Analysis: What Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey reveals about the adaptable nature of myth

This article contains spoilers for Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey.’

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has sparked renewed interest in one of the world’s oldest and most enduring stories — and it has sparked controversy about whether or not the film tells the story in the right way.

But what if we step back and think about how the adaptable nature of myth makes questions of right and wrong interpretations more complex?

As a professor of Greek and Roman studies, I think of myth as clay. As classics scholar Lorna Hardwick has termed it, there is a “malleability” of mythological narratives. If we can learn to embrace this, we can be open to new presentations of familiar material that allow for new interpretive avenues.

One of the big changes Nolan brings to the story of Odysseus is that, when we meet him on Calypso’s island, he has been eating the lotus flower and so has forgotten all of the events that came before his shipwrecked arrival there. Odysseus, as a result, appears to the audience far less as a masterful and crafty narrator than as a vulnerable man reckoning with his past.

Different versions of the same myth

Mythological storytelling tells us much about the interests of the storyteller.

This is most evident when you look at different versions of the same myth, told in different genres. For example, there are versions of the fall of Troy in an ancient Athenian tragedy by Euripides (The Trojan Women) and in the work of the Roman epic poet Virgil (The Aeneid).

In each account, the basic story does not change: the trick of the horse, the chaos and terror inside the city and the burning of the city.

But while Euripides tells the story from the perspective of the women of Troy who experience loss and enslavement by the Greeks, Virgil tells it from the perspective of Aeneas, the hero of what will become Rome, as he leads a group of refugees out of the city and towards a new life.

These different versions are like snapshots in time of what the themes in the myth meant to the authors and their audiences.

Euripides shows Athenians, in the middle of the Peloponnesian War, the horrors of the aftermath of war through the eyes of the Trojan women. Virgil paints a picture for his Roman audience living under the first emperor of one man’s efforts to find a new haven of peace and prosperity.

The beauty of myth is that it can speak to different people in different ways.

Never one ‘Odyssey’ in antiquity

Of course, what Nolan is doing is not quite the same. He is not using the myth of Odysseus’ return from Troy to make his own new story about related key events told with a new name. By calling the film The Odyssey he sets audience expectations around authenticity, and expectations will vary depending on people’s experience with the poem.

Those who know it well will likely have favourite parts, or elements that, if they are changed or missing, will tarnish the whole thing.

The fact that there is a text that people have known and loved for thousands of years makes it seem like The Odyssey is carved in stone, rather than shaped (and re-shaped) from clay — except that there wasn’t just one version of the Odyssey in antiquity. When the poems were purely oral, every performance would have been slightly different.

Even once the poem was written down, there was a certain uniformity to its basic plot points, but the the textual versions were not identical. The Homer Multitext Project, by professors of classical studies Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott, reminds us of this.

Even small differences — like a single line that is unique to one manuscript — open up the possibility of larger differences. To think of The Odyssey as a singular, fixed text takes for granted the notion of a single author and textual authority. It doesn’t allow for the idea of The Odyssey as a living, changing thing.

Big narrative change

In the Homeric poem, Odysseus tells his story with full narrative control, recounting varied episodes of his own story. While there are questions about Odysseus’s reliability as a narrator, he is in control of the audience’s understanding. He emphasizes the many obstacles he has conquered.

In Nolan’s film, Odysseus has forgotten his travels. Viewers learn of them in the form of flashbacks — which means that the audience is forced to experience the events in real time with him, including a full range of his fear and guilt as a king as the story slowly unfolds.

Odysseus as the spinner of his own tale is a fundamental part of the Homeric poem. Odysseus himself as clever, maybe duplicitous, but very much aware of everything is an important part of the epic poem’s rich complexity.

Many classics scholars would agree that the main themes of The Odyssey are not related to the trauma of war or Odysseus’ frank evaluation of his part in the war. But the mythological material doesn’t preclude that story.

Nolan’s version puts audiences inside Odysseus’s experience, and including what today some scholars have examined as the trauma of war.

The film spotlights questions of the weight of responsibility a leader faces in challenging situations or their contemplation of responsibility.

Nolan has told his version of the story, and perhaps we can appreciate it for what it is: an Odyssey that speaks to our time.

The director has spoken about the creative possibilities offered by The Odyssey’s stories within stories, as well as his enthusiasm for how film and IMAX specifically can immerse audiences.

From Homer’s day in the ancient world up to now, when a storyteller gets it right, audiences have a deep emotional and reflective experience. If Nolan manages that, his Odyssey can be considered a success.

Kathryn Mattison, Associate Professor of Greek and Roman Studies, McMaster University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.