I thought it was great when Emily Wilson got angry at filmmaker Christopher Nolan last week for being TOO woke:
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But then Wilson went and penned a whole angry article about why Nolan's film was so horrible!
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By the gods, what a statement. π
Read her words:
I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem: βTell me about a complicated man.' But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script. Sadly, Damon's Odysseus isn't complicated or wily or artful. One of Odysseus' funniest (and most famous) tricks in Homer is to tell Polyphemus that his name is βNo Man'. When the blinded giant screams for help from his neighbours, the other Cyclopes are reassured to learn that βNo Man' is hurting him. In the movie Odysseus doesn't have to outwit Polyphemus because the Cyclops is a puppet who has no wits.
...
Perhaps more surprising from the director of Oppenheimer, Damon's lummoxy Odysseus also seems to lack technological intelligence (polymΔchania).
This critique tracks with the same criticisms provided by right-wing commentators.
Nolan's Odysseus suffers from sad-old-man syndrome, a growing phenomenon across Hollywood.
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...the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie's imagined world. We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it - a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar - but Nolan doesn't. The Trojans are dehumanised by their masks; we know none of them by name or face. The hands of Odysseus and Telemachus are bloodied only by the most righteous, computer-game modes of killing, and we feel no pity or horror at the deaths of their victims, whether Trojans, giants, suitors or slaves. During the sack of Troy - which he supposedly organised - Odysseus gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before.
Even 2004's "Troy," which was panned for taking liberties with the characters and details of Homer's work, portrayed Odysseus as a witty, cheeky, inventive leader.
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Wilson goes on:
Nolan's Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior's glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.
And perhaps most scathing:
...I gazed at the shipwrecks and bloodbaths without any agony of emotion. My eyes stayed dry, even for Argos the dog - whose adorableness as a puppy is predictably amped up to suit our animal-loving times. If only the human characters had been treated with such serious attention.
The irony here is that Wilson is about as far-left politically as they come.
This is not a woman who wants to faithfully adapt the source material. She purposely interpreted her own translation through an anti-patriarchal, feminist lens that employs modern intersectional thought based on class consciousness derived from the writings of Karl Marx.
(Translation: She's super woke.)
She uses "Elliot" Page's preferred pronouns. She lambasts Nolan for filming in the Sahara because he contributed to "normalizing" violence against the "indigenous Sahrawi people" (in other words, she did a woke land acknowledgement). She loves the race-swapping of the characters, but she hated the way Nolan did it:
The race-neutral casting of Nolan's Odyssey was inevitably deplored in some quarters. But there is nothing progressive about it. Most of the non-white actors - Zendaya, Lupita Nyong'o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott - play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist.
Nolan was both TOO woke and NOT WOKE ENOUGH for her.
Yet again, we watch a male character's desperate quest to recover and/or avenge a female love object.
THE PATRIARCHY!! REEEEEEE!!!
She did like one thing, however:
There are more female characters than in most Nolan movies, thanks to the source material.
The source material just so happened to be ... her translation of the Odyssey.
π π π
What a time to be alive.
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