Transcription
Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine, and welcome to Godsplaining Reacts, where I provide you with takes on things contemporary, hopefully helping you to think your way through what's going on now with some measure of certainty and confidence, lest you be thrown for a loop.
I'd like to talk about the Odyssey, the most recent film from Christopher Nolan. Christopher Nolan is one of those directors who, when he releases a film, you just go and see it. Although, with this particular film, uh somewhat more complicated because when casting choices were revealed, people were made nervous that it was going to be DEI inspired.
>> 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?" >>
And so, the go woke, go broke kind of advocacy began, and people were calling for a boycott, but it's Christopher Nolan, so no one could resist, and then it had a huge weekend at the box office. So, it's like, "Uh all right, so we're going to get into like the question about the casting." Uh we'll talk about that eventually, but I want to do so specifically by asking whether this is traditional storytelling because I think that's more important kind of for a cultural take, and I think it actually helps us to appreciate what's at stake in the casting choices. Because I think the question of how we engage with the tradition is super important as a matter of our own formation and flourishing. So, I'm going to be asking like, "Does Christopher Nolan tell the story as Homer tells it? And where it's non-traditional, is there a way of understanding why?"
So, like a lot of us are worried about the DEI stuff because it seems like it's selling out to contemporary pressure, and that it gives rise to a kind of narrative incoherence in our culture, which is ultimately anti-humanistic. In the sense that's like, "Tear down the monuments, rewrite the history, and you're left with nothing. And so, we don't have a lot of what we formally had when it comes to making sense of ourselves, our place in the world, our activity, etc.
So, I'd like to talk briefly about the tradition, and then focus specifically on the character of Odysseus and his moral formation and what that reveals about our own moral formation. And then we'll talk about the casting questions right at the end.
So, the tradition I'd like to focus on So, the Iliad and the Odyssey obviously as source texts and then the Aeneid as a kind of important midpoint and then the Divine Comedy as giving us a kind of Christian read of the situation. So, just brief touches.
The Iliad and the Odyssey probably written like 750 to 675 BC. Obviously, they testify to an earlier time, perhaps around 1200 BC, sometime in the Bronze Age. Um and in this portrayal, Odysseus appears as a warrior, as a strategist, um and really as a hero. So, there are some elements of deception in the portrayal that we have from Homer himself, but not necessarily the most prominent elements, okay?
So, next, all right, so the Aeneid, obviously the Iliad's written in Attic Greek, the Aeneid is written in Latin, it's the great Latin epic or the great Latin epic poem. Tells the story of the empire, the founding of the empire. It's written between 29 and 19 BC by Virgil. And Ulysses, Ulysses being the Latin name for the Greek Odysseus, he comes up in book two, but it's through two layers of narrative interpretation. So, it's Aeneas is talking to Dido, they're in Carthage at this stage of the journey, and Aeneas is recounting the fall of Troy, and he does so by focusing on the character of Sinon. Sinon being the one who was left behind by the Greeks, left behind by the Greeks, um to trick the Trojans into welcoming the Trojan Horse. And the story that Sinon tells is a story of hatred for Ulysses. Like, Ulysses killed my relative, he befouled your temple, he threatened to sacrifice me. And so, what you're getting is a Trojan perspective on Sinon's tale. Sinon at this stage is being a conscious deceiver. And the way that Ulysses comes through is as deceptive and as sacrilegious. So, not a good person.
The next layer though is the Divine Comedy, right? Which is written in the early 14th century uh by Dante Alighieri. But in a way, it's dependent upon the Aeneid. Recall that Virgil is his guide through hell and most of Purgatory. And that the Divine Comedy is a kind of conscious engagement with the Aeneid. So, it's fascinating that Dante puts Ulysses in the eighth circle of hell. So, you might recall the seventh circle of hell is for like the simply violent. There you have like Phlegethon, the suicide wood, and then those who sin against nature who burn on the sands. And then you get to the eighth circle of hell, which is Malebolge, where there's like 10 pockets where you punish the complexly violent. And so, Odysseus is in the eighth pocket of the eighth circle of hell for the fraudulent. And he's identified there as the kind of arch trickster, right? So, so it's specifically fraud is his sin. Because, you know, like the envoy to Achilles in the Iliad, the theft/sacrilege of the Palladium, and the deception of the Trojans with the Trojan Horse. So, there it's like his his real sin is deceit or his real sin is fraudulence.
