s hard to say what Nolan’s film does and why he wanted to make a film called “The Odyssey” and not, say, another space opera. He gets so much wrong about the poem that you wonder why he was attracted to the story in the first place. It’s the ultimate act of hubris to rewrite Homer, which is fine, if you’ve got the chops. James Joyce did it, but Nolan is not Joyce, even in his own limited medium of film. He’s not even the Coen Brothers.

Joyce was a master of wordplay. But there’s little imageplay in Nolan’s film; the visual allusions are obvious and trite.  Nolan’s Odyssey won’t deepen in meaning on repeated viewings. It is how it looks on the surface. In other words, it’s superficial. Joyce was an early cineaste. He opened and ran one of the first movie theaters in Dublin, showing films such as the pre-surrealist The Bewitched Castle and the Tragic Story of Beatrice Cenci, which often aroused the consternation and fury of conservative Catholics who saw themselves as the guardians of Irish morality. Would Joyce have wasted three hours of the screen time at Cinematograph Volta on Nolan’s tendentious flick or played the slapstick films that he and his pal Samuel Beckett adored, such as The Deviled Crab, the Scylla  of the silent film era? The answer is self-evident.

Nolan says he was only able to make the Odyssey because of the huge box office returns from his previous film, Oppenheimer. And in a sense, the Odyssey is the perfect sequel to Oppenheimer.

The Odyssey is a sequel, in many ways, to Nolan’s previous film, Oppenheimer, a heroic treatment of the man who designed the atom bomb. Here is the story of genocider, turned into a hero, because of his ceaseless determination to find his way home. But how ceaseless was Odysseus’s desire for home, really?

What happens after the bomb goes off? What happens after the mass killing?  Odysseus gets lost. He gets lost in his own mind. Is he consumed by guilt or his own hubris? Hubris was a big thing for the Greeks. All their heroes seemed to have it and nearly all were undone by it. It was hubris that led Odysseus to set an uncharted course home to Ithaka. It was hubris that prompted him to shoot a parting arrow at Polyphemus, enraging his father Poseidon.  It was hubris that sent him to the land of the Lotus Eaters. It was hubris that made him raid the Cicones, destroy their city, commit genocidal slaughter again, steal and rape the women. It was hubris that made him open the bag of winds. Hubris that made him try to loot the land of the Laestrygonians (who appear briefly in Nolan’s film in shiny armor like giant versions of the Arthurian knights in Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac), with fatal consequences for his crew. And on and on.

In his much too brief life, Rainer Werner Fassbinder made 44 films, including some of the best in the history of cinema. The combined cost of all those films was less than the cost of Christopher Nolan’s $250 million production of The Odyssey. In fact, you could add the cost of all 40 of Jean Renoir’s films to Fassbinder’s and still have enough left over for Agnès Varda to have made a film or two. Varda could have made a film of the Odyssey for a few dollars, relatively speaking, which would have mined the misogyny of the Greek heroes, including the main man, and celebrated the retribution of the women they’ve abused and betrayed. Because Nolan portrays Odysseus as a hero, longing to return home to his wife, the faithful Penelope, he elides Odysseus’s great sin, an act as dark and depraved as anything an ISIS fighter or US GI at My Lai did. He’s slaughtered the innocent. He’s tricked them into sacrificial deaths.

 COUNTERPUNCH