HOW CHRISTOPHER NOLAN SHOULD ADAPT HOMER'S ODYSSEY TO FILM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUI90ZyX5OM

NOLAN’S ODYSSEY

The whole purpose of adapting Homer to the cinema experience ought to be to tackle its visual potential. But the challenge is retaining its meaning.

I'm excited that Nolan is going to tackle Homer’s Odyssey as a cinema experience. It's not the first and it's not the last. Dramatic adaptations of Homer have been happening since the Ancient Greeks themselves invented theatre and made plays of slices of his songs. Nolan’s approach to film will give it scale and weight. I’m sure we’ll feel the weight of the boat and the sea, the scale of the Cyclops, etc. But I doubt it will be Homer. It will a Nolan film with Nolanified impressions of the characters and scenario Homer created. I'm expecting it to be both a thrilling experience and an education. I think we'll all learn something about the cinema experience and about how to tackle these kinds of works in film. I do feel what Homer is about is already lost, from the images alone, and my essay aims to reinforce the reasoning behind that view. I want to approach this based on what Homer implies within the poem for how it should be on screen and still be Homer.

Storytelling is how we interpret experiences either remembered or invented. Those experiences are themselves manners of thinking through our values and beliefs. In essence, then, storytelling is a way of thinking about thinking, in such a way that defines a whole world view and self-impression. Homer does not imitate reality. He didn’t present a copy of the world. He interpreted the world as an artist. There is no need then for a filmmaker to aim to replicate reality on film.

The purpose of myth is to see insightfully into life. Not to see it at face value. This presents a problem for adapting myth to the screen because cinema tends to be literal.

Myth is much better suited to the stage. The theatre speaks in analogy and metaphor. The Ancient Greeks thought of their theatre as realistic, not because it represented an optical reality, but because it reflected their customs, religion, ritual - their culture. And despite being myth, it was really happening before their eyes. Until they invented drama, they had only the visual arts and their imagination.

Homer's Odyssey is a myth about mythmaking. A story about storytelling. Everyone in the work tells a story and there are layers of storytellers. The poet asks the Muses to inspire him with the song of Odysseus. Next we meet the gods on Olympus who influence of the lives of the mortal world. From Olympus we descend to the mortal level where humans meet together and share stories, or listen to poets sing stories about other heroes or gods outside of the present narrative. In Books 1-4 we learn of Odysseus in four full books before we meet him because of the stories others tell about him. In Books 9-12 Odysseus himself tells the story of his own wanderings which makes up the most well-known parts of the Odyssey.

— Structure of Homer’s Odyssey

Epic Invocation: Translating Invocation to Film

Though slices of Homer have been given dramatic adaptation since drama was invented by the Ancient Greeks themselves, the prologue of an epic is fundamentally different from that of a tragedy. We think of it as adapting a book into a film. The Greeks understood it as adapting a song into theatre, or rather one form of live music to another. The opening of an epic poem is a unique and essential element that a film adaptation cannot simply retell, traditionally commencing with an invocation to the Muses, in particular the muse of epic poetry, and the muse of memory, to retell the story in heroic poetic meter. The poet is not the author of the tale, but merely a vessel through which the divine story is told. This act is a declaration of the poem's divine origins and its grand scope. It is a big, declamatory opening that sets the tone and introduces the hero and his central conflict. Transferring this to live performance or cinema, a director must evoke the same thing through visual and auditory means.

I created a condensed version of the invocation to the Muse Caliope, which could appear on-screen instead of the whole opening invocation, possibly over a montage of clouds, islands, birds, mountains, waves:

Sing in me, Muse; through me, sing a hero.

Of broad-spirit and war-ready.

Many he met on his homecoming

Sailing after sacking sacred Troy,

Weighed by a heavy heart for home.

Though he sought safety for his men,

Imprudence transgressed impiety.

Zeus-child, begin where you will.

For a film, it will sound pedestrian and unartistic to have a lone speaker simply say the lines “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story..." and reveal the misunderstanding of the material by the director. A much more dynamic approach is needed to capture the spirit of the original. Firstly, the opening lines are not spoken they are sung and any director would be demonstrating their understanding of the material to actually have them sung. Maybe use the way Lisa Gerrard and Hans Zimmer collaborated on their music for Gladiator that seemed so relatable of the otherworldly. They may sing the invocation in English as opposed to Ancient Greek since we don't know what Ancient Greek sounded like. That would be good because then you'd start the ball rolling with the right experience. But there’s a more familiar way of thinking about it. Just as having music of the opening credits that sets the tone of the film, the same way the music of the invocation of the Muses can open the film. Yet also by singing the words, the director can dispense with the convention of having text recounting the past on-screen.

A film can evoke this invocation through a carefully constructed montage and a powerful musical score. This would be a good way to visually convey the "god's-eye view" of the situation and the scope of the hero's struggle. The music would serve as the "singing Muse," and the visuals would show the story in a way that is both epic and personal.

I've studied Ancient Greek music but ultimately, the least thing I ever care about is what Ancient Greek music sounded like. Imagine someone of the future trying to replicate music of the 20th century. Is there any single piece of music that can define the music of the 20th century? Not only because there are so many kinds of music but because bad music is just as important as good music in the century. So even if we could replicate a single piece of music of the Ancient Greek world, which there have been attempts to do, it wouldn't define anything more than a single piece. And only at our best attempts at recreation. What’s more the task would nevertheless need to then be a hypothetical continuation of time onwards to consider how that same approach to music can be in the present day so that it appeals to our audible tastes. It seems a fruitless exercise. So, the only thing that interests me is what Ancient Greek music in a specific context was trying to achieve; the music of tragedy, the music of lyrical poetry, the music of epic poetry etc. How it was constructed instrumentally; how it was performed; what were the effects of the music. We don't need to replicate its actual sound, but find a method of music that doesn't go astray from its artistic intentions and what the audience valued about it.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE ODYSSEY

Firstly, let’s discuss what we’re adapting to the screen. The Odyssey (Odysseia - song of Odysseus) is an 8^th century BCE Greek sung-poem that was written over decades and possibly centuries of oral tradition. An attempt at a standardised definitive edition was commissioned in 6^th BCE, due to the variations of the material. This suggests that the poem continued to develop between the 8^th and 6^th centuries, possibly not only in dialect but in its poetic content.

The poem itself commences after the events of the murder of King of Argos Agamemnon after returning from Troy, or more specifically the murder of Aegisthus, dramatised by Aeschylus in the Oresteia, and Homer brings the narrative of the whole epic by saying the Gods were thinking about those recent events. This immediately defines the epic poem as a nostos narrative. A genre of Ancient Greek storytelling about homecoming of a hero. In the same way that we might think about film genres like a heist movie. But furthermore, Homer is immediately comparing the present narrative of Odysseus’ homecoming with the past narrative of Agamemnon’s. For those who don’t know Agamemnon was murdered by his wife’s lover when he returned home. Therefore, this sets up an image that may await Odysseus in the listener’s mind. Will Odysseus arrive home only to find Penelope has taken a suitor in his absence who will murder him on his arrival through the aid of Penelope’s deception. Odysseus was only fated to return home to Ithaca. What would happen after is not told.

For example, when Odysseus is recounting his tales from his Odyssey, of course he didn’t die on those journeys, or he wouldn’t be alive to tell it. The audience aren’t in suspense of the what, but of the how.

Homer puts into the mouth of Zeus that men blame gods but their troubles from their own imprudence. “They accuse the gods, they say that their troubles come from us and yet by their own imprudence they draw down troubles upon themselves.” Book 1.

This immediately sets the frame of mind that men’s troubles are neither due to the gods or ignorance but their own imprudence. They are told what not to do, and they do it regardless. Leading them not to ignorance but impiety, since what prudence is most referring to here is to not break sacred laws.

Athena has compassion for her cherished mortal, Odysseus, and requests Zeus allow him homecoming. Zeus isn’t in control of Fate. The Fates control Fate, and Zeus is responsible for ensuring it comes to fulfilment. The Fates give Zeus the what must happen, but there is flexibility on the how. Zeus allows both Poseidon and Athena to have their way, but their intentions are contrasting. Zeus gives Poseidon time to satisfy his wrath, delaying Odysseus’s homecoming, but eventually Athena’s satisfaction follows. The whole story is a divine design.

Whilst Odysseus isn’t revealed to be currently on the Island of Ogygia, a barren wasteland, in the seductive company of Calypso, until Book 5, Athena first goes to Ithaca disguised as the mortal Mentes to speak to Telemachus hatching a plan. This commences Books 1-4 as a Telemachy – Telemachus’ story. Book 5-8 are how Odysseus leaves the Island of Ogygia and arrives on Scheria. Books 9-12 are Odysseus recounting his odyssey. Then ends the first half of the poem. Then 13-24 are his return to Ithaca, which themselves are subdivided into three sets of four books, which make up the second half of the poem.

The Odyssey is a frame narrative. The odyssey itself is a story that precedes the beginning of the poem. The self-described tale confuses Modern readers, since it’s the only part told from Odysseus’ perspective, but the whole poem is told from a divine plane of perspective looking down onto mortals. Plus, the odyssey is only four books out of the twenty-four, just one sixth of the whole poem.

