The Indypendent62%
This “Odyssey” is a Travesty 8%
By Elsie Carson58%
8/4/2026, 1:11:55 PM
Keywords: Odyssey, Christopher Nolan, Film Adaptation, Ancient Greece, Poetry, Imagination, Violence, Chris Hedges, Emily Wilson
BS Summary: This article contains 31 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Anecdotal, and Appeal to Emotion, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 28.2% saturation with 329 hits. Analysis detected 2,222 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,165 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 18.7% and a BS Rank of 8% (25,582 of 27,739 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 92.20% of the article peer group.
What writer does not want one of their great epics to be made into a blockbuster, 2800 years after their death?
On the other hand, writers are a prickly bunch and resist directors’ manhandling of their work.
In ancient times, the tragedians directed their own plays, and Homer, even earlier than that, improvised and recited his/their own work.
I was on the Greek islands of Tinos and Delos during the launch of Christopher Nolan’s enormously expensive, high grossing Odyssey .
I missed the MAGA attacks on central casting (a black Helen of Troy, a transgender sidekick).
I missed reading the lavish praise from the commercial press, whose job is to sell tickets.
I missed the equally predictable snarky attacks from highbrows on the Left.
I missed Rebecca Solnit’s mediation on ubiquitous rape in all foundational Western works.
But since I was on rocky islands in the Aegean sea, I was able to commune with Homer’s shade in the underworld.
Homer is bemused.
He is gratified that his epic tale of return is being favored with such a lavish revival by the mega-director Christopher Nolan, despite the fact that Homer, the blind bard, is unable to see in IMAX Technicolor so it all feels like a garish display to him.
He is, however, still able to hear the words of his great poetic work, now changed into an undistinguished vernacular.
I was on the Greek islands of Tinos and Delos during the launch of Christopher Nolan’s enormously expensive, high grossing Odyssey .
What, I asked, does Homer think?
Back in New York, I am reading The Odyssey in Emily Wilson’s highly praised recent edition.
I am struck by its childlike playfulness.
It seems the proto- typical fairy tale, a magical world of constant transformations, reversals, improbable escapes, its catalogue of monsters, witches, its delight in sexual love, in golden riches.
Improbable, horrifying, thrilling.
Waves, barren, rocky volcanic mounds that sometimes look like monsters rising up, wind, the indescribable brilliance of what is frequently called the “wine-dark sea,” the crescent moon with Venus overhead, the primal beauty of the Greek islands.
The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus trying to return home to his kingdom of Ithaka after ten years at war; this journey back will also take ten years.
Partly because Odysseus must pay for the fact that he had the idea of the Trojan Horse.
Odysseus, the trickster, tricked the Trojans into accepting the “gift” that de-stroyed their city.
Now, the gods will work their trickery on him and his journey home will become an epic adventure.
The Odyssey is also the story of our longing for “home,” a home we might once have known but which exists no longer, a home we never had but long for, a world we desire in which we feel at home, loved, revered, admired, safe, always out of reach
But the Odyssey is also the story of our longing for “home,” a home we might once have known but which exists no longer, a home we never had but long for, a world we desire in which we feel at home, loved, revered, admired, safe, always out of reach.
A home that is harsh and unforgiving but never dull, always surprising.
The home that exists only in imagination.
The Odyssey is a hymn to human imagination, the single trait we have that might set us apart from the rest of the animal world, our story telling, our longing.
And telling stories allows us to love and revere the rest of the animal and verdant world.
This is why Cafavy’s brilliant poem Ithaka defines the Odyssey as an interior journey: “you won’t encounter them [the many weird gods and creatures] unless you bring them along inside your soul.”
Ithaka is not a place; it is a longing.
Ithaka is not home, one cannot go there or arrive there, one can only strive, try, hope, remember and envision.
Ithaka for Cavafy, and for all of us who read the Odyssey , who once heard it recited under the starry sky, against the beat of wind and wave, who thrill to its vivid descriptions of cyclops, Circe, the divine enchantress, storms, impossible bravery and foolishness, danger, desire, lust, wine, gold, rich, form-fitting robes, and the wine-dark sea, is forever out of reach.
One strives for Ithaka, delights and fears and longs for the journey.
Ithaka is about desire, and the poem suggests that without imagination, we might as well be dead.
We will never arrive.
Or if we get there, it will not be as we wished.
We will continue to need to imagine more: beauty, magic, love, fear.
The poem wakes us to impossible feats fueled by impossible desire.
It pours life into our weary veins.
One thing the Odyssey is not is an action-adventure story in which the hero fights and kills and fights and feels badly about all those he has killed, yet lives to fight and kill again, and again.
The Odyssey is not the adolescent male fantasy of male muscle and female vagina, which evidently belongs to Christopher Nolan, the director who has stripped poetry, magic, imagination and desire in order to show sword fight after improbable sword fight, blood and guts, muscles and ridiculous feats of pseudo-bravery watched over by skinny women wanting to be fucked.
Chris Hedges raves.
He calls this film a testament to a failing civilization.
He lauds Nolan’s incessant violence as an indictment of the incessant violence of America’s endless wars.
He loves the brutality of the film; the ways in which it makes us feel and smell the blood.
He loves the suffering of Odysseus, the post-traumatic stress that oozes from the eyes and voice of Matt Damon.
Damon is so sorry that he killed.
He cannot help himself but kill again, and again.
The film is a travesty of the Odyssey , not its essence.
As if Nolan read the Cliff Notes, and having no idea of the poem itself, its visual language, decided instead to shock and drag us through an ugly street fight that never ends.
The film is a travesty of the Odyssey , not its essence.
Far from being an indictment of American violence, the film is American violence.
It is American excess, too.
Obscenely costly.
It makes us feel that we are doomed to be assaulted by outrageous cruelty and excessive spending until we die.
That no other choice exists for any man but murder.
The next big fight scene after the last big fight scene becomes an endless modern hell.
The film feels as punishing as the daily atrocities of which we read and must endure.
Recalling the wild beauty of the island, I wonder, again, what Homer thinks.
“By killing my poetry, you have murdered me,” Homer said, and then he
Karen Malpede is author of Last Radiance: Radical Lives, Bright Deaths, and 23 plays, including the forthcoming drama, Epstein Oratorio, or a Modern Hymn to Demeter.
Speakers
1speaker7.1%attributed speech1,082writer words
Selected voice
88%flagged-word coverageChris Hedges
83 attributed words100% of attributed speech85% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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