Transcription
At this point, why do you even want to be in this movie? Especially when you're playing a role that realistically you're not suited for.
When you read the Iliad and the Odyssey, very little time is spent in the perspective of the women. Right. Right? It's very It's told from a very masculine side of things, but this film takes time to really consider things from the female perspective. From the female perspective? You know, every time I watch Independence Day, I think to myself, man, that movie could have been so much better if they didn't do so much with the aliens and instead focused a lot more on the complex social hierarchies of women in the military. WHO'S THE MAN? HUH? WHO'S THE MAN?
LISTEN, GUYS, we already knew that Nolan's Odyssey is looking like it's extremely woke. We've seen this in creative decisions in the trailer. We know that it's based on a super feminist translation of the Odyssey by Emily Wilson, but this interview with Lupita Nyong'o, it just it absolutely cements the unfortunate conclusion that most of us have already come to, which is that this movie is created by and features people who just absolutely hate the source material. They hate it and they want to desecrate it. They want to stomp on the original version and they want to recreate it in their own image, which they think is going to be better at every turn. And it's it's never it. It never is.
I'd be like, so Homer, how do you feel about this screen time given to these women considering how little you spent with them? Yeah, I mean, this proves my point exactly. At this point, why do you even want to be in this movie? Especially when you're playing a role that realistically you're not suited for. It's less about being true to the story or having an honorable rendition of it and more about what your selfish ambitions are and putting your vision on everything else even if it doesn't really belong to you. But beyond Lupita's remarks, you guys, this interview points to another story here, which is the theory that I have had for quite some time that this movie is going to be an incredibly emasculating lecture rather than a triumphant epic. And because of this, it is going to be horribly boring on top of being intolerably woke. And I'm going to make this case to you of why I firmly believe that the Odyssey is going to be a woke feminist abuse of male heroism.
You have to crawl around on the floor like the dog you are. Yes, ma'am.
So, I'm going to make this case to you and in order to do so, we're going to have to do a little bit of a deep dive into the most egregious parts of Emily Wilson's translation because as I was doing a little bit of research on this, I already discovered some major overlaps with what she did to the Odyssey and what we've already seen in Nolan's trailers. So, let's dig into this. The biggest controversy and what I think is going to be the biggest problem in the Odyssey is what she did to Odysseus himself. And this is actually one of the biggest controversies surrounding Emily Wilson is her translation of the word polytropos, which is basically the word that's used to describe Odysseus. And other translators have rendered it in more of a way that talks about him being sly and clever, you know, the man of many ways, the man of twists and turns, the wily Odysseus. But Emily Wilson doesn't do that. She turns Odysseus into this sort of morally gray type of person. She opens up her translation by saying, "Tell me about a complicated man." He's not the mythic figure that Homer made him out to be. He's got a lot of flaws. He's got a lot of demons that he's battling, but he's good in some ways. He's just bad in others. You know, he's admirable, but he's selfish, but he's brave, but he's ruthless. She's turning him into less of a straightforward hero like a Luke Skywalker and more of a Tony Soprano or a Walter White. Someone who was regarded as like a grand figure but was morally gray and complicated.
On its surface, there's really nothing wrong with that. I mean, we all want extremely nuanced characters. There's something that we love about all that. Tony Soprano is one of the greatest characters of all time. Uh Cersei Lannister is another famous sort of like anti-hero villain that people love to explore at different levels. The difference is with these types of characters, you know, anti-heroes or morally ambiguous, is that we're really not watching them set out to accomplish a goal. We're just kind of watching their behavior and all of the consequences from that behavior unfold on screen. Things happen to this character because of the way that they are and because of the actions they choose to take. When you apply this to someone who is supposed to be a more mythic hero like Odysseus, like Luke Skywalker, now you're really taking away the investment that audiences are supposed to be making into their actions, into their journey. If I don't really like Odysseus, if I think that he kind of sucks because he has slaves or he beats his wife or, you know, he's selfish and rude, why do I care so much about him getting home? You're compromising the entire hero's journey by telling us right off the bat he's not really a hero. So, then why do I care? Why do I care if he accomplishes his goal? If it means something for the greater good of mankind, that might be one thing, but like if it's about Odysseus making it home and ruling Ithaca, you have to really believe in that man. You have to believe in that character. You have to want to stand with your hero and root for your hero to care about the plot from that point forward. If you're going to tell us that Odysseus has all of these little areas in which he's just like not quite so good or he's kind of icky on this part, you're really neutering the heart of the story, which is we want to help this hero get home.
During my research, I also came across this Greek concept of arete, which basically means to fulfill one's destiny, to fulfill one's potential as it relates to being the best version of yourself in all aspects. There are great people, great men who have done amazing things and achieved this concept of arete, of their greatest human potential. Does it mean that they were like the best moral person ever? That they're the person that you want to be neighbors with? Not exactly. It means that they went out there and they accomplished something so huge that it was meaningful enough to be on the imprint of human history.
And in this house, Christopher Columbus is a hero. End of story.
So, I really think that's what Homer was driving at when he crafted this poem like 3,000 years ago. I'm not trying to speak for Homer, but I would say that that's probably closer to what he was after than what Emily Wilson is trying to translate here. And I can see why this would be a hugely controversial take on this interpretation of the Odyssey. Now, are we guaranteed that this is how the movie's going to go? No, we're not. There's not really like a lot of direct overlap so far in the trailer with this specific point other than we're looking at Lupita Nyong'o's interviews. We're looking at the energy that she is giving off and there's a derision for Homer. There's a derision there for the original vision that we think that he had for the Odyssey and for its hero Odysseus.
