Why So Serious?

We are at peak Nolan moroseness

If you still haven’t gone out to see The Odyssey, well . . . are you by any chance a hermit? I ask because apparently this movie has become as impossible to avoid as death and taxes. I saw it and, despite a recent spate of contrarian criticism, I found it to be a wonderful piece of middlebrow entertainment with a (mostly) coherent message that fits snugly into the sentiments of our era without being too preachy about it. Compared to other summertime blockbusters, this makes Nolan’s Odyssey something of an art film. Which it kind of is. After all, that’s Nolan’s whole schtick to begin with, the seamless interweaving of the ligature of artistic cinema into the vessel of raw entertainment. In The Odyssey, he performs his schtick with grace and intelligence.

Earlier this year, however, when I first saw the trailer, I was predictably nonplussed: another summertime blockbuster sporting big action and insipid plots vying for my attention and dollars, no thank you. I say “predictably” because I am generally a rather fatigued individual when it comes to marketing, hype and other elements of the vast portion of the attention economy traditionally known as the culture industry. Nolan being a bigtime Hollywood director is part and parcel of the giant, sedulous machine that continually vies for, and often wins, our attention.

After several months away from any engagement with Mr. Nolan and his new enterprise—along with some yearning for more reading time as I would glance at the spine of my Fagles translation of the Homeric epic on my bookshelf—I was ripe for the suits in Hollywood to reel in another fish in the form of me. The glowing reviews came in and, being a more than tepid appreciator of Nolan’s corpus, I decided to drop my skepticism and take a plunge into the Bronze Age Mediterranean for three hours.

And I do not regret it.

I won’t go on any more than I already have about this or that about the film as I’m sure you’ve either a) already seen it or b) aren’t in any position to bear hearing one more accolade. Chances are that, when it comes to whether or not you should see it, you either don’t need any convincing or you’re dead set against it. So, whether or not you’re part of the a) or the b) category, I simply want to share with you a particularly Gen X sentiment that I think is getting lost in the unending hoopla.

A good deal of that noise has to do with one Emily Wilson, her modern translation of The Odyssey and her review of the film itself in The London Review of Books. Suffice it to say it was not part of the cadre of incandescent criticism Nolan’s latest has been receiving. She threw tomatoes, not flowers. This is striking given that Nolan used her translation to devise the screenplay and the success of the film has subsequently catapulted the British classicist to ancillary fame. I can imagine Nolan, perplexed about all the latter-day opposition to his treatment of the epic, feeling the shaft of the blade from his very own muse: “Et tu, Brute?”

Wilson’s translation is part of that breed of reexamination of the classics that seeks to blow dust off the tome. Her translation—which, full disclosure, I’ve only sampled—translates Homer’s verse into a colloquial patter that is direct, unadorned and elemental. I am not a supporter of this type of scholarship. Personally, I chafe when a prince from an ancient society calls his queenly mother, “Mom.” I see the point of this kind of reimagining of the affect and syntax of ancient dialogue and ancient narration, but I think it destroys more than it helps. Antiquity is too strange to our modern sentimentalities to sustain such familiarization. It feels like an imposition and a kind of scholastic graffiti. We learn from the classics because of our shared humanity across a cultural and historical chasm. Remove that chasm and the import of the lesson vanishes.

Emily Wilson’s review of the movie was as controversial as her translation. And it has spawned a micro-genre of reviews of her review which, technically, this very Substack article you are currently reading is an example of (along with being yet another stone placed on the gigantic cairn of summertime Odyssey mania—yes, I know, and I am sorry). Wilson’s line of attack borrowed from another review that preceded hers which the magazine Jacobin published a mere week or so prior: that review, written by the notorious Nolan hater Eileen Jones, made a lot of hay about the moroseness of this interpretation of the Odyssey and how it manipulates the true nature of the poem’s hero and era beyond recognition. Wilson’s subsequent takedown elaborates on this idea, claiming that it obliterates the real value of the Odyssey tale as a whole. Rich words coming from someone whose translation of The Odyssey almost reads like a young adult novel!

Ok, let’s face it: Matt Damon’s performance as the titular hero of the movie is about as moving as egg yolk coagulation at the bottom of this morning’s breakfast dish. He might have gotten carried away with Nolan’s note about “less is more.” Throughout the entire movie he seems to need an up-dose of his Zoloft prescription. It is jarring, tragic and, at certain points, unintentionally comical, to have been given the feast of this new film, with all of its kinetic thrills and fascinating mysteries, only to be guided through the whole affair by a man who sounds like he’s attending his first AA meeting.

Yet, we never went to a Nolan film for the laughs, nor for the dialogue, for that matter, and The Odyssey, with its wooden, declamatory lines, is no exception. You actually have to give it to a genius like Nolan that he so willfully dispenses with even trying to do anything about the hyper-severity of his films and the artificiality of the words he puts into his characters’ mouths. He has his eyes set on another prize and, as far as I am concerned, he wins it.

