What Is The Odyssey?

 

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.The Odyssey is not the book you think it is. Most of the action you remember happens in Books 9-12, the whole back half of The Odyssey has far less action than those four chapters. Those four chapters are the part everybody loves. Everybody thinks this is a great action-adventure story, but the major point of The Odyssey is not the adventures of Odysseus. The major point of The Odyssey is that 'these douchebags are drinking Odysseus's wine!'

Homer, at its core, is not about its action: epic poetry is not about action. Epic poetry is about ritual. Homer is about ritual because rituals are what give order to life.

What makes poetry epic is not the excitement, it's not even the scale or scope: it's the stakes; it's the sense that these events matter, that these people matter; matter so much that we are not ourselves if we don't learn their deeds and teach them to our children. The Rage of Achilles is not just about Achilles's rage, it is about the rage of every person who has ever mourned a murder victim, and its nothing short of a ritual enactment of what every person who's experienced that rage wants to do. The Trojan War is not just about the Trojan War, it's about every war and every fear we have that civilization-wide death is coming for our peoples just as it came for theirs.

We may think that in our biggest movies we have that kind of grandeur, but we look for that grandeur in the wrong places. There are only a very few artistic creators in all of human history who come close to that kind of sublime solemnity: maybe Wagner or Michelangelo, or Goya or Milton. But if you really want to understand what Homer is like: don't picture a Christopher Nolan movie, you'll only find that kind of grandeur in a very few places in American culture. Picture the Baptismal Massacre in The Godfather, or Colonel Kurtz's camp in Apocalypse Now. Picture the ape picking up a bone in 2001. Picture the oil fire in There Will Be Blood.

That's four moments in American film, there aren't many more, in which the limitations of what entertainment can do are so transcended that it takes on the properties of a religious ritual.

Those moments are not just art, those are moments so transcendent that they put us in touch with the possibility that there are forces in the universe more grand than anything of which our imaginations can conceive. When you (I) see the massacre at the end of The Godfather, it is as though evil itself has emerged from hell and subverted Christianity's holiest sacraments. Many people watch that oil fire in There Will Be Blood, and instead of an oil fire they see the destructive forces of capitalism itself given body and being. And the monkey with the bone in 2001? I needn't describe it, everyone who's seen it can tell you it's exactly what Kubrick says it is: the dawn of man.

Now take all those tableaux's and stretch them into a thirty hour movie where half the tone is basically the same as all those scenes, and half the tone is so quiet that we can hear our own thoughts. Now you have an idea of what a Homeric epic is. We think of Homer beginning the Greek half of Western Civilization because he managed to take the most literally awesome five minutes of The Godfather or 2001 and stretch it to the length of a book.

That's Homer. He's is not about the adventure, he's about the transcendence. Every moment of his books is that ritual where every book in his epic seems to summon a new sublime force from the ether. Not every moment in his poems is sublime, but every one of his chapters has elements that feels connected to some subtextual element of the universe so much bigger than what it seems to be. Every other page is a grand tableux or a feast or a retelling of events every member of society was expected to know, but they're not necessarily that exciting. If they are exciting, it's not because they feel eventful, it's because they feel important.

You can't find the equivalent in too much American art, you can only find it commonly in religion: in a Passover Seder, an Easter Passion Play, a Catholic holy sacrament. And just like those rituals, it's supposed to be a little repetitive, it's supposed to try your patience a little bit. That is what Homer does, the rituals he describes are meant to summon forces that transcend material limits, and like a giant Italian cathedral, he retells it in poetry so ornate, so visceral, and often so gorgeous, that even as you hear it, even as you're sometimes bored, you can still hear the creation of the earth.

I have no doubt that some people will see this new adaptation of The Odyssey and come away feeling they had a spiritual experience just as awesome: maybe they did. But will they have it again?

What has always irritated me to the point of rage about Christopher Nolan is that I think he's convinced the American public that you can make great art out of spectacular brainteasers.

I don't think Nolan is a bad artist, I think he's a bad entertainer. Nolan's a great craftsman, but he is Self-Serious with two capital S's, and so often without humor, without human complexity, without emotion itself. It's not art, I'm not even sure it's entertainment. It's a toy: and just like in James Cameron, a lot of his movies' impact would evaporate away from a multiplex where you see it in giant frame alongside 500 people.

