Please help me recoup my losses from these IMAX tickets. Please!
Last night, I had the privilege of viewing The Odyssey the way it was meant to be viewed: on the largest IMAX screen in the country, with merlot, a cup of Dippin’ Dots, and three friends. Very traditional. I discovered today that I could have sold these $30 tickets for something like $4,000. It’s all getting to such a point, and I wonder how much longer I can endure.
Pouring my canned wine into a cup, expectations were high. I’d managed to avoid the particulars of “the discourse,” but total abstinence was basically impossible. Questions abounded. Is The Odyssey woke? Based? Unfaithful to the source material? Does it need to be faithful to the source material? Will Odysseus have a Bisexual Moment™? Will Penelope look into the camera and say, “and women too, of course”? Does Ithaca run on Dunkin’?
I was looking forward to receiving the answers to these questions and more from the huge screen before me. Yes. An epic must be huge. I’m deeply informed on this subject by the late Michael Sugrue’s excellent lecture on Gilgamesh, where he argues that an epic is like a culture’s RAM, encoding its values and norms into something that can be passed down.
The epic is a conservative medium. Epics justify the morals and attitudes of the elites to hoi polloi. “There are no revolutionary epics,” Sugrue says. The most interesting thing a modern take on an ancient epic can do is update it. Affirm our contemporary culture. In a way, it’s also the most faithful thing it can do. Beyond costuming, beyond fidelity to dialogue, constructing and reinforcing a collective identity honors the form.
It can’t accomplish this by lecturing, by sitting us down and hectoring us (sorry, that’s The Iliad) into having “good values.” Culture. Water to fish. We’re liable to forget we hold certain values in the first place. What we do know is that it feels good when those values are affirmed. The pleasure of a harmonious order. The pleasure in music. Poetry.
The prestige of antiquity tends to obscure The Odyssey’s capacity as vulgar entertainment. Heroic narratives have very often been just that. Homer gives us a Bronze-Age hero. I know where to find him. What I wanted from Nolan’s adaptation was a crowd-pleasing blockbuster that positively articulated what a hero looks like in the WFH age. Show us a great man who embodies the best in us. Test him against nature, against his fellow man, against the gods, against emails!
This is what I hoped for as I shoveled another spoonful of cryogenically-frozen “ice cream” pellets down my gullet.
Did Nolan deliver?