[This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.]

Scott Black: Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways to wander, driven off course after sacking Troy's hallowed keep. The stories and songs of Odysseus's return from the Trojan War were already the stuff of legend by the time Homer, or the Homeric bards, gathered them into the text of The Odyssey.

Since then, the epic has remained one of the most popular and influential stories of world literature, its own fortunes resembling the many disguises and crafty variations adopted by Odysseus himself. The latest version is this summer's blockbuster movie by Christopher Nolan. How does the film measure up? How does it adapt and update the classic epic for us?

Welcome to The Virtual Jewel Box, podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center. I'm Scott Black, director of the Tanner Humanities Center, and I'm delighted to be joined today by two colleagues at the University of Utah who teach Homer to discuss Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey. Margaret Toscano is professor of classics in the Department of World Languages and Cultures, and Paisley Rekdal is distinguished professor of English and Poetry.

Welcome, Margaret.

Margaret Toscano: I'm glad to be here.

Scott Black: Welcome, Paisley.

Paisley Rekdal: I'm glad to be here too.

Scott Black: I'll start with you, Margaret. What are your first impressions of Nolan's Odyssey?

Margaret Toscano: I have to say that I went to see it with sort of mixed feelings. On the one hand, because I'm a scholar of classical reception, one of the basic premises of this area of scholarship is that we should judge an adaptation on its own merits.

What is the author, the filmmaker, the artist trying to do with the story, and is it successful? Then maybe secondarily you ask, how does it relate to the ancient text or to whatever is past, and what does our interaction with the past and the present help us understand?

So I tried to go in with an open mind, and I have to say I enjoyed it. I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed it. It's a compelling film, obviously very well crafted. But after I saw it, I started having mixed feelings thinking back on some of the elements.

Scott Black: It's actually similar to my response. It's a spectacular movie. As you said, really well done, pulls out all the Hollywood stops. The action stuff is exciting, and I was really caught up in it, although the sound is abysmal, and I mean literally way too low.

But I was really caught up, and afterwards I also started to think about his choices. As I was reflecting on what he chose to make this about, some of it really grabbed me during the movie and I think remains really important: the focus on xenia, hospitality. Some of the choices are interesting. There are no gods in this. But then some of the other choices, which I think we'll get to later, really started to rub me the wrong way in some ways.

Margaret Toscano: I do hope we go back to the gods because, even though they're not there, we could argue about Athena, right? The idea of Zeus's laws of how you treat strangers is so heavy in the film.

Scott Black: Yeah.

Margaret Toscano: And so it creates the presence of the gods.

Scott Black: Interesting.

Margaret Toscano: But in what way? I caught at one point, and maybe I need to go back and think about this, that Odysseus—it said he defied the gods. And of course there's Poseidon. So are they real? What is their effect? How are we supposed to understand them?

Scott Black: Paisley, what were your impressions of the film?

Paisley Rekdal: I'm a vaguely pessimistic person by nature, and so I went in thinking this is gonna be terrible. For me, I was actually really delighted because I thought it was a very smart adaptation.

I think if you were doing a straight one-to-one textual analysis, obviously a lot has been jettisoned, and we'll talk about some of the jettisoning as problematic. But I also feel like some of the things that he kept were really, really smart.

I'm also working on poems about war, I should say. I'm thinking a lot about how we write about war, how we think about war, and I think of Nolan's adaptation as really a meditation on war and its long-term effects, more so than I'm looking at it as a really, truly engaged conversation with The Odyssey. I think he picked and chose among the things that would bring out that particular argument, which might go back to the question of how the women are treated, which we'll talk about.

Margaret Toscano: I felt, the more I thought about the film, that it was a very heavy-handed morality tale about war.

The image of the Trojan horse bothered me. My first reaction—I said to my husband after we left—was, "There's Oppenheimer 2." The Trojan horse is the atomic bomb. It hangs like an albatross around Odysseus's neck, and how many times do we have to see that in the film? I felt like I was beaten over the head with it.

Paisley Rekdal: I would say yes and no. Yes, in the sense that they kept going back to it. It was a spectacular image to go to and show just the commitment to doing what they did and how violent it was on every level.

But I also think it was there to remind us that Odysseus lands somewhere, he's violating someone else's home, and there's that question of, is he a welcome guest or an unwelcome guest? When I think about the gods' law, Zeus's law, it doesn't, for me, bring up the question of whether the gods exist. It brings up the question of what is civilization except accepted norms and behaviors in which kindness, civilization, art, love can be fostered.

So the gods don't become as important as the idea of, are you violating someone's terms of how they're offering civilization, how they are promoting and keeping civilization? I think there's something about that Trojan horse that is supposed to remind us that this is the first violation of these civilized norms that will be echoed throughout.

Margaret Toscano: I agree that the laws of xenia—the laws of hospitality—they're not just hospitality. More basically, they're how you treat strangers. But you could argue that in the ancient Mediterranean world, every time you traveled anywhere, you were going onto foreign land as soon as you went out of your own home.

So when he approaches something, and I agree that Nolan treats it a little differently than Homer does, that's why you have to be careful, because the first thing is you are on foreign land, and you have to try to make an entrance where you encounter the other and obey the rules so that you can have civilization and both of you can—

Paisley Rekdal: Survive.

Margaret Toscano: Right. But I would also raise the question: is war the same as simply traveling to a foreign land? I felt like that, to me, mixed some things that were a little troubling.