Meanwhile, a large part of the point in Homer is the renewability. If you go back to this Odyssey movie in a week or a month, will you have the same experience of it? If you watch it on something less than an IMAX screen, will you have the same experience of it? If you watch it on a home entertainment system, will you have the same experience of it?

The point with Homer is that millions of people over three thousand years decided that his poetry has that level of transcendence. No matter who recited it, no matter who read it, no matter who translated it, millions of people decided that the essence of Homer came through. Lots of people recited Homer through the millenia, lots of people recited his entire poems from memory. Some of them got great reviews, some of them got bad reviews, but it was the essence of Homer that mattered: a direct contact with the original source.

Now, the truth is, nobody can live with that level of transcendence all the time. Parts of Homer are supposed to be funny and probably were to ancient Greeks and Romans, and even where he's not trying to be funny, Homer can be kinda dreary. In terms of the ancients, I much prefer Ovid where you get lots of jokes and ordinary people and sex and spoofs of the gods. Certain stories from Ovid are some of the most spellbinding reading on earth, and in a very modern way. Nobody knew that better than Shakespeare, who occasionally used Ovid as a cheat sheet.

But the dreariness is part of the reason we read Homer, a dreariness that if the new movie is as good as half its spectators say it is, the movie completely lacks. Many people read Homer and all his rituals and find themselves saying 'GET BACK TO THE PLOT!' But Homer tells us 'the rituals ARE the plot.

Take, for just a minute, the final segment of The Iliad. The middle third of The Iliad is slow, deliberately slow. Achilles refuses to fight for the Acheans, and what do we do? We wait, and wait, and wait.

Then comes the stuff we read the book for. Many say The Iliad is the greatest book ever written and I wouldn't correct them even if a lot is not to my taste, but the last third of The Iliad may be the greatest long segment in a book ever written and it's almost not a question. What happens is so powerful, so sublime, so incredibly exciting and quick moving that it defines epic in the way we now think of 'epic': and all the moreso because we've had to adjust our clock to a much slower pace, so that when the release of violence comes, it is a bloodletting that is absolutely ecstatic.

I don't dare give away any more of the main plot for those who don't know it than's necessary to make my point, but here's the gist what happens. After all that, after the most brutal, terrifying, exciting, inspiring, and somehow uplifting display of violence and rage in the history of... history.... comes the final scene, when Priam, the ancient Trojan king, comes to plead for the body of his son whom Achilles so detests and so dishonored so he can get a proper burial. He asks him to remember his own father, and so overcome is this half-god full of rage that they both weep in each others' arms. Is there a moment of that much humanity, that much forgiveness, in any other story ever told? Long before my father died, I teared up whenever I thought of that passage. But here's the point: what do Achilles and Priam do after they forgive each other and weep in each others arms as though they are father and son themselves?

They eat.

The second half of The Odyssey is quiet. Conflict is there; tension and action too, but it's there to be resolved, and the ultimate point in Homer is not the conflict, the point is the resolution, the bringing back of disturbed cosmic forces into cosmic order. THAT is what makes him considered one of the three or four greatest writers who ever lived.

Like so much of the greatest art, Homer is instruction: a kind of 'how to' manual, not for how to take action, but how to heal. That is something very few Hollywood movies try to do, and save certain Spielbergs and Fords, the ones that do don't make much money.

Epics, real epics, are not meant to be action-packed, they're meant to show that action is just one small phase of a much larger life cycle. Excitement is just the beginning, what brings people back to Homer is just what brings people back to the final Shakespeare plays, to Mozart operas, to Bach and Rembrandt, maybe Spielberg even, maybe even Bruce Springsteen or late Johnny Cash. What brings people back to Homer is the capacity and the hope that he helps to heal us. The real point of the back half of The Odyessey is everything Odysseus does to restore the order of his house. Homer doesn't just excite us, he doesn't just move us, he quiets us, and makes the difficulties of little people like us easier to go about.

Homer isn't remembered because he invented the action epic, he's remembered because when we're traumatized, he was the first to show us how to put ourselves back together.