132: Sleep with One Eye Open

This week we are tackling The Odyssey, both the ancient Greek epic and the recent adaptation directed by Christopher Nolan. We go over the context of the poem's composition and dissemination, its significance to the Greeks, and give a broad outline of the major incidents in the poem. Fear not, Zeus's Law is mentioned!

We discuss how the film compresses the twenty-four book epic into a three hour movie, as well as Nolan's use of Vergil's Aeneid as a kind of narrative supplement. We also touch on Emily Wilson's review of the film in the London Review of Books and consider how profoundly stupid the "Emily Wilson is Woke" reading of her translations has always been, even while taking some issue with her critique of Nolan. 

Lastly we consider how Nolan superimposes contemporary historical understandings of the Bronze Age Collapse onto a narrative set in the period when that collapse was occurring, and how this leads to some of the film's most unsatisfying, clunkiest dialogue. 

Emily Wilson's Review of Nolan's The Odyssey in LRB

Our Episode on the Ancient Greek Afterlife

Our Episode on The Bronze Age Collapse

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:23

All right, everybody, welcome back. This is the end of the world with Michael and Stu. I'm Michael. And I'm Stu, and today we are talking about Homer's Odyssey. That's right. It's been a summer of Odyssey Mania. Uh quite almost equivalent to Barbenheimer Mania that we saw in 2023. A little different though, because this is uh is more of a standalone uh well, I mean it's it's about one movie, right? Yeah. Although now we have a new contender has entered the field and has just demolished the box office this past week. Which is uh Spider-Man, brand new day, the fourth installment in the Tom Holland, who also is in the Odyssey.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

What should we call the fourth Spider-Man?

SPEAKER_00 1:12

How about brand new day? Well, Michael, if you were not a complete ignoramus, you would know that this is an allusion to a very famous 2000s era Spider-Man uh storyline. Yeah, yeah, where his I apologize to all the man heads.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:30

Yes, those those lovers of men, if you will. In any case, uh yeah, I saw I saw I had a funny thing where I saw the Odyssey. Is it doing better than the Odyssey? Oh, it's demolished. It made $130 million on its opening weekend. That's it. Yeah. It's the second highest grossing film ever on opening weekend. What?

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Yeah. You know, I haven't seen a minute of any of the Spider-Man's, including who was the first one? Toby Maguire.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

Right, right. Well, I mean, you should be executed at once. Look, some of us grew up with man, all right, and he's been an important part of our lives and is still an important part of our lives.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

In fact, I am in this thing, he got bit by a spider, a radioactive spider.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

I'm in fact in possession, Michael, of that very comic book where that happens in this apartment right now.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Yeah. And then he just becomes the man version.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Yeah. He has us he gains the proportional strength and agility of an arachnid, if you must know.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Okay. And he can make webs, I assume?

SPEAKER_00 2:31

No, he has to do that artificially. Although the new film deals with this as the spider DNA becomes more active, he starts to generate biological webs.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Well, then I should watch it to get all of my pressing questions answered.

SPEAKER_00 2:44

I'm afraid so, yeah. Uh, I thought you'd be more impressed that I own Amazing Fantasy XV, but no, you're not. I don't, I can't believe it. It means it means nothing to you. Steve Ditko is just his name is Mud, as far as you're concerned. All right. Sure. But back to the Odyssey. Uh, we're not going to focus so much on the movie. I mean, we'll talk about the movie a bit, but we're not going to do like a segment-by-segment plot breakdown of the film as we do sometimes with these things. I thought because I have a long history, a long and illustrious history.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

So that's an epic history.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

An epic history. So so epic that I was in fact uh fired silently from that job after 12 years, but uh it's just the way it goes in uh adjunct uh employment. Beginning your own uh Odyssey of sorts? Yeah, to several different colleges since then, but we're still doing it. The dream is not over yet. Um but yeah, for for about 10 years or a little more, I taught the Odyssey uh at least once a year, if not to multiple sections of students as part of my ancient literature syllabus I offered at John Jay. Uh, I would kind of mix it up. One semester I'd do the Iliad, the next semester I'd do the Odyssey. Uh it would always be the second big work we tackled. That is, that tends to be the mix, right? Yeah, well, if you're gonna include a Greek epic, it's gonna be one or the other. It's never gonna be both, right? Because that would just be a little samey. 48 books of uh Greek epic, probably a little too much. But I would always do Gilgamesh first because it's the oldest uh surviving epic poem. Then I would do the Odyssey or the Iliad. I have a slight preference for the Odyssey over the Iliad, I must say. Um, and then I would always finish the epic segment with uh Virgil's Aeneid, which is just unstoppably good. Um better than Iliad and the Odyssey. And in fact, is the Iliad and the Odyssey put together in half as many books as either.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

Oh, finally got an editor.

SPEAKER_00 4:43

Well, yeah, Virgil's a great genius of of compression. His lines are so compact and dense and powerful. Great, one of my great heroes, Virgil. But anyway, as I'm sure he is for many. But um so what do you know about the Odyssey? You you've read the Odyssey, you told me, but you don't remember you don't remember much of it.

SPEAKER_01 5:04

When it was given when it was given to me as an assignment, basically.

SPEAKER_00 5:08

Sure, but uh you don't have any no famous uh episodes.

SPEAKER_01 5:12

I I I remember things like cunning, right? Like that was always that was always a popular essay topic.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

What a British soccer announcer might refer to as Guile.

SPEAKER_01 5:22

Yes. Oh my yes, exactly. In fact, it's surprising that I believe we went through the whole World Cup despite the coming of the movie and made it through without a commentator actually invoking Odysseus, which I assumed would happen many times throughout the tournament, but alas.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

Yeah, and I felt like Guile was greatly underused as a descriptor of touches. I feel like Venom and Guile are on the way out. Yeah. Anyway, so you don't have much memory of the Odyssey, but Odysseus is one of our most ancient heroes, you know, that who uh writing about whom survives. And the Iliad and the Odyssey are in a sense the closest equivalent to like the Bible of the ancient Greeks.