I want to say one more thing about the Trojan horse, though, before we go on with its meaning. I felt like that almost initial image with the bronze horse and the sand was like—I don't know if maybe you're too young to remember this—but Planet of the Apes, where at the end—

Paisley Rekdal: No, it absolutely—

Margaret Toscano: Does. The Statue of Liberty, the end of civilization, and that goes along with our Bronze Age is failing.

Of course, I also thought they would never be so stupid as to make a bronze horse and put it on the sand. There's no way. Visually it was beautiful, but you're dragging it along.

Scott Black: Well, that was another issue. They did have wheel technology there.

Margaret Toscano: And of course, what is it—

Scott Black: Certainly the Trojan horse was on wheels.

Margaret Toscano: And what was it called in The Odyssey? It's the wooden horse.

Scott Black: Wooden horse.

Margaret Toscano: Right. It's never the Trojan horse.

Scott Black: Exactly.

Margaret Toscano: So that kind of bothered me because it was powerful, but then you think, "I'm being manipulated."

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah, but that's a film. It's designed to, and that's a literary text. It's designed to manipulate you. It's designed to get you out of the comfortable things of our real life.

Scott Black: And I do think the Planet of the Apes is actually part of the point.

Margaret Toscano: I think it is.

Scott Black: It was a quotation, and it evokes exactly the same questions of civilization and downfall.

Paisley Rekdal: That's what I want to bring up too. There's a couple of things, and I'll go with the Planet of the Apesreference first, because the movie begins and ends, first with the Planet of the Apes, but then there's also this—I don't know whether Nolan knows these poems or not—but there's a distant nod to them where, effectively, Odysseus says to Penelope, "These poems will—this story will echo on until we forget the point of the poems at all."

There are two poems I was thinking of: Yeats's "Leda and the Swan," but then Auden's "The Shield of Achilles." Mostly Auden's "The Shield of Achilles," which goes back to the story of Thetis asking Hephaestus to remake Achilles's armor for him. Instead of making this glorious world, which is in The Iliad, that he actually receives, he gets this monstrosity of a shield that shows nothing but modern World War I, World War II kind of warfare technology.

The argument effectively of the poem is, this is the story behind the story, that these are poems of slaughter and rape.

And to your other point, which is, is traveling home the same as being in war? No, it's not. But I think Nolan's point was that the interpretation of why Odysseus takes so damn long to get home was that it was in some ways a traumatic refusal at some point. It wasn't just, "I got waylaid and had sex with some hot women on these different islands and had these adventures." It was sort of like, "I couldn't bear to go back to a civilization when I myself am somebody who has violated the terms of civilization."

So it's a sort of avoidance of home. It's not to say that war is the same thing as traveling. It's to say, "Why do I have to keep traveling?"

Margaret Toscano: I thought that was a really interesting and powerful interpretation. But the thing that bothered me about it was that I felt it made it into a one-dimensional Odysseus.

Paisley Rekdal: Yes, I agree.

Margaret Toscano: It was like guilt. And also—and this will go into Penelope. I don't know if we want to start this now.

Paisley Rekdal: Let's do it.

Margaret Toscano: The idea that if you love your wife, okay, you've had trauma. My father-in-law was in Italy as a spy, basically, in World War II. He was traumatized when he went home to his wife, but he went home. And you take up your responsibilities. How do you act toward those you love?

Are you just gonna sit with self-pity and kind of wallow in your guilt? And this could lead into the Calypso story. I actually like Matt Damon's acting, but I felt the character was written in a too one-dimensional way. Odysseus himself, I would argue, even in Homer, is not someone who just sees things as, "Oh, we the great Greeks."

And Homer doesn't.

Paisley Rekdal: No, he doesn't.

Margaret Toscano: I think the greatest anti-war poem I know is The Iliad. There, though, you're sympathetic to the Trojans as much as the Greeks. It's not a national, "Oh, yay for us." My students like Hector more than they like Achilles.

Paisley Rekdal: Well, there's good reasons to. But what's interesting if you read—I agree with you that The Iliad is in some ways one of the best anti-war poems you can imagine. It's also one of the most critical of administrative capabilities poems, where you're looking at the different heroes. Here's Agamemnon and his flaws, here's Achilles, who sounds great, but here's his flaws. And here's Hector, and here's his flaws too.

Each of these men presents a kind of positive and negative. And Odysseus obviously is the new administrative figure. He's supposed to get these guys home. From the very beginning—and I think Nolan points this out—he's like, "Yeah, we can beat Agamemnon home and we'll get to see something fun along the way."

Boy, is that the wrong choice. He's like the Shackleton of the Greek world. He just really gets these guys stuck in it.

And I agree with you that this is where the adaptation is constrained, I think, by the marketplace of Hollywood. Can the American public actually fathom a complicated man, as Wilson translated Odysseus?

Odysseus is full of wiles. When he returns home, he doesn't just return home. It's multiple layers of tricks with his nurse, with Penelope, with the goatherd, the cowherd, all of the people, Telemachus. He tests everyone again, and you're like, "You're the jerk who was gone for 10 years. Come back."

So there are definitely ways that they could've played that up more, but would we have accepted that as a hero? That says more about us.

Margaret Toscano: I think we should come back to what a modern audience can accept, but I want to play on that a little bit. From a Greek point of view, the fact that he doesn't reveal himself, and of course he communicates with Athena about that, is a sign of one of his greatest strengths. What the Greeks would call sophrosyne, which is restraint, self-control. He doesn't just run in and kill people.