While Athena acts as a supporting character to the mortals, her story arc is arguably the most crucial. Her actions are not just supportive; they are the catalyst and the conclusion. The entire epic is framed by the gods' debate on Mount Olympus. Athena's pleading for Odysseus's release in Book 1 sets the main plot in motion, and her divine intervention in Book 24 brings the story to its final, peaceful resolution.

The beginning and end of the poem are bookended by a similar interaction between Athena and Zeus. As it ends with Zeus saying that everything she wanted was fulfilled. But it has created a new cycle of violence. Odysseus doesn’t bring peace to Ithaca but his bloody revenge only incites a new rebellious uprising against the palace by the families of the dead suitors. Athena and Zeus decide to bring this to an end. This is similar to how Athena ends the cycle of violence in the Oresteia too. A divine peace ends both narratives. Just as Athena appeared as Mentes at the start, she appears as Mentor at the end. Yet rather than instructing peace, she inspires Laertes to throw a spear through the skull of Eupheithes. I guess she wanted Odysseus to have the edge over the uprising. Then says enough but Odysseus begins to charge at the relatives, but Zeus hurls down a lightning bolt to signal all to obey. This ends Odysseus’ arc of impulsive behaviour and he backs off. Submitting to piety. In doing so, he avoids an end had by Agamemnon by killing the suitors and Aegisthus by listening to Zeus.

It's not a story of the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. It's a story of piety and prudence. Not suffering and vengeance. It’s a story of Fate not free-will. It’s story for those awaiting sons, fathers, brothers, husbands, to return from war. And for those who have returned to hope for renown in poetic song.

Hospitality is a key motivator for characters' actions and a source of both conflict and resolution. Odysseus's journey is defined by both the good and bad hospitality he receives, and his return to Ithaca is the ultimate test of this theme, as he must be a "host" in his own home.

The Chronological Timeline

The Odyssey is told out of chronological order to build suspense and withhold character.

One epic. Divided into six sets of four books. That overall reveal two halves. The first three sets of four books shift in their focus of time and place. The Telemachy and the Homecoming. Whereas the second half of three sets of four books are consistent of time and place, all taking place on Ithaca. I believe this was evident to the Romans too because Virgil divides his Aeneid into two halves of the journey and the founding too. Virgil commences his epic the same as Homer, an invocation to the Muse to recount the story of a wandering hero, ill-stared by a god’s wrath. Aeneas is granted hospitality by Dido and then recounts the journey he’s gone through before arriving there. Then rather than a homecoming, Aeneas has to war with the native king. Virgil merges The Odyssey and The Iliad into one epic. Roman reception of Homer is explicitly evident in the Aeneid. There’s no rationality behind Hollywood’s reception turning the feature of Greek gods into Christian conceptual metaphysics and the human aspect into Old Testament narratives.

The Problem with Linearity

The story of The Odyssey begins not with Odysseus himself, but with the gods, then Odysseus’ his son and wife. A linear film adaptation would likely begin with the Trojan War and progress through all of Odysseus's adventures before he even arrives in Ithaca. The chronological order would place the Odyssey first as these events occur in the years immediately following the Trojan War. This would put the most fantastical elements at the beginning, potentially front-loading the story and making the return to Ithaca feel like an anticlimax. It would also delay the introduction of key characters like Penelope and Telemachus, weakening their emotional impact. The dramatic tension would be lost, as the audience would not be aware of the danger awaiting Odysseus at home until much later in the story.

The Purpose of the Non-Linear Structure

A film adaptation of The Odyssey would be more effective mirroring the non-linear narrative structure of the epic poem.

Homer chose this non-linear narrative for several reasons:

• To create suspense: By starting with the situation in Ithaca, the audience immediately understands the stakes. They know Odysseus's family is in danger, which makes his return all the more urgent and compelling.

• To introduce the main characters: The early books allow Homer to establish the character of Telemachus and the plight of Penelope. We understand why Odysseus's return is so crucial.

• To build a sense of wonder: The Phaeacians provide the perfect audience for Odysseus to tell his stories. This narrative device allows Homer to present the most fantastical and "unbelievable" parts of the journey as a series of tales told by the hero himself, adding a layer of authenticity and a sense of wonder.

• Building Suspense: Starting the film in Ithaca, with the Telemachy, immediately establishes the high stakes. The audience sees the chaos of the suitors and the vulnerability of Penelope and Telemachus. This creates a powerful sense of urgency and makes Odysseus's long-awaited return even more meaningful. We know what he is fighting to save, and the delay in his arrival becomes a source of dramatic tension.

A Three-Part Structure

PART 1 (30 minutes)

1.        Books 1–4: The Telemachy (30 Minutes) This part is the story of Telemachus's journey to find news of his father. It establishes the central conflict in Ithaca and Telemachus’s coming-of-age.

This section efficiently sets the stage. Within the first half hour, a non-linear approach allows you to establish the primary conflict (the suitors), the central hero (Telemachus), and the hero's great absence (Odysseus). We see the world that Odysseus is fighting to reclaim, what the heroes are up against, and why Odysseus's return is so urgent.

PART 2 (90 minutes)

2.      Books 5–8: The Homecoming This part focuses on Odysseus’s release from Calypso, his perilous voyage to the Phaeacians, and his arrival on the island of Scheria. This section is all about the gods' intervention to put the homecoming in motion.

3.        Books 9–12: The Odyssey This is the epic's flashback sequence, where Odysseus tells his story to the Phaeacians. These books contain the most famous adventures, including the Cyclops, Circe, and the Sirens.

This is the heart of the film, where Odysseus's adventures are brought to life. Giving this section a full hour and a half allows for a cinematic exploration of the most iconic moments: the blinding of the Cyclops, the encounter with Circe, the journey to the Underworld, and the temptations of the Sirens. This part is both a thrilling adventure and a deep dive into the hero's character, as he becomes a bard of his own epic.

PART 3 (60 minutes)

4.        Books 13–24: The Return This final and longest section covers Odysseus's arrival in Ithaca, his disguise as a beggar, the slaughter of the suitors, and the final reunions and peace treaty. This final section can also be broken down thematically into smaller parts.

• The Reunion (Books 13–16): Odysseus arrives, is disguised, and is reunited with his most loyal servants and son.

• The Testing (Books 17–20): Odysseus, in disguise, enters his own palace, endures the taunts of the suitors, and is recognized only by his dog and his nurse.

• The Climax (Books 21–24): The archery contest leads to the final, bloody battle, followed by the reunions with Penelope and Laertes, and the divine intervention that ends the war.

The final hour of the film provides a powerful and satisfying climax. This final act brings the story back to Ithaca. Odysseus arrives in disguise, tests the loyalty of his family and servants, and ultimately orchestrates the bloody slaughter of the suitors. The tension that has been building since the first scene is released in a sequence of events. Odysseus's disguise, the recognition by Eurycleia, the archery contest, and the final bloody slaughter of the suitors. The climax is not just the battle but the reunion with Penelope and the final divine intervention that secures lasting peace. This section is a testament to Odysseus's cunning and strength, ending with the crucial divine intervention that resolves the narrative and affirms his kleos.

This three-part structure, with the final part having its own sub-structure, is a very strong and accurate way to understand the narrative flow of The Odyssey.

However, adapting it to a film could easily condense the books rather than have them whole. Whilst their literary value requires its entirely, a film adaptation may concern itself more with the experiential and visual rather than the literary. It’s about recognising what has been achieved in the poetic form but then being economical about the pacing of the film.

I’ve made some practical choices for condensing the narrative:

• Condensing Books 1-4: The Telemachy is important for setting up the situation in Ithaca and Telemachus's character development, but a film can convey this information much more quickly than a poem. Focusing on the conflict with the suitors and Telemachus's growing confidence would be enough. Despite that it would leave out important literary devices such as Menalaus’ relating the fortunes of his comrades after Troy, which from a literary perspective is essential in the suspense Homer is setting up for Odysseus. Film has the advantage that it can do multiple things at once, a visual statement can say a lot in one image, and a montage can do a lot quickly.

• Leaving out Books 7-8: Whilst book 8 is essential to understand why Odysseus even relates his adventures in Book 9. It can be more swiftly though compromising its literary value. The feasting and games with the Phaeacians, while showcasing Odysseus's strength, aren't essential for moving the main plot forward. His storytelling in the following books is the more critical part of his time there.

• Compressing Books 13-23: This is where the action really happens, but it can be a fast-paced sequence. The tension of Odysseus's disguise, the recognition by Eurycleia, and the final bloody confrontation would make for a gripping final act.

• Now, I do believe in including Book 24 as I believe it affirms the whole point of the poem. A film ending at the climax of the slaughter might feel to provide cathartic closure from a human perspective, but that would make the story have been about retribution and exist on a human level alone. It would reject the deeper meaning of the work, the divine design at work all along, it would reject the intervention of peace by the gods ending the cycle of violence, and it would neglect the arc of Odysseus for once learning to control his audacious nature. What’s more, though we had the reunion with Telemachus and Penelope, including the reunion with Laertes would mean that we see sons return to fathers too. Demonstrating the poem as a war poem for those whose sons, brothers, fathers, and husbands have gone to war.

