The Odyssey and Story Arcs

‍I am Team Emily Wilson. Not because of fidelity or otherwise to Greek myths or history: that’s not my bag. Rather, I am annoyed about The Odyssey because it didn’t finish its arcs.

To quote myself in my forthcoming writing book:

An arc is simply the progression of an element throughout the book. If nothing changes, there is no arc. Don’t overthink this as a scary technical thing; it’s just a way to look at the moving parts of the book. If your main character’s relationship with her mum is an ongoing thing that changes as the book progresses, that’s an arc; if it doesn’t change significantly, then it’s not. There’s no value judgement in this. You just need to be aware, because if you set an arc going, you need to resolve it.

Pretty basic storytelling. And yet.

(Spoilers for the Nolan film abound from here on in.)

There’s been criticism that The Odyssey is too much of an action movie. I don’t have a problem with that per se because every historical novel, movie, play, or epic poem is told through the lens of its period of creation and its genre. I write 21st-century romance novels that are set in historicalish periods; I have no issue with a 21st-century action movie set in a historicalish period. I also see no reason for Nolan not to pick, choose and adapt whatever bits he likes from the original, as long as it makes a cohesive and satisfying whole.

Which it does not. Because the picking and choosing, the adaptation, and especially the genre all go against the arcs the film chooses to set up.

Right, let’s do this:

We establish at great and repetitive length that the main moral issue in this world is Zeus’s law, a hospitality rule that has been vaguely expanded into the Golden Rule (‘do unto others…’) to the point where it’s more like Terry Pratchett’s immortal cry, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice If Everyone Was Nice.” Apparently the Trojan horse thing breached Zeus’s law. It is not clear to me how warfare would otherwise have been within the remit, but whatever. The horse is taken to Athena’s temple which is despoiled during the fall of Troy, and there’s a repeated shot of her statue’s broken head on the ground that’s extremely reminiscent of the Ray Harryhausen Clash of the Titans I’m just saying.

We go, via a Cyclops sequence that replaces the traditional parts of Odysseus being clever with one of him being stupid, to a cool but narratively irrelevant scene of the Greeks arriving on an island to get food. They see a little girl. They are very nice and polite to her. She screams anyway and giants attack them.

We then head to Circe’s island. Upon their arrival, Circe runs in terror from the armed men invading her house, one of whom pins her to the ground, but only to explain that they are super nice and mean her no harm (apart from they’re going to use Zeus’s law to demand a lone woman in a tumbledown shack on an apparently barren rock hands over all her food, but, you know, nicely). She serves them food and turns them into pigs with it. This is a fantastic scene, best in the movie. The threat she feels is real to us, and so is the passion with which she tells the soldiers their true nature is as beasts, and when she talks to Odysseus about soldiers raping and pillaging across the islands. Not his men though! His men are super polite and nice to women and girls! We’ve seen that ourselves twice now!  

Meanwhile the other plot thread is happening, viz Penelope fending off the suitors. One of these is Robert Pattinson, the second best thing in the film, being creepy, cowardly, and sexually threatening. Wet paper towel Telemachus goes to visit Menelaus for underwritten reasons, and meets Helen of Troy, who has been disfigured and is clearly trapped in an abusive marriage. We also learn that Agamemnon is dead, killed by his wife because he murdered their daughter.

During all this, along with many scenes of men getting on and off ships, we have established that Odysseus is reluctant to go home because he feels guilty. When he finally makes it back, he speaks to Penelope in disguise, and we see in flashback what that was about: The Greek soldiers invade Troy and sack it, and at least three women specifically are killed amid the mass slaughter.

That’s it.

The entire film to this point has been telling us about soldiers as a sexual threat to women. Athena the maiden goddess has her virginally white statue flung down and broken. Circe’s scene about soldiers being beasts is hugely rape-coded. Helen and her twin are walking emblems of male domestic abuse. Yet do we see a single soldier carrying off a screaming woman in Troy? Do we see Odysseus ignoring that sort of war crime going on around him while he walks through the melee? We do not. His soldiers, as we have repeatedly established, are nice like that. If you looked at what the Troy sequence puts on screen in isolation, you’d probably conclude that the real crime against Zeus’s law is setting fire to towers.

What a fucking cop-out.

Imagine if there had been a bit of truth to what soldiers do to women in sacked cities in showing the despoilation of Troy. Imagine if Odysseus had had to sit there telling his wife—who we have seen trapped in her home with fifty-odd potential rapists for years—about that.

Of course he doesn’t. He’s responsible for people being killed in a war, but not for, you know, bad things. (People being killed isn’t bad per se: we know this because he’s about to kill most of the suitors single-handed.) When he goes to hell, Odysseus is reproached by hundreds of dead soldiers, but I don’t think I saw a woman among the crowd of victims, and there certainly isn’t one who gets a voice.

This Odysseus is a 21st-century action hero. 21st-century action heroes aren’t rapists or facilitators of rape. Therefore, despite the film setting up male abuse of women as an ongoing thread and telling us Odysseus is permanently tainted by what he made happen at Troy, Nolan bottles it, and the whole solidly established arc dissipates in a cloud of generic War is Bad (Wouldn’t It Be Nice If Everyone Was Nice).

Look at the handmaiden. Famously the Odyssey includes a scene where Odysseus and Telemachus hang Penelope’s faithless handmaidens, who had sex with/were raped by the suitors. Obviously this doesn’t happen. Instead there is one faithless handmaiden, who voluntarily chooses to betray Penelope, and it’s Penelope who punishes her, by shutting her into the room where Odysseus kills the suitors. We never find out what happens to her. Does Odysseus kill her, inadvertently in battle fury or as execution? If he doesn’t, why would anyone else? If she lives, how is she punished? Dunno. She just evaporates, arc unfinished. (Why couldn’t Penelope stab her, if she needed stabbing, ffs? Let Penelope take control of her domain as Odysseus takes control of his? But no.)

This post is already too long (much like The Odyssey), but the film also flubs the Telemachus arc. In the original, father and son fight the suitors together, but here action movie conventions demand that Odysseus gets his single-handed fight scene, and Telemachus is given very little to do. Therefore the ending, with Telemachus as king as his parents sail into the sunset, is entirely unsatisfying. It would have been so easy to build in a sequence that left us believing he’s learned the cunning or martial skills or both to be a decent king. It would have been just as easy to demonstrate that this useless bag of milk will helm the collapse of Ithaca, supporting the whole theme of the decay of civilisation. But we don’t get either of those: he just stands there. And thus, as with so much of this film, the conclusion is infuriatingly, wetly inconclusive.

It doesn’t work because the story arcs aren’t finished, and the story arcs aren’t finished because the story they tell is are at odds with the genre of the movie. The film doesn’t have the courage to stick to its narrative choices, either of realism (in which case we would see, eg, what really happened at Troy, Odysseus killing the serving woman, some foreshadowing of Telemachus’s inevitable failures leading to Ithaca’s collapse) or of movie action heroism (in which case it wouldn’t have the relentless build to the reveal that never happens, and Telemachus would doubtless have a semi-final ‘save dad from a baddie’ sequence to show he could be a super fighter too). This movie wants to eat its cake and have it, and as a result, I left feeling unsatisfied.

This Odysseus should have learned from Noah. Finish your arcs off properly, or you’ll sink. (I realise that would land better in audio but just read it out loud, okay.)

______________________________

For more on arcs and much else, Think, Write, Edit, Romance comes out in December from Hay House. Up for preorder now!