SPEAKER_02 6:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 6:06

We touched on this a little bit, I think, when we did our Greek afterlife episode. And the other relevant episode we've done is the Bronze Age Collapse episode, which uh I'll put links to both of those in the show notes. Bronze Age Collapse is episode 23. So yeah, within the first uh six months of the show or so. And uh a good episode. I I I went back and looked at the transcript.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

Um leaps off the page.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

Oh, yeah, screams right, screams like Homer's poems themselves. So the story of Odysseus in the poem is a little different than the one we get in the movie. In the poem, he's much more concerned with Kleos, which is to say fame. He was he's really into burnishing his reputation. Oh, really? Yeah, I think in the in the I won't, you know, Emily Wilson, the famed translator of The Iliad and the Odyssey, uh has been very down on the movie and has done a bunch of sort of scorched earth interviews about I did hear about this, yeah. Uh which, you know, fair enough. That's sh she's in the position to to judge, I guess. Although if you read her her essay length review, it sort of felt to me after reading it that she'd seen like maybe seven or eight movies in her life.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

Was it uh was it like just on her letterbox or what no no no it wasn't I forget where it was.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

It was in The Guardian or New Republic or something, you know.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

Uh it was a you know uh I would have preferred like a letterbox account like Emily Wilson with like a Z.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

No, it's her. It's it's been authenticated, it's definitely her. Um she didn't like the movie. She hated the movie, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

She said that it was it was I'm no I'm no famed translator, but I uh I tend to side with with Wilson here.

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Yeah, you hated the movie also. Um I'm not gonna argue too strongly against that. Uh I think it's important to remember that like one of the big things the movie makes is that the Trojan Horse episode is treated as though it is this fundamental violation of the right of hospitality. Well, you mean Zeus's law? Zeus's law. Yeah, what the film what the film calls uh 29 times Zeus's Law.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

Uh now the real I couldn't help but notice, but we did a pass on the script, and it appears that you've you've actually taken the term Zeus's Law out of the movie twice, and so we'd like you to go back and fix that, please.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

Uh the real idea of Zeus's Law is Xenia, which is understood to be as like hospitality or guest. What in Game of Thrones is called guest right, right? The idea that if you approach a host and you're polite, they are they it's their duty to treat you as if you might be a god in disguise, right? And that this is the kind of civilizational bond you make with strangers that prevents the kind of Hobbesian war of all against all from it feels like it really opens you up to the possibility of being manipulated. It certainly does, but as a guest, in that circumstance, you're also bound by the law, right? Sure. So if you transgress, it's within the host's right to kill you, you know. Which is why the the Trojan horse, it's treated like, oh, this is such a violation of guest right. It's like they've been at war for 10 years. They're not guests of the Trojans, right? Correct.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

They leave this Is this the same in the book?

SPEAKER_00 9:43

What do you mean?

SPEAKER_01 9:45

Like, is this the way the Trojan horse story is treated?

SPEAKER_00 9:47

Yeah, then they're the horse, the horse story is pretty closely similar, although it draws uh we don't get as full of a depiction of it in the Odyssey. It does, it doesn't happen at all in the Iliad, which takes place before the fall of Troy. But he's drawing a lot on the Aeneid in the movie, because Virgil Virgil gives us a full depiction of the the horse, and like the there's a lot of bargaining. A bunch of Trojans are like, Oh, I don't think we should take in this horse. I don't trust these Greeks at all, you know, yeah. And then uh this priest comes, Zeus's law. This there's this priest called Lacowan who comes out and is like, the horse is evil, it's going to, you know, if we bring it in, it'll be the end of our city. And just then Athena, who's helping out the Greeks, sends a couple of sea serpents, and they come and they devour Lacowan on the beach. And just in case that was enough.

SPEAKER_01 10:46

And and the observers are like, well then, nothing to see here.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

Yeah. Well, they also devour Lacowan's kids who are standing near him. Just like it's like, damn, the gods really don't like Lackawan. He must be wrong. So let's bring the horse in. I guess yeah, I guess there is no problem with this horse. I mean, right? Pretty deceitful. I think I feel like Athena may have violated uh Zeus's law. Sure. Also, Sinon, uh, the character, I guess he's called Sinon in the movie, who's played by Elliot Page, that's not in the Odyssey at all. That's all from Virgil. Interesting. And Sinon, who's left behind, isn't ignorant of Odysseus's plan. He knows everything and is incredibly deceitful. He's a kind of trickster figure who's like, oh, those bastards, the Greeks, you know what would really piss them off? It's if you took in this big horse that they've left as a tribute to a Poseidon or whatever, you know, or to Athena, you know. And so he really he doesn't get killed quite in the same. All the stuff we see with the Elliot Page character, I think works pretty well in the movie, but it's it's Nolan's invention. Now, one of the other preoccupations, aside from Zeus's Law in the Nolan film, is the Bronze Age collapse, right?

SPEAKER_02 12:00

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

In a way that's just um I found to be really heavy-handed. It's just kind of beating you over the head with it. Like what are then our age of bronze is coming to an end, I think the character says at one point. It's just like, what are you getting at? And so the Bronze Age Collapse, just a refresher. And what place does it have in the Odyssey like that?

SPEAKER_01 12:23

Is is that a department? It has no place.

SPEAKER_00 12:26

Yeah, it it is not present at all. I mean, if only in a dim sense that there's a golden age is passing away in that the age of heroes is is over. But there's no sense.

SPEAKER_01 12:39

You get the sense that it's like a heavy-handed uh attempt to draw a comparison to to now by Nolan.

