Scott Turow and Darren Schwartz
Subject: Is Nolan’s Odyssey a Masterpiece?
Bio: Scott: Author of Presumed Innocent, Darren: What Happens Next Culture Critic
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is -- Is Nolan’s Odyssey a Masterpiece?
Our speakers are Scott Turow the author of Presumed Innocent and Darren Schwartz the What Happens Next Culture Critic.
Darren, please begin.
Darren Schwartz:
We’re here to discuss The Odyssey. It’s Christopher Nolan’s film on Homer’s Epic. Stars an incredible cast: Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zedaya, Charlize Theron, Himesh Patel, John Leguizamo, Samantha Morton, Lupita Nyong’o, Jon Bernthal. It’s the first feature film shot entirely in 70-millimeter.
Gross $800mm so far, budget of $250mm, marketing of $125mm. They need to make $700mm to break even, which they’ve just passed. IMAX showings, which we did not see, are sold out for as much as three weeks in advance. It’s a cultural phenomenon and I loved it.
Larry Bernstein:
Scott, you saw the movie. What’d you think?
Scott Turow:
I liked it a lot. I thought it was a fabulous spectacle, outstanding movie making. but for all that said, I didn’t think it was a great movie because it lacked coherence, but I was still delighted to see this icon of Western literature celebrated.
Larry Bernstein:
The Odyssey was the first book assigned in New Trier High School’s freshman English class.
Scott Turow:
Me too.
Larry Bernstein:
Why is that?
Scott Turow:
It was the first book that I was assigned at the same high school. and this is one of the source documents for Western literature. There are all literary tropes we still have, like the Trojan horse or Penelope weaving, that remain part of our literary culture. Odysseus is one of those Heroes with No Face that Joseph Campbell talked about. He spends twenty years trying to get home. He encounters unimaginable obstacles and yet persists and succeeds at his quest. And that that is the myth that’s being celebrated.
Darren Schwartz:
Are you saying we’ve gotten soft as a society compared to what Odysseus had to go through?
Scott Turow:
The classic hero that Odysseus embodies, every society is soft compared to that figure. and the question is whether the ideal embodied by that hero satisfies us and the question you’re asking your high school freshman. It’s still worth asking today, “Are we satisfied by this image of a hero, or do we think it’s lacking something?”
Larry Bernstein:
The movie uses some of the plot lines but diverges in others. You have had several books turned into films.
Scott Turow:
I have.
Larry Bernstein:
Often, they diverge from your script.
Larry Bernstein:
And in the past, you mentioned to me that this as a different art form. How do you feel about Christopher Nolan diverging in the Odyssey?
Scott Turow:
I have no problem with diverging from the book, which has been my own experience several times. My philosophy is that every narrative work that survives that retains its original power in the retelling has got to be adjusted to meet contemporary tastes and needs, so that the contemporary audience can experience the core force of the story.
Transforming a literary work for those purposes seems to me perfectly appropriate, but you’ve got to get the core power of the story in the translation. I think the Nolan adaptation goes slightly awry in that regard.
Larry Bernstein:
I thought some plot changes were necessary and others were foolhardy. A necessary change was introducing the story of the Trojan horse and the sacking of Troy. It wasn’t described in detail in the Odyssey. A modern audience needs that background information.
Scott Turow:
Adding the Trojan horse, which is the way the Nolan movie opens, is it’s part of the same story and credited to the same author, if we can believe that Homer was just one author. I don’t have any problem with reminding the audience about the sacking of Troy, in Nolan’s version. This is the experience that Odysseus is carrying with him in his 20-year odyssey.
Darren Schwartz:
Odysseus’s strategic decision making is considered one of the great warfare decisions in the ancient world.
Larry Bernstein:
What bothers me is when they systematically change the character. Before he goes to Troy, Odysseus lies down with his wife where she says, “Don’t go to war. Maybe we can just take off, head to the sun.”
Scott Turow:
Agamemnon will come kill our son if I don’t go.
Larry Bernstein:
That’s not how it goes in the poem. That is an idea that neither party had seriously considered. This is his duty. We have a war to fight. I’m the king. I’m going to lead my troops into battle. It was obligatory to him. And then the last scene, which is perfectly foreshadowed in that first scene, is that they then run away to leave the island after the killing of the suitors.
Nolan makes Odysseus into a caring, torn individual as it relates to his struggle with the death that he’s caused.
Scott Turow:
It was a great achievement in the original text. The ideal of masculinity three millennia ago included the glory of vanquishing your enemies, sacking, pillaging and even raping. Nolan’s problem is that’s not going to sit well with a contemporary audience. So, he decides to make Odysseus a more ambivalent, self-conscious hero who sees himself, because of the experience in Troy, as something of an anti-hero. He regrets this. But then at the end of the movie he turns around and slays a hundred suitors who are camped out in his house pursuing his wife.