The Uprising and Divine Intervention

The ending is not a straightforward happy resolution brought about by Odysseus's return; but a divine intervention that is necessary to prevent further chaos from a uprising from the relatives of the suitors. It’s important to recognise the peace was not restored by the return of Odysseus, but a new cycle of violence. After the massacre of the suitors, their relatives gather, seeking revenge for their kinsmen's deaths. Led by Antinous's father, Eupithes, they form an army and march on the palace. Odysseus and his small group of allies—Telemachus, Laertes, Eumaeus, and a few others—go out to meet them in battle. Laertes, empowered by Athena, kills Eupithes with a spear throw, and a full-scale battle begins.

The final battle in Book 24, where Odysseus's family fights the relatives of the slain suitors, shows that human justice and vengeance can lead to an endless cycle of violence. Odysseus's actions, while justified in his view, threaten to tear his kingdom apart. The conflict is not resolved by human action. The bloodshed threatens to tear Ithaca apart. Zeus throws a thunderbolt to signal his disapproval of the ongoing violence, and Athena, disguised as Mentor, intervenes directly. She commands both sides to stop fighting and make peace. When some of the relatives try to flee in panic, Athena cries out with a terrifying voice, causing them to drop their weapons.

The final resolution is not earned by Odysseus but is a divine mandate. Athena, with Zeus's approval, ensures that the oath of peace between Odysseus and the relatives of the suitors is established, and she takes on the form of a leader to cement the agreement. This ending reinforces the theme of piety and prudence. The ending isn't just about a hero's triumphant homecoming; it's a testament to the ultimate authority of the gods.

Aeschylus drew inspiration from the tragic themes present in the homecoming narratives of figures like Agamemnon and Odysseus, particularly the idea that a hero's return can bring chaos rather than peace. The Oresteia trilogy—which includes Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides—is a powerful exploration of the cycle of violence and vengeance. Agamemnon's murder of his daughter, in retribution for the murder of Artemis’ stag, sets of a cycle of reciprocal violence, culminating in by Agamemnon’s murder by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus upon his return from Troy, followed by their son’s murder of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. This cycle of bloodshed is only broken when Athena establishes a court of law, replacing personal revenge with civic justice.

This mirrors and inverses the climax of The Odyssey in a crucial way. Both epics show that human vengeance can lead to an endless cycle of blood guilt. The Odyssey concludes with a divine intervention that establishes a new form of order. The Oresteia subverts this by ending with a human triumph of a court of law.

There is also the structure of mythologising Odysseus, first by the words of others, then the words of himself, and the sight of his deeds.

In The Odyssey, rhapsodists perform epic songs of heroes. These poets at Ithaca and Phaeacia are what Homer was. This similarly appears in The Iliad when Achilles sings at the tents. Epic rhapsodists would have only sang portions of the whole at each musical performances not the whole poem from beginning to end. Think of it as an album of songs. It reveals the tradition and importance of singing of great figures.

In Book 1, a bard in Ithaca is singing if the homecoming of the Greeks from Troy and how Athena made it sorrowful. Penelope asks him to stop because it made it her weep. But Telemachus tells her to not do so because it deprives everyone else if their pleasure to hear music and the singer's right to fulfil their talent. In Book 8, Demodocus the bard of the Phaeacians, sings three times, of three different stories, before Odysseus begins to recount his own adventures in Book 9. To be sung of by a poet inspired of song by the Muses was the great desire of the Greek hero.

Part 1: Renown in the Mouths of Others

The first part of the epic, the Telemachy, establishes Odysseus's fame entirely through the voices of others. We hear of his legendary status from characters like Nestor and Menelaus, who praise his cunning and bravery in the Trojan War. Telemachus’ journey is an attempt to is seek out his father who exists only in rumour and reputation. The kleos (immortal glory) here is secondhand, a promise waiting to be fulfilled.

Part 2: Renown in the Mouth of Odysseus Himself

Demodocus in Book 8 sings three times. This gives us an insight into the cultural idea of the epic poet. He is said to be blind (as Homer was described to be). “The Muse…his eyes she took from him, but she gave him entrancing song…The goddess of song moved the bard to sing of the deeds of heroes.” In the first song Demodocus sings of Odysseus’ quarrel with Achilles. The second song sings about Ares’ love affair with Aphrodite, whilst young boys dance around Demodocus in a circle. The third song Odysseus request it to be about the wooden horse gifted to Troy. This results in everyone believing this is no obscure stranger, and Odysseus reveals who he is and tells everyone his adventures of how he came to be in their company. After listening to three songs by Demodocus, Odysseus becomes the storyteller, the myth-maker of his own reputation. Homer the poet invokes the Muse to tell the narrative, the poet creates another poet with his own Muse, then makes Odysseus the poet of his own story.

By telling his story to the Phaeacians, Odysseus is engaged in an act of self-mythologizing as the hero and the poet become one, presenting himself as a cunning and resilient figure worthy of their awe and aid. He takes control of his narrative, recounting his fantastical adventures with a skill that rivals any professional bard. He becomes a living legend, a storyteller of his own epic. However, the kleos he truly desires is not complete until he has reclaimed his kingdom, reunited with his family, and, crucially, enacted vengeance upon the suitors. can only be secured upon his triumphant return home.

Part 3: True Kleos

The final part of the epic is where Odysseus's true kleos is forged and confirmed. This is the ultimate test of his identity and his status as a hero. He must transform from a storyteller into a man of action. By enduring humiliation as a beggar, stringing his own bow, and slaughtering the suitors, he validates everything he claimed in his stories. The final battle is the climax of his journey to earn his true glory.. The epic's conclusion, with the divine intervention that restores peace, confirms that his victory and his kleos are sanctioned by the gods, ensuring his place in the pantheon of heroes. The gods don't just affirm Odysseus's kleos; they save him from the very consequences of his own final impious and imprudent violence. The forgetfulness is important. The gods prevent him from becoming a ruthless tyrant in the eyes of his own people. Essentially, the gods ensure that Odysseus' legacy is one of a hero who restored order, not a king who plunged his kingdom into endless violence.

Three key mortal narrative threads

1. The Telemachy: The story of Telemachus's journey from a helpless boy into a mature and confident man.

2. Odysseus's physical homecoming journey back to Ithaca and his re-establishment to his rightful place.

3. Penelope's endurance, cunning, and loyalty, around her efforts to fend off the suitors and her steadfast hope for Odysseus's return.

But the most fundamental narrative thread is the ongoing story of the gods' involvement in mortal affairs, specifically the conflict between Athena and Poseidon. Athena champions Odysseus and Telemachus, while Poseidon seeks to thwart Odysseus's return. This cosmic conflict drives the plot and ultimately dictates the outcome of the entire epic.

Odysseus is not able to return home through his own cunning alone; he requires Athena's direct help. The tragic fate of the suitors and Odysseus's men serves as a warning that those who lack piety and disrespect the gods will be punished. The entire divine narrative demonstrates the limitations of human will. The most important lesson is that mortal success is impossible without divine favour. His struggle against Poseidon shows that he is but a small player in a cosmic drama. No matter how clever or strong Odysseus is, he cannot overcome the gods' will. His victory is not a personal one, but a divinely ordained one, teaching that mortals must accept their place in the divine order.

Homeric epic, unlike the Old and New Testament, is not a human mythology by the divine one. Re-analysing The Odyssey from a purely divine perspective reveals that the gods are not just supporting characters but active drivers of the plot, shaping the fate of mortals. The divine plane of The Odyssey involves the gods Athena and Poseidon as the primary characters, with Zeus acting as the ultimate authority. Their conflict and arcs directly shape the mortal narrative, teaching crucial lessons about piety and the limits of human action.

Characters and Conflicts

• Athena: As the goddess of wisdom and war strategy, Athena champions Odysseus. She sees in him a reflection of her own cunning and intelligence. Her primary conflict is with Poseidon, as she must work around his wrath to protect her mortal favourite.

• Poseidon was a god of more than just the sea. He was also the "Earth-Shaker" and was strongly associated with earthquakes and horses. He is the main divine hindrance to Odysseus’ homecoming. His character arc is driven by a desire for vengeance for the blinding of his son, Polyphemus. He uses his immense power to create storms and obstacles, prolonging Odysseus' journey. He’s not a villain and it would be wrong to characterise him as an antagonist even. It’s far more important that Poseidon is justified in satisfying his own temper. That is the way to understand the pluralistic universe of the Ancient Greeks, which is not a dualistic moral universe. In Homer’s Iliad, Poseidon was a supporter of Odysseus.

• Zeus: As king of the gods, Zeus is the arbiter of divine justice. His character arc is about maintaining cosmic order. While he initially allows Poseidon's wrath to play out, he ultimately sides with Athena to ensure Odysseus's return.