So the testing is about learning—

Paisley Rekdal: Who you can trust.

Margaret Toscano: Who you can trust. And actually the one person he does not test is Telemachus. He reveals himself to Telemachus right away.

Paisley Rekdal: 'Cause he needs him. He needs him to fight those suitors off.

Margaret Toscano: And I would argue—I don't know if this is the time for Penelope, I keep anticipating.

Paisley Rekdal: We gotta talk about Penelope.

Margaret Toscano: But I don't think he tests her either, even though Agamemnon tells him he has to.

He looks at her, and I really—the scene between Odysseus and Penelope in The Odyssey is one of my favorite—

Paisley Rekdal: The one where he talks about the bed, like the making of the bed? There's an erotic—

Margaret Toscano: No, no, no.

Paisley Rekdal: No?

Margaret Toscano: That's later. That's after he's revealed himself and he's killed the suitors. No, the one where they're in the household and she wants to talk to him to see if he has news of Odysseus. Of course, he tells a tall tale, but he says he did know Odysseus. In that speech, he praises her.

He admires her. In fact, he tells her the thing that she tries to tell Telemachus in Nolan: "You are like the best king there ever was." "You are so wise." He sees her as his equal.

Scott Black: That's important.

Margaret Toscano: It's very important.

Scott Black: I agree with you that he doesn't test her like he tests the others. On the other hand, she's withstood 20 years of suitors and not married. That's the greatest test.

Margaret Toscano: I agree. In fact, I think he becomes her suitor.

Scott Black: Absolutely.

Margaret Toscano: I like that. He realizes that he has to win her again.

Scott Black: And he literally—

Margaret Toscano: Wins the—

Scott Black: Contest.

Margaret Toscano: He wins the contest, but he has to woo her because she was abandoned. And she deserves that.

Paisley Rekdal: I want to point out a couple of things, just listening to you talk. So many of the things you bring up are really, really right. But something that you were hinting at is that when we translate or adapt a text, are we adapting the culture as it was, or are we adapting to a culture that receives?

So with Matt Damon, obviously we're adapting to a culture that we imagine receives. Clearly, I think that maybe some of our disagreements with Nolan's adaptation might have to do more with how he imagines an American audience versus how he imagines the Greek world.

Margaret Toscano: I think that's important.

Paisley Rekdal: It is important, especially with Penelope.

Margaret Toscano: You have to talk to your audience, right? You have to do your audience.

Paisley Rekdal: But that's, I think, why one of the most anachronistic moments in that movie is when Penelope hisses furiously at Telemachus, like, "You think you got a couple of beard hairs on your chin and you should run this place. I'm the one who held it together."

And it's true, the text actually provides that. But if Odysseus in an American 21st, 22nd century says that and gives it to her, that reads as patronizing in a completely different way.

So it's a fascinating way to see how we read even a feminist kind of moment. I was taken by something Mary Beard said about The Odyssey. She said, "It's a very woman-centered poem." And it's very filled with some of the most interesting female characters. She talks about Nausicaa as one of the big ones.

But let's talk about Penelope and then—

Margaret Toscano: When it comes down to it, it's a hard text to translate for our time.

Paisley Rekdal: I agree.

Margaret Toscano: It's very hard. But I felt like the way he treats the women in the film was the thing that upset me the very most. For me, the women were all projections of Odysseus's ego.

Paisley Rekdal: Except Circe. Come on.

Margaret Toscano: Well, okay. Circe. But even there I wasn't convinced by the way he saw through her. I felt like it was contrived. I thought she was a great character.

She was great. I actually liked her of all the female characters. But I wasn't convinced that he really could have seen through her as much as it said.

But if you think about everybody else—was it in The New York Times, the reviewer who says that Calypso is his therapist and Athena is his conscience?

For me, the telling thing about Penelope, and this bothered me a great deal, is I feel like she becomes his mother at the end.

Paisley Rekdal: That's interesting.

Margaret Toscano: In that scene where she's talking to him, I thought one of the anachronisms was that—what would you call it? It's not a veil, but the screen between.

First of all, if you're doing your weaving where everybody can see you, it's kind of stupid that you would be doing it where they could see you through the screen.

But when he talks to her, it's a very moving scene where he has the flashback and Athena is sitting there, and it's very emotional. Afterwards I started thinking: he's been gone 20 years. He's told his son that he's proud of him. In that scene, it's not about connecting with Penelope, it's about him. It's all about him. "Oh, poor me, I'm so guilty." And he doesn't look at her. In fact, nowhere in the reunion do they look eye to eye.

They don't kiss. They don't embrace. And then after he's wounded with the suitors, he lies in her lap like a pietà.

Scott Black: Yep, exactly.

Margaret Toscano: That bothered me. She becomes his mother. And then at the very end when they're sailing away, she's at his side, but there's never this—

Paisley Rekdal: That equality.

Margaret Toscano: That—never this looking, sort of erotic pull. I think the bed is supposed to be both erotic but also grounded in friendship. It's a combination of the body and the mind, which is where Penelope and Odysseus connect. They connect in both senses.

