Stop Overthinking ‘The Odyssey’

Welcome to the Second Thought newsletter, where I take another look at whatever’s bubbling up in the middle and the margins of the culture. This week I saw The Odyssey—or, since I got tickets late and had to sit in the front row, mere feet from the massive IMAX screen it was shown on: I saw the bottom left corner of The Odyssey, and if I really craned my neck, most of the middle of it. This was apparently one of the smaller huge screens in New York, at a width of around 60 feet, but I’m still vibrating from the endless drumming of the score. One of the trailers, for a horror film starring Jessica Chastain, made me feel like I was under live fire. If my great-grandparents had been seated in this theater and caught even one of the mellower moments of this movie—like when Calypso, played by Charlize Theron, cradles Matt Damon’s beaten-down Odysseus on her beach—I think that their hearts would have exploded.

But luckily for us all, the nearly three hours of sweeping shots of beaches and ocean, brutal battle scenes, and dazzling special effects that make up Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s epic poem are available to us for about 20 bucks. The cast is stacked—though some performances pop more than others, sorry Tom Holland—and it comes at a time where the themes, about the cost of war, the limits of hospitality, and institutional collapse, are apt as ever. Nolan is a virtuoso; at this point, if he directed oncoming traffic, it would make hundreds of millions of dollars.

So why is everyone so worked up?

Even before the title card on Nolan’s latest film flashed with the words “A time of apparent magic . . .”, pooh-poohers were looking to gum up The Odyssey’s groove. Elon Musk, who owns X, posted that Nolan “desecrated Homer” and “groveled on his knees just to meet the woke rules required to win an Oscar.” Nolan’s crime was enlisting colorblind casting; Helen of Troy is played by Lupita Nyong’o, who is black, alongside actors who are Indian (Himesh Patel plays Odysseus’s second-in-command, Eurylochus) and Columbian American in the case of John Leguizamo, who plays Eumaeus, Odysseus’s blind, loyal servant. “In defiance of all common sense and logistics, a bunch of South Asians apparently managed to travel thousands of miles to Greece, where they joined Odysseus’s crew,” conservative commentator Matt Walsh pointed out in his post-game. “The casting by itself contradicts the internal logic of the story.”

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Walsh’s bizarre logic begs the question: If this is all supposed to take place in ancient Greece, how the hell did Anne Hathaway, with her deep-plane facial, get there? And come to think of it, why are they all speaking English?

It seems that with The Odyssey, some are forgetting that movies are pretend—there’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the accuracy of the helmets on the Spartan warriors and how the ship was a Viking one, not a Greek one—and that directors can do whatever they want with whatever source material they choose. Colorblind casting works here, like it did in Hamilton, and like it would in a movie depicting stories from the Bible, because these are foundational texts full of universal ideas. Anyone can opt in. Besides, the point of a movie isn’t to make you feel like you’re part of an impeccably re-created moment in time; that’s EPCOT, not AMC. But leaving aside silly casting quibbles and meltdowns over helmet plumes, I don’t see the culture war coming for the Trojan War as a bad thing.

Suddenly, my feed is full of debates over the difference between kleos, the Greek concept of glory, and timé, which is honor. There’s analysis over which translation Nolan was relying on; the more florid Robert Fagles or the more plainspoken Emily Wilson, who gave her own read to an interviewer at the 92nd Street Y: “I think this is a film that has some interest in shame, but I don’t think it has any interest in glory.” That the movie of the summer has any interest in shame or glory or revenge at all is a win. Let me remind you of the last few films that owned the summer months: Barbie, Top Gun: Maverick, and a bunch of superhero movies. Do you remember the awe and anguish you experienced during Deadpool & Wolverine? Me neither.

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Instead of romantic love, war, or evil, or whether Barbie was a feminist project, Nolan chose to make the centripetal force in his Odyssey “Zeus’s law,” or xenia, the Greek hospitality code that says you should always welcome a stranger in your midst, since they might be gods in disguise. He explores xenia on the island of Aeaea, where the witch Circe turns Odysseus’s men into pigs after welcoming them in and feeding them. Ditto on the island of Thrinacia, where Odysseus’s crew slaughters sacred cows, even though he warned them not to. And on Ithaca, where Penelope waits for years for Odysseus, forced to host the brutish suitors who are vying to become the next king. Some hosts are seductive; like the sirens, whose song Odysseus describes as “all the things you wanted it to be, then all the things you wish you never wished for.”

It’s a stunning movie—with food for thought about when guests become invaders, and when hosts become hostage keepers. Damon’s Odysseus is beset by guilt and haunted by the soldiers who died under his command. But if you think that makes him an anti-war activist who’d campaign for decolonization, you’ve been online too long.

Go see The Odyssey without worrying about whether it’s woke or not, and report back your thoughts. And if you want to hear more of my thoughts—about The Odyssey, but also the World Cup, and that viral raccoon in Seattle—catch this week’s episode of Second Thought:

Here’s What Else I’m Thinking About

Many companies refer to their workforce “like one big family,” but it seems that many mothers are trying to make their homes more like a company. “Every hour I spend folding laundry or scheduling a repair person is an hour I’m not present with my kids,” one so-called CEO parent told The Wall Street Journal. CEO parents hire nannies, assistants, maids, drivers, and chefs to help outsource parenting so that they can drop in for the “high-impact, core memories” as one put it. I’ll give this trend a few decades to see how these moms do on their performance reviews and, for now, I’ll rely on Liz Wolfe, who celebrates the “blessed drudgery” of mothering.

A childhood friend sent me a picture from the camp we used to go to together—and the memories came rushing back. I was wild for summer camp; for my friends, for Color War, the lake, all of it. Peter Savodnik’s latest essay didn’t just make me miss those summers—he brought me right back to them. It’s a story about homesickness, and growing up, how there’s “brief, itsy-bitsy samplings of death” along the way. It’ll make you cry, but I promise some of the tears will be happy ones!

At this point, if I’m Natalie Portman, and a high-brow novelist wants to be my friend, I’d politely decline. First there was the minor scandal of her emails with Jonathan Safran Foer 10 years ago (an editor thought it would be a good idea to publish their pretentious exchanges, and it was rumored Foer left his wife for Portman, who didn’t love him back). And now: Rachel Cusk’s new novel, called Life of M, is apparently a roman à clef about Portman. Second Thought guarantees a review. And Natalie: Stick to movie-star friends; they won’t write about you!

Fergie Chambers, who I profiled a few years ago, is in the news this week after being arrested in Spain on a U.S. extradition request over allegations that he provided material support to Hamas. I met Fergie right after he’d extracted $250 million from his family’s massive empire—they own media outlets, car auction sites, and many, many car lots—but before he’d set his sights on the Jewish state as his ur-enemy. Fergie is a committed communist, a problem child, a recently converted Muslim, and so much more. Read my profile of him from 2023 here, and Jay Solomon on what’s happened since.

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