You see, Nolan is a fellow Gen X-er, and one of the many things that most people don’t understand about the Gen X mentality is its disaffection, cynicism and fatigue. While we were kids we were watching cheesy, ridiculous and incompetent syndicated programs from the 60s and the 70s. All you would have had to do was turn on the tube after you got back from school every day and, within a year, you would have seen the entire series of the original Batman TV show. You know, the one that invented the lexicon of “BAM!” and “KAPOW!” At the same time, there was a whole industry shelling out inventions of brand new genres at scale. The buddy crime-comedy, the sci-fi and fantasy flick, the action-adventure blockbuster. But many of these were rated R, which, back in ‘85, was sometimes a problem if you hadn’t convinced your parent to accompany you to the theater. The experience was unnerving: at home on the television, culture appeared like one big joke while on the screen it was oracular. TV audiences today can never know the curious thrill of seeing beloved characters from a TV series that was broadcast in a 4:3 aspect ratio suddenly vivified on a gigantic screen in 16:9. The effect is of being brought into deeper realms of their psyches than had previously been possible. That was the divide between TV and film, a divide which today has been collapsed as streaming cinematizes TV and makes film itself secondary.

We Gen X-ers recognize what Nolan is doing in ways that Boomers and Millennials, who were not exposed to the cognitive dissonance of being children during the 80s, simply cannot. The obsession with seriousness which Nolan grants his heroes, from his Batman to his Odysseus, is an effort to accomplish a task whose mandate was first clarified back when he was a child and having to contend with the insufficiency and kitschiness of the culture industry, even as its newer offerings hinted at unexplored potential. People forget that the die had already been cast by the time Nolan’s Batman Begins changed the playbook for superhero extrapolation: it may seem unbelievable now, but when Tim Burton came out with his Michael Keaton Batman in 1989, word on the street was that Batman had been turned into a serious man. I remember once driving on a boulevard somewhere in Trenton, New Jersey and there was a guy who had somehow souped up his Cadillac to look like the chintzy original Batmobile and was costumed in the innovative Burton Batman suit driving past me, expressionless. At that moment, I knew he was one of us, a man caught between two pop cultural sensibilities. He probably could not afford to make his vehicle look like Burton’s Batmobile but he’d found a way to invest in the suit and that disconnect between two distinct versions of a well-known intellectual property sums up the Gen X experience growing up. It was an indecisive time between pop-cultural hegemonies.

The recent adaptations of the Dune series, along with a slew of other intellectual properties, illustrate this notion even more. There is an attempt on the part of Gen X auteurs to compensate for a lost childhood during which so much potential for deep and dark psychological complexity was simply lost to the jejune antics of Boomer suits signing off on deals while drinking too many martinis during lunch. We wanted something serious because we knew that something serious lurked inside of these properties. And now, thirty to forty years later, we have the efflorescence of that yearning for depth: a spate of sci-fi/fantasy/action-adventure flicks motioning towards Shakespeare. Just compare the way the villain in Villeneuve’s Dune movies, Baron Harkonnen, is portrayed between David Lynch’s (boomer) rendition of a buffoonish psychopath with an acne problem and Villeneuve’s (Gen X) version of a cold, Godfather-like stoic. Having read the Dune books I can tell you that Lynch’s is closer to Frank Herbert’s original creation. But that’s not really the point, is it?

And that is the real problem with Emily Wilson’s review of Nolan’s The Odyssey. Setting aside the fact that she is a classicist and not a film critic—and this is obvious reading her review of the movie—Wilson commits an error which you don’t need to be a film critic to avoid making: she forgets that cinema is by nature an interpretive genre. Perhaps she is too close to the source material, having lovingly translated the epic only ten years ago. But her bemoaning of the creation of a film version of The Odyssey so bereft of wonder and gods and magic and one so cast in gray misses the very point of a movie taking an original text as its source material in the first place. When people say that “the book was better than the movie” they are also committing this error, as though the two consumptions of media, involving the committal of disparate faculties, can in any way be compared by the same metric. Since when was a movie supposed to be so loyal? People get caught up in the inherent vivification that accompanies sitting through a film, with its real humans using their voices and moving around right in front of your eyes. But just because a film director has interceded on the powers of imagination which occur when one is reading, by animating the drama with real live sets, doesn’t mean that this expectation of fealty to the original text is warranted. There is a host of other mitigating factors that go into the making of a film, from the politics of synchronous, mass release to the gigantic budgets to the injunction to entertain, that vitiate against the expectation that a film must express the status quo of any given audience’s understanding of an intellectual property. Somehow, Wilson, in her review, forgot about this essential fact about filmmaking in general and that is unfortunate.

I will close by saying that I think it is high time we Gen X-ers realize that the era of Shakespeare-ization of the blockbuster needs to come to a close. Nolan’s version of The Odyssey is a forward-moving, thrilling and extremely serious version of the ancient tale of a hero on his way home through troubled waters. The original Homeric text is to Nolan’s version of the epic poem what Lynch’s Harkonnen is to Villeneuve’s, a much more colorful and dynamic story that does not so neatly express one big idea. Nolan should be praised for his powers of distillation. But we have now savored that particular brew many, many times. We are now at peak Nolan fever and at peak self-seriousness. It’s been a great run of turning familiar intellectual properties into dark journeys into the shadow side of the soul. How about we now start expanding our horizons and rediscover some of that good ol’ naivete? Last night, I watched Written on the Wind, a mid-fifties Sirk melodrama full of insane, campy, over-the-top antics that somehow speak volumes about our naked appetites and propensity towards decadence and it was amazing. More of that please.