Paisley Rekdal: And that's why they had that scene earlier on where they are talking in bed, but he doesn't bring that up—

Margaret Toscano: But the fact that it's before—and our culture, we can only accept young sex. We can't accept older—

Paisley Rekdal: Older sex. And it's interesting that the device by which they fully recognize each other in the poem is that she says basically, "How did—how did you make this bed?" And he talks about the making of the bed.

That's the symbol that he kind of carries with him, whereas in the movie I think she gives him a maternal goddess figure—

Margaret Toscano: It's a pin.

Paisley Rekdal: Or something.

Margaret Toscano: It's a pin.

Paisley Rekdal: An Athena pin.

Margaret Toscano: An Athena pin. That's what it was.

Scott Black: And without the bed—

Paisley Rekdal: That's the chance for Penelope to be—

Scott Black: Clever and to prove that she is Odysseus's—

Paisley Rekdal: Absolutely.

Scott Black: People say, "I moved the bed." And he then freaks out.

But they don't go to bed. They do in the poem, and then they talk. That's actually the significant thing.

I love that. And he doesn't go to bed with anyone. He doesn't go to bed with Calypso—

Paisley Rekdal: No, that's true.

Scott Black: So he has no chance to choose his aging mortal wife over the hot, young goddess.

Margaret Toscano: That's one of the most marvelous things in Homer.

Scott Black: Exactly.

Margaret Toscano: He chooses—I love that speech he has with Calypso. "I don't want to offend you, goddess, you're beautiful, but I wanna go home to my wife."

Paisley Rekdal: It's true. Calypso does read as a kind of therapy figure. There's just something very post-Freudian about the whole movie, where—I don't know if this is spoiling it—but even the presence of the gods or the goddesses.

I think this was a very canny choice on Nolan's part, which is it's gonna be really hard to translate the laws of hospitality to a contemporary American audience. We're just like, "They're eating at a house and home, kill them." We would never put up with that.

But he manages to translate that, and I think he manages to translate the weirdness of the gods and the goddesses, that realm, which I think is already kind of, in either The Iliad or The Odyssey, a really strange thing. How much do the gods really play a role?

In Nolan's case, he sort of made the Athena goddess really a traumatic memory of the priestess he's killed in Troy. I think that's a canny adaptation because many people would be like, "If it's gods and goddesses, then why hasn't this whole thing solved?"

But this idea of guilt and memory—memory is the thing that haunts you. And we were talking about the kind of continuation of whether it's Dunkirk and Oppenheimer. This is a movie that's in that vein, that there's that kind of Oppenheimer guilt, which I did not love in—

I did not love Oppenheimer largely because it sort of treats the erasure of these Japanese innocent civilians as sort of like, "That's just bad for me," right? Like, "I feel terrible about that."

Margaret Toscano: Odysseus: "Oh, I feel so terrible about everything that happened."

But the suitors—we can come back to them too. I liked how they handled that. That was good too.

I have taught The Odyssey a lot, both in Greek and also in translation. The two things that moderns have a hard time with are the gods. Moderns do not like the gods. They feel like they're too invasive. The other thing is sex, that Odysseus has sex with Calypso and Circe. Because from their point of view—

Paisley Rekdal: He's unfaithful.

Margaret Toscano: He's unfaithful. So I see my students now, they either interpret it that he's an adulterer and he's bad. And of course, this is not at all a Greek view.

Paisley Rekdal: No.

Margaret Toscano: Or they have to make Calypso a rapist.

Paisley Rekdal: Oh, yes.

Margaret Toscano: And I felt like Nolan sort of edged on that. The fact that she's feeding him the lotus blossoms.

Paisley Rekdal: The lotus, right, and—

Margaret Toscano: And he's sort of not really willing because he can't remember anything. But she does—

Paisley Rekdal: That bothered me. She does say initially, "I gave this to you so that your body, your mind could heal into your body," 'cause they were gonna heal at different rates, and then she stops him several times from eating it. But there is this sense of—

Margaret Toscano: I liked it, but—

Paisley Rekdal: I liked it, but I get your point. It does speak to a very uncomfortable conversation that happens through both of these epic poems, which is: are the gods our doubles, effectively? Are they like the ids that are our projections?

How much do they really control this? I'm not saying that the pagans didn't believe in the gods. They did. But to go to The Iliad, there's an interesting moment where Agamemnon deliberately misinterprets a dream that he gets from Zeus in order to force people to do what he wants.

I think there's a certain way in which a lot of these characters will manipulate what the gods tell them to do, so there's always this question in both of these ancient poems about how much agency do we really have, and how much do we project onto, deliberately misinterpret what is being told to us?

Margaret Toscano: I think there's that, but I agree with you. I think Homer definitely believes in the gods.

Paisley Rekdal: Oh, for sure.

Scott Black: That's not a—

Paisley Rekdal: Question.

Margaret Toscano: Ovid, he does not believe in them, I don't think. That's a different question. Eight hundred years later, maybe.

But I feel like the ancient Greeks believed that you both could be fated and that you had choices that were meaningful. Even someone like Oedipus, who seems to have the worst fate of anybody, Sophocles pictures him as somebody whose choices matter.

Paisley Rekdal: But it's the choices based in interpretation. That's what's interesting. You are fated, but it's about: do you understand what's being told to you when it's being told to you? I think that's the question.

