Oi. The workdays this week sucked, but outside of work it’s been good, the past weekend was fantastic, and this weekend is scheduled to be a couple of days of chillaxing.
Presently reading London Falling by Paul Cornell, which might not have been the best choice. Hopefully, I’ll watch Spider-Man this weekend, too. Also! The Ninth Jedi episodes of Star Wars: Visions are on YouTube for free right now, to promote their full series on their streaming services. I’ve only seen the first one, back when it came out, which I thought was pretty good.
Odyssey Discourse
We talked a little about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey last week, and hopefully I’ll have an actual review of the movie out soonish. But there’s something downright bizarre going on in conversations about the movie. Insane discourse isn’t precisely new, especially when it comes to big budget Hollywood movies; however, in this case, it’s gotten weird. Maybe it’s because Homer’s epic is such a huge part of the cultural literacy of our civilization? Or something?
For instance, Emily Wilson, the Classics professor who translated the edition that Nolan used for reference, has written not one, but several pieces and posts declaring war on Christopher Nolan. She didn’t just say it was a bad adaptation, she also heavily implies that Nolan is an incompetent filmmaker and a failure of a storyteller. Which is, uh, certainly a take on an award-winning, critically-acclaimed director.
You also have a bunch of people inclined not to like the film to begin with taking this as evidence that it sucks. Some of these people have issue with a woman daring to translate the epic–there was a post going around Tumblr, for instance, suggesting Wilson was incapable of telling the story and instead made it into a modern feminist tract. But she says the movie sucks? Must be right! There’s also one blogger I half fell away from about a year ago, and for about a week in unrelated posts would show that she’d cherry-picked quotes from negative reviews to justify her opinion on the movie.
It’s not even like all classicists hate this movie, either. There are plenty that had good and bad things to say about it.
Film has long been used as a canvas to retell older stories, even from the early days of human civilization (The Ten Commandments, anyone?). It’s far from unheard of that people take issue when a story, even an ancient one, is adapted with several notable liberties. I remember almost ten years after its release, hearing a professor of Old English deriding the 2007 Beowulf as an inaccurate bit of tripe–though that case bothered me, because the point of that movie is that Beowulf is an unreliable narrator of his adventures. But really, no one seemed to raise too much of a fuss about it, even though it rewrites the hero of the earliest English epic into a liar prone to giving into his base lusts over helping people.
Likewise, a few years ago, there was the movie The Green Knight, which is a pretty darn weird take on the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. That story takes the premise to make a really weird, trippy movie, where the only real virtue is courage, and the entire point is that Gawain needs to learn to face his fears. The actual main test for Gawain is turned into one of many, and significantly shortened.
Did I hear a massive outcry from medievalists about this? About people who supposedly are so invested about the fate of Western Civilization? Nope.
And then there was the Netflix series Kaos, a story about Greek mythology in modern day. I haven’t seen it, but as far as I can tell, it’s mostly using Greek mythology to do a story about how religion is bad. And yet at least one classicist declared it the best adaptation of Greek mythology she’d ever seen.
I guess my question is this: what is going on here? Like, the first instinct is that you have a lot of reactionary weirdos who make their career out of making people angry on the Internet, except I’m seeing people who, as far as I can tell, are earnestly trying to say something worthwhile making utter fools of themselves. Emily Wilson’s review, for instance, complains that there are no sex scenes and the food doesn’t look good, and seems baffled that someone would adapt the story in such a way to make a point about modern society.
And as has been pointed out more than once–Wilson has been turned into the face of the Classics, a field which several universities are killing funding for (if not outright shutting down those departments), so coming across as excessively hostile is not a great strategy! Though Wilson, teaching in a private, Ivy League university, is unlikely to personally face any consequences for that.
What is happening? Why are people freaking out so strangely? Why are we acting like this is the only adaptation of the Odyssey out there, and its failings or achievements are judgments of our culture in a way that no other adaptation of classical literature has been?
What is wrong with these people? Why have they gone insane?
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