Yet however much we may like
The stoic manner in which
The classical authors wrote
Only the young and the rich
Have the nerve or the figure to strike
The lacrimae rerum note.
W.H. Auden wrote those lines some three-quarters of a century ago, little realizing how soon the time would come when nobody had the nerve or the figuration to strike the lacrimae rerum note—or even, outside the world of classical scholarship, knew what it was. I’m not sure I do myself.
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I know the phrase is Latin and comes from Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid, and that, with the added word sunt, it literally means “there are the tears of things.”
Huh? The impersonal construction is meant, presumably, to distance both the poet and the reader or listener—perhaps even the epic hero himself—from the emotional turmoil he must suffer in the course of an epic adventure like that of the Aeneid. Or Homer’s Odyssey.
There is certainly no question of such fatalistic distancing in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which shares a hero with the name of Odysseus (Matt Damon) and a bare-bones plot outline with Homer’s but almost nothing else. To some extent, this isn’t his fault but is built into the essential difference between epic poetry and the movies as artistic and dramatic genres.
The epic poet takes up a position of humility with respect to his larger-than-life hero and expects his listener or reader to do likewise. He will not allow us to flatter ourselves—or to insult the hero—with the illusion that we are somehow suffering along with him. The poetic artifice helps to create this barrier between the hero and ourselves, along with the emotional restraint of poet and hero alike.
The movies operate in precisely the opposite way. They are an ineluctably realistic medium that must hide their artifice in order to look as real as possible and so draw the audience into sympathy with, even self-identification with, their heroes. This, it seems to me, is the essential difference between epic poetry and the cinema, which, throughout its relatively brief history, has constantly fallen for the temptation of trying to turn the highly wrought artificiality of epic verse into a totally lifelike action movie. Reader, it can’t be done.
But people go on trying to do it anyway, partly because the master literary genre of the modernist era, which came in along with the movies themselves around the beginning of the last century, is mock-heroic. A century before Christopher Nolan tried to tackle The Odyssey, James Joyce (who, by the way, opened the first cinema in Ireland in 1909) made a deliberate mockery of Homer’s poem in Ulysses, which set something like the same story among the lower middle classes of Dublin in 1904—and he was hailed thereafter for having written what many saw as the greatest novel of the 20th century.
I don’t think the 22nd century will say anything like that about Nolan’s picture. More likely, they’ll look at it the way we do at Cecil B. DeMille’s cheesy biblical epics of the 20th. Nothing dates like realism, and the movies are, always have been, and always will be, nothing if not realistic.
Credit where it’s due, however. Nolan has made a heroic effort of his own against the fates decreeing his necessary unsuccess by either omitting the most unrealistic elements of the story of The Odyssey, including all but one of its gods and goddesses, or, with some help from the well-established iconography of the horror-fantasy movies of the last century, made them look just about as real as they can look. Though this is still not very real.
The comedy of the squabbling immortals set against the heroic tragedy of humankind, in whom they only take a fitful and mostly hostile interest, is a big part of that emotional distancing that I began this review by noticing in ancient epics. In Nolan’s The Odyssey, the only putatively divine figure left over from Homer is Athena (Zendaya), who is something of a heroic figure in her own right in the original but who, as Rod Dreher writes, “looks and acts like Odysseus’s Brentwood massage therapist.”
Like any other kind of therapist, her job is to stand in for the audience by lending a sympathetic ear to the self-pity and Weltschmerz of Odysseus and to try to buck him up emotionally. But she may be only a hallucination.
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Not so the more familiar monsters of Homer’s epic—the one-eyed, man-eating Cyclops, the six-headed man-eating Scylla of the Calabrian cliffside, the witch Circe (Samantha Morton), who changes men into pigs, or the Laestrygonians of Sicily, said by Homer to be the size of mountains (and also man-eaters) but here imagined as 12-foot-tall, all-metal, ambulatory robots magically transported to Homer’s time from a 1950s sci-fi movie set.
These, by the way, are a good example of how, by now, so much of our experience of reality comes to us at secondhand, through the movies, that moviemakers can often get away with making their mise-en-scène look quite unreal, so long as it looks like other movies. Thus, you sometimes hear people say that someone or something looks like an alien or an alien spaceship when the only aliens or alien spaceships they have ever seen are on film.
And this goes, too, for the climactic fight scene of The Odyssey, pitting Odysseus and his son Telemachus (Tom Holland), standing alone, against five or six dozen plug-ugly suitors for the hand of the fair Penelope (Anne Hathaway), O’s queen and T’s mom.
Of course something of the sort occurs in Homer too, but Homer didn’t have to visualize it. The movie does, and this might make our heroes’ success in the fracas seem rather a stretch, even for a Homeric hero—except that we’ve all seen movie superheroes do as much, so nobody sees this kind of more-than-human fighting prowess as a problem of verisimilitude anymore.
Many conservatives have criticized The Odyssey for being “woke.” I disagree. So far from being woke, it is sound asleep and dreaming that it’s a remake of Oppenheimer or The Dark Knight. In these movies, as in others of Nolan’s past triumphs, he has given us a victim-hero, tortured by guilt for the evil he has inadvertently unleashed upon the world by trying to do good. His Odysseus is just the same but with the added charm of suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder—from his part in bringing about the sack of Troy with the help of his famous wooden horse. For this, he takes drugs (lotus blossom) administered by sexy demigoddess Calypso (Charlize Theron).
But Nolan’s many box-office successes speak for themselves. This is the kind of thing modern audiences love to see, love to admire, love to identify themselves with, so this is what we keep coming back to see more of. Homer may get a “based on a story by” credit for this Odyssey, but that’s all.
Does it matter that the movie has nothing but a basic plot outline in common with its Homeric original? Only, perhaps, if you think that movies are, or ought to be, something more than entertaining. The neoclassical ideal, derived ultimately from a later period of Greek history than Homer’s, was that literary and dramatic art should aim to instruct as well as entertain—and “instruct” not in a narrow, moralizing sense but by the revelation of the reality it represents. And I’m afraid that there’s just not a lot of reality left in cinematic depictions of psychically tortured victim-heroes.
At any rate, there isn’t much instruction, except perhaps in cinematic technique, in Christopher Nolan’s films, for all their apparent entertainment value. And I persist in believing that, for a mature taste, such entertainment isn’t even entertaining. But what do I know? If I’m so smart, why am I not as rich as Christopher Nolan?
Yet I also believe that only a society into which either genuine (as opposed to super-) heroism or tragedy seldom, by historical standards, obtrudes can thrill to depictions of psychic suffering—just as horror movies only work where horror is, for most people, confined to the movies. Those who are more intimately familiar with suffering prefer not to acknowledge its salience in their, or their heroes’, lives—except to say, you know, “there are the tears in things.”
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