But it's fascinating that there's more. Because Dante will go on to tell that like Ulysses suffers from a kind of curious desire for knowledge and experience. He wants to go beyond the Pillars of Hercules all the way to Mount Purgatory. Like he wants to explore to the very ends of the earth. So, you have this line in the Comedy where he says, "You were not formed to live the life of brutes, but virtue to pursue and knowledge high." So, it's like Ulysses styles himself a kind of humanist in the sense that he wants to increase the scope of man's life and seek things which man has not formally sought. So, Dante introduces the note of pride. That what lies at the root of his fraudulence is in fact pride. Um so, you can think of the sin of curiosity, which St. Thomas treats in the Summa Theologiae in question 167 of the Secunda Secundae. Curiosity for him is a bad thing. It's opposed to studious application, to like studious care, specifically for learning those things which you ought to learn about God, about lower things with reference to higher things, about the things that pertain to your state in life that fall within your ken, and going about it in the right way. So, to be curious is in a way to be in kind of rejection of your estate. So, it's a vice against moderation. And the thing that's fascinating is that questions 166 and 167 about studiousness and curiousness, respectively, come right after questions 161 and 162 on humility and pride, and then 163 to 165 on the fall of man. So, it's in a section where pride features as the most evident vice. So, you have a a sense here that that there's more to be said about Ulysses, and that his real fault is the sin of pride.
So, what I think Nolan gives us is a cool spin on the Greek, Trojan, and Christian valuation of the character of Odysseus. So, when it comes to like the tradition of storytelling, I think that Nolan gives us a relatively straightforward, traditional telling of the tale. Obviously, he wanted to do a huge film, and set design-wise, it's just it's just massive. It's awesome. So, he can't necessarily do all of the different vignettes which one might do, and so he makes strategic choices. So, he follows the sequencing of the Odyssey itself, largely. Um and he does, you know, like some mashing up of things, like he's Odysseus is eating lotus flowers on the island of Calypso. But, he largely preserves the narrative he largely preserves the mode of storytelling itself. So, he cuts out the Cicones, he cuts out the Lotus-Eaters, he cuts out the island of Aeolus, he cuts out the Phaeacians, uh but he keeps Polyphemus, the Cyclops, he keeps the Laestrygonians, he keeps Circe, Hades, the Sirens, Scylla, Charybdis, Helios, Calypso. And that's a lot.
But, I think what's fast most fascinating about his storytelling is the way that he interprets the character of Odysseus himself in light of these Greek, Trojan, and Christian elements. Because, if we're going by a kind of Homeric understanding of virtue, and I borrow here from Alister McIntyre, what we're talking about is effectively doing one's duty. So, virtue is largely socially defined. Like, who are you in society? What's required of this type of person in society? And are you willing to do it? So, it's not so much a matter of, you know, like grace, virtue, gifts of the Holy Spirit as we understand it in the Christian dispensation, obviously. But, it's a matter of doing the thing for which you have been made and placed. And so, it's there's like a lot there about resignation to one's fate. There's a lot there about a kind of I don't know if sterile's the right word, but a kind of cold abandon to circumstances.
Now, I think that you see a kind of Homeric understanding of virtue challenged in part by the narrative setting of the Odyssey itself. Because part of what's destabilizing about Odysseus's journey is that the social context is is just totally out of sorts. He's going to new places, meeting new people who live by their own rules. And he's constantly finding himself in conflictual situations because there is no clear social context. He can only really have that in Greece. And even when he gets back, it's been kind of called into question. So, I think that like Nolan uses that as a way for well, as a way to introduce other elements of the tradition and to kind of prompt his audience to make a fuller accounting of Odysseus's character. So, I think what you get is a kind of synthetic reading where Odysseus is a hero, but he's also a trickster. And what lies at the root of the conflict at work in his life is that he's a proud man. But, I think he's also capable of a kind of redemption. And that's what makes it so fascinating.
