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Matt Damon in Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of the Odyssey.
Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of the Odyssey, which opened in theaters worldwide on July 17, sparked controversy during its production for filming in Western Sahara, an independent territory that has been under occupation by Morocco for more than fifty years. As critics like Eoghan Gilmartin have rightly noted, Hollywood’s presence in Western Sahara would have been unthinkable before 2020, when Donald Trump forced U.S. recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the territory. In the intervening years, Morocco has made substantial efforts to transform Western Sahara into a magnet for both filmmaking and tourism, lending a false legitimacy to its control over the region.
Much of the criticism directed at Nolan has made note of the apparent hypocrisy in his choice to make use of colonized land for a film featuring diverse casting of Greek heroes, including Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. An open letter of disapproval signed by stars such as actor Javier Bardem, director Pedro Almodóvar, and activist Greta Thunberg, asks Nolan to “acknowledge that they should not have filmed scenes in Dakhla, and to either not edit them into the film or to get consent to do so from the Sahrawi people.”
This is a fair point. But perhaps even more importantly, the Western Sahara controversy is also galling given the story’s colonialist themes, and in particular, the progressive spirit of Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation, which Nolan has cited as a source of inspiration. Nolan’s uncritical treatment of the Odyssey not only erases Wilson’s important work, but also contributes to the whitewashing of classical antiquity long embraced by right-wing movements.
Because Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey is thought to have been written at the time when Greek city-states first began colonizing the Mediterranean, its story has long been interpreted as a reflection of that process. The epic’s stance toward colonialism remains a subject of debate. On the one hand, its hero Odysseus and his crew act as a colonizing force during their decade-long journey to the kingdom of Ithaca after fighting in the Trojan War. They set foot on strange shores without invitation, and invariably place those who live there in one of two categories: civilized, like themselves, or savages lacking in culture and morals. But the events of the poem frame this mindset—and the behavior it is used to justify—as hypocritical and self-defeating.
When Odysseus meets, blinds, and escapes from the man-eating cyclops Polyphemus, the contradiction is especially clear. Though he is juxtaposed against the decent, god-fearing Greeks, Polyphemus is the son of the Olympian god Poseidon, and his island is described as much more beautiful and bountiful than Greece itself. Odysseus’s confrontation with the cyclops ultimately does him more harm than good—by spurring Polythemus to invoke his father’s wrath and turn the seas against him, Odysseus significantly delays his own return to Ithaca.
On a recent episode of their podcast The Rest is History, historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook discuss how the Odyssey functions as a deconstruction of Homer’s other epic poem, the Iliad. In the Iliad, which tells the story of the Trojan War, the Greek hero Achilles, choosing a short but glorious life over a long and unremarkable one. But in the Odyssey, when Odysseus encounters the ghost of Achilles in the underworld, he seems to have come to regret this decision, telling his former compatriot that any kind of life—no matter how insignificant—is preferable to death. Just as the Odyssey questions the nature of heroism, so too might it question the moral value of actions like exploring and subjugating foreign lands, which the poem itself presents in a more ambiguous light than Nolan does in his adaptation.
It’s easy to see why Emily Wilson’s Odyssey translation, which she undertook in part to make the poem more accessible to twenty-first century readers, would speak to Nolan—it ditches archaic language in favor of modern words like “pep talk” and “tote bag” (as opposed to “spoke cheeringly” and “wallet” in an earlier translation by Samuel Butler). But while Nolan has readily adopted Wilson’s use of everyday language, he appears not to have grasped the larger purpose that this change in diction served. Wilson’s translation from Greek is not just worth reading for how its use of language reframes certain events of the poem, but also for the extent to which it draws attention to the biases of previous translations, particularly with regard to sex and gender. Previous translations referred to a group of female slaves whom Odysseus’s son Telemachus sentences to death as “sluts” and “whores,” while Wilson translates them more neutrally as “the female ones.” Wilson also translates insults directed at female characters as “dog” rather than “bitch.” One line translated with macho swagger by Robert Fagles in 1996—“As Dawn rose up from bed by her lordly mate Tithonus / bringing light to immortal gods and mortal men”—apperars in Wilson’s translation as “Then Dawn rose up from bed with Lord Tithonus / to bring the light to the deathless gods and mortals.”
One could argue that in making these changes, Wilson is transposing contemporary norms onto an ancient text and culture—or, alternatively, that they act as a corrective for the biases already transposed onto the text by translators of generations past. “There was certainly misogyny in Homer’s time,” Janey Tracey notes in her review of Wilson’s translation for Ploughshares, “but this specific type of sexual shaming is an ‘imported’ type of sexism.”
Though widely praised upon release, Wilson’s translation also attracted its fair share of critics. Some, like the classicist Richard Whitaker, argued that Wilson strayed too far from the original text, and in doing so produced something closer to a creative interpretation of the Odyssey like James Joyce’s novel Ulysses than a proper academic translation. What this pushback fails to recognize is that, as Wilson readily acknowledges, the Odyssey’s exact historical context is to some extent unknowable: We still don’t know exactly when the Odyssey was written or by whom, and ancient versions of the poem survive only in fragments. The arguments against her revisions not only bolster her point that translation is fundamentally subjective; they also demonstrate how, over time, certain interpretations can be perceived as an objective truth, rather than matters of interpretation at all.
After a period of silence on the matter, Wilson has since shared her thoughts on Nolan’s adaptation in a scathing review published in the London Review of Books where she notes, among other complaints, that “many of the film’s implicit values contradict those of Homer’s poem.”
Interrogating our understanding of the Odyssey is not just a matter of literary or linguistic concern. From Benito Mussolini’s use of ancient symbols to frame his rise to power in Italy as a form of national rejuvenation, to contemporary alt-right internet groups projecting their own ideology onto Stoic philosophers, Greco-Roman cultural heritage has a long history of getting hijacked by conservative actors.
Now, as the conservative movements in both Europe and the United States grow increasingly extreme, we need films that acknowledge and challenge the ways in which the present has unduly imposed itself on the past, not ones that reflect their biases back at them. Beyond the ethical implications of its production, Nolan’s Odyssey is an artificial construction that parades for the real deal, and that confidence is no less concerning.
Despite its fame—or in part because of it—we don’t know the Odyssey nearly as well as we think we do. The best and most responsible way to adapt the Odyssey isn’t to treat the story as sacrosanct, but as constructed: not a shining marble bust, untouched since the day of its creation, but a dilapidated ruin, damaged and rebuilt across time.