SPEAKER_00 12:44

Well, certainly that, but it's also Nolan clearly read probably 1177 BCE, that book by uh I think his name is Eric Klein. He's a classicist. It's a good book. It's the book we used for our Bronze Age Collapse episode. And it's gotten a certain level of mainstream cachet uh over the last decade or so. And so if you'll remember, the the Bronze Age Collapse is when a number of Eastern Mediterranean civilizations collapse in the years roughly from 1200 to 1175 BCE, right?

SPEAKER_02 13:19

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 13:20

So among those are the Mycenaean Greeks, whom we think the Homeric Greeks are based on. But also uh there's a bunch of people that appear called the the sea peoples that attack Egypt twice, uh once in 1208 BCE and again in 1178. And the Egyptians fend them off. And Egypt is actually the only major civilization in this area to not collapse, right? But the uh the the sea peoples are kind of like the most famous symptom of the Bronze Age collapse. Suddenly there's these pirates who are just showing up out of nowhere en masse and just attacking, uh, and they seem to have destroyed, they they may have played a role and even in the Hittite.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

And there wasn't any uh historical precedent to like build your defenses to deal with the these people.

SPEAKER_00 14:07

No, there was, but the the these this was just in a higher a higher level than had ever been seen before, right? So they also destroy the Hittites.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

Like when you're like when you're playing civilization and you're doing so badly, and then all of a sudden, like a battleship shows up, but you still have horses. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

It's kind of like it's not it's not quite it's not quite like that, but it's sort of like that. Um and a bunch of other civilizations collapse or are greatly reduced. The Hittite Empire, who were the supporters we think of the historical Troy. That collapses, although not because of the sea peoples. The other big thing is there's a lot of climate shifts around this time, not primarily driven by man, unlike our present age, but this is a there's a sort of cascading series of factors. There's like intra-tribal disputes within empires leading to fragmentation, then sea people show up and side with one, they kill, you know, it's it's just like a domino effect, a kind of series of self-reinforcing feedback loops, if we want to use the language of cybernetics yet again, which we do and which we must. So, one thing that we learn from the Egyptians as they talk about these sea peoples, is that some of them at least were Greeks, right? So there's the Equash, which is a name for the Achaeans, a name in Homer uses for the Greeks, and then there's the Denians, which are the Danins, another name for the Greeks that appears in the Odyssey. So that's Nolan, Nolan, like, because the big moment in the end of the Odyssey is like when Odysseus is like, we were the people from the sea, like this sort of light bulb moment. That's kind of true, right? I mean, raiding Greeks were probably some of whom had left collapsed palaces in mainland Greece or on Crete or whatever, and come to places like Egypt or uh modern Lebanon, Syria, right? And like started raiding. So he really but there's like there's so much Bronze Age collapse stuff in the movie that it like really doesn't sit right.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

Like it it's uh at the end of the movie, especially, uh Penelope and you're saying that's not faithful to the Odyssey itself.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

No, not at all.

SPEAKER_01 16:18

Like, there's no I mean the the Bronze Age story came from the the Aeneid, and then he tacked on this sea people stuff.

SPEAKER_00 16:27

Which well he superimposed a modern understanding of the Bronze Age collapse onto a narrative that's set roughly at the time when the Bronze Age Collapse happened.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

But the And was just like we'll keep the title, the Odyssey stays.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

No, it's still the Odyssey. I mean, it still has all the main episodes in the I mean it's the Odyssey. Like it definitely is the same story, but he's superimposing these other Tell that to Emily Wilson. Yeah, well, her beef is that it doesn't emphasize glory enough. Glory. Yeah, the glory of killing of that that Odysseus would not have felt sad at having conquered Troy. That he would not be like, oh, I'm a war criminal, like I shouldn't have killed those Viet Cong in the village or what right because there's a little bit of that, right? There's a little bit of like post-Vietnam syndrome, the PTSD, right? That's not something that's present in the Odyssey at all.

SPEAKER_01 17:22

Right, or like when when the hound gives decides he doesn't like to fight anymore, there's a bit of that vibe when he's like in Troy and everything's burning and he's like looking around. What is this all for, type vibe?