• The Moirae (Fates): The Fates are the embodiment of Fate itself. They are the most fundamental plane of the narrative, even above Zeus. The Fates are a reminder that while the gods can influence a mortal's journey, they cannot change their ultimate destiny. Odysseus is fated to return home and face a certain kind of suffering, and while Poseidon can prolong his journey, he cannot ultimately stop it. The Fate prescribe the WHAT, Zeus is in charge of ensuring it comes to fulfilment, the gods and mortals unknowingly enact the HOW.

• Hermes: The messenger god. He carries messages from Zeus to other deities and mortals, most notably when he is sent to order Calypso to release Odysseus.

• Helios: The sun god. He plays a pivotal role in the plot when Odysseus's men, driven by hunger, eat his sacred cattle, leading Helios to demand their punishment from Zeus.

• Circe: A powerful goddess of magic who turns Odysseus's men into pigs. After Odysseus withstands her magic with divine aid, she becomes an ally and provides him with crucial advice for his journey.

• Calypso: A nymph who falls in love with Odysseus and holds him captive on her island for seven years. She is forced to release him only after Hermes delivers a direct command from Zeus.

Other Divine Figures

• Hades and Persephone: The king and queen of the Underworld. Odysseus encounters them when he travels to the land of the dead to consult the prophet Tiresias.

• Aeolus: The keeper of the winds. He aids Odysseus by giving him a bag containing all the unfavorable winds, but he refuses to help him a second time after Odysseus's men foolishly release the winds.

• Ino (Leucothea): A sea nymph who rescues Odysseus from Poseidon's storm by giving him a magical scarf that keeps him afloat.

• Proteus: An "Old Man of the Sea" and a shapeshifting god who Menelaus must wrestle with to learn how to return home. He reveals to Menelaus that Odysseus is still alive.

• The Muses: The goddesses of inspiration who are invoked at the beginning of the epic. They symbolize the divine origin of the story itself.

• The Sirens in The Odyssey are hybrid creatures with the bodies of birds and the heads of women, who lure sailors to their deaths with their enchanting songs of heroic glory. Their appeal isn't just to a sailor's carnal desire, but to a hero's deepest longing for kleos—immortal glory and fame. Odysseus encounters them in Book 12 of the epic.

The epic is structured around a repeated cycle of violence that is initiated by a violation of piety, or the sacred laws of xenia (hospitality).

The First Cycle of Violence

The cycle begins with a violation of trust and hospitality, followed by an escalation of violence.

Violation of Hospitality: Books 5-8 are of course contrasting with books 1-4. Whereas the suitors showed no decorum of hospitality, the Phaeacians show good hospitality, which also sets up the contrast for episodes within the Odyssey section of Books 9-12.

The cycles of violence are a central lesson of the entire epic: human vengeance, no matter how justified, leads to endless violence. The only true and lasting peace comes from a higher, divine authority that stands outside the cycle of retaliation.

— How To Do Greek Myth on Film

The intellectual capacity of ideas is not an experience. Ideas cannot be pulled over aesthetics. It doesn't matter how clever they are. The audience experience an artowrk aesthetically. You have to convey ideas for the mouthpiece of aesthetics.

Film is experienced backwards to the way it is created. For the audience, it begins with an image, then works backwards, deeper into its substance, through the text and music, to the religious disposition. But it is created in reverse. The last thing of the filmmaker is the first thing for the audience. So to consider how to make a film of Homer, we’ll start with the religious substance.

POLYTHEISM ON FILM

Any artform is a looking at life through religious experience. Every idea of drama is a metaphysical expression. Art is the preservation of the disposition of that metaphysical expression as an experience.

Ancient Greek epic is a contemplation of the subject matter through the lens of Ancient Greek religion. Epic, as in tragedy, is always from the gods’ perspective. The gods are the point of reality. It is not a human drama it is not a human mythology. Drastically contradicting Protestantism with its emphasis on the innerness of the soul, polytheism is characterised by an externally focused view. Many things are beyond human control. It sees insightfully in observation.

The Odyssey is an affirmation of life. If the tone and perspective were to have pity for the plight of Odysseus then inherently the perspective is less affirmative of life, but it can go even as far as being slanderous of life that life can be cruel. In Homer, life is working in an ecosystem of various deities each so pluralistic that life is affirmed even with its contradictions, its paradoxes and its irony. Their world view is so dependent on gods that it's not even accurate to say The Odyssey is not an affirmation of the human spirit, because that would imply he's existing in the world that is indifferent to him which is not the case whatsoever. Odysseus is watched by the gods, and the perspective of the narrative is from the gods watching.

The problem with presenting Homer on stage or on film is it the creators don't know how to represent a polytheistic universe, just as the problem with presenting Greek tragedy on stage is that they don't know how to use the chorus. In both cases, the problem is the same they don't know how to represent the religious element of Ancient Greek stories. Something problematic about this is that we're not poor of visual examples from painters and sculptors of how to represent these things visually. That film seems to blunder this every time has no legitimate excuse for why Hollywood isn't able to do this correctly. I can only assume the effort to synchronise or reconcile ancient Greek religion with Judeo-Christianism is a deliberate intention to distort it out of recognition.

Nolan has tackled Batman, with an approach to ground it in realism. This might work for Batman because Batman and Gotham are the opposite of an ecstatic world. Nolan would need to do everything he didn’t do with Batman. Batman is the product of a Modern individual artist. One could argue the world of Gotham and its mad inhabitants are a projection of Bruce Wayne’s own existential state, from the trauma, anguish and despair of losing his parents. Dreams of Darkness in the animated series explored this a little. Gotham is a dystopian city, and dystopia is a projection of subjective pessimism. The world of Batman is a kind of henotheism, where all the characters and world are emanations from the trauma, resentment, and despair of witnessing his parents' death. Though Bruce masters his fear, he does so by leaning into it. None of this is Homer’s mind. Batman is a product of the Modern existential mind, just as Homer is the product of the Ancient Greek ecstatic mind.

FATE vs FREE WILL

It’s important to make the distinction, the gods did not cause things so much as they were the working within things. The sea that drives Odysseus wandering is not caused by Poseidon's so much at it is Poseidon. It's better to think of the event and the god as one and the same rather than cause and effect. Everything happens in some way because of a god. The gods make up everything we today think of in terms of natural phenomena and typical characteristic of human experience.

So the slogan that accompanies Nolan’s film “DEFY THE GODS” is completely incorrect. The idea that Homer wrote of an atheistic hero is just something you shouldn’t say aloud it's so ridiculous. Odysseus is entirely dependent on the gods. He's dependent on Athena more than any other. She is even a symbol of his own strategic cunning. Athena after all is a goddess of war, but the strategic element rather than the bloody side.

A significant Christianisation will probably arise in the matter of free will. Homer presented a world hanging on fate. The Fates governed this, and Zeus was to ensure it happened as was to be. The deities representing natural phenomena and typical characteristics of life act in combination with human liberty. One reinforces the other. These aren't stories of individual will and the perseverance of the human spirit but of characteristics of the universe and the importance of piety.

But we also must consider the purpose of free will in a Christian sense. Free will exists so a human can be judged and redeemed for moral transgression. Neither applies to an Ancient Greek understanding. Odysseus did not desire to be redeemed. He did not desire to find a new life. He did not desire to explore the world. He did not feel abandoned by the gods. He wanted to return to his rightful place, and was delayed by the wrath of a god. But what caused his delay was also the catalyst for his kleos. Odysseus was told his future. Christianity requires free will, not for only morality, but otherwise if everything was God's plan then Jesus has no purpose dying to relieve the sins of mankind. A problem John Calvin didn't seem to realise. The Existentialism that arose in the late 19th and early 20th Century, reverts Christianity back to its St Augustine mode.

It's fundamental to understand that naivety of choice in Greek narrative. Every tragedy has a "what should I do?" moment but there is truthfully never a choice in the events. Free will doesn't exist in Ancient Greek mind. A modern idea of free will would just be seen as a rationalising after thought of what was always going to happen. When Orestes must kill his mother he turns to his best friend Pylades to ask "What should I do?" Pylades answers "Better to anger men than gods."

Odysseus angered Poseidon and Poseidon tormented Odysseus for his own satisfaction. Humans sacrifice for the gods' appeasement. Zeus eventually wills Poseidon’s wrath to end because Odysseus is fated to return to Ithaca. Odysseus is rightfully king of Ithaca. He doesn't redeem anything. He returns. It's a nostos narrative. Odysseus reasserts himself. Nothing changes. Athena requests Odysseus to return home. He was always fated to. Zeus may have nudged it on to the displeasure of Poseidon. But he was always fated to. Odysseus changed nothing. The gods brought Fate to fulfilment.

There are other things I'm curious to in the way the story is structured for Nolan. Conflict and change seem to be how the West tells a story. The closest thing to a conflict is that the suitors are not where they should be and neither is Odysseus. There is disharmony. They're not opposing each other. Even when they finally meet, Odysseus is in disguise to avoid conflict. Once his identity is revealed they immediately die, as the disharmony finds equilibrium. We keep hearing he is fated to return. So, until that happens things are out of harmony. But they're out of harmony because other gods’ wills are being satisfied until the satisfaction of those wills is how Odysseus returns home. So even in disharmony there isn't a Judeo-Christian imbalance of the universe. It's not a broken universe. There is no moral imbalance to redeem. The suitors have broken no rule against Odysseus but against Zeus. They are not honouring the rule of hospitality. They get away with it because Penelope and Telemachus are honouring the rule of hospitality. The suitors die not just because we narratively dislike them but because they broke an obligation to Zeus. The gods make up everything in Homer.