So, like he's given a heroic cast, but there are clear failings. And you see the trickery, like the way that he describes his choice for the Trojan horse. I mean, like you see cool trickery when he escapes the cave of Polyphemus. You see the trickery when he enters his own house in Ithaca in the guise of a beggar. There's just trickery all throughout. But, it he's ultimately gesturing towards a kind of pride or a hubris which underlies a lot of his faults and failings as a controlling sin. So, like the way that he doubles back to taunt Polyphemus, which ultimately loses him more men and incurs Poseidon's wrath, which becomes the prevailing counterforce throughout the course of, you know, the narrative. But, just like pride, pride's throughout, you know, like so diverting from a known course, leading his men into dangerous conditions, failing to bury the dead, which ends up being super important. So, it seems like he kind of appears unprincipled in his defiance. Uh his defiance of the gods, his defiance of fate, his defiance of the circumstances. But, the red thread is that he's ultimately curved in on himself, that he's reliant on himself, dependent upon himself in a way that causes these tragic faults and failings to, you know, resonate through the narrative.
And I think here you see a kind of cool connection to the Christian teaching on capital vices or capital sins. So, in one enumeration, there are seven of them, and you just go pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust. And that's what Dante does, especially in laying you know, the rings of hell and the rings of purgatory. But, there's another parallel tradition where there are actually eight, in the sense that instead of pride, you have vain glory. And the way that pride functions is at the root of all of the sins. So, it's like the mother of the vices, the queen of the vices, to speak in strange terms. And I think that there's there's something of that at work in the story, and that pride is effectively at the root of all that we do that's sinful and vicious. Not all that we do, obviously, but all that we do that's sinful and vicious.
And so, I think what we see in um Odysseus is a kind of conflict between his heroic aspirations of a noble sort within a Homeric setting, and then his prideful aspirations, which are sinful and vicious by kind of Christian standard, which ultimately undermine the nobility of his pursuits. So, there's a kind of basic goodness at work in him, and you see that at various points, but he's in conflict with himself. There's an orientation to redemption, but there's also an orientation to self-destruction.
So, like even when he strings his bow and plucks it, you know, you see it at an early point in the movie that that's meant to warn the animals because he doesn't want to just like sneak up on them and slay them. He wants to fight with them rather than merely hunt with them. But he also doesn't warn the Trojans when conceiving of, you know, the Trojan horse and having it introduced into the city. Or like you see it in the way in which he expresses his care for people. Like see so he cares about his men, but he mostly cares about himself. And you can see that conflict play out in really wild ways. So he's like in some senses he's kind of a consequentialist but with a desire to be noble and he can't find his way through.
And you see this concretized by the fact that he carries with him two tokens. All right? So on the one hand he has the token of Athena which was given to him by his wife and it's a sign well it's a call really to religion, to piety, to fidelity. Um but on the other hand he has a lot. And there it's a reminder of chance, of fortune, of fate. But he uses it as a way to remind him of Antinous, specifically of Antinous's shame. Um and you know, like the reason for which Sinon finds himself in the situation in which he is is because Antinous did what he did.
I think that like what's what's cool about Nolan is that it's a kind of not that you can improve upon the Christianity of the Divine Comedy, but it's like a new layer of Christian exploration of Odysseus's character because Dante obviously is content to leave him to suffer the effects of his trickery and pride in the eighth pouch of the eighth circle of hell. But Nolan reads him within the whole tradition as a flawed hero with a way forward, but he focuses on the fact that like Odysseus has to choose. He has to choose the noble path. He has to choose a kind of redemption. He has to choose what amounts to like atonement or satisfaction.
So like Odysseus knows enough. He has no excuses. He himself, you know, engages in a kind of discourse with Athena throughout. And he'll say, "Why can't the gods speak in ways that we understand?" And Athena says, "Who doesn't understand thunder, fire, a child's smile, a good harvest?" Basically saying, "You know enough. You are responsible. You live within a coherent moral universe that gives scope for whatever you're going to do hence. Like whereas in the epics itself, like specifically in the Iliad and the Odyssey, you often feel like you're dealing with gods who are almost totally capricious. But there's there's a kind of stability to the divine order here, which gives a real sense of the moral import of Odysseus's choices.