SPEAKER_00 17:34

Yeah, that would that's not present at all. Odysseus is evil. I mean, he loves seems like a pretty big thing to shift. Well, it's it's just trying to accommodate our modern moral values. Not just Hollywood, but like sorry, sorry, woke Hollywood, right? That's correct. Well, it's because this has led to something funny where a lot of people hate Emily Wilson because they assume she's woke because she's a woman, which is which is not which is not correct, by the way. I actually know Emily Wilson very slightly. Um she was a grad student at Yale when I was an undergrad, and I never had her as a teacher or anything, but I had we had friends in common, so I went out drinking with her once or twice. Um she's as old school British classicist, you know, comes from a kind of patrician um interesting. She's not woke in the slightest, she's just a woman, and so like this is just how shallow and stupid like anti-woke ideology is like does not even address the content of what anyone does at all. All it is is like pointing at someone's skin or gender or whatever, being like, that's woke. Believe it or not, Michael. The the anti-woke stuff is actually not as sophisticated as you might expect. So let's talk about Homer a little bit. Because why not? So Homer or Omaros, what does what does Omaros mean? You guessed it, hostage. So Iliad. Yeah, so the person who composed the Iliad in the Odyssey allegedly was forced to. Yeah, or or was some kind of royal person who was in the captive of another king. Because the hostage exchanging of hostages was a common practice in peace negotiations at the time. You're gonna write the greatest damage. Well, you wouldn't be hostage and forced to write, but uh there there's that's good though. There there's some thought that he this may point to him being some kind of well wealthy person, but there's as many people that think Homer isn't a real person at all, and that it's just a kind of retroactive name that was uh given to uh what essentially were a group of or several individuals who compiled these oral narratives into into the form that we have we know today. And there's ample evidence that the Odyssey was definitely written after the Iliad, and that they probably were not written by the same hand. Um the reason why what's that? Why? Why why do people think that? Uh stylometrics. It's just a way of analyzing the frequency of word usage and stuff that you can sort of use to detect authorship. It's still evolved. It's a little woo-woo to me, but it's pretty clear from the vocabulary that the Odyssey was probably written 20 to 30 or 40 years after the Iliad, and that the author of the Odyssey or compiler of the Odyssey uh was familiar with the Iliad because of all the times Troy comes up in the Odyssey, and it comes up quite frequently, uh, it never relates any story that's covered in the Iliad. Almost as if the author were aware of what the Iliad talks about, and so doesn't want to repeat anything from the earlier uh story. Also, there's certain formulas for expression that exist within both epics that point us in the idea that these are formulas for expression are are a sign of the oral tradition because it's one of the mechanisms people use to memorize exceedingly long, you know, like, oh, at this part it's this thing, right? There are certain formulas that come up again and again that help uh it's one of the reasons rhyme exists in English, right? Like rhyme is is in part a device for memorization, it's easier to remember things that are in rhyme. Um basically, as far as we can tell, both poems were composed were um compiled in the written form that we know today around uh 700 BC. Although even then they were still preserved orally until the 530s. This is the first time we hear of the Iliad and the Odyssey being written down on papyrus scrolls by the Pisistratids in Athens. These are the tyrants of Athens prior to the rise of the democracy. And interestingly, the earliest text of the Odyssey that survives is pretty old. It's from uh a pot shared in Oblia in modern day Ukraine. Ukraine that was uh probably inscribed in the 400s BCE. So someone just like scratched a line from the Iliad. Is it still in Ukraine? It's in a museum somewhere now. Probably not probably I think the British got it or what it'd shock you to know that uh it's actually in the Louvre, anyway. So the Odyssey is probably comes into being in the dark in what is known as like the end tail end of the Greek Dark Age, right? So 1200 BC, Greek civilization collapses, all the palaces are abandoned.

SPEAKER_01 22:38

The Greeks in the Dark Ages, they pull off the Odyssey? That seems like a bit of a contradiction.

SPEAKER_00 22:43

Well, the here let me explain. They forget how to read and write, and this is the other thing that that is alluded to at the end of the Odyssey. When Penelope and Odysseus are sailing away, Penelope's like, Why will the songs be so important for for remembering our de your deeds, Odysseus? And Odysseus is like, because people are gonna forget how to read and write. And it's just like there is no way that that would ever have been said in the Odyssey. I think that's just it's just like it's like Nolan being like, I know about the Bronze Age collapse, wink wink. But in the most like That's kind of interesting. Just like, what are you doing, bro? Like, come on. In any case, no, so stories in some form or another about the Trojan War developed during that dark age from 1200 to 800 BCE. The Greeks regained the ability to read and write sometime around 800 or thereabouts. That's where our earliest evidence is.

SPEAKER_01 23:45

How many people are fighting in that war?

SPEAKER_00 23:48

How big is that? Is Troy? I mean, if there was no historical Trojan war that lasted for 10 years where there were like thousands of people on either side. No, but like in the in the in the book, is it's like it's a it's oh in the book it's a lot. There's a thousand ships.

SPEAKER_01 24:04

Okay, right. That's what I was saying.

SPEAKER_00 24:05

But in reality, it would not have been a thousand ships. Like a thousand ships would be like the biggest fleet assembled in classical antiquity when we know there were much higher populations. But um, yeah, I think Troy. Maybe 20 ships? Maybe more than that, maybe a hundred. Okay. There were several thousand people living at Troy, but we're not talking like 50,000 people. We're not talking like anywhere.

SPEAKER_01 24:34

So, like one little wooden horse full of people might have been able to cause a ruckus.

SPEAKER_00 24:38

Sure, but I I mean the historicity of the Trojan horse is extremely suspect. I mean, how stupid are the Trojans? Like, oh, let's take the horse into the It's like, come on, man, no one's falling for that. No one's gonna check to see if there's some guys inside the horse. Come on. Oh, the war's over, the Greeks are all gone. Let's just bring this giant thing they left. Come on, like people have said that the Trojan horse is a metaphor for siege engine, right? That they developed the first like tower on wheels you could push up to the walls and attack from above, right?

SPEAKER_01 25:15

That's like a civilization game moment.

SPEAKER_00 25:17

Exactly. Um, so the reason the eventually Greeks become more sophisticated in their ability to read and write, they write down the poem or they compile the poem. But this is like by the time it's getting written down or codified, it would be like you or me writing a poem about Columbus based only on oral tradition that had been reported to us with no writing over 500 years.

SPEAKER_01 25:48

Funny that you mentioned that because that is what I'm working on. I didn't want to tell all the listeners until it was done, but geez.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

Well, I'm sure you're you're gonna win that fight. Uh so the poem's about Odysseus coming back from Troy, obviously.

SPEAKER_02 26:17

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 26:18

And I'm gonna just go through like what happens in the actual book. Uh one thing that's interesting about it is even though this is like the oldest text in literature, well, aside from Gilgamesh and a few earlier things, it's older than the Bible, for instance. Like the oldest portions of the Bible are not written down until I think around the time of the Babylonian captivity, which is in the five, you know, late five late sixth century BCE. Um basically it's got a very postmodern structure. It's filled with flashbacks. It opens on the suitors. The suitors are partying, they've been partying at at Odysseus' house for years, begging Odysseus's wife Penelope to pick one of them to be her new husband. The assumption being Odysseus is long dead. Everyone who's gonna return from Troy has long ago returned, and since he hasn't We're all really good at partying, we would make great husbands. Right, and there are like hundreds of guys in the Odyssey. There's I forget how many there are, but there's like a hundred suitors, and they're all uh rude to Telemachus, they treat the slaves in the house or the servants like dirt, and only a few servants, as we see in the film, remain loyal to Odysseus. Uh Eumaeus, as played by John Leguizamo, being the most prominent.