That piece of the story has been difficult to handle in in other contemporary adaptations. My friend Mary Zimmerman, who stages narrative works. She staged the Odyssey and she too was deeply troubled about Odysseus coming home and killing all the suitors. She felt that the audience would literally walk out of the theater holding their nose. Mary represented the suitors as six figures on stage with sandbags over the heads of all of them. And the sandbags are opened and sand then rains down gently on the suitors. They’re made to figuratively disappear rather than the bloody climax where Odysseus literally spears one hundred people.
Larry Bernstein:
One of the core issues of morality of the Odyssey is that there is a duty when a stranger comes to the door to treat him with love and respect. It is to offer food, shelter, whatever they need to go on their way.
Then if you are welcomed into the home, treat it with respect. Don’t overstay your welcome. Be kind and generous in return and leave on good terms without harming the host in any way. And it’s the suitors who abuse this who have for years eaten everything, sleeping with their slaves. It’s nonstop. And it’s that abuse of that moral code that is why Odysseus feels compelled to kill them.
Scott Turow:
One of the things that Nolan does, which I have to admire him for, is that he explains the law of Zeus that you must treat a stranger who comes to your home with kindness because that stranger may be a god in disguise. The gods were always testing us. and so sometimes they’d show up in human form. But strangers got to act with the courtesy you’d expect of a visiting God.
They’re called suitors because they’re all trying to marry his wife. The reason that the suitors are there is because Odysseus took his time getting home and experienced the charms of many other ladies along the way, including Circe and Calypso.
Larry Bernstein:
I’d like to to go over my favorite scene in the epic poem. It’s when Odysseus returns to Ithaca in disguise, and Penelope sees Odysseus in disguise and orders the older nurse to give his feet a good washing. And this is the same nurse that bathed Odysseus as a baby who had first cleaned a boar’s wound on his leg that she now recognizes as his scar.
She screams out, “It’s you Odysseus, my master.” And in the poem, he grabs her by the neck and says, “If you open your mouth, I will kill you. I’m here to kill the suitors. You cannot tell Penelope.”
He releases her neck and she says, “I understand my role. I’m so happy to have you are home. Later, after you kill all the suitors, can I tell you which of the slaves you should kill who’ve been sleeping with the enemy?” And he says, “I don’t need your help.” And then he tosses her to the ground.
In the Nolan movie, Odysseus’ treatment of the nurse is kind. He’s not beating up slave women. And she is not offering up to kill her colleagues. Both Odysseus and the nurse are taking on completely different characters.
Scott Turow:
The incident with the slave nurse would not suit contemporary tastes to see Odysseus behaving like a slave master, free to torture his slaves and even to kill them if they got in the way that has to be softened.
Larry Bernstein:
Darren, we saw another Odysseus film called The Return. This is the 2024 Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche movie. And in that scene with the old nurse when she discovers the scar, how would you describe that scene in contrast?
Darren Schwartz:
Different than the book and much different than the Nolan movie.
Larry Bernstein:
It was sexually charged.
Darren Schwartz:
It was passionate. It was bizarre.
Larry Bernstein:
You screamed out.
Darren Schwartz:
Multiple times, I screamed, “Please stop this horror.” The movie focused only on when Odysseus returned to Ithaca. I thought it was too slow. Then he started making out with this nurse, rolling around to the ground. I had a problem with that.
Larry Bernstein:
It was an incredible scene. She’s extremely glad to see him. Darren and I were flabbergasted.
Darren Schwartz:
It started with the recognition of who he was, then a hug where in the book it was more violent. In the Nolan movie, it was somewhere in between.
Scott Turow:
I have to say I was a little baffled by why that scene got included. We already know because dogs are heroes, in our contemporary world. We know that it’s Odysseus because Argus, his all but dead dog, wags his tail at Odysseus. Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, immediately realizes what the significance of that is and says, “Hey, you’re my father. and what are we going to do about all these guys who are camped out in the living room eating all our food?” And Odysseus is like, “Stand back, son, I got this.”
I don’t think we really need the scene with the nurse.
Darren Schwartz:
Agamemnon came home and his wife and lover killed him, stabbed him. It’s a tough homecoming.
Scott Turow:
Odysseus when Odysseus makes a brief stop in hell. Agamemnon says, “You go home in disguise because it may not be the way you left it. It might be that Penelope has taken up with one of these lovers and doesn’t want to see you return. Make sure that your wife actually wants you back.”