All motivation exists on a divine plane. Not as an act of free will but Fate. It is not a moral responsibility upon the characters because polytheism is not a moral based universe. Their concern is whether to anger gods or men. They know deities demand reference especially when they have compelled humans to act. The duty of humans is to revere gods by sacrifices and by behaving according to the character of nature.

The Odyssey is no lesson on humanity. There is instruction but little insight into how humans behave except that without a fearful leader they turn to anarchy. It's a religious work. It's a lesson on divinity. It teaches how to think of the relationship between men and gods.

Zeus says men blame the gods when it is their own imprudence to blame.  Odysseus blames Zeus to have forced his journey on him (referring to Fate). Yet truthfully Odysseus blinded and mocked the Cyclops himself and before that the men ate the cattle of Helios. But significantly Odysseus doesn't blame Poseidon.

HOMER’S STYLISATION

Homer is a story that does not suit being grounded in reality. It is fantastical and stylised as far as the imagination can go. Laws of physics are disobeyed. What makes it relatable is neither the emotion nor vividness of imagery, but the adversity of it. We recall our own adversity. But we recall it with the disposition that Homer gives us. The waves we see Odysseus struggling to survive in are all the arduous events we've come through in our own lives. It's not compassion that we feel: it's admiration. We admire Odysseus in the way we would have liked to have admired ourselves in adversity. If done with compassion and pity, it's done wrong. The key ingredient of Christianity is pity. Christians rework the Greek myths from an orientation of pity that doesn't truly exist in Homer. Kleos is the aim of the Greek hero, and therefore strife is important to reach that goal. The Sirens actually were singing of heroic heroes. The allure was not their beauty but to hear a song sung of your feats. They were winged-women, more beast like than beautiful. In this sense, a kind of macabre version of the Muses.

But it’s not only the potential for visual and practical effects. But the potential of cinema as a visual medium. The medium of cinema must shift from its present one to do it right. Better to turn to silent film and the golden age of adverts and music videos. The economy of iconographic visual statements. You do it in compressed time instead of real time. There is so much room for visual statements, montage, that silent film would suit the poem more than modern cinema, after all, the poem was not written with dramatisation in mind.

A difficulty is cinema is literal. Theatre presents things symbolically and metaphorical as standard. Myth is better suited to theatre. Think of religious ritual that dramatises its ideas in symbolic form. Theatre can convey more complex information in one moment because the literal can be dispensed with. A cinema screen of a human being walking onto a stage is a human being walking onto a stage. But on the stage things are representations of ideas not literal things.

The tragedians couldn't portray Homer in the freedom of time and image that cinema affords. Drama on stage moves in scenes in the way that cinema doesn't need to. In film, one can do many things simultaneously which adheres to Homeric metaphor. Think of the parallels that Homer is famous for. Not comparing one thing to another but evoking that one thing was exactly as another thing. Such as the movement to a lion compared to a soldier. The poem lends itself much more to the art of film editing, which is fundamentally the art of cinema. Therefore, it's not so much that you can leave a lot out, but that you can compress a lot in. Many things can be suggested rather than dramatised. Nolan does an incredible job of this style in Oppenheimer, notably when Oppenheimer is young in Europe.

Nolan can do whatever he wants creatively, but Homer implies a way. The work is already directed. The Ancient Greek tragedians already transferred Homer to stage work. Creative license is creativity with the freedom to be what it is: creative. To allow a vision to overpower the grounded reality into impressions, tones, patterns, all which are considered unnatural but rather just unnoticed. A film makes things beautiful by making them more regular than they seem in everyday life. But that's only because in real life we follow our own human eye. Photography and painting have shown there's a beautiful way – an artistic way - to see everything.

The film should be a gateway towards the appreciation of the poem. It should be like a mystery cult that you enter to adopt a disposition. Firstly, it's impossible not to distort the work when adapting it to cinema or any other medium because the original medium was a song. Even when we read it on the page we are experiencing it other than it was. When we read it in translation, in modern language, sometimes in prose. Even what we love about Homer is also a distortion.

One could argue we do nothing but modernise Ancient Greek poetry and literature. We read it in translation and in our modern language. Nevertheless, the text can be appreciated in this way. A translation doesn't aim to distort a worldview.

Modernising is essential. However, what works for opera, ballet, and even Shakespeare isn't going to work for Ancient Greek work. The problem is modernisation often comes with denial of the original culture. The creators try to merge the past culture with the present tastes and worldview. Hollywood never seems to have trouble making Old Testament stories or Christian parables…

The Ancient Greeks are never portrayed correctly. I've had this concern with theatre on their modernisation on tragedy on stage and even their archaism. There are only one people at two key periods that understood the Greek art: the Italians at the height of the Renaissance and Ancient Rome. Every other period only understands themselves. Yet academia has never been better. It's just that art and academia are so estranged from each other.

Let's look at recent films featuring Greek myth:

• Hercules (1997) made Hades the devil

• Troy (2004) has no gods

• Wonder Woman (2017) made Ares the devil

• Immortals (2011) distorts the whole amoral polytheistic concept of the universe

• Clash/Wrath of the Titans (2010/2012) made Hades the devil

• Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) killed the immortal Zeus

Why Hades or Ares or even Zeus has to become evil in Christian rewrites is because the Christian needs a dualistic universe where there is good and evil, and subsequently the Western writer needs conflict, and a protagonist-antagonist dynamic, where the protagonist is a moral redeemer of a broken world, and usually proceeds in a linear direction of individual objective to fulfilment mediated by obstacles. Ancient Greek narrative does not adhere to these rules. These are Western ideas of narrative that the East has demonstrated doesn’t need to exist at all to tell a great story.

If a filmmaker wanted to be the best at Greek myth on film, they have an easy job. Do it as it the Ancient Greeks had. Just do it right. Every modern portrayal is wrong. The bar is so low that the podium is empty. Any filmmaker to approach the material with cultural alignment that adheres to academic understanding of the material would by default be the best. First place would be given to the first to try.

It's not only an ignorance of the mountainous work that has been done academically in the field for centuries but also of the artistic efforts by painters, poets, and sculptures to create work that demonstrates their understanding to visualise Greek myth. An archaic representation of ancient poems or plays would be anachronistic to our tastes. But it’s worse to make something that refuses to adhere to the hard efforts academia has pursued for centuries. If Hollywood were to present these works to a serious circle of academics they'd be laughed out of town.

Style is vision. The style tells us how to see. Kubrick thought everyone made a Kafka adaptation badly because his writing is journalistic not surreal. Lynch wrote Metamorphosis as a script but said the work was better as words rather than a film.

Vision is literary style. How Homer writes is how he sees. How the tone feels is how the imagery feels. When Homer writes description it's in mirages. He makes the impossible vivid. There is an intimacy with language that is hard to put on screen. Beautiful yet brutal. His poetic style is hard hitting and direct. But his combination of words makes it simultaneously ornamental. Truthfully Homer on screen should be more stylised than our contemporary tastes.

Homer's diction is above the colloquial. Therefore, his vision for his imagination is too. The impossibility of gods. Think of Jonathan Glazer's surfer advert for Guineas. When Odysseus is struggling to hold on a plank of wood whilst the waves are throwing him around. You don't film it real time. You film it in condensed time and then metaphorically evoke. Chris Cunningham and his Gucci Flora advert with Abbie Lee Kershaw that was done with just a wind machine. The gods move as we often portray ghosts in cinema. Effortlessly defiant of the natural law of space and time.

There are two seemingly contradictory things that need to be achieved when putting Homer on screen. The narrative and the character go through brutal and dangerous terrain, yet the imagery is beautiful and sensual. Think of the beauty and danger of a turbulent ocean. Homer was an erotic writer in the sense he was obsessed with physical details. He doesn't just show things in detail he makes you feel them.

It's so abstract that it may be best to first work out the film visually then inserting dialogue where it's most necessary and approach it that way. That's why it's important to turn to the Ancient Greek dramatists and also consider how they chose to adapt Homer to the stage. More Greek plays are taken from the Trojan War than from any other subject matter.

Bone Gatherers, Penelope, Psychagôgoi are all lost Aeschylus plays from The Odyssey. Aeschylus was notable for spectacular visual effects, staging, and costume.

• Bone Gatherers dramatises from Book 24 of The Odyssey where the families of the dead suitors come to collect their bodies for burial.

• Circe was a satyr play dramatising Book 10

• Penelope is taken from Book 19 of The Odyssey when Odysseus arrives to his palace disguised as a beggar

• Psychagôgoi is taken from Book 11 The Odyssey when Odysseus conjures spirits of the dead in the Underworld in the eleventh book.

• In Phaeacia, Sophocles dramatised Book 6 when Odysseus arrives to the Phaeacians and meets Nausicaa.

