The Odyssey in the movies

Textkit Community Civilization and Culture of the Greeks and Romans
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We’re going to get two very different movie adaptations of the Odyssey in a short time. I saw Uberto Pasolini’s The Return last spring, from a blu ray disc in my home theater, as the film was never shown in movie theaters in Finland, and got much less publicity than I thought it deserved. The other is of course Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

Pasolini’s film concentrates on what I think was always the core plot of the Odyssey, the part where Odyssey is back in Ithaca and must win back his wife and his kingdom, and dispenses altogether with the parts with monsters and sexy goddesses, which really are just digressions. We should remember that when Odysseus lands in Ithaca, the story is just halfway and will take another 12 books. The film, like the original poem, focuses on the disruption caused by Odysseus’ long absence, and the impossibility of coming back home after 20 years’ absence, when everything and everyone that once constituted home has changed. There’s an anti-war side to the film and emphasis on war-trauma that I think are alien to the original (killing, pillaging, raping and kidnapping all happen in war and Homer has great empathy for such human suffering, but for him such things are part of the natural order of things, like disease and natural disasters), but then again, one can’t honestly expect a modern film to completely ignore modern sensibilities, and course a film director has the full right to his own interpretation of the story. All in all, I found the film very stimulating and was very glad to see for once an Odyssey adaption that was clearly targeted at an adult audience. By the way, Ralph Fiennes (Odysseus) and Juliette Binoche (Penelope) are both way too old for their roles.

The other film, Nolan’s Odyssey, will be a different beast altogether, and I have quite high expectations for his version as well. The Odyssey is probably (at least as far as I know) the first surviving story that relies on such a complex, convoluted narrative involving flashbacks, nested narratives and unreliable narrators – exactly the sort of thing that Christopher Nolan’s films are famous for. I like the idea of having Anne Hathaway as Penelope, not so sure about Matt Damon as Odysseus. We’ll see! (I saw the trailer, which was a bore. But I’m not losing hope yet!)

Any comments?

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I disagree that the monsters and side trips were digressions. They may not be part of the “plot” per se, but I disagree that the plot is the central feature of the Odyssey or the Iliad.

IMHO, these works are not novels, so we should not analyze their plots or themes as novels.

The main feature of Odyssey and Iliad is the wordplay, and the interactions and descriptions in each scene.

We should think of them as songs. Good songs are catchy, but they don’t always have a coherent overall message. If one part of a song disconfirms another part of a song, we don’t complaint about it. It is what it is. If it sounds good, we like it.

Both Odyssey and Iliad feature a lot of battles, and rivalry, and conflict, so we can certainly say that battles and conflict are a central feature of both epics. However, they also feature a great deal of tale-telling. The battle action in the Iliad is interruped over and over again so that characters can stop to tell a tale. These aren’t digressions: These actually are the main feature of the work. The overall plot is secondary. I’m not saing that plot is unimportant, I’m saying it’s secondary. (Just my opinion.)

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Well, we can discuss whether digression is the best term, or whether maybe expansion would be better. My point was that the main part of the Odyssey is set in Ithaca, and it’s about the Returning Husband - the work is better remembered for the fantastic adventures, but those were not, in my opinion, the story the author originally set out to tell us, although they of course became an integral part of it. Scholars have argued (Martin West at least I think) that Homer borrowed other material such as elements that originally belonged to the Argonaut story and integrated them into the Odyssey. But they are, of course, what define the Odyssey as we have it.

This reminds me of Alexandre Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo. The book is best remembered for Edmond Dantès’s/Monte Cristo’s captivity and escape from the Chateau d’If. That part, however, is only a small part of the work, and the rest concentrates on the revenge he takes on his enemies. The revenge story, however, or at least part of it, was written first and the famous part with the Chateau d’If etc. wasn’t originally even part of the book. It was only at the suggestion of his collaborator Auguste Maquet that Dumas decided to write it.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are not novels, of course. The good question is, what exactly are they? How did they perform such large works, and what purpose and what occasion were they composed for? People did not read alone the way people read now, so the works were meant for oral performance, but unlike other surviving hexameter poetry, such as Hesiod’s works or the Homeric hymns, they are much too long to be performed in a single sitting, and this problem remains fundamental when scholars try to understand how these works came about. Anyway, they are much more than a string of loosely integrated episodes, quite the contrary - both are carefully composed wholes with an underlying “masterplan”. So I firmly disagree with your assessment that “the plot is not the central feature of the Odyssey or the Iliad”.

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I would suggest that this is not something we have access to. It’s not a novel and it does not have an “original author” that we can identify. The original story, if there was one, may have been very different: We cannot see it now.

It’s like asking “What was Humpty Dumpty really about?” or “What did the author of Humpty Dumpty truly intend?” Humpty Dumpty is rhyme and wordplay, primarily. It’s entertaning, even if the audience does not agree on what it means.