Darren Schwartz:
I mean, he’s like, “Well, let’s go see some things. I don’t want to follow Agamemnon. We’re going to go our own way.” He was on the beach. Everyone’s leaving. He’s like, “You know what? Let’s go left. We’re going to take I-294, not I-90. We want to avoid the city.” And you know what? Sometimes it’s good. A lot of times it’s not.
Larry Bernstein:
They didn’t have WAZE.
Scott Turow:
Odysseus, starting with the Trojan horse, is a master of deceit.
Larry Bernstein:
That is a core part of his character. It is appreciated by Homer as a key aspect of warfare. Even today, we look at deception and war as something to support. The Trojan horse reminded me of the Israelis using beepers to blow up their enemies.
Scott Turow:
We want to think of our heroes as larger than life actors. Odysseus’s deceitfulness is disconcerting. Not only does he kill the Trojans by deceiving them with the Trojan horse, saying, “This is a gift.”
Odysseus continues that deceit. He lies to his men at more than one moment, by the way, losing their trust in in the Nolan version. The most interesting episode is when Odysseus, understanding the fact that they’ve lost trust in him, tells them when they face the famous twin dilemmas of Scylla and Charybdis.
Scylla being a voracious whirlpool. He tells him, let’s go toward the whirlpool, knowing that they no longer trust him and will therefore go through the Strait of Charybdis, where there is an awful monster waiting but where they have a chance to survive.
Larry Bernstein:
But knowing that six of his crew will be killed in the process.
Scott Turow:
Odysseus by doing that sparing some of his crew, or is he in fact just saving his own life? Because he certainly ends up living, which had they gone into the whirlpool was far, far from certain. and that he chooses to manipulate rather than win their trust by his valiant leadership is unsettling, but I will say something I really liked, because it is an antihero aspect of Odysseus that’s congenial to a modern sensibility that nobody’s perfect.
Larry Bernstein:
Odysseus arrives back home in Ithaca disguised as a beggar. When he is introduced to Penelope, he says he’s a former soldier who fought at Troy.
Scott Turow:
He’s even deceitful when he returns to his wife and his son. He’s described as this homeless beggar in rags. He can’t keep come clean with Penelope or Telemachus because of the example of Clytemnestra. He’s afraid he may no longer be welcome in his own home. and so. I’ll just trick them. It’s a piece of ugliness in Odysseus’s character. Interesting that it’s part of the anti-hero nature of the contemporary Odysseus that Nolan is inventing.
Larry Bernstein:
I read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. She is Professor of Classics at Penn. Her translation uses language and style that is straightforward. Her translation is a poem, not prose, with the same number of lines as the original. She uses meter and alliteration and all that. So, in many ways, she’s taken a traditionalist approach to The Odyssey.
Nolan has publicly said that he used Wilson’s translation as inspiration for the movie. Recently, Wilson wrote a scathing review of the movie in the London Review of Books. She said, “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.” Emily Wilson has trouble with this film’s treatment of Odysseus. He’s passive, sexless, and regretful. He’s “an action hero who feels bad about being an action hero.”
Scott Turow:
Emily Wilson, the translator of the Odyssey displays typical academic narrowness. She reminded me a periodontist who thinks that all of the problems with American health care are the way root canals are handled. and she cannot see beyond the borders of her own version of the Odyssey. She’s trapped in the Homeric vision and can’t recognize the many brilliant aspects of Nolan’s
contemporary translation of this epic.
Credit where credit is due, Nolan knows how to wring fabulous emotion out of these classic scenes, starting with the Trojan horse. Those are literally epical. The Odyssey partakes of the same elements that cause audiences to pack the theaters for superhero movies. It is an action epic and Nolan is very smart about recognizing that he’s dealing with the same materials that are so pleasing to contemporary audiences. Emily Wilson can’t see that. She’s blind to what makes this movie succeed.
Emily Wilson’s got her feet set in concrete because of her own approach to Homer and literally can’t move on to appreciate Nolan’s.
Larry Bernstein:
What do you think of Circe as a character?
Scott Turow:
She’s a raggedy witch in Nolan’s presentation who perhaps has been abused by men throughout her lifetime, who lures Odysseus’s crew in and turns them all into swine. Now that is a far cry from the version of Circe in the Odyssey where she is a fabulous, gorgeous goddess. Odysseus is eventually happily seduced by her.