Of course you don't, because we delude ourselves. I think that's one of the most human parts of all of these texts, which is that the gods can come in and batter you about and you can still say, "Yeah, but I really wanna hear the sirens. I really wanna hang out here for a little bit and see what's in that big cave." The misinterpretation or the belief that you can somehow escape or rewrite what the gods have told you—

Margaret Toscano: Well, I think that's in—

Paisley Rekdal: Is—

Margaret Toscano: What—

Paisley Rekdal: Really is a problem.

Margaret Toscano: That's in Homer. Because I think there's so much psychological depth in Homer. All of the characters. There's so much depth.

In fact, the sirens for me is a really interesting one because I like the way that Nolan does that, but it's so different from Homer. And of course, here's a question. He makes it be this desire: what have you desired? What have you wanted?

But do I really want it, and did it turn out like I wanted it to? And I can't go home because of my memories. But what have you lost? The Odysseus with the curiosity. The Odysseus who wants to understand and think about everything.

It's back to the polymetis, the man of many minds and ways. In fact, I was just looking. Do you know that probably Odysseus has more epithets than any hero or god?

Paisley Rekdal: I didn't know that, but they are constantly changing.

Margaret Toscano: And they're all polys.

Paisley Rekdal: Complicated, twisting—

Margaret Toscano: Many and much. Many turning, many twisted, but many, much. It has much depth of frame. But he's also much suffering.

So Homer has him suffering. It's different, though, than Nolan. But I think that siren scene—because I do like it in Nolan—there is that question: is there something we're missing that he could have had? Could he have been a more complicated character even in Nolan?

Scott Black: I think so. That's really important. One of the things that bothered me finally, as I was thinking about it, was the sort of single dimension of Odysseus. As you said, he's polytropos. He is the original complicated hero.

And what goes with that is cleverness, storytelling, lying, trickery, and a tremendous facility with poetry, with verbal art. And that's taken away.

Paisley Rekdal: Yes, but it has to be, right?

Scott Black: So the Cyclops—

Margaret Toscano: No, it doesn't have to be.

Scott Black: The Cyclops moment, he doesn't actually—

Margaret Toscano: I hate that scene.

Scott Black: He doesn't say—

Paisley Rekdal: "I—"

Scott Black: "Am no one." He doesn't say, "I'm no one."

Margaret Toscano: I hate that scene. What do they say to little kids? "Use your words"?

Scott Black: Yes, exactly.

Margaret Toscano: That's what I wanted to say. "Odysseus, use your words."

Scott Black: But this is actually—

Margaret Toscano: He's so clever.

Scott Black: This is a hero for our deeply intellectual time. All he does is suffer and feel guilty instead of actually being the clever hero.

Margaret Toscano: Clever person.

Scott Black: Owning his cleverness. I want to go back to the idea of a hero. The Odyssey is the great revision of the Achilles hero. Achilles in The Odyssey—we don't get this in the film, of course—says, "I would give up all of my fame and glory to be a simple farmer again."

Paisley Rekdal: But that's such a revision from what he was—

Scott Black: Saying. Of course. But this is actually the point.

He is—and I agree with you, Paisley—this is a deeply post-war poem. It's thinking about how you are a hero, how you are a man—and this is very anachronistic—but how you are a Greek hero after war, after those kind of martial values are important. And Homer's answer is Odysseus: cleverness, trickery even. Adaptation.

Paisley Rekdal: Adaptation. Constant adaptation.

Scott Black: Exactly.

Margaret Toscano: But I have to say that I agree that the Achilles scene in the other world is important in The Odyssey, but I see a little humor and irony there too. Really, Achilles—

Scott Black: I don't believe it for a minute.

Margaret Toscano: You're down there in the world, you're playing dice and talking with your friends. That is the Greek ideal, talking and playing dice. But—

Scott Black: But no, I do agree. Actually that's very much the point.

Margaret Toscano: It has—

Scott Black: Many sides, right? In The Odyssey, there is irony and humor.

Margaret Toscano: Absolutely.

Paisley Rekdal: Can I interrupt here? What strikes me about all of the online debates about this movie, and even our conversation now, is I think what we're maybe really talking about is the frustrations between an oral-aural reception and a textual reception.

I don't know how the Greeks probably received the poem in terms of how they were able to analyze it at the time, but the thing about a Hollywood blockbuster is it pulls into the oral-aural. You know, where you're—

Margaret Toscano: Well, the visual—

Paisley Rekdal: The visual, right.

Margaret Toscano: The visual dominant.

Paisley Rekdal: But that's what I mean. The difference between text and visuality is razor thin because as soon as you read a thing, you imagine it. So you are caught up in that. The movie just amplifies that. It gives you all of the visual, and from that, here we go back into the textual, those of us who feel like we have that conversation.

And of course, the textual does something that the visual can't or risks losing all the time, or the oral poem risks losing, which is if you're sitting around a big fire and someone's telling you this story, you're in it for the Cyclops, you're in it for the sex, you're in it for the violence and the craziness, and are you reading in the same ways that we're reading textually?

Textual reading allows us to return to passages, allows us to go right back. You guys are giving me this look like, "No, no, no," but I do think there's a difference between—

Scott Black: But hearing—

Paisley Rekdal: Listening, hearing—

Scott Black: Hearing poetry as poetry is very much part of the poem. It is. And that is a verbal art.

Paisley Rekdal: It is a verbal art, but I guess what I'm saying—

Scott Black: And it's the chance that he's hearing—

Paisley Rekdal: Is the analysis of that verbal art can't be reproduced as much. But—

Margaret Toscano: You know what? The ancient audiences—

Paisley Rekdal: And I'm a—

Margaret Toscano: And I'm a poet saying that—they kept hearing it again and again.