Considering how little you spent with her. There's a contempt that she has there. Well, also, I'm just looking at the trailer itself and there's no like real direct evidence of this, but when you go back and you rewatch the trailer, it really feels like Odysseus is not the hero of his own story. There's a lot of competing perspectives, there's a lot of different focal points throughout the trailer, a lot of different dialogues and things happening at once on the screen, which of course they were happening in the actual story, but you're not really seeing a lot of Odysseus taking action or talking about the stakes or talking about his desire, his yearning to get home. That's not really in there a lot. His tone, his voice over is extremely reflective. All of the scenes with him are just they feel so slow-paced and drawn out. He's contemplative, he's reflective, he's thinking about his past or he's thinking about all the men who lost their lives. Like, he's really not driving the story forward at any point in the trailer other than just saying like bringing it all and then he like shouts to a bunch of soldiers, "Let's go!" and then they start running. So, there are hints that that action is there, but for me, and this is just me, the soul of the trailer, the heart of this man feels completely missing from the story. Only time will tell, we have to go watch the movie to see, but I'm getting more and more of this vibe by the day.
There were two signature changes in the Emily Wilson translation that I discovered that do directly overlap with the trailer. The first one is, apparently she uses modern language. And there you go, guys, there's your dialogue.
I did not hit her. I did not. Oh, hi, Mark.
There's dad and daddy in the Odyssey. It's because Emily Wilson translated the Odyssey to sound like it was written in the 1990s. I don't know if it was that exaggerated, but this is a major criticism of the way that she wrote this and the way that she translated it. Some people really like it, a lot of people don't. It is missing the grandeur. It is missing the ancient epic feeling from the earlier translations. She wrote it to be very modern. You can see that in the dialogue, in what Christopher Nolan has done with his creative choices, his decision to not have an orchestra for some reason, his decision to cast Travis Scott as the bard. Like, there are all of these modern interpretations of this film because of the Emily Wilson translation. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, if you wanted to do that so bad, why didn't you just do what the Coen brothers did and make it like O Brother, Where Art Thou? Just do a completely modern reinvention. Don't bastardize the original.
[screaming and groaning]
THAT'S WHERE THAT'S where that dialogue is coming from. It's coming from the Emily Wilson translation, sorry to say. The other significant overlap that we all clearly noticed is that Emily Wilson focuses on the women in the story a lot more.
from the female perspective
She humanizes them. You know, and this could relate to Anne Hathaway's character, Odysseus's wife, a little bit more. Specifically though, the Emily Wilson version calls out the the handmaids, the maids in Odysseus's house, and just directly calls them slaves. Which I think that they were, but they're referred to in older translations as maids, not as slaves. Emily Wilson completely makes them out to be the victims because a lot of them end up sleeping with the suitors, who end up staying at Odysseus's house, and a a of those handmaids sleep with the suitors. In Emily Wilson's translation, it's not really consensual, if you get what I'm saying. In the other translations, it is consensual, and they even use derogatory terms for these women, and basically equate them to traitors. This makes a big difference, because at the end of the story, all of these women are hanged for basically treason, um for their betrayal. And in the end of the original translation, or the older translations, that is seen as a like justifiable punishment, right? But it's not that way in Emily Wilson's translation. It's very like it's disturbing, and it's tragic. I don't know if the story is going to focus on handmaids a lot, or that part of the story as much, but it sounds like we're getting a lot more of these tragic type of female characters with the characters that Lupita Nyong'o is playing, with what we've seen of Anne Hathaway's character. I think we're going to be pulling in a lot of the wrongs that have been done to women throughout this journey. I think that's going to be a theme that comes up over and over and over again, is how victimized women were throughout Odysseus's journey. So, you're going to have that theme, you're going to pair it with this sort of morally complicated, gray character that Odysseus is, that he's not actually uh a true hero anymore. And at the end of the day, I think we're going to get a story that just completely neuters any shred of male heroism from this epic. I'm sorry, guys. I really am. You know, I I can't tell you not to go and see this movie. That just that would be hypocritical of me. I'm going to go see the movie. I'm going to review it. I'm going to tell you guys what I think about it. I'm very curious to know if I'm right or not. You know, that being said, if you are looking for this movie to lift up the male hero, I don't think that's going to happen here. Unfortunately, I really don't. I don't think this is going to be the movie that does that. I think it's too full of itself. I think they're going to get our butts in the seats just so that they can lecture us about modern morality and all the wrongs and all of the gray areas where men have messed up and all the wrongs that they've done and how they've wronged women along the way and they want us to like walk out of the theater somehow really like thinking about all of these complicated relationships that men and women had and the and the complex dynamics of the of the age and I just I just want to see a movie. I just want to see a good movie. I don't think this is going to be it. And to be honest with you guys, I don't know that Hollywood is really that concerned about bringing the male hero back again at all ever. I mean, if they can take a 3,000-year-old mythic hero and turn him into a feminist message, they're they're just going to keep doing that with every other male character that they can get their hands on. And it's sad and it's unfortunate and it's disappointing especially from a director like Nolan, but there it is. But these are just my thoughts. Please let me know what you guys think in the comments. Do you think I might be right or onto something or do you still have hope for this movie? Are you going to go see it? Let me know what you think and if you like this video, please like, hype, and subscribe so that you can get more of my content. Thank you so much, guys. I'll see you in the next one.