Instead, Nolan portrays her as this slattern. The scene did not appeal to me for that reason because, she was inherently distrustful of men. Circe has been interpreted as a classic figure of great fascination, including by Madeline Miller, whose recent novel Circe saw her as a feminist hero like way Homer originally portrayed her. I think what scared Nolan about that version, is that he can’t have Odysseus stopping everywhere, and screwing all these women because it is it’s guaranteed to displease a large part of the female audience. So, he changes Circe. It is an amazing scene because of the movie making involved in the transformation of the crew into pigs. But it just didn’t sit well with me as a moviegoer. and you can say that’s because you knew the original story and liked it better.
Larry Bernstein:
Let’s go to Cyclops.
Scott Turow:
I thought that was Nolan’s brilliance as a movie maker, very much at the height of his powers. Cyclops looks like a Claymation figure, grotesquely distorted, and looks like the victim of those misbegotten pharmaceuticals that created grotesque birth defects. I love the scene.
Darren Schwartz:
He seemed very childlike. These guys came in and they’re going to eat his sheep. He walks in, sees a few people. He eats them, doesn’t pay attention to the rest of them, and he’s going to take a nap.
Scott Turow:
He is the discarded child. Maybe his dad has set him up here on this island where he’s got a herd of sheep and can survive well with those circumstances.
Cyclops possesses moral ambiguity, because Odysseus and his crew invade this figure’s house, and certainly are not good guests. Because they put out Cyclops’ one eye, they’re worse guests than even the suitors are in Odysseus’s House. You actually feel sympathy for the Cyclops.
Larry Bernstein:
One thing that was not in the movie but was in the book was that Cyclops had a chat with Odysseus where as part of his deception says that his name is “no man.” And so, when the Cyclops is blinded, he yells out to his neighbors, “I’ve been hurt!” “Who hurt you?” “No man.” And so, the neighbors don’t come to his aid and the Greeks flee.
Darren Schwartz:
But doesn’t Odysseus then still yell at the end his own name?
Larry Bernstein:
Yes, and there’s Odysseus’ pride. He fires a couple more arrows and yells out his real name. Cyclops tells his father the God Poseidon to curse Odysseus’ journey home. This conversation with the Cyclops is a huge, plot-driving moment in the poem, and Nolan cuts it. He doesn’t even have Odysseus talk to him.
Scott Turow:
As they’re leaving and finally back on their ship, one of the crew members speaks up and goes, “That Cyclops, he’s Poseidon’s son. We are going to have a very rough voyage now on Poseidon’s seas.” And that proves to be prophetic.
Larry Bernstein:
In the poem, the gods play a much larger role. I like the fact that there’s disagreement among the gods with different agendas and perspectives, you can see how things can quickly get out of control.
Athena is a huge fan of Odysseus. Always looking out for him, helping out with guidance. Calypso is a God played by Charlize Theron who wants to marry Odysseus and keeps him stranded on an island for seven years.
Athena speaks to her father Zeus and afterwards Zeus intervenes and has Calypso let Odysseus return to his wife. Human agency is core to the story. Odysseus makes good and bad decisions but ultimately it is his agency that causes the ongoing tragedy.
Scott Turow:
Athena tells him a siren would drive everybody mad and says, no, I’m going to put wax in their ears.
Larry Bernstein:
But Odysseus has got to hear the Sirens. His decision puts his crew at risk. If he had put wax in his ears, the ship would have passed without incident. But here they strap Odysseus to the mast, he’s going crazy and some of his workmates remove their wax because they see how he is responding and then they swim to their deaths. I mean, that’s on him.
Scott Turow:
Absolutely. So much that goes wrong, it’s on him. Odysseus disobeys the gods or disregards Athena’s warnings to the detriment of his crew. Odysseus ties himself to the mast so he can hear the siren’s song but not succumb to it. The crew members see him living this larger-than-life experience and a couple of them take the wax out of their ears. As happens with these gorgeous women with this alluring song, they go off to pursue the sirens and die on the way.
Darren Schwartz:
Well, personally, I do believe in free will but sometimes the cards are stacked against you.
Larry Bernstein:
In ancient times, there’s so much going on around you that you can’t explain. Where did this storm come from? It must be because Poseidon’s pissed off. They’re looking for causality for what’s going on.
Scott Turow:
Most of us want to believe in free will, to make choices and not be subject to God’s will. The Greek notion of fate, that the gods decide every moment of your life undermines that Odysseus is a hero in our modern sense, that he can make choices, impose his own will, and triumph over obstacles to return home.
Darren Schwartz:
Scott, I saw parallels between Presumed Innocent and the Kindle County characters with The Odyssey, including the theme of temptation. Rusty’s journey, you could say mirrors Odysseus, is that his character is rooted in good but makes a lot of bad decisions.
