One of the funniest stories last week was Classics professor and translator Emily Wilson’s scathing critique of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Nolan had actually cited Wilson and her Odyssey translation as important inspirations for his adapted script. Make no mistake, Wilson’s critique was mostly about the script and how Nolan adapted the story to suit his own agenda, although it’s clear that Wilson didn’t really care for the direction either. As I wrote when Joyce Carol Oates chimed in on Wilson’s critique, I love the whole controversy, and I love that Wilson is using Nolan’s film to have a larger conversation about what The Odyssey (the real text) is actually about. Well, Wilson is still critiquing. She’s written a new piece for the Atlantic about how Nolan’s script hinges around “Zeus’s law” and how the Trojan horse was the ultimate betrayal of Zeus’s law. Wilson pointed out the obvious contradiction:

Emily Wilson, the author whose 2017 translation of “The Odyssey” was an influence for Christopher Nolan during his own adaptation process, is doubling down in her critiques of the director’s blockbuster epic. In an op-ed written for The Atlantic, Wilson called out Nolan’s “Odyssey” for being “emotionally empty.” She previously torched the movie in a review published by the London Review of Books in which she called Nolan’s screenplay “abysmal” and added: “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”

In her op-ed for the Atlantic, Wilson explains how one of her big issues with Nolan’s movie is its approach to “Zeus’ law.” The phrase is repeated numerous times by characters in the movie and is a variation of the Golden Rule: “We must host beggars and strangers kindly, to ‘do as we would be done by,’ and because they could be gods in disguise.” Nolan’s movie reckons with how Odysseus (Matt Damon) breaks Zeus’ law by coming up with the plan for the Trojan Horse and executing it in an attempt to sack the city of Troy through a deception. But Wilson is not sold on Nolan’s interpretation here.

As Wilson explains: “The horse is presented as the ultimate violation of the law of Zeus, because it entails wielding a weapon of mass destruction disguised as a gift… The horse is presented as breaking ‘civilization’ because it represents the moment when the good guy, Odysseus, echoes the behavior of the bad guy by being a deceitful, ungrateful guest. But the film does not explain what ‘hospitality’ has to do with a narrative situation in which the Greeks have been besieging Troy for 10 years already [which Nolan’s movie does not depict]; the Trojans are not their hosts but their enemies in war. If the war is bad, it is nonsensical to suggest that the most important turning point is the use of the horse rather than Agamemnon’s choice to invade Troy in the first place and Odysseus’s choice to yield to the empire’s demands. The visually impressive spectacle of the horse on a stunning stretch of pristine beach contributes to the narrative muddle: The Greeks have supposedly been encamped there for the past decade, yet it shows no sign of human habitation.”

According to Wilson, Nolan’s “Odyssey” is “not interested in the social or psychological questions of how people deceive and are deceived.” She takes issue with the dissonance between the director’s script and his direction. The screenplay “grandly insists on the importance of human kindness, while the camera shows us an entirely different set of values,” she argues, explaining that Nolan’s direction is mostly concerned with the “mechanical challenge of moving objects through space,” be it the Trojan Horse or ships or more.

“What matters cinematically are the logistics: the rolling of the horse uphill and the claustrophobic, waterlogged interior. Once the ambush of the Trojans begins, the camera lingers repeatedly not on the human actors but on the enflamed, toppling buildings and the great gates of the city, whose slow-moving mechanism is observed at great length,” Wilson writes. “The script tells us loudly that people matter, but the camera shows us that what matters is the mechanical challenge of moving objects through space.”

“Nolan’s Odyssey is itself a kind of Trojan horse,” she continued. “The script grandly insists on the importance of human kindness, while the camera shows us an entirely different set of values. In these times of hatred and misinformation, we need more than the ‘apparent magic’ of deceptive images. We need art that is truthful about the costs and the necessity of compassion, and that recognizes that a sense of spiritual superiority may not protect us from lies. These lessons are legible in Homer and Virgil, but are elided by Nolan’s visually stunning, emotionally empty film.”

[From Variety]

Yeah, I’m sorry but Wilson really got his ass. Nolan is absolutely obsessed with “moving objects through space,” and not so obsessed with morally ambiguous men and women making decisions for complicated reasons. This is important too: “If the war is bad, it is nonsensical to suggest that the most important turning point is the use of the horse rather than Agamemnon’s choice to invade Troy in the first place and Odysseus’s choice to yield to the empire’s demands.” Exactly!! While The Odyssey is not specifically about the ten-year Trojan War, Wilson’s argument is that the movie treats the horse like it was the thing which broke “Zeus’s law” – Wilson is saying that the war itself was the original sin. Although one could absolutely argue that the real original sin was Paris “abducting” Helen (which was surely the ultimate violation of Zeus’s law??). Anyway, I’m totally fine with Professor Wilson continuing to use this film as an excuse to educate people on what the actual Greek myths are actually about.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images. Poster courtesy of ‘The Odyssey’.