As students go back “toward school with heavy looks,” there is likely some renewed conversation with Great Books teachers around the summer blockbuster of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey.
I know. Everyone’s had their say. A good survey of the disparity responses to the film appears in Part I of Annie Crawford’s insightful series on the Logres Institute Substack. But above the noise of opinions perhaps the most accurate and compelling response came from Dr. Martin Shaw, when he shook his grey beard and said, “They’d robbed it of its essential pagan-ness.” In an interview with Jonathan Pageau, Shaw went on to explain, why, for instance, this is a “strange thing for a Christian to say.”
I'd love Odysseus to have a conversion experience on the beach, but it's not in the story. And what is in the story is humor, sex, wonderful language, and a world ensouled with gods and goddesses and a great kind of tragic [and] beautiful story about nostos—about getting home. And so the moment the [opening] credit said, “In a time of apparent magic,” I just thought, “Oh, we've had it. We've had it already. We've moved from a kind of shamanic encounter with a great myth into sort of Vegas trickery.”
The bad script notwithstanding, Shaw exposed what I think is its most fatal flaw: “I didn’t care. I just didn’t care about anybody. I didn’t weep. And for me, as somebody that loves that story dearly.” He summed it up as, “Visually sumptuous, emotionally vacuous.”
His overall critique is centered on two concerns: (1) the substance of the story and its proper meaning in light of the Western tradition of the great myths, and (2) the reception and effect it produces in relation to being human. But notice that the former is parent of the latter. Insofar as Nolan’s film was robbed of its “essential pagan-ness,” it was also “emotionally vacuous,” enough to not care. It was—like so much of pop-culture desiderata—forgettable. And the real Homer is anything but forgettable. (And for all you deconstructionists, whose knowing smiles are already stretching across your faces, yes, there was a real Homer.)
As to Nolan’s changing of the story—the altering of characters, the strange choice in casting, the terrible lines of dialogue, the significant omissions—Peter Leithart suggests it’s not so bad a sin as it seems, that “Hollywood didn’t invent Homeric revisionism.” Those indignant with the Nolan’s changes “take Homer far more seriously than the classical tradition they claim to champion.” Leithart points out some typical examples: Virgil, Dante, Tennyson, Auden, and others take liberties with the Homeric elements—the structure of the story, the heroic nature of Odysseus himself, the integrity of certain characters. Leithart argues, “Shakespeare is the greatest offender.” He cites Troilus and Cressida, calling it “a burlesque on a popular medieval tale of Troy.” He argues,
Long before Christopher Nolan, “woke” Will Shakespeare deconstructed one of Western civilization’s founding stories. But that’s what “the classics” do: plunder, rewrite, subvert, and twist earlier classics. … The great writers of the Western tradition don’t offer solemn homage to impeccable predecessors. Western literature is more like a transcript of the struggle to exorcise the ghost of Homeric influence.
It’s a compelling argument, and stated forcefully in clever Leithartian prose. But I think he might be missing something. Modern attempts of retelling the old stories seem doomed to always get it wrong. If there is a tradition in Western art and literature of plundering and rewriting Homer, then Nolan seems outside of it. He misses the mark not merely because he puts a “woke” spin on things (as bad as that may be) but because he fails to tell a good and human story. This is what Martin Shaw meant when he said the film had been robbed of its “essential pagan-ness.” It couldn’t rise to the dignity of paganism. Dignity of paganism? Yes. Lewis (and Chesterton before him) had been saying it for years, that the only hope for real Christian conversion of a people living in a post-Christian secular age is to become pagan first.
In his essay “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans,”1 C. S. Lewis writes, “It looks to me, neighbours, as though we shall have to set about becoming true Pagans if only as a preliminary to becoming Christians.” Were it not from the mouth of Lewis, such a statement would normally cause the modern evangelical to break out in hives. What can he possibly mean? Lewis answers,
I don't mean that we should begin leaving little bits of bread under the tree at the end of the garden as an offering to the Dryad. I don't mean that we should dance to Dionysus across Hampstead Heath (though perhaps a little more solemn or ecstatic gaiety and a little less commercialised “amusement” might make our holidays better than they now are). I don't even mean (though I do very much wish) that we should recover that sympathy with nature, that religious attitude to the family, and that appetite for beauty which the better Pagans had. Perhaps what I do mean is best put like this.
If the modern post-Christian view is wrong—and every day I find it harder to think it right—then there are three kinds of people in the world. (1) Those who are sick and don’t know it (the post-Christians). (2) Those who are sick and know it (Pagans). (3) Those who have found the cure. And if you start in the first class you must go through the second to reach the third. For (in a sense) all that Christianity adds to Paganism is the cure. It confirms the old belief that in this universe we are up against Living Power: that there is a real Right and that we have failed to obey it: that existence is beautiful and terrifying. It adds a wonder of which Paganism had not distinctly heard—that the Mighty One has come down to help us, to remove our guilt, to reconcile us.
All of the world (even in Japan, even in Russia) men and women will meet on December 25th to do what is a very old-fashioned and, if you like, a very Pagan thing—to sing and feast because a God has been born. You are uncertain whether it is more than a myth. Well if it is, then our last hope is gone. But is the opposite explanation not worth trying?
Who knows but that here, and here alone, lies your way back not only to Heaven, but to Earth too, and to the great human family whose oldest hopes are confirmed by this story that does not die?
This is perhaps what Leithart misses. Nolan’s film isn’t merely rewriting The Odyssey, as other classics have done. It doesn’t participate in the great human family, of which Homer is a grandfather. Change comes in a few different forms. There is a kind of change that improves or enhances. And there is a change that disorders. The former is ordered to God’s purposes for created things to go from strength to strength. The latter is ordered towards disintegration and chaos. This is what separates one revision from another.
Those Homeric revisions of the medieval tradition rewrite Homer in a way that still manages to honor the poet-father, preserving some integrity of his meaning in text and character. To Leithart’s point, it’s important to remember that Shakespeare wasn’t merely having fun with Homer’s heroism; he was also responding to Chaucer’s own Troilus and Chriseyde and the ideal of courtly love. Even if the result was a lesser tragedy than that of Hamlet or King Lear, the writing alone was good enough to be remembered, as Samuel Johnson notes—good enough for C. S. Lewis to quote in one of his letters.
The changes of Nolan, however, are typical of modern retellings. They alter without being good enough to remember. After all the table reads, the treatment meetings, the committee changes, the talent and casting notes—the result is a bad script and a weak and secularized film version of what is one of the greatest pagan stories. Shaw was right: “Visually sumptuous, emotionally vacuous.”
Published in Strand Magazine, December of 1946.
