"A fine blaze of song"

Last week I took my son Michael—eleven, and counting the days to twelve—to see Christopher Nolan's new blockbuster movie, The Odyssey.

It was awesome.

This was Michael’s idea. He and I had recently watched Nolan’s Batman trilogy—brooding, gritty, violent and gorgeous—which Michael loved. He’d heard good things about Nolan’s rendering of The Odyssey, so off we went to a 9:45PM showing of this three-hour epic.

We saw the film in “4DX.” What’s that? Well, that’s the format where the seats throw you around, bucking and lurching in coordination with the action on screen. And there’s water spitting out of the dark, and snow—wet, cold flakes—falling from above, and wind coming at you from everywhere at once, and bursts and whooshes of air when an arrow flies by, and the occasional blinding blast of a strobe light when lightning strikes. Like I said—it was awesome.

It was also the perfect way for a boy to engage with Homer: loud, physical, outlandish, and completely alive. He came out wide-eyed. Me, too.

As it happens he'd already met Homer, in Gareth Hinds's marvelous, blood-soaked graphic novel of the Iliad , which we'd read together—the clash of armies, Hector’s killing of Patroclus, Achilles’ terrible revenge, all of it gloriously gory.

Homer may be ancient literature, but Nolan and Hinds demonstrate he is our contemporary, too.

Forty years ago I first read The Odyssey in a hopelessly stuffy and starchy 18th Century translation by the deservedly forgotten William Cowper (it was cheap). It didn’t matter. A dull translation, a comic book, a theme-park blockbuster. Here is the thing we can say plainly: they all work. Every one of them. Because underneath every version is the story, and the story is indestructible.

We take stories into our hearts for reasons we don't fully understand. Narrative is something older than argument. I think maybe it’s hardwired into us at birth, and maybe before that. A great story, perhaps, is part of the eternal orchestration of the universe itself, awaiting its call into breath.

The Odyssey has survived three thousand years not as a museum piece but as a tale, passed hand to hand, sung differently every night it was ever sung.

Christopher Nolan, who is a great narrative artist, understands this in his bones. His job was never to file a report on Bronze Age Greece. It was to make the old fire catch again. It did. Michael is the proof.

And yet.

Yes, you read that right. Conservatives are angry—infuriated—at one of the greatest services that Hollywood has ever done to make the ancient classics of our culture come alive for new generations.

Some of this backlash against Nolan’s masterpiece is mere pedantry—the “actually” brigade, running around insisting that the sandals are wrong, the casting is wrong, the whole thing an affront to a poem that I suspect many of them have not read. “How dare he?” they declare, the hall monitors of our culture, looking to get a gold star from teacher, or at least a retweet from Elon Musk.

This is dumb. Alas, it is a familiar kind of dumbness. The repeated attacks on some classics— The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Taming of the Shrew—reveal a creeping censoriousness on the left, as well, an impulse to pull books off the shelf, movies from the screen, plays from the stage. It was entirely predictable that the worst elements of the American right would take that and run with it. Now that these folks hold the culture's whip hand, they have simply become the censors themselves.

And this is where it stops being an annoyance and turns into something darker:

You don't have to squint to see it.

On Friday President Trump ordered warning signs planted on the sidewalks outside the Smithsonian's Museum of American History, telling visitors that what waits inside is "inaccurate" and steering them toward "accurate" history the administration prefers. The attack comes after a March White House report that declared, “White, male and Christian Americans are regularly denigrated” at the Smithsonian."

You see where this goes. Accurate. That’s the same word the conservative pedants aim at Nolan.

But their campaign will fail against his Homer. It already has: Nolan's Odyssey opened to $124 million at home and $264 million worldwide, the biggest launch of his career, despite the attempt to make a culture-war out of it. Audiences, blessedly, most of them under thirty-five, simply walked past all that nonsense. Homer will outlast these censors as he outlasted my dreary old translation.

But the attack needs to be beaten back anyway, so the boys and girls can hear the story in our own time, by our own lights, and let its noble magic work on them, too. Michael is already halfway to Ithaca. I'm not about to let anyone tell him he took the wrong road there.

My favorite passage from this epic was not directly included in Nolan’s film, though he hints at it. Odysseus, the great hero, has washed ashore in a strange land (again). He is alone; all his shipmates have been lost during the long journey home. No one recognizes him, but he bears himself nobly, and the local king (Alcinous) holds a feast for him.

A bard steps forward. He begins a song; it’s the tale of the Trojan War. Odysseus listens as so many his fallen comrades, men he fought with for years and loved, are sung back into being, transformed, and he listens as he, too, becomes legend.

—Terry

by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles

Stirred now by the Muse, the bard launched out

in a fine blaze of song, starting at just the point

where the main Achaean force, setting their camps afire,

had boarded the oarswept ships and sailed for home

but famed Odysseus’ men already crouched in hiding—

in the heart of Troy’s assembly—dark in that horse

the Trojans dragged themselves to the city heights.

Now it stood there, looming …

and round its bulk the Trojans sat debating,

clashing, days on end. Three plans split their ranks:

either to hack open the hollow vault with ruthless bronze

or haul it up to the highest ridge and pitch it down the cliffs

or let it stand—a glorious offering made to pacify the gods—

and that, that final plan, was bound to win the day.

For Troy was fated to perish once the city lodged

inside her walls the monstrous wooden horse

where the prime of Argive power lay in wait

with death and slaughter bearing down on Troy.

And he sang how troops of Achaeans broke from cover,

streaming out of the horse’s hollow flanks to plunder Troy—

he sang how left and right they ravaged the steep city,

sang how Odysseus marched right up to Deiphobus’ house

like the god of war on attack with diehard Menelaus.

There, he sang, Odysseus fought the grimmest fight

he had ever braved but he won through at last,

thanks to Athena’s superhuman power.

That was the song the famous harper sang

but great Odysseus melted into tears,

running down from his eyes to wet his cheeks …

as a woman weeps, her arms flung round her darling husband

a man who fell in battle, fighting for town and townsmen,

trying to beat the day of doom from home and children.

Seeing the man go down, dying, gasping for breath,

she clings for dear life, screams and shrills—

but the victors, just behind her,

digging spear-butts into her back and shoulders,

drag her off in bondage, yoked to hard labor, pain,

and the most heartbreaking torment wastes her cheeks.

So from Odysseus’ eyes ran tears of heartbreak now.

But his weeping went unmarked by all the others;

only Alcinous, sitting close beside him,

noticed his guest’s tears,

heard the groan in the man’s labored breathing

and said at once to the master mariners around him,

“Hear me, my lords and captains of Phaeacia!

Let Demodocus rest his ringing lyre now—

this song he sings can hardly please us all.

Ever since our meal began and the stirring bard

launched his song, our guest has never paused

in his tears and throbbing sorrow.

Clearly grief has overpowered his heart.

Break off this song!”