• Sophocles also dramatised Book 19 in Foot Washing (Niptra) when Odysseus is recognised by the nurse Eurycleia when still disguised as a beggar because she recognises the boar wound scar.

• Of what survives the only narrative from the Odyssey is Euripides' satyr play Cyclops that dramatises Book 9 when the sailors blind the Cyclops. Except since it's a satyr play it's reworked to include satyrs and rewritten as a farce.

Aristotle, in Poetics, mentions the difficulty of adapting selections from epics suitable for tragedy with a coherent beginning middle and end. I think taking these vignettes from Homer is most effective when you ignore events as an arc but focus on having something to say or do with the subject matter. If the thematic arc is clear, a coherent beginning middle and end will arrive on its own from perceiving where in the myth that fulfils the analogy of its demonstration.

In The Odyssey, the gods are referred to move like birds:

"With these words the gleaming-eyed goddess left him and took her flight upwards...He had seen what she did and was astonished; it came to him that this was a god."

"At once he fastened under his feet the immortal sandals of lovely gold that carried him, swift as airy breezes, over ocean and over boundless earth. And he took the rod that lulls men's eyes for him, at his pleasure, or awakens others when they slumber. With this in hand the strong Radiant One began his flight; over Pieria he passed, then from the upper air dipped down to the sea and sped on over the waves like the seagull that hunts for fishes in the frightening troughs of the barren sea and wets his thick plumage in the brine; like a bird was Hermes carried over the multitudinous waves."

In antiquity, this was a common characteristic. Birds were always considered part of the auspices of heaven. Zeus was always associated with an eagle. Usually, a golden eagle in art. Homer doesn’t reference Poseidon to horses, but since chariots were pulled by horses, Walter Crane depicted Poseidon, as the Roman equivalent Neptune, riding the waves as a chariot of horses. British Oscar winning director Jonathan Glazer adapting this in his award-winning advert surfer advert for Guiness. These kinds of metaphor help you understand the Homeric vision.

I hope Nolan puts at least one image of Homer's dawns. They are so important as check markers of time. Eos was a deity of Dawn. Aurora in the Roman equivalent. The film should acknowledge that natural phenomena are divine representations.

"Dawn comes early, with rosy fingers."

"The sun sank, and light thickened on every path"

Scenes pass as if in visual contemplation. We observe, but we do not participate. Except for Books 9-12, the story certainly isn't told from Odysseus's perspective not from any other individual character.

HOMER AS ECSTATIC POET

The Greeks, above all, were the ones to overcome the existential disposition. On the modern stage, we nullify the effects of tragedy because we try to put it into this private in a world of modern existential theatre. The fundamental failure immediately is the idea that the word tragedy holds its modern meaning of misfortune and shame. Tragedy is not an existential art. So if we invest it with existential traits, we invest it with the precise thing it was created to repel. Tragedy as I said in my essay on The Origin of Drama was a revival of Homeric tradition within the arising existential cultural shift. The value of suffering - the most crucial existential of subjects - is turned on its head. That subject of the most concern to religion means something different in value in meaning to every religion. To the Greeks, the culture wherein suffering carries a meaning diametrically opposed to the modern Abrahamic tradition, pain and suffering are concerns of them both. The existential sees themselves as a prisoner of life; the ectatic sees himself as a general. Dread, pity, horror, pessimism, fear – none of these are characteristics of Homer. If epic and tragedy were melodrama, then all the tension would be focused on its emotional despair. But these songs were sung at social and court events. It was with songs that warriors hoped would be sung about them. We cannot possibly assume that this material gave them grief. Part of the problem is when we modern people follow a story week tend to follow it emotionally and weigh up the characters morally, we try to comprehend the characters from their moral worth and their character arcs. This isn't the way to see Greek art.

Nolan conversely is Romantic, typical of the English, and therefore his films have a cold and pessimistic tone. Perfectly applied in Oppenheimer. The experience of reading Homer is not cold and pessimistic. Certainly not if it was to be heard sung. I've not seen Nolan demonstrate he can execute the tone that Homer's work has. Nolan's tone is bleak and existential. You cannot capture the spirit of Homeric poetry with that disposition and you can't see the characters and events through that lens. The Englishman sees objectivity as pessimism. The more pessimistic and cold, the more real. The reality of a Mediterranean summer is hard for an Englishman to comprehend as true reality and not a rose-tinted ideal because it is not his own. The Englishman only understands his own reality. To the Englishman anything but England is exotic to him.

Of all literature that you could possibly bring to one’s attention, Homer is not existential. My concern is that readers new to Homer will think of the film and interpret its world under existential terms. The endurance of the Ancient Greeks is precisely because they were not existential. They were better than that. They teach us that there is something better than existentialism - and it's attainable.

Any good reader who reads the poem of The Odyssey can picture Odysseus with the observation of the Homeric disposition. No good reader imagines him in a state of existential crisis, staring out from a barren shore to a blanket of ocean. They picture him with all the strength and courage of a man, defiant of every natural obstacle that comes to refuse his return home. Odysseus is certainly no Stoic hero, nor were any of the Greeks heroic men. They are impulsively driven and action orientated. Yes, their hearts sink and eyes roll tears at misfortunes, but they are quick to murder when necessary. Stoicism was an attempt at prudence against such character. Nevertheless, the West gets these kinds of Heroes wrong because they give them too much ordinariness and make them morally and emotionally driven rather than ruthlessly amoral to their own interests. These men are almost childlike, but childlike in the way Sergio Leone's characters are childlike in their audacity. Yet, Odysseus is no Leone or Kurosawa hero with a stoic centre. He's almost George Miller’s Mad Max or James Caan's character in Michael Mann’s Thief. Like an untouchable uncontrollable animal. In fact, no offence Matt Damon, but of Nolan's recurrent actors I probably would have had Tom Hardy in this role. He's more Mad Max than Jason Bourne. Odysseus is unruly because he knows how good he is. He asks his sailors to tie him to the mast because he wants to hear the Sirens. He taunts the Cyclops after blinding him because he can't hold his tongue. He kills every suitor and every disloyal maidservant. He is the undisputed King of Ithaca, and he's coming back literally by hell or high water to take his throne again. There cannot be a single image of this man looking pathetic. This is not a poem of compassion. This is a poem that elicits piety, prudence, and bravery. Bravery of those soldiers that would hear it and go to war. Fathers, sons, brothers, husbands who would hope to have the same kleos sang of them. Homer is no novelist. Compare the Iliad with War & Peace. Tolstoy's entire register is compassion. Tolstoy the direct obverse of Homer.

It should be an adventure story which in its disposition inspires courage and evokes bravery in adversity, but ultimately perceives the working of the plurality of divinity working in the events towards the eventual Fated outcome. The fact that Odysseus arrived home at all, unlike Agamemnon, shows just how well liked by the gods he was. Odysseus wrestles with his own adversity rather than with gods. Every moment of adversity is an opportunity for Odysseus to show up in life as Odysseus. Odysseus is a military genius, a hero contrary to anything like a Christian hero.

OBJECTIVE PERSPECTIVE

Subjectivity in Western art arguably exists as far back as perspective was introduced into Western art. This brings everything to the level of the human eye. Prior to that, scale was hierarchical, space and distance were abstract, colour was symbolic to cultural meaning. Ancient Chinese and Japanese painting have examples where there is no interest in perspective from the human eye. They both have a lot of painting that is through the clouds, as if gods were looking down on humanity. That’s the perspective of The Odyssey. There are Ancient Roman frescos of The Odyssey that depict the episodes from a bird’s eye distance. The whole Odyssey is a divine song gifted to the poet-singer by the Muses. It is told from a divine perspective. This isn’t On The Road, The Motorcycle Diaries, or Gonzo Journalism. This isn’t Odysseus recounting his own life. This is what the gods remember, and the gods can be everywhere, and certain ones can know everything.

The stance the film should be told on, is given in the opening of Book 1. It's a god's eye view. Not just one but many gods. First the Muses inspire and then we come first to the gods. Therefore, it departs from the novelist's mono-interpretation of all things but sees from several contradicting points of view. Since the gods are representations not of a monotheistic or henotheistic God but are many gods. The outcome is an amoral universe but one with its own rules. But the most important thing is that humans are on a lower level. The humans are observed and deceptively interacted with.

A subjective view where the camera is bound to the ship as it's on the waves is not Homer. Homer is always objective. He witnesses. He sings from gods looking upon men. The only subjectivity should really be to put the audience on the divine plane. To hurl from Olympus to earth for example. To see the world of humans as the gods see it. This makes it wholly different from the Old Testament narratives. And though I imagine Nolan will film it as if Numbers from the Bible it would be the wholly wrong way to approach the material.

The narrative flows like music rather than that of the theatre. How much Homer is not a novelist. No introspection of characters' souls, no moral interpretation of the world, no arc of character, no change of world from one thing to another. The Odyssey is one long affirmation, one long visual statement. One repeating narrative of do and don't. Do sacrifice to the gods, do give hospitality to strangers and friends, do sing in remembrance of brave men, do await with patience and hope your sons and fathers from war.