I would suggest that the Iliad and Odyssey are mainly poetry and wordplay, and portrayal of ancestral heroes doing heroic things. They don’t need to stick to a main plot, or any plot or theme.

They are similar to a Hollywood film, such as Star Wars, that is philosophically inconsistent, but still really cool on a certain level. Space battles! Wooo! If you compare Star Wars to Faust, you will be disappointed, but Star Wars audiences were not thinking about Goethe, they were watching the spaceships.

In a nutshell: The overal plot, the overall story, is not the main thing. The Odyssey is not about “the returning husband.” There’s a returning husband in it, but that’s not what it’s about.

Odysseus is not only a “returning husband,” he’s also a husband who did not return, for a long time, on a flimsy excuse. But we do not have to despair about this inconsistency if we aren’t dedicated to making “returning husband” into the central theme.

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I agree. The invisible elephant in this chatroom is the famous Mario Camerini movie, starring Kirk Douglas, with Silvana Mangano playing both Circe and Penelope. It can be criticized for omitting a lot of material (although that seems inevitable in a 2h film) but I think the focus on the “sex and violence” is true to the spirit of the epic because it’s basically an adolescent adventure fantasy where the hero outsmarts and outfights all rivals and monsters and is the object of desire of all the beautiful women. There’s no explicit sex, of course, but Silvia Mangano is voluptuous and there are lots of suggestive scenes. I’m sure the Greeks particularly enjoyed the Cyclops and Circe segments, as well as the vengeance against the suitors (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkWthM8pf-M). Those adventurous and sexy scenes are probably what induced the audience to stick around and listen to the incredibly long epic.
I haven’t seen “The Return” yet but I surmise that the Greek audience was probably much more interested in the adventures than in the moralistic themes of regret and self-doubt.
In other words, the “digressions” were really the main attractions.
BTW, here’s a good survey of the various film versions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anKcDOde8lo&t=761s

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Paul,

I’m not sure that conveying a moral message is the raison d’être of the Odyssey, but I do think it has a moral message, not a Christian morality condemning infidelity, sex, trickery, etc. but a sort of civic duty: Odysseus renounces the ideal hedonistic lifestyle of a man kept by a “bewitchingly” beautiful Circe out of nostalgia for his patria Ithaca as well as his son and his wife (in that order of importance for the Greeks). The audience might have felt a sort of moral outrage if he had chosen to abandon his family and homeland to live the life of a playboy with a foreigner. That makes the homecoming an important part of the story but its main purpose is probably still entertainment rather than moralizing.

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Perhaps it’s not an intensional moral message but simply the moral undercurrent of Greek society at the time when Homer lived?

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Perhaps it wasn’t quite the right formulation when I said “the story the author originally set out to tell us”, maybe it would better to talk about the “core story”. But I think you are confounding story with reception somewhat. There’s no doubt that books 5 to 12 (Odysseus’ fantastic adventures) have been immensely popular for over two millennia, probably more so than the rest of epic, but the fact remains that they are only a small part of the Odyssey, which I think justifies my calling the digressions. By far the biggest part of the epic is set in Ithaca; it’s much too long to be called just a frame story, so I call it the main story, and judging just by length I suppose it’s legitimate to at least suspect that it was the part that interested the poet most. If you don’t want to call the Cyclops and Circe etc. digressions I’m fine, but I don’t think it’s too bad in lack of a better word.

Homeric epics aren’t “novels”, but they certainly have a plot, which is a very important and integral part of them. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey are very carefully constructed coherent wholes; I would say both (but especially the Iliad) have an overall structure that is simply brilliant. Just read them starting from line 1, and it should be evident. If you read epics simply as disconnected episodes, or for “poetry and wordplay”, you are missing a large part. There’s a paradox here, because people didn’t really read alone like they do now, and the works are too long for a single day’s oral performance, so the question remains why they bothered to make such long, carefully built stories, when the possibilities to perform them would have been few and far between.

As for whether the Iliad or the Odyssey have an “original author”, that’s a thorny question, but I think the answer is firmly YES. It is complicated, and very different opinions and theories have been formulated over centuries. You are probably going to retort that the Homeric epics are oral poetry, and oral poetry is by nature fluid and doesn’t have an original author – I think yes and no. I believe the epics were both composed in writing (they are long TEXTs, remember), but by someone who was very well versed with the oral tradition. The subject matter is traditional, but what we have is clearly someone’s version of a traditional story - something original, an individual of art. A book called The Making of the Iliad by Martin L. West (probably one the greatest Greek scholars who ever lived) makes this point, and I’ve decided to believe him at least in the main part.

