Myth, Movies, and the Many Meanings of an Ancient Tale

I recently saw Nolan’s Odyssey – IMAX obviously – and I loved it.

Christopher Nolan has the rare gift of making the cinema truly special. I have loved every movie of his that I have seen.

Even Tenet.

At least what I understood of it.

The Odyssey was probably the loudest movie I’ve ever seen and there was one scene (if you’ve seen the movie, you know what I’m talking about) where it was genuinely uncomfortable. But I suspect that was the point.

The visuals were incredible.

The details were immaculate.

And Anne Hathaway was so good she ascended Mount Olympus.

But not everyone liked it.

There was a groundswell, albeit a modest swell, of discontent. The swell was vocal and loud, like a mosquito hidden somewhere in your bedroom as you’re trying to fall asleep. An incessant buzzing that pops up when you least want it to.

The object of that discontent was mostly about the casting. More specifically, the casting of two characters: Helen, the wife of Menelaus, and Sinon, the young soldier taken from Virgil’s Aeneid (though many were mistakenly convinced this would be Achilles). The former was played by Lupita Nyong’o and the latter by Elliot Page.

Helen, they complained, would have been white, so casting Nyong’o was a direct affront to all that was holy. Achilles was a great and feared warrior, son of a sea-goddess, and the killer of Hector. Surely Page cannot play such a character? A black woman playing the most beautiful woman in the world and a transgender man playing the legendary warrior? This is outrageous woke nonsense!

Of course, they forgot that Helen was the daughter of Zeus, who pretended to be a swan to gain the affections of Helen’s mother, and that Helen hatched from an egg. Good luck casting that role with “historical accuracy”!

They also forgot that Page was playing Sinon, not Achilles, but they didn’t care – they took the opportunity to pile on in their performative identity signalling. But they also forgot that in many ancient traditions Achilles did, in fact, have at least one male lover and so was not their assumed pinnacle of heterosexual masculinity.

But, most importantly, they forgot that these characters are all made up. The characters exist – truly exist – in our minds and imagination, but they weren’t real human beings who inhabited flesh and blood and walked the shores of the Troad.

So I honestly didn’t care that Nyong’o and Page were cast for their roles. And they played their roles brilliantly.

And those that were upset that Nolan changed Homer’s original ending should maybe go and read the poem and take a moment to consider what that might look like on a massive IMAX screen.

But who is missing?

I think the more pertinent issue is the presence, or lack thereof, of Greek actors. Not for some supposed ‘historical accuracy’ benchmark (we are talking about a story that features monsters and gods, after all), but for the importance of the story within Greek culture and history.

Let’s imagine Christopher Nolan decided to turn the ballad Waltzing Matilda into an epic movie. This poem is important to Australian (at least white Australian) culture, epitomising the archetypical anarchist Aussie spirit – go bush, steal a sheep, flip off the coppers. The song is essentially the unofficial national anthem.

But Nolan decides not to include any Australians in the production. Matt Damon does his best at a nasally Aussie twang but just sounds like a Bostonian with pneumonia.

A story so important to Australia stripped of anything Australian would almost certainly upset anyone, such as myself, who grew up belting out the soaring lyrics, “You’ll never catch me alive!”

So I can imagine that Greek people might feel hurt. And yet they’re not the ones complaining so loudly. Possibly because they understand that while the story is a significant cultural artifact of Greece, it’s mythology. And mythology has always been malleable. Myths – whether Greek or otherwise – change over time, taking on new layers of meaning and significance. It’s retold in new settings for new purposes. The characters change as the context alters.

Myth is not something that we read.

Rather, it is something that reads us.

It confronts us. Challenges us. Teaches us.

That’s what good stories do. They take us outside of ourselves and put us squarely in the shoes of another person. We see the world through a different set of eyes and our own identity is confronted.

We sit with both Odysseus and Nolan on that ship and are invited to reflect on issues pertinent to today. Issues like welcoming the stranger, respecting the sacred (even if they’re not sacred to us), the harms of war, deception, and tyranny, and why you should always know who owns the animal you’re thinking of slaughtering (a lesson the swagman of the Aussie ballad was clearly never taught).

However, the characters of the Odyssey aren’t made-up at all; they are very real – as real as anything else that occupies space in our mind. Sure, Homer might have imagined Telemachus and Penelope and Polyphemus into being, but the moment the words slipped from his tongue, they ceased being mere imaginings and inhabited a very real existence.

Yes, even the cyclops.

They exist in our mind and memory.

But there was never any single Odysseus. There have been as many Odysseuses and as many Odysseys as there are hearers and readers and viewers. For each reading and each re-reading shapes and moulds and breathes life – very real life – into a new story.

The version of the poem I read (though I admit I haven’t read all of it…yet) is a completely different tale to the one you might have experienced in your own personal psyche. We each import our own images, hopes, meanings, and interpretations into the text; our state of mind at the moment of reading morphs and textures that reading; our education, experiences, upbringings, and the very language we think in creates a story in our minds entirely unique to ourselves.

This isn’t Homer’s story.

The moment he finished, the story took on an existence of its own. To wander the world and go farther than Homer ever imagined. To be adopted by people Homer never knew. To influence the Western world and be used (and sometimes weaponised) in ways that Homer could never have anticipated.

It is Homer’s story, of course. He is the author and should be respected as such. Copyright laws may not have existed in the Greek Dark Ages, but storytellers of any age should be remembered as the artists and truth-sayers they are.

We honour Homer by attempting as best we can to inhabit the context and understand the original language and seek out his meaning.

But the story he intended is never the story that is received.

There is no direct link between Homer’s mind and my own. That chain, from Homer’s mind to his tongue, to the hearers and rememberers and retellers, to the translators and preservers, via the historians and archaeologists and classicists, to the editors and publishers, and then finally to my mind, is a muddy and imperfect chain. The world I live in is an immeasurably different world to the one that Homer lived in, and I bring to the text knowledge, assumptions, and prejudices that not even Athena could recognise.

No one has experienced the same Odyssey as I, and I have never experienced the same Odyssey as they.

Some might find that discomforting. Many people long for certainty and definitions and objectivity, and wish to dissect the text and pull out the beating heart of what it really means.

But that’s impossible, as much as one may wish otherwise.

It carries meaning for sure, but that meaning is incomplete until we attach our own meaning to it. This is not an act of force, like Achilles driving a spear through Hector’s neck and dragging the body behind a chariot to dehumanise and indeed possess the once proud prince and father. Nor is this an act of subterfuge, like Odysseus in the horse turning the sacred into sacrilege and trust into torment. We neither force our meaning upon the text to possess it nor smuggle it in to violate it. We meet it on its own terms and we listen to it.

But ultimately, we cannot escape the partial and provisional perspective of our own subjectivity. And nor should we. For our own interpretive lens has been built over the course of our lives to reveal and to protect that which is most important to us. It shapes us as much as we shape it. We should learn to challenge that lens and let it be changed and to grow, but it is no less and no more than our very self.

We derive meaning through the hard work of reflection and empathy. If we refuse one or the other, the meaning we arrive at will be distorted.

Our interpretation is not universal.

Our perspective is not assumed.

We need one another to be challenged and to think and to allow our preconceptions to be shaken (or stirred).

Debate is good. Prejudice is bad.

We need good stories, told in new ways, pushing us to think differently.

We need Nolan as we need Homer as we need any storyteller.

We need the flawed and complicated trickster that was Odysseus.

We need Harry, Daenerys, Katniss, Ripley, Shrek, and Sinon.

We need myth.