SPEAKER_01 27:44

But a couple characters is pretty fantastic in the movie.

SPEAKER_00 27:46

Oh, he's great. Yeah, I thought he was great too. Uh Odysseus' father is still around, Anchises. He's cut from the movie, but he's living up with Eumaeus, kind of hanging out around the sheep, and he's very old. He's like, he's nearing death, right? And Telemachus, the nurse of Odysseus, Eurycleia, is there. She's the woman that recognizes the scar on his leg that identifies him towards the end of the movie. We see her sewing him up in a flashback. Uh, she's there, she's loyal, but a lot of the servants are buddies with the suitors, as we see. And Odysseus will kill every single one of them when he gets back. And we we see the same thing. Uh I thought like he's pretty faithful to the structure of the poem. Like the flashbacks, the time jumps, which is all like vintage Christopher Nolan stuff, anyway, is actually um that's very true to the poem. So the first four books, which are referred to colloquially as the Telemachy, follow Telemachus.

SPEAKER_01 28:52

Sounds like a pretty colloquial name to me, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:54

Yeah, Telemache. He goes, he goes to Pylos, uh, which is in the film, we see Pylos as the place where the suitors try and kill him. Uh and they kill Mentor, R.A.P. Mentor. That does not happen in the poem. Um, Pylos is one of the great sites of Mycenaean civilization where many of our linear B tablets originate from, because they are preserved in one of the sacks. Like when Pylos went down, the library got buried in a way that it preserved a lot of records and stuff. Wow. Yeah, so Pylos is a real place. Nestor is the king there, he's the wisest, oldest of all the kings, uh, as opposed to Odysseus, who's the most cunning of all the kings, different than wisest. Yeah, remembering. Yeah, and then he goes on to Menelaus, sees Helen. Helen does not have horrible scars given to her by her husband. That's Nolan's invention for the film. Weird. I mean, there's a lot of Game of Thrones influence on this, I kind of felt like. Didn't you? Like the idea of like, oh, like this evil woman, she has now been scarred. Like, that feels like something that would happen in Game of Thrones or whatever. Absolutely. Um, so we see his we see him, the suitors do plan to kill him. They don't they Athena though is with Telemachus the whole time. Mentor appears in the Odyssey. It's always Athena in disguise, though. We have no idea like what's going on with the real mentor. We only see, and even the last line of the poem is like, and and they were accompanied by uh uh Athena, still in the guise of Mentor. Like that's the last line of the Odyssey, um, which I always think is kind of funny. Yeah, so we then cut away after we see Telemachus escape and get back home to Odysseus. He's been stranded on Calypso's Island for seven years. He's not taking drugs there though, because he's loving it. Calypso Calypso is hot. It turns out they are and they have like a house. It's not like they're just living in a tent on the beach. They have like she has like the movie is sexless, which is interesting. Yeah, very sexless. There's a lot of sex in in and there's a lot of yearning, and there there are characters that want to have sex and can't and kill themselves. You know, I mean there's like a very interesting omission. I mean, I feel like Nolan is kind of a sexless filmmaker.

SPEAKER_01 31:27

I mean, even this even the very couple dooosies in Oppenheimer.

SPEAKER_00 31:30

Yeah, but even those are so um they almost feel like still lives or something.

SPEAKER_01 31:36

Yeah, interesting.

SPEAKER_00 31:37

It doesn't feel very real. It's like, okay, they're naked, he's naked, he's imagining her naked. It's all very like voyeuristic, it's not very embodied.

SPEAKER_01 31:47

Um, anytime you get Matt Damon and Charlie Surround on an island, you have to definitely make sure that you don't have them have sex. No one would want to see that.

SPEAKER_00 31:57

Right. Um well I think he's flattening because one of the things about Odysseus is that uh although Pedelope is faithful to him, he is not faithful to her. Like in the in the poem, he doesn't just have sex, he has sex with Calypso for seven years. And like they're having a grand everyone slips up, Stu. Everyone has one of those little seven-year wayward spells, and then they go back and the other person's like dutifully waiting. Wasn't about you, it was just this one thing. It was this nymph, this seven-year nymph.

SPEAKER_01 32:33

Um yeah, that's interesting because the the vibe in the movie is definitely that he's got his little pin and he just wants to see his wife, you know.

SPEAKER_00 32:42

Yeah, I mean, he does want to go home. He he just calypso is also kind of entrapped him, right? She's sort of he's she's like a witch. She's powerful. Um so eventually Athena's like, look, you gotta let him go. And Odysseus escapes, he goes on a raft, as we see in the film, but he doesn't wash right up on Ithaca. Instead, he washes up on the island of the Phaetians. And the Phaeacians live not too far from Ithaca. There, and they're kind of like a perfect ideal kingdom, where we have uh Alkineus and his wife Arete, and they're just and Odysseus washed up on the beach. It's discovered by Nausica, their beautiful young daughter, who immediately is like in love with Odysseus and wants to marry him. And in some later myths, she does commit suicide after he leaves without marrying her. She's like, Well, Odysseus is gone, it's I just can't go on. What's the point?