There was a repetition there.

Paisley Rekdal: So they would be—

Margaret Toscano: Familiar enough that they could do it. "Ooh, I wanna hear that part again. I love that part." That would be the ancient audience, right?

Paisley Rekdal: That would be great to think about in—

Margaret Toscano: That sense, because even in The Odyssey, in Book Eight, is it, when Demodocus—Odysseus wants to hear the story of the horse.

Paisley Rekdal: Well, let me make an argument for—and it's funny because, again, I started out as a pessimist on Nolan and now I am his biggest defender in this.

But I will say that there is a nod to orality, the way that storytelling functions in the poem overall. Because if you think about it, for obvious reasons, there's a lot of repetition, because we have to memorize huge swaths of this thing. But everywhere he goes, he basically retells the story.

Gossip matters. Retellings matter. If you don't win the war because you've killed your enemy, you can definitely win the war if you tell a better story about it.

There's definitely that aspect of the text that comes out in the sense that, everywhere he goes, there's a nod to how gossip works, how people say, "Tell me the story. What do you know about him? You tell me." So there's that kind of subtle nod to it, but you're right. The actual fireworks of poetry aren't there. That's—

Scott Black: And—

Paisley Rekdal: Replaced by the visual.

Scott Black: And one of the signs of that is there is that bard at the very beginning—

Paisley Rekdal: Right.

Scott Black: Who's like, "A man, pound, pound." There's literally no music and no poetry, and they've taken the bard figure, who is in the poem recurrently, both as Odysseus but also literally bards talking about it. They've made that into a shouting—

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah.

Scott Black: Monosyllabic, industrial noise pounding—

Paisley Rekdal: And they're all sick of—

Scott Black: Music.

Paisley Rekdal: And they keep saying, "I'm sick of hearing that story. I'm sick of it," which is actually kind of literally funny.

Scott Black: Maybe if he sang, it would—

Paisley Rekdal: Be better. It's funny. One of the definitions of lyric poetry is it's poetry meant to be sung to a lyre.

Margaret Toscano: Right.

Paisley Rekdal: Exactly. One of my first students was like, "You mean, like, a liar or a musical instrument?" I was like, "You're so great. You're a genius." I always think about that when I write poetry now.

Scott Black: So can I shift the conversation? We've been harping on what we feel are some of the issues, some of the lacks of the movie. And that's fine. I do want to ask, however, what this adaptation is doing now. Why this Odysseus in our culture at this moment?

Paisley Rekdal: I know exactly why. Well, I assume I know why.

Scott Black: Because adaptations, as you said, are for the target audience, for us.

Paisley Rekdal: Right. We've been in a 20—well, now we're back in a war, but probably when he was conceiving of this, we had just finished a 20-year war, which is fascinating because the average American probably didn't really realize that.

It really wasn't penetrating, I think, our consciousness how many people were out there fighting and dying because a lot of that war had become a war of rhetoric, a war of technology. And then also it was in the Middle East, so it was someplace we didn't see.

And I think, like I said, the other big three films that Nolan has done have at some level been asking questions about war and memory.

I think what he's trying to do is sort of say, "Okay, now we've got the return home. We have the return home of all of these sorts of soldiers. How do we absorb that story into the culture at large while also paying attention to the people who are going on about their daily lives but haunted by that?"

And I don't want to say it's luck, but now that we're back in a war, the question was very haunting to me at the end where he says, "Are we just gonna forget the whole point?" And I'm like, "Wow, that was well-timed."

Margaret Toscano: Let me bring in something here. At first, as I said, I saw it as Oppenheimer 2 and a very anti-war statement and so forth. But as I've talked to a few people and read Ezra Klein's article—I don't know if you did read that one, Scott.

Scott Black: No.

Margaret Toscano: They're focusing not on war per se, but on a cultural war between the sort of MAGA right wing and the others. And so some of the people—and they're mostly men, I don't know, does that sound sexist?—who really love it, who are my liberal friends, they love it because they see all the military images as like, "Oh, this is Trump and the MAGA."

Paisley Rekdal: Huh.

Margaret Toscano: And this movie is critiquing that, and so they don't see it as anti-war except for a cultural war. That bothers me on a certain level because I can see how they read it like that. In fact, they even call him MAGAmemnon.

Paisley Rekdal: MAGAmemnon. That's so funny. That is amazing.

Margaret Toscano: I love that.

And notice how—and this bothers me—all of the soldiers, you don't see faces again.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah.

Margaret Toscano: So it's bad guys versus good guys almost. But let me just finish this whole thing, and then you can—

Paisley Rekdal: Go on.

Margaret Toscano: Then you go on, because then they're saying, "Oh, Odysseus then becomes the enlightened one who knows that he's got to be redeemed. That's why he has to sail off at the end, because he's responsible."

But the ancient texts—it's that battle also between—you have this extreme right that's trying to claim the classical texts.

Paisley Rekdal: Oh, yes. And—

Margaret Toscano: How much do you think about Rome?

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah.

Margaret Toscano: Exactly, or they're all now Stoics. And they're claiming the classical texts, and that bothers me. So is this saying that the classical texts are all polluted with this kind of dominance theory, and therefore we have to reject them? I wouldn't have seen it that way, but I've talked to enough people that that's one of the interpretations that's coming out.