And you see Odysseus come to a narrative understanding of his sins, of his vices. So like he he comes to an understanding that his prideful defiance is effectively a defiance of the gods and of their laws. And he roots it in a kind of primordial sin, specifically the deception of Troy, which is fascinating. It's super fascinating. He he says at that point like he saw 10 years of rage pour into that city in one night. And the rage of the Greeks, you know, recall the Iliad begins sing O muse of the rage of Achilleus. So the rage of the Greeks is portrayed as like anti-humanistic, right? As bestial. And you see this play played out kind of personalistically as as the Greeks are putting, you know, Trojan women to the sword, one of whom is Athena, you know, played by Zendaya or Zende, I don't know how to pronounce her name, sorry. So it's it's like portrayed personalistically in the rape of the city and the killing of its gods. And that hearkens back to that whole history about the Palladium.
So, there's a there's a spotlight shown on his moral responsibility. Like it's it's his sins, it's his vices which need atoning. So it's not just Paris's lust or Helen's infidelity or Menelaus's rage or Agamemnon's bid for domination. All of those different factors are diminished, you know, like Paris isn't even shown. And Hela Helen, you know, like she's been slashed so she's been diminished herself. Menelaus is shown to be an uncultured man. And Agamemnon, you never actually even see his face. Um he's like this cool kind of iconic warrior, but you never see his face. So the emphasis then is placed on you. You've got to choose. You've got to choose how you engage with the tradition, the tradition of your own life as it sit as it sits within this shared life.
So the thing with Odysseus and the way that the story plays out is that it's only in satisfying for his sins and vices can he come home? And so like Nolan introduces this cool thought that Odysseus doesn't actually want to go home. Um like because yeah, so that you have this kind of dialogue between Eurylochus and Odysseus after they pass the Sirens. And Eurylochus asks, "What was the song of the Sirens like?" And Odysseus says, "All the things you wanted to be and then all of the things you wished you never wished for. It was a delicious itch you want to scratch, but you find it under the skin and can't reach it. So the delicious itch becomes unbearable. It told you what you most want is what you most can't have and that the most you can't have is what you already had and lost. It was a song of all the promises I failed to keep and it told me I don't really want to go home."
So So So Odysseus has to reckon with his real existential state. He has, you know, as as Penelope identifies, he's become the people from the sea. He's become a raider, a marauder. He's become someone else and he can't come home until he makes amends because he can't be himself and be received as himself until he makes amends. So it's very human um in that it it takes some time to reckon with his sin, to recognize his need for atonement and then to embrace the punishment. And it also has to cost him, you know, so he himself says the power of the sacrifice is in the cost of the person making it. And he recognizes that when Calypso says, "You have to give yourself to the storm, give yourself to Poseidon, take your punishment." And he'll be taking his punishment for many years hence, it seems.
So it's like he has to choose whether he remembers and he has to choose what he remembers. Recall the two tokens. Once he does arrive in Ithaca, you see the dying embers of the consequentialist. Like he still wants to rid his house of all of these suitors in most bloody fashion. Were there other ways? Not clear, but he chose this way. And then the beginnings of something like humility. So recall he enters his house as a beggar. Not It's not merely a deception, it's also a gesture of humility in a certain sense. Because, you know, like when he's trying to evaluate who's loyal and who's unloyal, he says the best way to do so is as a beggar because he says the clearest view of men is from below.
So, the thing that's cool about the storytelling is that it it retains the homecoming, but it moralizes it. Like it interiorizes it. It valorizes, you know, the the communication of the kingdom to the son. Um but it does so in a way that salvages the worthiness of the king, I think. So, it's like it's a traditional narrative with the kind of emphasis on personal transformation. And when he goes into his voluntary exile to the unknown west to offer sacrifice to make atonement for not having buried, you know, his fallen brethren and for having defied the gods, there's a sense there of real hope. You know, like that there's that there's more for him. It's not mere chance, fortune, fate. All right, it's it's religion. It's piety. It's fidelity.
Then when you get to the DAI thing, like, okay, so it is problematic in the sense that like whenever you have decisions which are easily interpreted in this way, it kind of makes the art political and then it's seemingly no longer about the beauty of the artwork. And like the choice is proven trusive. Some people say like maybe he's just trying to get an Oscar and these are all the new criteria. Some people say like, you know, while this is film, it's deeply indebted to an earlier tradition of, you know, stage acting and, you know, bardic narration. So, like it's it requires less in the way of photorealism. I don't know, whatever. But I I think what might be at stake here is that Nolan is playing tricks, but tricks of a redemptive sort. He's actually prompting us to a kind of transformation.