SPEAKER_02 33:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:40

Yeah. So at this point, he tells the whole story of how he got to Calypso's Island in a f extended flashback to them on the island of the Phaeacians. And there's this great scene when there's a bard is playing, a blind bard comes in and starts, and this is where people think Homer is blind because they think this is a self-insert into the poem. If you think Homer was real, which, as I've already said, most people don't at this point. And the bard uh starts to tell the story of Troy, and Odysseus is crying, but he's like very good. This happens a lot, he's very good at concealing his tears. So he's like weeping, but he's just like, uh I'm good. Yeah, no, but no one can tell. No one can ever tell, even though uh I'm not sure how he does it. He's an amazing man. So then the whole relaying of the story is again, it's like a flashback. Anyway, there's a lot, it's a complicated structure. So let's just go through the episodes. They take the first place they take is the island of the Kikones, who are uh the villagers we see in the film. They brutally sack their town for supplies, but then they counterattack, a bunch of guys are killed, and the Greeks flee. Um then they come to the island of the lotus eaters, where they encounter the people who are addicted to lotus. Now, I looked it up. Lotus does not have narcotic um aspects. So this is probably some other plant that these people are addicted to. Uh, and this is located usually uh into around Tunisia. So they've taken a big miss, they've they've gone around the Cape, the southernmost Cape of Greece, and got blown off course across the Mediterranean to Africa. And the lotus robs you of your desire for the homeward journey. And it also is a metaphor for warning, you know, a warning against succumbing to the pleasures of the flesh. Which I think, you know, you can imagine being burned out, getting to Lotus Cedars Island, and being like, eh, good enough.

SPEAKER_01 35:50

Yeah, I think I'll hang around here.

SPEAKER_00 35:51

Yeah. Now the next uh incident is the famous Cyclops encounter, which occurs in Sicily, and uh it's quite different than what Nolan depicts in the film. The Cyclops is talkative, communicative. He speaks to Odysseus at length, he's pretty dumb. He asks Odysseus, Odysseus, what's your name? And Odysseus is like, Me? Oh, my name is No One.

SPEAKER_01 36:19

Ooh. How tricky. The Cyclops says, I don't get it.

SPEAKER_00 36:24

No, the Cyclops says, Okay, no one. He doesn't realize it's a gag, he's he's very slow. Uh and then they they blind him, as in the film, when he's sleeping, and they escape by tying themselves to the bottom of the sheep. And then just as they're about to get away, Odysseus says, Oh no, the Cyclops then is angry and he goes out, no one blinded me, no one blinded me. And the other cyclops hear him and they're like, Well, if no one blinded you, then there's no problem. It's actually pretty funny. It's a bit of a weird thing to say. No, it's actually pretty funny. Like, it's a bit in the Odyssey. You're like, okay, oh uh, and this is part of the reason it takes him so long, is because he brags, he can't just get away with it. He's like, It wasn't no one that blinded you, Cyclops. It was I, Odysseus, you know, from Ithaca, Laertes' son. He like doxes himself on the ocean, and he just like Instagram profile. You can see Poseidon's like trident rising out of the water, being like, um, and this is hubris, right? So he violates hospitality by stealing the Cyclops' food and then blinding him without having been invited. Cyclops is also not a great host, but the real sin is hubris, right? Which is insulting the gods through your arrogant comparison of yourself to them, right? Now, they next get to the island of Aeolus, the king of the winds. He they chill for a month. In the Odyssey, they're always getting somewhere and just chilling and partying for a month, a year. They don't care. They're in real no real hurry. He gives them a bag. He loves Aeolus loves Odysseus. He gives him a bag that has a bag that's filled with all the winds. I mean, it's not a real thing. Um, and he's like, here, just hold these, and the one wind that I haven't put in the bag will just blow you straight home after you leave. And Odysseus is like, Bet. Um, so he doesn't tell his men about this. So again, this is hubris. Like, I can do this all on my own. I don't need to tell the men about it at all. They get to within sight of Ithaca, and Odysseus passes out from exhaustion. And the men are like, That bag is filled with treasure he's withholding from us. Let's get at it. So they open the bag, the winds get out, they get blown all the way back to Aeolus' island. Which is like on the other side of Italy. I mean, it's it's a total disaster. And if he, you know, if he had just trusted his men, if he had delegated, but he gets back to Aeolis, and Aeolis is like, You're the vilest, most disgusting person I've ever seen in my life. Get the fuck away from me, you fucking freak. So that's over. Then they get to the island of the Lystragonians, who are gigantic cannibals who destroy most of his other boats, and only he and a few men survive. This is the scene with the knights in the movie, right? The giant knights. And I think again, what's their armor made of in that scene, Michael? Yeah, I don't know. Iron? Iron. Oh. Is our Age of Bronze being replaced by one of iron? Right? So I mean, like, that's fine, but it's again, it's like, all right, I get it. You've read about the Bronze Age collapse. Like, I've got it. Um, there's no animation in the poem that they have iron weapons. So the one remaining ship then gets to Circe's Island. The gluttonous men are turned to swine. I thought that scene was one of the better ones in the film.

SPEAKER_01 39:54

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 39:55

When they turn to pigs, that actress was really good. Uh Circe, however, in in the myth is very attractive. So I thought it was interesting to have her be kind of a more plain woman. Yeah. Um, Circe he stays with Circe for a year. They have multiple kids together, possibly. Like, there's all these other kids Odysseus has floating around in mythology. Um, she eventually is like, look, the only way you're gonna peace Poseidon is you gotta talk to Tiresias. So they go to the land of the dead. Uh, we see the first person we see in the land of the dead is Elpinor, who is a guy who died while partying at Circe's house and no one noticed and they didn't bury him. He's like, Odysseus, you forgot to bury me. I I I'm stuck on the outside of hell. What the hell? And he's like, Don't worry, buddy, we'll we'll take care of that. Unclear if he ever does. Then he talks to Agamemnon, as in the film, uh, and he talks to his mother, who's like too sad to speak, having died of like heartbreak from Odysseus's long absence. And lastly, he speaks to Achilles, who says he's rather be a slave, he'd rather be the slave of the poorest man than the king of hell, because being in hell is so goddamn boring. Huh. Yeah. A little afterlife. Uh we may have mentioned that in the afterlife episode on Greece because I forget, but but it goes, you know, we in our afterlife stuff we've talked about how a lot of visions of the afterlife are just boring. Absolutely. Yeah. So that's another one of the things. Finally, Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, appears and is like, Look, you're gonna get home alone. Your men are all gonna die. Like in the movie, Odysseus does not share this with the men, probably wisely, right? Yeah, and he's like, they're gonna eat the cattle of the sun, and they're Zeus is gonna kill them all. But when you get back, you gotta take an a winnowing fan, you gotta take an oar on your shoulder and walk far inland, way away from Ithaca. You've got to leave again. And when you get to people who are like, Oh, what's that winnowing fan on your shoulder? It'll mean they've never seen an oar, and they think it's like a fan for fanning chaff wheat from the chaff kind of thing. And that will be a place where Poseidon is unknown because they don't know about boats. So there you're gonna tell them about Poseidon, set up a shrine, teach them his worship, and that's how you can atone. Basically, you're gonna go on a missionary mission. You're gonna go on a missionary trip and you're gonna convert people to LDS. I mean, to uh worship of Poseidon, and uh I always thought that was kind of good, but he tells them at nothing. Sirens thing, the siren's skill in Charybdis happens much as in the movie. Uh why does Odysseus didn't love it? Yeah, I was a little I thought this the skill looked like timing up.