Paisley Rekdal: I'm gonna have to sit with that for a while because you make a really persuasive case for how people might make that reading. I think there is something about the classical world—and worlds, I should say—that have been really attractive to a variety of these far-right types, and that is really disturbing.

And this is where I think some of the visual reading of Agamemnon's body—as you point out, he's faceless. He's always turned away. Actually, I think he is the figure when the first posters I saw for the movie, the first social media posts. But of course, his helmet is a skull and spine.

And his biggest speech is after he's unearthed from the underworld. I don't read him as a political figure, unless you read MAGA as a death cult, which maybe you could. But Agamemnon is not a great leader, I would argue, and he's not a great leader in Nolan's film either.

Margaret Toscano: Or in Homer.

Paisley Rekdal: Or in Homer. Certainly not in Homer. And I think that sense of him being just a death figure more than anything else—there's this—I don't know what to do with the question of the woke or, I should say, the political reading of it, because everything I read about the culture wars was complaints about the casting itself.

Like, Helen of Troy shouldn't be African American. There shouldn't be a trans Sinon.

Margaret Toscano: Sinon.

Paisley Rekdal: Right. This to me is the least interesting way of thinking about adaptation possible, but—

Margaret Toscano: I agree with you. That was all a conversation that was happening before the film.

Paisley Rekdal: Before the film.

Margaret Toscano: The conversation I'm talking about is happening now. They're sort of avoiding that earlier issue. They're not complaining about the Black or the trans or anything. They're thinking about it as a political cultural-war statement.

Paisley Rekdal: I'd love to hear your thoughts about this in general, 'cause I read Mary Beard's wonderful book on Rome, thinking about the Roman Empire. There are some fascinating ways you could easily take some moments of that time and splice them into some moments of our time.

And so when I hear those things about, "How much do you think about Ancient Rome?" I'm like, "I think about it all the time, but probably not for the reasons that other people are thinking about it all the time." But I'm curious: what is it you think they're finding in the ancient world from a very far-right perspective now? What is that attraction?

Margaret Toscano: I don't know if I can speak to this really well, but I think it's the attraction of—they feel like the classical texts, and they usually haven't read them or they really don't know them. It's like thinking that you're gonna teach Latin to conservative students, and this is gonna reinforce conservative values, right?

Paisley Rekdal: Oh, yeah.

Margaret Toscano: So they don't really know. They haven't really read their Catullus, right? But I think it's the idea that they see the ancient world, Greece and Rome, as the basis for Western civilization.

And therefore they think that any retelling or attack on it is an attack on what has made what they see Western civilization as succeeding with. So it's an attack on what they think of as their values.

Paisley Rekdal: Well, they're not wrong in that sense because, when I would go back to Auden or Yeats, that's kind of their point, which is these foundational Western texts are in some ways making arguments that create the modernist values that allow for a proliferation of violent, inhumane technologies that make war not just a disastrous—I mean, like a truly catastrophic—

Margaret Toscano: Right.

Paisley Rekdal: Culture-ending and civilization-changing experience. So—

Margaret Toscano: And they have been used like that.

Paisley Rekdal: And they have been used like that.

Margaret Toscano: As far as that goes, the whole idea of also the elevation of the white heterosexual male—they like to use these to also say that that's the basis of our culture.

But of course, if you actually go to the ancient Greek texts, it's ridiculous to even think about race or gender like we do because it's so different. But that's how they perceive it.

Paisley Rekdal: They don't have the same idea around racial meaning that we ascribe to it now.

Margaret Toscano: Oh, not at all. It was more ethnic, if you're gonna talk about—

Paisley Rekdal: Any kind—

Margaret Toscano: Of differences.

Paisley Rekdal: If you're a barbarian, it's not about race, it's about you're just not our civilization.

Scott Black: So within this context, we could actually think about what Nolan is doing to a classical text, perhaps in answer to the other ways that classical texts have or are being appropriated now. Is that an interesting way to think about the movie?

Paisley Rekdal: I think so. In the literary field right now, there are so many retellings in poetry and in novels and in short stories. Whether it's Trojan women stories, Pat Barker really—

Margaret Toscano: Right. I've read that recently released one. That's a wonderful one.

Paisley Rekdal: Or the Circe text by Madeline, whatever her name is.

Margaret Toscano: Miller.

Paisley Rekdal: Miller. Madeline Miller. Or Song of Achilles. These things have become wild bestsellers, and I think that there is something that we're working out around questions about gender roles, gender fluidity, sexual fluidity, certainly living with kinds of violence and guilt.

I think there's a reason that during the Me Too movement, there were a lot of women going and rewriting these myths, because it turns out there's a lot of sexual violence in these myths. And often it's not as simple as men are allowed to rape.

There are oftentimes women who come back and have violent responses to that, that there is a kind of agency and things like that. Even, I think, Iphigenia in Aulis is a really interesting one where she's sacrificed, but she also turns around and says, "Well, I choose to be sacrificed because, if there's gonna be a war, I want to be part of it. I want to be at the origin of it."

People don't read that. They want to just see her as pure victim. But if you go back to some of these classical texts, they will oftentimes rewrite our—

Margaret Toscano: Imagination—well—

Paisley Rekdal: Of those—

Margaret Toscano: And the Greeks themselves rewrote their myths.

Paisley Rekdal: Exactly.

Margaret Toscano: So the story that you're talking about is from Euripides.