You might want to have a look at this old thread about the subject: https://www.textkit.com/t/silent-expurgation/

As for the moral message of the Odyssey (let’s leave the Iliad out for now, which is a slightly different beast), I think it’s pretty important but of course not the kind of moral that we’d expect. The themes of regret and self-doubt are in the film The Return, but they are part of what I called “modern sensibilities” in my first post, and are not in the original epic. I don’t disagree with ClassyCuss about the epic’s moral message here, but I think there are other moralistic themes that also important. One is the theme of hospitality – throughout the Odyssey, we have examples of what it is to be a good host (Telemachus, Nestor, Menelaus, Eumaios) or a bad host (the prominent example is the Cyclops, but others as well). Perhaps the case in point are the suitors – they crime they really get their just deserts for is abusing hospitality. Another moralistic aspect is that the Odyssey is strongly supportive of existing social order: everyone should know their place, slaves should be loyal to their master etc. (just look at the loyal Eumaios, and compare to what happened to the unloyal handmaidens) – no wonder, as the poet was probably sponsored by some wealthy patron.

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The Odyssey is a story that was told orally for a long time before it was ever written down. Something important to understand about oral storytelling is that it is very much a flexible thing. You can tell a story in a short way, or you can tell the same exact story in a very expanded and sprawling way. We lose a lot of this in western society because our primary way to engage with stories is through the written word, which gives us a false sense of how exactly stories used to work in the ancient world.

If anyone here has never actually tried oral storytelling in front of an audience, I would highly recommend you give it a try. Try it many times over many different sessions with the same story. I started doing this a couple of years ago with basic fairy tales, and the practice has completely altered the way I read ancient texts.

For a real practical example, one of the stories I do a lot is Hansel and Gretel. We all know the basic skeleton of the story: boy and girl lost in the woods after being abandoned by their father, they find a gingerbread cookie house with a wicked witch in it, the witch traps Hansel and tries to fatten him up to eat him, but Gretel outwits the witch and frees her brother, and they safely return home. Great, that’s the story of Hansel and Gretel in about fifteen seconds. I haven’t “left anything out”, but all I’ve done is build a skeleton. If you tell that story to an audience it won’t get any kind of positive reception because it isn’t alive. There’s no flesh on it, it doesn’t breathe.

What the storyteller has to do is bring that skeleton to life. How much life you give it, and which direction you go with it, are heavily dependent on the individual storyteller and the audience he’s talking to. I can tell that story in two minutes or I can tell it over half an hour, depending on the audience. Sometimes the gingerbread cookie house is ten stories tall, sometimes it’s just one. Sometimes the witch makes Gretel eat crab shells, sometimes it’s fingernails and sticks. There are endless variations, but all of those stories are still “Hansel and Gretel” to the audience.

What I can’t do is violate the basic integrity of the story. I can’t give Hansel a hunting rifle and have him shoot a deer in the woods so they can eat it and stay away from the witch. I can’t have Gretel and the witch get into a witch duel and accidentally turn Hansel into a black cat. The witch can’t eat Hansel while Gretel saves only herself by crawling through a hole she dug in the back of the chicken coop. There are no dinosaurs in Hansel and Gretel, nor are there military trucks or nuclear bombs. If you try any of those things, you’ll inevitably get a reply from the audience: “THAT’S NOT IN THE STORY!”

This same idea goes for the Odyssey, the Iliad, and literally every other ancient story that was told orally for a long time before it was written down. There’s an essential core to the story that cannot be violated, but how the individual storyteller brings that core to life is itself always up for negotiation. Whether or not that story is “The Odyssey”, though, is entirely up to how the audience receives it.

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It’s been some time since you wrote, but I thought I’d reply. That the Homeric epics were “told orally for a long time before it was written down” is the received idea, but is that really true?

Earlier I suggested that Odysseus’ Wanderings, the most famous part of the story (and not the main story, which is the story of the Returning Husband) might actually largely consist of material borrowed from the Argonaut story, so they’re actually perhaps not a traditional part of the story at all. Rather, if there is a traditional core in the Odyssey, I would suggest it’s the story of the Returning Husband.

With the Iliad, I think it’s even clearer that it’s not the traditional story. The Iliad is set in the Trojan war, which is a traditional setting, but it actually doesn’t include any of the traditional elements of the story, nothing of what you call the “essential core to the story”: there’s no Judgment of Paris, no Abduction of Helen, no mention of the Trojan Horse, and no Sack of Troy. What it does have is a large cast of heroes that look like they originally belonged different local traditions who have been brought together in the Trojan context, rather like in the superhero film The Avengers.

What I’m suggesting is that with the Homeric epics, and especially with the Iliad, we have someone very well versed with the traditional material and the traditional medium who has taken the tradition as a starting point to compose something that is very much his own. They are poems composed in a traditional meter with traditional formulas, and set in traditional contexts, but I don’t think the stories themselves are traditional.