The whole poem is stylised and should not be grounded visually that loses that hyper-stylsation. Imagery that looks great on film, but is a little unnatural for people to behave in such a way. Everything should photograph well. It should seem more a film of cinematography and production design. Sergio Leone always compared the genre of the Western to Homer:

"Probably the greatest writer of westerns himself was Homer. His character were never all good or all bad. They're half and half, these characters, as all human beings are." Sergio Leone

The way Leone presents his cinematic society would be the better way to perceive the Homeric world on film. A lawless, amoral, world of cunning and ruthlessness, within which there is also an unspoken code of decorum. A Machiavellian/Thucydian world without demeaning it with moralisation, but lives in it with the insight of Baroque cynicism.

What’s also important is that subjectivity wasn’t the preferred approach of the Ancient Greeks. If we consider both epic poetry and early drama were music - and both can be differentiated from lyrical poetry. - Ancient Greek drama retains the objectivity of epic poetry. Since the narrative of The Odyssey is not subjective, the music should not dramatize the character’s internal emotion, nor should it dramatize the activity of the event. It should provide the disposition to the polytheistic oversight of Odysseus’ homecoming. It should even be indifferent to the character’s emotions and events. A disposition not of dread and anguish but bravery and courage, as the stout-hearted gods look on humanity. There are expressions of characters weeping, such as Odysseus at the bard, but it is because the poet is required to speak of emotion in extremes because he never speaks in nuanced details, and never in subtext. Homer’s characters are always assertive of their emotional states.

“Him do I hate even as the gates of hell who says one thing while he hides another in his heart.” Homer’s Iliad, Book 9 – Achilles spoken to Odysseus

There should be no shot of Odysseus staring out to the endless sea from Ogygia. That would be confronting the situation from Odysseus’ own perspective. But both the reader/listener/audience have already known that the gods have agreed to his homecoming and are coming to his aid to let it happen. So, we have to witness him from the divine plane. It should be filmed with objective observation. The whole objectification should be like a natural history documentary. We do not plummet into the conflicted souls of the characters but observe their behaviour. For example, think of Ingmar Bergman’s opening of the Seventh Seal. That puts us there as a witness of imagery. Bergman doesn’t provide emotional context. He doesn’t emotionally place us, but visually place us. We are simply observers, seeing it with awe and distance.

The Book of Judges, the Book of Job, and the wisdom books of the Old Testament are a big problem with incorrectly interpreting The Odyssey. That is seeing Odysseus as a man of faith. It is not Numbers from the Old Testament, and an ideal of a test of faith. As a kind of Noah. The emphasis on being free will the abstracted individual affront or in conflict with their environment the meaningless absurdity and the difficulty of existence.

Suffering is understood entirely differently in Homer to how it is in a Judeo-Christian view. In Christianity, suffering is a cause for compassion and a signal of sin. In Homer, it's a sign a god considered you worthy of their attention. There are no myths of obscure ordinary men. Suffering was an opportunity to show up as assert who you were. It was a signal for increased power. A god is involved in both sides of Odysseus suffering. Even when Odysseus cries, if you've ever seen an athlete cry, it relates to the adversity they are recalling the effort and adversity they've sustained to that moment. It's not Job weeping under the indifference of God. Whether Odysseus wants it to happen isn't the point. It happens and he shows up as needed. Odysseus lives in the world. Encounters it, acts in it, accomplished in it, braves it. He does not want to change anything. Odysseus he is and to Ithaca he belongs. There is no king that has usurped his throne. He wishes only to return to his rightful place that aligns with who he is. In the Bible change is the whole narrative. From Eden through the Fall into New Eden. The narrative needs to be seen from the godlike perspective not a human one. Ancient Greek myth is a mythology of gods. The Old Testament is a human mythology. It had to take place not only in a world of polytheistic gods. There can't be a bad god. They all are what they are, enjoying being what they are, and desire humans to glorify them to seek their favour.

One of the most memorable moments is Book 5 when Odysseus is tossed about on the waves due to Poseidon's anger. Whilst the danger of death is high, Odysseus does not break into melodramatic cries but, as Homer, sings in beautiful poetry. This is ecstatic par excellence. He is not succumbing to the existential disposition even on the precipice of death. Odysseus lives and lives to live.

What's the most ecstatic aspect is that this moment is not only the lyric, but was sung in accompaniment of music. Therefore we only get half of the experience. The music accompanies this counter-balancing the moment rather than dramatising it. How much the ancients loved counter point. Their art was practically defined by its irony. The whole episode is like a compounding development of music that rises and falls like the waves itself. Once Odysseus reaches the shore the episode culminates in one of the best cadences of all literature

"So Odysseus buried himself in leaves, and Athene poured sleep to cover his eyelids over, sleep to release him quickly from toil and pains."

Homer’s Odyssey, Book 5

He's now with the Phaeacians. The tone is quiet and calm.

DESIGN & PERFORMANCE

Visual replication and historical accuracy was not the Ancient Greek way. They always modernised and invented on old myths. The Ancient Greek way was always an intense imagination leading to stylisation rather than realism.

As visually vivid as Homer is, he leaves many things out. He didn't aim to depict God's world like a novelist (who describes everything in sight through a moral lens), Dante (who described every visual and sensual detail of the present moment), or Shakespeare (who populated his pays with the high and low of society). He is more like a director, that focuses his vision on particulars. Think of how Wong Kar-Wai filmed Grandmaster, the way his camera sweeps across a scene as if a brush stroke, or the way Robert Bresson follows the hands of his untrained actors. What's in the frame is the frame, what's left out is out. Homer directs us where to look, and he moves through his scenes like movements or music rather than scenes.

Costume design was about a character's metaphor and function to the drama, not their personality, characteristics, or attempt at realism. Whilst the costume was symbolic in dramatic meaning, set design was fairly minimal and Homer doesn't indicate much about the environment beyond what his characters are looking at. So, it would be incorrect artistically to create environments which reflect the psychological states the characters or to light them in such a way. The environment is indifferent to their psychological state. The set design must avoid visual representation of Romanticism and melodrama. If you look at ancient art we see that Romantic traits do not appear such as scaling a person against a large background. Romantic painters would always position a figure low in a scene with grand landscapes or high in a scene with descending landscapes. Therefore, it cannot have grand scale which dwarves the actor, but must be at anatomical scale. The Greeks used every inch of space, and the body was the measure of things. Ancient Greek art was not natural but a deliberate unnatural naturalness.

It can’t have melodramatic mise en scène which would mean ugly provocative imagery. Not that everything must be beautiful, but it must be well composed. The Greeks never staged dramatic work in contemporary clothing, but they also didn't stage it in the historical accuracy of the period they staged it in a manner which was stylistically communicative of what was dramatically symbolic. In other words, they were more concerned with presenting things as what it meant dramatically than what it was historically.

Ancient Greek set design and costumes were more concerned with visual metaphors than depicting literal place settings. Nothing like method acting took place because it would distract from the insight in the going on of patterns of nature, and instead focus on the interior emotional centre of an actor. The point was to have insight into the working of the universe not into the conflicted soul of man. The acting was declamatory, slow, but full of energy with aesthetically pleasant shapes it was not frantic, hurried, gloomy, and hunched.

REPRESENTATION

There is a lot of talk about historical accuracy. But we forget that the ancient Greeks invented drama and they produced drama of Homer's poems. Their dramas demonstrate that the Ancient Greeks did not care about historical accuracy in their performances or literature. The Greeks always invented, modernised and reinvented. Theirs was an art of stylisation, not realism and naturalism.

The purpose of the story isn't to learn about an historical period. Those are intellectual criticisms but not artistic ones. Homer was an artist not a historian. His poem is about mythology not history. His work is set in a period centuries before his own time, so neither is it a work of memory and experience. The very discipline of history arrived three centuries afterwards. Myth making was an attempt to preserve an interpretation of events in the way a community would like to remember it. It was more like how a mural painter works. To throw several elements together to evoke the subject matter rather than represent it.

The 5^th century tragedian, Aeschylus, staged a Greek drama based on an historical event, called Persians. It is the oldest surviving drama in the world. With it, Aeschylus takes creative liberty, distorting distance, stylising costume, utilising the machinery of the theatre to portray the supernatural, and to convey a perspective and supply meaning rather than to be mimetic of reality. The very spirit of the Ancient Greek poets was not to accurately represent reality, but to lift reality out of the drab interpretation which existentialists were liable to do. Hence lyrical poetry and philosophers who strived to see the world without fantastical ideas but through raw feeling and clear-eyed observation were corrosive to the Homeric sensibility. The art of Ancient Greece, Mycenaeans, and Minoans was stylised and vibrant and unrealistic. The artistic sense of self, how they wish to portray themselves and their world in art was not realistic. We have this incorrect idea of naturalism of ancient sculpture, but it was not at all. There are physical features that are deliberately unrealistic there are proportions that were asymmetrical due to the perspective of the viewer. The sculptures were also painted without intention to be realistic.