So, like we'll say that in a way he trivializes the beauty of Helen. Recall, in the movie Helen is twins with Clytemnestra and it seems to suggest like whether she's beautiful or not, you know, like whether you think this is a good choice or not, you know, like whether she's the passive seduced in the case of Helen or the active fury in the case of Clytemnestra doesn't matter. Whether or not you find her convincing as a Greek queen. It matters how you choose to engage with this text in part. You know, like it matters how you choose to engage with the narration. And it's it's even more cool, I think, with Sinon. So, like Sinon is either deceiving or deceived. So, in the Aeneid, he is deceiving. In Nolan's telling of the story, he is deceived. Okay, so, like, in the Aeneid, he says that he hated Odysseus because of, you know, Odysseus executed a relation, that he was left behind, that he no longer wants to do have anything to do with the Greeks, and he says that the horse is an offering to Athena because of the sacrilege of the Palladium that Odysseus and Diomedes defiled. And if the Trojans bring it inside, then they'll be safe. And for this fraudulence, well, it's for this, you know, that that Dante puts him in an even lower circle of hell than Ulysses. But Nolan styles him as an unconscious trickster in the film. So, he ends up being in Hades the accuser of Odysseus. So, Achilles doesn't even appear in the visit to Hades. It's mostly dominated by Sinon and then Agamemnon and then Tiresias.
So, I I I think that maybe what he's saying is like as to, you know, like the trans person, uh, you know, like Ellen Page, like the choice of her, it it doesn't matter whether, you know, she's deceived or deceiving too terribly much. It matters how you choose. It matters how you engage with what's going on in our contemporary society and how you bring the traditions of past years to bear, how you bring a kind of humanistic concern to bear, because we're all responsible in a certain sense for carrying forward the tradition, for receiving it creatively and transmitting it creatively, which is to say, by receiving it humanly and, you know, like transmitting it humanly. And so, people make certain characterizations of the progressive and the conservative, like, the progressive thinks only of transmitting it with novelty, and the conservative thinks only of receiving it with fidelity. But the fact of the matter is that we're all called to a kind of principal discourse with our tradition or within the setting of our tradition.
And so, you know, I think like part of the anti-woke furor leading up to the movie reveals a certain limitation of the go woke, go broke praxis, because it didn't have enough data. It didn't really know how Nolan was engaging with the tradition. And so, I think that maybe maybe part of what Nolan is suggesting, and this is a real stretch, so yeah, just pardon me for this. But, that like anti-woke furor sometimes operates out of the same paradigm as woke furor. It doesn't really think so much about principled discourse, it just thinks about winning, right? It's just back and forth. It's indebted to the same kind of Marxist materialist principles, right? It's just about push and pull. It's just about violence. Or it's a kind of definition by rejection. So, what we see in the anti-woke furor sometimes is a kind of similar anger to the anger that would tear down statues and rewrite history books. It's It's kind of fueled by a certain resentment, which which makes sense in light of all that's gone on in like the past 10-15 years. But, the fact of the matter is that we need to reckon with our past. We need to reckon with our tradition. Like, the fact of the matter is that we're not the victims. You know, Jesus Christ is the victim. He alone is the victim. You know, that that we have to assume the responsibility for what we have done, personally and communally. And this isn't to like apply guilt and blah blah blah reparations. It's just to say that like we need to be creative in our reception of the tradition, creative in our transmission of the tradition, and we need to be about a business of redeeming the past because Christ has redeemed it, but it remains for us to appropriate that redemption. So, there are stories to be told, and we need to be able to engage with those stories in human fashion, in creative fashion. But, it means a principled discourse, you know? So, like for for Odysseus, it meant satisfaction. It meant atonement. It meant conversion. And if we're going to engage with our past and live towards our future, it's going to mean atonement. It's going to mean satisfaction. It's going to mean conversion. It's not enough to live at the surface and the push-pull back and forth. We got to do more. We got to do more with our stories. We got to do more with our culture.
Okay, that is what I wanted to share. Sorry that it was too long. I keep forgetting to tell people to subscribe at the end of video, so I've been told to do that. So, if you haven't yet, subscribe, and we're delighted to engage you in conversation in other ways besides. So, boom. All right, this has been Godsplaining Reacts. I am Father Gregory. It's been a joy to chat with you. Know my prayers for you. Please pray for me, and I look forward to catching you next time on Godsplaining. Peace.