SPEAKER_01 42:41

I'll I'll shriek for 30 seconds.

SPEAKER_00 42:45

But we didn't hear their music really, like no.

SPEAKER_01 42:48

Although that's to me, I I didn't mind that because it's like how are you gonna come up with the the sound to actually you know we're gonna hire Ed Sheeran, obviously.

SPEAKER_00 43:03

If Justin Bieber is unavailable, um yeah, I thought the Skilla the Monster looked kind of bad, like coming out, taking the men up, like just so CG in a movie that had a lot of practical energy. Uh and also the Charybdis didn't look an extra other 50 mil on that budget that could have got it. And I mean, like the Charybdis, it just sort of seemed like you could just sail around the Charybdis, right? Like the Whirlpool. The Whirlpool, we didn't get any top-down view of like I feel like the Whirlpool usually has like a there's like an evil mouth in the middle of the Whirlpool, kind of, right? But no. Um Odysseus chooses, he kind of tricks the men into going the way of Scylla without telling them about the monster, which is an example of his pragmatism.

SPEAKER_01 43:48

I mean, they're already dead anyway, right?

SPEAKER_00 43:51

They're all gonna die. It doesn't matter.

unknown 43:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:55

And then we finally see the sun gods cattle incident, which I thought it was fine. That's pretty accurate about what happens. They get become there. So this brings us finally back. The Phaeacians give Odysseus a big ship. They're like, what a great story. It's so sad. He sails back to Ithaca in disguise. He meets with Eumaeus. He meets with Telemachus, concealing his identity. He does a lot of spy missions in the house, testing who's loyal, who's not, looking at, you know, the suitors mistreat him, they hit him with the stool, a lot of the stuff that happens. But the thing about this is the last like the adventures in the Odyssey are over by book 13. And there's 11 more books that are just all about him plotting his revenge on the suitors. Interesting. And his his revenge doesn't occur until book 22. So there's just nine whole.

SPEAKER_01 44:46

It does make sense to condense that for the purposes of a movie.

SPEAKER_00 44:50

Oh my god, yeah, man. My students hated the second half of the Odyssey. They're just like, when is he gonna kill the suitors? I'm just like, I know, believe me. No, he has to like have a flashback where he remembers a hunting trip he took where he got a gash on his knee, or what you know. Um and then he does, I mean, I you know, he does most of the stuff that's depicted. I thought one thing that was funny in the movie was they chose to show Telemachus in the in the novel, in the poem, Odysseus Athena is one of the fighters in disguise as mentor. Eumaeus fights, and then even Laertes comes a little bit and fights, like his old ancient dad. And Telemachus fights the whole time. The guy from Hamlet shows up. Well, that's where the name comes to Hamlet from. But um Laertes, uh there's so that so it's like hundred against four, one of the four being a god. Whereas I found the him shooting all of them with arrows and them not knowing what to do. It's like, well, there's one guy with a bow and arrow, just charge him and kill him. Just charge him, right?

SPEAKER_01 45:58

I find I mean they've been partying for a long time. They're pretty wasted.

SPEAKER_00 46:01

I yeah, they're all hung over. I found that a little unsatisfying. I didn't like the choreography of the final fight, and the you know, and then that Telemachus is fighting against the pig herd or whatever the goat herd Melantheus, as he's throwing weapons down. I was like I thought Tom, I thought Tom Holland was pretty much a bust in this thing. Yeah, I did too. Uh much better in Spider-Man.

SPEAKER_01 46:22

Uh much better as I just also find it like a strange choice.

SPEAKER_00 46:26

Much more profound character, Spider-Man is much more suited to Tom Holland's talents.

SPEAKER_01 46:32

You're just like you're at the point where you can cast anybody. It's just weird. I don't know. I just didn't.

SPEAKER_00 46:38

I think you just wanted that draw, right? Because he has Zendaya as Athena slash the priestess, right? She sort of uh I don't know. I thought the treatment of the gods in the film was pretty good. Uh clearly, you know, he's trying to make some analogies to our world, our our our own moment of precarity, right? Where we're on the verge of a similar slide into backwardness where we forget how to read and write. And and in the notes I've just written, perhaps, but it's not because of uh privacy or even climate change. In fact, it's because of AI. Like that's what's like leading the charge in our slide back to illiteracy. Uh and you know, climate, we do have climate change. I mean, climate change doesn't really come up in the in this story. There's also one weird moment where he's like, uh Agamemnon wants to dominate the trade routes or something. Where it's like, all right, like, are we gonna do like a real politique Odyssey or are we gonna do the mythological Odyssey? It's a little weird to try and have it both of these.