Scott Turow:
Odysseus and Rusty Savage in Presumed Innocent are both deeply flawed characters who create their own troubles and then have to surmount enormous obstacles because of their ill-advised choices in order to return to their homes.
Larry Bernstein:
The Odyssey is an 11-hour story, people need to go to the bathroom. In the Odyssey, there’s repetition. Characters tell other characters what’s going on.
You do that in your Kindle County book series. You give background information. You don’t tell them the whole story, but you provide key prior character attributes and historical facts so that the new audience can understand what’s going on.
Scott Turow:
In writing these eleven novels, I’ve tried to make sure that each one is freestanding. But that means that there has to be a certain explanation of the background story of the character when it is consequential to what they’re doing in the present. And it’s always a challenge. But despite having to deliver what happened in the past, the present storyline still works.
Darren Schwartz:
Another question. When you’re writing, when do you know how it’s going to end?
Scott Turow:
The challenge always has been is novels end but life goes on. and I’ve always been conscious that whatever the ending is, it’s got to be meaningful in the context of the story.
If it’s the classic whodunit format, it’s who did do it, and that it be surprising, because we want to maintain suspense, and add something to the story. Is it for example an instance of misbegotten love? is it love gone awry so that there’s poignance to the killer’s appetite to kill? That’s a process of discovery. You don’t write the ending till you get to the end. but you’ve got to know where you’re going, otherwise the story won’t make any sense.
Larry Bernstein:
Darren, should the audience run out and see the new Odyssey film?
Darren Schwartz:
Yes. If you’re like someone like you or Scott who read and knew it, then you’ll appreciate it from that level. If you’re like me and don’t have any recollection of reading it, it’s a great movie, but it also has given me the opportunity to go back and learn it. And it’s a visual masterpiece. If you can see it in one of the true IMAX theaters, that is an even more powerful experience.
Larry Bernstein:
What Happens Next with the Odyssey?
Darren Schwartz:
I think what happens next is The Iliad.
Larry Bernstein:
It’s a billion-dollar project. Do you think Christopher Nolan will take the bait?
Darren Schwartz:
Yeah. I’m sure. It’d be interesting to see the growth of the 70-millimeter IMEX theaters, right now there’s 25. In a couple of years, it could be 50.
Larry Bernstein:
Will Matt Damon play Odysseus?
Darren Schwartz:
He’ll be offered.
Larry Bernstein:
If they don’t get Matt Damon, who do you think they will take?
Darren Schwartz:
Ralph Fiennes is probably under consideration.
Larry Bernstein:
Can you think of other films where the objective is “I just want to go home?”
Darren Schwartz:
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.
Steve Martin in this case would be Odysseus. He just wants to get back to Thanksgiving. Beautiful wife and family. And he gets bumped from his plane. John Candy’s there. And we all know the journey that they went on. Very similar.
Larry Bernstein:
One key distinction is that John Candy doesn’t have a family to go back to. One of the really awkward moments is when Steve Martin recognizes that.
Darren Schwartz:
At the end he revealed himself as a sad, lonely character that throughout receives Steve Martin’s empathy.
Larry Bernstein:
Let’s try a different movie. Castaway.
Darren Schwartz:
Castaway is a great film. Remember the tooth. Could you hit yourself in the face hard enough to take out the tooth.
Larry Bernstein:
I think if you’re in enough pain, you’d be amazed what you could accomplish.
Darren Schwartz:
How about the loss of weight?
Larry Bernstein:
I could lose the weight if I were on the shot.
Darren Schwartz:
He had Wilson.
Larry Bernstein:
Well, maybe Calypso was a figure of imagination as well. Maybe Calypso was a basketball.
What do you think of the ending of the Odyssey?
Darren Schwartz:
Why does he have to kill everybody? Why couldn’t he be like, “Hey guys, I’m back. My wife is taken. Let’s have one more meal. Everyone goes your separate ways.”
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Scott and Darren for joining us.
If you missed our previous 2 podcasts, they have been about the American Revolution. Why George Washington was the Unanimous Choice for President and Would you have been a Loyalist or a Patriot?
Our speaker was H.W. Brands, a Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of the biography American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington.
Professor Brands explained why Washington was appointed commander in chief of the revolutionary forces, the head of the constitutional congress, and our first president.
Patrick Allitt who is a Professor of History at Emory. He discussed why the British government demanded that American colonies pay their fair for their own defense, and why the Crown chose war instead of reconciliation. Americans learn in school why the patriots fought against taxation without representation, but we didn’t consider why many American colonialists preferred King George’s rule.
Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as at Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.
Check out our previous episode, Would You Have Been a Loyalist or a Patriot?, here.