Not only did the Ancient Greeks not care for historical accurate presentations, but they go even further, the Greeks always modernised. When Aeschylus presents his drama Danaids, the city of Argos, ruled of Pelasgus, functions as a democratic republic. When he presents the trilogy of the Oresteia, Athens becomes in the final play a democracy. Costume on the stage was completely for stage effect and it's meaning for stage symbolism. The Greeks themselves did not portray historical accuracy either in story, staging, or costume. It was entirely designed for the purpose of a production's effect.

Even within the tradition of their myths, the Greeks often invented rather than held to an authoritative version. The characters of Antigone and Ismene, from Sophocles’ Theban plays of Oedipus, are inventions by Sophocles.  Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides each made a drama about Philoctetes, depicting the same event, yet each dramatist has different characters involved. The Greeks invented their myths continuously. This ties back to that Homer's Odyssey is a story about story telling. It's a myth about myth making. Not only the dramatists, but Stesichorus adapted myths to choral poetry, refining the detail of character that anticipates drama.

When it comes to casting, recall that the Ancient Greek dramas were only performed by men, all characters, male, female, ghost, or god, were all men. They did not care for accuracy but artistry. Representation is a very modern thing. But when we see that the culture in question does not follow those rules it validates the modern creator in not doing so.

The part where I get disappointed is when the culture that it belongs to is not represented. I mean can you imagine a film about what's going on in the Middle East right now and everyone is English? In other words, I'm more concerned with cultural representation than historical accuracy.

I could be challenged in this by that I love Spaghetti Westerns, particularly those of Sergio Leone’s films. Filmed in Spain, with many European actors, about not only American history but a kind of American mythology of the Western genre. A slight difference is that this is a national epic. It's Greece's national epic and no one else's.

Therefore thinking of Homer in context, it's plausible that Homer came from Chios or Smyrna, small Greek islands off the coast of Turkey, due to the Ionian dialect of the poem as well as the familiar sights from that region.  There was a guild of rhapsodists on Chios called the Homeridae in the 6th century BCE, a name meaning the descendants of Homer. Homer doesn’t come from mainland Greece.

What matters is that it's in the Aegean Sea. Antiquity saw it much more as a basin of interacting cultural territory rather than anything like nations. Just scattered city states that all recognised a shared unity because they worshipped the same gods in the same way. There was no nationalism. Homer referred to the Greeks collectively as Dardans, Hellenes, and Achaeans. But these are slightly different terms. It was Peisistratus, the tyrant of Athens, in the sixth century BCE who issued there to be an authoritative version of Homer's poems.

The poems of Homer arose after the Dark Ages. Near the Ionian coast of Persia he’s closer to other civilisations. There are aspects of Homer that bare resemblance to other mythological epics outside of Greek ones. We already know that deities like Aphrodite and Dionysus have derived from developments from antecedent deities in other cultures. Greece was more than any other culture we know the greatest and taking the best of elsewhere and developing it within its own frame of mind. There was no independent Greek miracle. Its culture was developed out of admiration of the surrounding empires of which Greece was a little fish in a big pond even in its heyday before Alexander the Great began his imperial occupations.

There is naivety to imagine a racial purity both in the time of Homer and today after centuries of war, conquest, and migration. What's more the Ancient Greeks weren't racist in the Modern ideology of racism. They acknowledged that people had different pigmentation and general characteristic but there is nothing like the insanity of Modern racism. They were xenophobic but our modern racism derived from the Middle Ages superficially designating the triad of Abrahamic religions into geographical monopopulations - which was exasperated during the scientific revolution. For the most part the Ancient Greeks were very sexist, arguably a much older prejudice.

I think the mortals should be Mediterranean. But I don't feel that way about the gods. And with good reason. When the Greeks travelled to other polytheistic regions they saw their own gods in theirs believing that they simply appeared to the populace in the way they would be familiar to them. The audience of this from is global therefore I like the idea of a multiethnic pantheon. What's more they should be different than the mortals.

Furthermore, whenever Athena revived Odysseus, not only from his disguise as a beggar, but when he reaches the shore of Ithaca, she made his skin darker. In Ancient Greek colour symbolism in art red was for masculinity and yellow or pale colour for women. The Greeks were very sexiest with the exception of Sparta where women arguably had more freedom than women today. Red was life and pale was death. Life meant virility, strength, power, a kind of closer to divinity. But all that was culturally also to mean masculinity. There is a Greek vase depicting Heracles with the Egyptians where the Egyptian men are depicted in yellow. This was both a deliberate xenophobic and sexist representation of foreigners.

DRAMATIC ADAPTATION OF HOMER

Homer has been adapted into dramatic performance since the time of the Ancient Greek’s themselves.  So, there’s no point to list dramatic adaptions of Homer, since they go back to the very invention of theatre. The Ancient Greek’s own dramatic performances are perhaps the most important to consider as they tell us how they themselves adapted Homer to dramatic performance. Their productions of Homer tell us what’s approved by their standards. We also understand the reception of Homer’s work by the Romans because of the imitation Virgil strived for in his Aeneid, effectively combining both The Odyssey and Iliad in one epic.

Conflict shuts down the imagination. There is an interesting early essay by Nietzsche written during university about ancient pantomime, and how Plato used it because it grasps the attention of the spectator by always providing tension. Homer demands visual attention, so audiences needed space to think in intoxicated concentration and open up their imagination. They are listening to a poetry which is full of imagery which needs to be retained in their minds as a metaphor to comprehend the richness of the dramatic meaning. To accomplish that you have to give the audience space to think. If their minds are overloaded with new information emotions tension conflict the imagination shuts down and the audience becomes passive spectators.

If a Greek tragedy was about the emotion and all the tension in a scene would be on emotion and no insights into the meaning of the relationship between mortals and gods. It would be full of conflict, tension, moving plot, because it would always be about present action and present emotion. It would focus on an inwardness. That is not present in the external facing religion of the Greeks. Epic and tragedies not interested in inner moral worth because Greek religion is not a religion of dualistic moral imbalance and moral responsibility.

DIALOGUE

As for dialogue, this is where things will go very badly.  Homer’s dialogue is super stylised. He writes long speeches. No one speaks briefly unless arriving or departing. Yet to say this is unrealistic misses the point. Homeric poems are for the most part told through dialogue. Most of the pivots of plot hinge on scenes of dialogue. Barely any action takes place without it. The narration is swift like a montage of mirages.  If we strip that back into visual statements, it's economical. But the disposition created by those dialogues must be transferred to image and music.

So, what did the dialogue serve? Assertions of being and desire. Each speaks as if throwing a javelin to assert their argument, and then another throws their javelin for their argument. They make speeches as if in contest. The one who speaks better prevails. There is no tension, no subtext, no arguments, no reasoning. It’s all assertive speeches in beautiful poetic lyrics of self-affirmation. Each character makes a declaration. They each speak assertively without subtext. The arguments presented redefine the circumstances. It is word, not action, that most scenes pivot on, as characters try to one-up each other in audacious and bold assertiveness. The tragedians and Thucydides continued this. The scenes should make effective use of blocking, rather than reverse shots of people talking. Think of how Spielberg excels at blocking, or how Leone composed blocking in Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America, or how Akira Kurosawa composed blocking in High & Low, and Ran. Since everything was song, not spoken, and not drama, it would make sense that the Homeric speeches were originally composed as song verses, and would flow forward in their development. Reason and argument would confuse the song and be jarring with its back and forth. Everything develops not contradicts. Since it was written before drama, and before lyrical poetry, it has everything to do with music. Therefore, Homer didn’t conceive of each book as a series of scenes, but more as a series of musical moods. Each book is a song.

Aristotle said tragedians wrote of people better than they are. Comedians as they are. The gods should not speak as if mortal men. The men should not speak in a way that betrays their status. No one should speak that undermines the evocation of boldness and strength that Homer is soliciting.

Homer does not aim to be realistic. Therefore, that no one speaks realistically isn't an issue for Homer. It's only an issue for Modern audiences that want gritty pessimistic realism and wish to see themselves in the work.

The novel — if we summarise its technical style it has inherited — is a comedy we have pity for, built out of the picaresque and written in the low style of prose. Since cinema took cues from the novel and cinema in most cases could be played on stage. It's only the visual spectacle that is lost, but the writing can be done on stage. Homer being neither a dramatic script nor a novel, but a poem, offers a different possibility. But the conventional process of screenwriting is likely to remove that potential to reduce it to something more like the theatre.

CLOSING

How do we communicate our feelings for our contemporary world through Homer? We can’t. Because we don't think Ecstatically. We think Existentially. Our news our movies, our music, our social media, are existential through a lens of modern subjectivism. Greek Epic and tragedy were overcoming of a way of thinking that is fundamentally Modern. Why the Ancient Greeks are timeless is because they always bring us into examination.

We cannot Modernise Ancient Greek work. To the Modern person, the liberation of Ancient Greece is precisely because it has no bearing on the present. To Modernise would be to undo and reject all that is unModern about it. Whenever we bring it towards ourselves, we corrupt it or lose it entirely. The timelessness of the Ancient Greeks is that they enrich every subsequent age with their idea of life. The task then is not to bring it towards ourselves, but for us to go toward it.