Note: We took some time off after an extreme summer, but will start posts up again with this return to the Odysscene.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I took life advice from Agamemnon.
In Christopher Nolan’s movie adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, the shade of Agamemnon appears to Odysseus in the Underworld and imparts him with the following about Odysseus’ homecoming:
“Come in disguise… take your time… assess.”
And that’s how I have approached writing a review of what is now clearly a generational blockbuster movie success. As of this piece, Nolan’s The Odyssey has eclipsed $1.7 billion in worldwide box office receipts. Everyone, everywhere, in regular media and online spent the summer talking about it, writing thinkpieces, arguing over likes and dislikes, fighting over issues as big as faithfulness to the original poem and as small as particular lines of dialogue and costume choices. It was a rare moment of monoculture that for me represents its own type of homecoming.
I studied Classics as an undergraduate at University of Wisconsin, learned to read Ancient Greek, and fell in love/obsession with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. I had a particular interest in thinking about the pre-literate oral bardic performance culture that created these poems before they were fixed and preserved by the advent of writing. And I was especially fascinated with the legacy of retellings and adaptations and reimaginings of the Odyssey: everything from ancient works like the Argonautica and Aeneid, to Tennyson’s Ulysses, Cavafy’s Ithaka, and James Joyce’s Ulysses, and all the way forward to the Simpsons’ version of the Odyssey and the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou?
I was so fascinated that I decided to make my own retelling of the story of Odysseus’ homecoming, what I conceived of as a return to its oral performance roots, and in 2001 I wrote a 35 minute 24 song “folk opera” version of the Odyssey. Using a contemporary original folk song format, I retold the epic in first person from the eyes of the characters and hoped it would allow my audiences to access the story more easily through what I believed to be universal themes present in the original. If I could do this, I supposed, I could Trojan Horse in (sorry/not sorry) some of the specific ancient Greek cultural details from the original all the while observing how telling a story in performance to an audience in a collective setting was different than reading a text alone.
tl;dr – I became a bard in the mold of Homer and the legion of bards that sang the stories of the Odyssey and Iliad, like Travis Scott’s character in the movie. (I’ve written about my bardic experiences performing Homer on Sententiae Antiquae here, here, and here.)
What I didn’t suppose was that over the course of the 25 years that followed I would get to perform my musical Odyssey almost 400 times in every state in the country as well as throughout western Europe, eventually adding a second folk opera based on Homer’s Iliad called The Blues of Achilles. I also didn’t foresee that mainstream culture would move in my direction and validate my approach by so fully embracing the format that I utilized for my retellings as it has in the massive successes of the musical Hadestown and viral web smash song cycle Epic: The Musical (whose creator, Jorge Rivera Herrans, was an undergrad at University of Notre Dame in 2018 when I performed my Odyssey for students there).
And I REALLY didn’t suppose that in the summer of 2026, everyone everywhere would be consumed with this story that has been the most important thing in my life and the retelling of which has become my life’s work. Which is to say that when I walked into my first viewing of Christopher Nolan’s movie the Friday that it opened, I did so with a different relationship to the source material than nearly anyone else in the world.
I brought to that first viewing the perspective of not only someone who knows and loves Homer’s Odyssey, but someone who has done the work of adapting it. Someone who knows what it’s like to wade into a 12,000 line poem with roots stretching back 3000 years and try to bring it to a 21st century audience in a timeframe and mode that suits a modern attention span. Many of the critiques of Nolan’s movie, I’ve heard to my face from audience members who don’t see their Odyssey in my version. I have even had a professor say to me in front of 100 students after one of my performances “That wasn’t Homer’s Odyssey!”
My response, paraphrased: “No shit!”
I’m not suggesting that my bardic bare bones musical version of the Odyssey is the equal of a movie with a $250 million dollar budget and I don’t think that Christopher Nolan needs my help defending himself or his artistic choices. But I do think my experience in navigating even a simple intersemiotic translation of the Odyssey does give me an appreciation for how difficult it is to do what Nolan has tried to do in bringing the Odyssey to mainstream movie culture. Something I found myself saying over and over in response to negative commentary on the movie is that no one knows better that what they do isn’t Homer’s Odyssey than those of us who are lucky enough to try to adapt the poem.
Homer is bigger than anything because the poems we have, however they eventually got written down, were created over hundreds of years by tens of thousands of bards in hundreds of thousands of performances. When you read Homer, one of the many things you feel is a heavy collective humanity, a residue of that collective creative process. It’s the most moving experience I’ve ever had, especially in the original language, and I encourage any and everyone to explore learning ancient Greek if you are curious about appreciating an aspect of the original poem that is unavailable in translation.
A three-hour movie version made for all intents and purposes by one person will necessarily be deficient to source material created by a centuries-long tradition and I don’t feel the need to list the ways that Nolan’s movie is not Homer. You can find any number of good faith reviews by smart people who do that in varying degrees of interesting.
You can also find reviews, even some by very high profile thinkers with important and productive voices, that are not written in good faith, reviews that put on the veneer of objectivity and expertise but really just come down to the reviewer’s taste and unmet personal wish list based on their individual reading of the poem. This is where Agamemnon’s underworld advice has been of good use. As I’ve observed discourse and review culture since the movie release, I sometimes feel as if I’m Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, sitting in Ithaka watching the Suitors devour food and wine that is not theirs with no gratitude for their host.
Those of us who live inside Homeric epic like to say that the poems are a mirror in which the reader can see oneself and I will acknowledge openly that my review of the movie is really a review of myself and the collection of experiences I brought to that first showing. What I saw in the movie, for better and worse, was my humanity. And the humanity of the person who made the movie. And the humanity of the hundreds of people who sold out a 7:45 am IMAX showing of a three millennia old story, a story given new life by a movie on a screen so big you can see the humanity in the pores and flaws of the actors’ skin.
A movie that will undoubtedly inspire not only a return to the original telling (check the sales of translations) which is actually a collection of tellings, but also inspire a new collection of tellings stretching forward in time as far as the original inspiration stretches backwards.
So: this bard doesn’t understand how anyone who truly loves Homer could feel anything but excitement about and gratitude for Christopher Nolan’s movie. How someone who understands Homer couldn’t set aside or at least contextualize criticism and acknowledge how difficult bringing Homer to the screen is.
This bard thinks the value of Nolan’s movie and the collective conversation it has started honors the purpose and function of Homeric epic in a way that supersedes any of the inherent flaws of this particular iteration of a story that has been iterated by bards for thousands of years. This bard knows that epic is and has always has been additive: one telling does not threaten or cancel out another. The story is the sum of all the tellings.
And this bard knows that his review is telling him (and anyone else) mostly about himself, which might be the way in which Nolan’s Odyssey most closely and movingly honors Homer’s.
But then again, this bard is taking life advice from Agamemnon so…
Joe Goodkin is a modern bard who performs original music based on epic poetry and other subjects. He can be seen and heard at http://www.joesodyssey.com http://www.thebluesofachilles.com or http://www.joegoodkin.com and emailed at joegoodkin@gmail.com about bookings or anything else.
