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This article contains spoilers for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Homeric scholar Emily Wilson has once again blasted Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, this time taking aim at the film’s interpretation of “Zeus’ Law”. In a previous op-ed, Wilson said she would “be ashamed to have written any part of this script” and that Nolan’s film “lacks psychological, emotional, political, and ethical depth.”
In a new article for The Atlantic, Wilson – whose 2017 translation of Homer’s epic poem has been cited by Nolan as a key influence on his screenplay adaptation – slams Nolan’s take on xenia, or what the film calls Zeus’ Law, and how Odysseus’s ruse with the Trojan Horse is depicted as the ultimate violation of it. (Xenia is the ancient Greek code of hospitality that requires hosts to treat guests with respect lest they be gods in disguise.)
“The unkindness of Penelope’s suitors to Odysseus’s poor dog Argos and to the blind Eumaeus is a clear violation of this principle. Yet the film also suggests that the law of Zeus is concerned with a quite different moral problem: deception,” Wilson argues.
“The horse is presented as the ultimate violation of the law of Zeus, because it entails wielding a weapon of mass destruction disguised as a gift. The Homeric Zeus is a cunning schemer, whereas Nolan’s Zeus takes a particularly hard line on deceit, especially in relationships between hosts and guests. The film’s arch-villain, the lead suitor, Antinous, proves his villainy by being a bad guest, and a bad host, and an entertainingly weaselly liar.”
Wilson continues, “The horse is presented as breaking ‘civilization’ because it represents the moment when the good guy, Odysseus, echoes the behavior of the bad guy by being a deceitful, ungrateful guest. But the film does not explain what ‘hospitality’ has to do with a narrative situation in which the Greeks have been besieging Troy for 10 years already; the Trojans are not their hosts but their enemies in war. If the war is bad, it is nonsensical to suggest that the most important turning point is the use of the horse rather than Agamemnon’s choice to invade Troy in the first place and Odysseus’s choice to yield to the empire’s demands.”
Wilson closes by calling Nolan’s Odyssey “itself a kind of Trojan horse. The script grandly insists on the importance of human kindness, while the camera shows us an entirely different set of values. In these times of hatred and misinformation, we need more than the ‘apparent magic’ of deceptive images. We need art that is truthful about the costs and the necessity of compassion, and that recognizes that a sense of spiritual superiority may not protect us from lies.”
Like her previous op-ed, Wilson’s piece goes beyond lambasting Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s text to critiquing the filmmaking itself, which it should be noted is not the University of Pennsylvania professor’s area of expertise.
While Nolan has not directly commented on Wilson’s op-eds, the Oscar-winning director did recently reveal what he thinks of amateur film critics.