SPEAKER_01 47:45

What are your thoughts on the movie as somebody who obviously has spent so much time with the with the poem?

SPEAKER_00 47:50

I'll say it did a good job of economizing the incidents, like the incidents it left out, like the kick home, you know, it didn't it made the it it it made up for those by like the lotus eaters. We didn't see them, but then the lotus on Calypso's Island. I thought that was fine.

SPEAKER_01 48:05

Like I just I I I just thought the dialogue was really bad. The dialogue was incredibly bad and incredibly wooden. It was it was truly like cringe worthy, and obviously that feels really out of place considering the source material, but also like I don't know, it it looked amazing.

SPEAKER_00 48:24

It looked amazing, but it looked quite drab. Like the thing we have this vision of the ancient world as being black, like very white and and like stone. They had paint, they had colors, they wore a lot of different colors. We know from fragments.

SPEAKER_01 48:39

To me, like I'm like, you know, obviously everybody is excited to go watch like a huge movie, right? And um, as they say in in the modern day, it's uh it's hell of an IP, right? But uh but at a certain point, I just I don't know, with movies like this, I'm like it's hard for me to be impressed because you you have so much money. It's like it's supposed to look good, you know, like it doesn't feel like it didn't feel like a particularly like incredible filmmaking more than it did just like a thing at scale.

SPEAKER_00 49:15

Did you like this better than Oppenheimer or worse?

SPEAKER_01 49:19

Uh I liked this much better than Oppenheimer, yeah. Uh I I the thing about Oppenheimer is just like I think I uh we've talked about this before, but it's like you have you have the highest stakes you could have for for a movie, you know, and the the whole the whole third act is about a Senate hearing. I'm like, I just can't.

SPEAKER_00 49:40

The movie is framed by that. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 49:42

Like it's just like I can't handle this. Security clearances is the issue. Jesus Christ. Yeah, fair enough.

SPEAKER_00 49:50

Yeah, I would say I prefer this to Oppenheimer too. It had a little bit more pace. I mean, it was this was still like fun.

SPEAKER_01 49:56

I mean, like, you know, for everything I just said, it's like it was it was it not only was it was it much more fun. I mean, obviously it's gonna be more fun, it's the Odyssey, but also like they're similar in length, and boy, did this feel so much quicker.

SPEAKER_00 50:10

Yeah, no, that that's that's really how I that's the big difference I noticed as well. Yeah, I mean I I liked it. I thought the as I've said over and over again, I thought the sort of like hammering like the just beating you over the head with the Bronze Age collapse stuff was just a bridge to be.

SPEAKER_01 50:30

Although I I will say that to strike a slightly hopeful note, it's like you know, to speak back to the to speak on the IP, right? There is something encouraging about the fact that this incredibly mainstream cast, an incredibly mainstream director, an incredibly like mainstream sort of blockbuster, um has led to you know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people discovering or rediscovering a work like the Odyssey, seeing it, reading it.

SPEAKER_00 51:05

I mean Emily Wilson herself notes that like they've a million people have bought the Odyssey or her translation or something. I you know, I um just since the movie came out, like yeah, it's interesting in the last month.

SPEAKER_01 51:21

But you were saying at the beginning, because after I watched it, I didn't go out to get the Odyssey, but in fact, I am uh gonna take on the Aeneid.

SPEAKER_00 51:31

Aeneid's so good, man.

SPEAKER_01 51:33

So but I think yeah, just the idea of these massively important works sort of flooding back into culture sort of feels I mean, somewhat helpful.

SPEAKER_00 51:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:45

And just like out of step with the overall degradation of culture that we talk about. And so I think it's important to note like that can still happen. And even if it has to happen in this way, like, you know, that's really it's kind of a cool debate. Yeah, I wonder if any of my old students like summer beach read is the Odyssey is kind of just fun.

SPEAKER_00 52:05

Yeah, I wonder if any of my old students, you know, from 20 years ago or whenever I first started were like, oh, the Odyssey. And like I read that what would Dr.

SPEAKER_01 52:13

Watson have thought?

SPEAKER_00 52:14

I prefer I pretended to read that for Watson's class back in. Yeah. All right. Well, I mean, yeah. I agree with everything you just said. I think there is something hopeful about it. I kind of just wish somehow it had been better, but as far as adaptions of the Odyssey, adaptations of the Odyssey, like I don't see how it could be that much better. This did a good job.

SPEAKER_01 52:46

That's that's a key point, right? Is it kind of like you're gonna be if you're going to be critical of it, and of course it's different if it is someone like a noted translator of the thing. But you know, people like us being like, wow, the movie, and it's like, well, kind of like, okay, well, you try.

SPEAKER_00 53:01

Yeah, well, I wouldn't. I mean, it's it's kind of a fool's errand, but he's done with that considered, I think it's pretty economical. Uh, I just wish I just wish the script were a little better, you know.

SPEAKER_01 53:12

And I just wish there was way more sex. So there you go.

SPEAKER_00 53:15

Yeah. All right. Well, we haven't chosen our topic for next week, but I'm sure we'll probably tease it out though. Yeah, we'll definitely, we'll definitely. There's just dropping some hints about it in the uh Instagram stories. But if you like the show, you can follow us on the podcatcher of your choice. If you really like it, you can leave us a rating and or review on that podcatcher. You can also follow us on Instagram to see those teases at the end of the world, or at what is it? End of the world WMS on Instagram. Yes, it's the same one that it's always been that I've said 115 times or whatever, however long we've been doing this, 130 times. Anyway, uh we post exciting reels from the show there, in addition to our many, many teases. So we'll have something good. I think maybe a book or something different next time. Who knows? Who can say? Uh, but until then, this has been the end of the world with Michael and Stu.

SPEAKER_01 54:12

I'm Michael.

SPEAKER_00 54:13

And I'm Stu, and we will talk to you real soon.