The feminist writer whose left-wing translation of The Odyssey served as the basis for director Christopher Nolan’s film, says the movie is unfaithful to the original story and serves to feminize the film’s main character in a “modern psychiatric” way.
Writer and feminist scholar Emily Wilson appeared on stage in New York City with The 92nd Street Y’s Sarah Ruhl on July 16to talk about her thoughts on Homer’s nearly 3,000-year-old famed Greek epic poem and what she thought of Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the source material. And she wasn’t all that complimentary.
Ahead of its release, critics had pointed out several red flags in the film’s promotional materials, including that the script leans heavily on a revisionist translation of The Odyssey by the left-wing, feminist writer. But Wilson says that Nolan took it too far. Apparently even the feminist writer was disappointed in Nolan’s take on the story.
Wilson was asked how she feels about Nolan’s film being “anti-war.” She replied that she didn’t think the movie was explicitly anti-war, but that Nolan most certainly turned Odysseus from a proud Greek warrior, to a hand wringing, mentally compromised neurotic, who is anguished over his own wartime actions.
Wilson told Ruhal that Nolan “certainly presents us with an Odysseus who feels very bad about certain things that he’s done in war and is struggling to process them in a in a very, um, I would say very modern psychiatized way. And he’s struggling to process them and needs drugs to do so for help with his recovery.”
Wilson went on with her criticism of the film, adding that Nolan’s Odysseus “seems to feel bad about being a warrior, and we never actually get to see him doing much warrioring, which I thought in a way was a bit of a shame.”
Later in the interview, Wilson lamented that Nolan completely missed the subtext of Odysseus’s search for glory and instead turned the main character into one who is mired in “shame.”
She noted that “you’ll see what Nolan does with all of that but it’s different things from what Homer does. I kept looking in vain for a sense that this was a a film about glory. I think it’s a film has some interest in shame, but I don’t think it has any interest in glory.”
This isn’t the first time Wilson criticized Nolan’s film. In an interview with the Associated Press, she said she was ultimately “unsatisfied” by it all.
“I want to celebrate the fact that so many more people are aware of The Odyssey — but at the same time, I had the sense that Christopher Nolan was trying to pack everything in while missing themes that were essential to the poem,” she said.
She went on to say Nolan’s film is “incoherent” and “catered towards modern sentimentality.”
Nolan was also bashed ahead of the film’s debut for his casting of African actress Lupita Nyong’o to play the Greek character Helen of Troy, who is described as having pale skin and light blonde or reddish hair; and the casting 5-foot-one, 105-pound transvestite actor Elliot Page as Sinon, a Greek warrior who does not even appear in The Odyssey or in Homer’s other epic The Illiad. The character was created much later by Roman poet Virgil in his Trojan War epic The Aeneid.
See Wilson’s full 92NY interview below:
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