Paisley Rekdal: Euripides.

Margaret Toscano: Fifth century BCE, and I love his plays. His Iphigenia is—and I don't know if you've ever seen the film version—

Paisley Rekdal: Yes.

Margaret Toscano: By Michael Cacoyannis.

Paisley Rekdal: So good.

Margaret Toscano: Oh my gosh, it's so good.

Paisley Rekdal: Amazing.

Margaret Toscano: But it's interesting. Her figure, she is pictured as a teenager, at least a late teenager, who could've been a bride to Achilles.

She's not the little two-year-old that you see in Nolan.

Paisley Rekdal: Right, and that was a mistake, I think, because that little two-year-old looked a lot like Zendaya, and she could've actually—there's a lot of ways in which the movie plays with doubles; so does the poem.

Margaret Toscano: Oh, yeah, it does.

Paisley Rekdal: And they could've doubled up and sort of suggested the curse of the House of Atreus, 'cause it clearly does come out of what happens in Troy. But anyway.

Margaret Toscano: But my point is that the Greeks themselves—and Euripides also wrote the wonderful Trojan Women, that tells it from the point of view of the women who were left. What a powerful play.

Again, I'm old, so I remember when that film came out by Cacoyannis again, 1971, Vietnam War. The film was speaking to the times then. But I don't know. I feel like it does it better than Nolan does.

I think bottom line—and I like a lot of Nolan, and I agree with you, Paisley, that we should retell these stories. We do need to make them relevant for our times. But I felt like he creates—it's almost like the villains and the—I mean, I don't think there are any heroes maybe.

But just everybody's Black and a villain. I mean, I shouldn't use the word Black, but everybody's dark, right? And the fact that you don't have, like you do with the Greeks, like with Homer—

Paisley Rekdal: The Iliad.

Margaret Toscano: Everybody has a face. Everybody's nuanced, even Agamemnon, whom everybody hates, right? But he is nuanced, and that's what bothers me most, whether we're talking anti-war or cultural wars.

If we just see the other side as monstrous, mechanical, what is the result of that? That's what worries me about the film.

Paisley Rekdal: I think Americans have been terrible about memorializing war. You could just say that as a blanket, stereotypical kind of statement, but I think it does actually hold a kind of relevance for this discussion, which is that I do think Nolan produced a kind of American elegy around war, just as Oppenheimer is a kind of American elegy around nuclear technology.

It is genuine in the sense that it is easily and immediately felt, but it is not necessarily profoundly plumbed in terms of all of the defin—radial kinds of connections that can be made. And I think it's, to a certain extent, the resistance to fully examine all of the ways in which we are responsible.

That's why Matt Damon is both a brilliant and maybe a terrible choice for casting, because he's the kind of American that we could want to give that kind of complexity to, because he sort of resists it. We want him to be Tom Hanks, right? And—

Margaret Toscano: It would not—

Paisley Rekdal: Tom Hanks would be terrible. I mean, I'm—

Margaret Toscano: No, I mean in Private Ryan. I'm talking about how that figure was used, right?

Paisley Rekdal: Right, exactly. But I think a Tom Hardy-like figure, going back to something that he did do really well, The Dark Knight Rises. I think that's a more interesting kind of character, and Hardy radiates a kind of sexy menace thinking, but also you kind of want to root for him.

There's a lot there, and with—

Margaret Toscano: With Matt Damon—we like dark heroes. We like—

Paisley Rekdal: Dark heroes. We like dark heroes. And I don't know if Matt Damon is as dark as he needs to be to actually make Odysseus—

Margaret Toscano: Well, is there anybody that you like in the film? Do you really like the characters?

Paisley Rekdal: I guess I never think about likability with characters so much. Or I shouldn't say never. I just sort of feel like with these characters in particular, maybe liking is not the point.

If there was somebody, it would be Circe, because she really—

Margaret Toscano: Lays it all bare.

Paisley Rekdal: She's like, "I'm not turning anyone into anything." And that's the most—in some ways that's the most classically accurate—

Margaret Toscano: Depiction, which is—well, it's very central in the film too, I think.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah.

Margaret Toscano: "You are pigs," right?

Paisley Rekdal: "You are pigs," right?

Margaret Toscano: That's your true form, right?

Paisley Rekdal: Like when we go to Ovid's Metamorphoses, those characters—

Margaret Toscano: That's the theme there.

Paisley Rekdal: That's the theme there. People don't turn into something new. They become, in the most horrifying iteration, what they always were.

Margaret Toscano: Right.

Paisley Rekdal: And that's what makes change scary.

Scott Black: I will put a pitch in for Miller's Circe, which is really partially about this. It's also partially about multiple revisions of the hero, of Odysseus, as his two sons. So we'll end with a pitch for another adaptation, one that is equally interesting, Miller's Circe.

Thank you very much. This was a terrific conversation. Thanks, Paisley. Thanks, Margaret. I appreciate hearing your thoughts about Odyssey. It was so much fun.

And go see the movie, and go read—

Paisley Rekdal: Go read the poem.

Margaret Toscano: Go read the poem. I think you should see the movie. It's important for our times.

Scott Black: Absolutely.

Margaret Toscano: A very important statement for our times.

Scott Black: Great. Thanks a lot. Thanks for joining us.

Margaret Toscano: Thank you.

Scott Black: You've been listening to The Virtual Jewel Box podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center. Thanks for listening.