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Articles about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey have been appearing seemingly everywhere, so why not here on a tax blog?

At The Movies

Evie and I saw the film in a theater in Sturbridge MA that has been converted to one of those “luxury” places, with assigned seats that are large and comfortable, which accounts for me dozing off a bit. It wasn’t the film’s fault. The special effects were really pretty impressive.

(SPOILER ALERT) I thought the way they did the Trojan horse, partly buried on the beach rather than on wheels as it is often portrayed was really impressive. I also thought there was something cool about the ending and something uncool. Odysseus leaves Telemachus to run the kingdom and sets off on a new adventure. This evokes Tennyson’s 1842 poem Ulysses (the Roman version of the name). In that poem an aged Ulysses is bored of kinging and thinks Telemachus is up for it.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

So he is going to take off adventuring with his old crew.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

Tennyson glosses over the point that all the crew died during the Odyssey. Anyway, it was cool to pull that image in, but as it happens the thought embodied in that poem aggravates me.

There has developed this patina around the word “odyssey” which can be seen in some definitions like this one : “a long, exciting trip” or “a long trip or period involving a lot of exciting activities especially while searching for something”. It strikes me that definition which seems to have the connotation that an “odyssey” is something you would like to do is inconsistent with the actual Odyssey. I have a sort of long piece that refers to this called The Schlep Factor. I wrote it fifteen years ago and, on reflection think some of it is a little tasteless, but I am not ready to revise it. In reflecting on the nature of schlepping I wrote:

“We might want to consider one of the most ancient stories that we have. The Odyssey. When you hear the word used today it usually is a metaphor for some great exploratory journey. The Odyssey of the Mind or some such tripe. Whoever came up with that metaphor doesn’t know the story, has forgotten it or is relying on the fact that most people don’t know the story The story is called the Odyssey after the main character, Odysseus.”

Then it gets a little tasteless. Anyway I conclude:

“So what would the subtitle of the Odyssey be if we were being really accurate – Schlepping back from Troy. One of the oldest written stories handed down verbally for hundreds of years before it was written down and its about schlepping.”

There are some other really great effects in Nolan’s film like the whirlpool and the cyclops. So I came out feeling it was OK, but on reflection I felt like I liked The Return better.

I could not quite articulate why. So I asked my friend Sammy Juliano, who is a very serious student of film. He is also the author of a series of novels set in my hometown, Fairview NJ. (I reviewed the first one which is still my favorite although I like the subsequent ones.) Sammy felt even more strongly than I did and, unlike me, articulates it well.

“Peter, I liked The Return far better, in fact I didn’t even like The Odyssey. I can’t recall a more overrated film. Whereas The Return is a trenchant and grounded drama, Nolan’s film is over-reliant on action hero tropes. The Return is intimate and focused. The Odyssey is largely spectacle and gimmickry. In The Return, Ralph Fiennes gave a stirring performance as a traumatized veteran; in The Odyssey, Matt Damon was conventional and never transcended his Hollywood persona. Similarly, the depth of Binoche’s performance vastly eclipsed the underwritten Hathaway turn. I much prefer psychological realism over AI, as I do internal emotions over overwrought set pieces………as far as I’m concerned, The Odyssey, sad to say, was a failure.”

The Return is limited to the very end of the Odyssey when Odysseus is back at Ithaca but almost nobody recognizes him and he has to figure out how to deal with the suitors. It also leaves out the gods and goddesses. So I guess on a percentage basis Nolan followed Homer better, but that is neither here nor there. Anyway, I am lobbying Evie to watch it again. We’ll see.

Here is the thing. I appreciate good action scenes, but I can live without them. Seriously, one of my favorite films is My Dinner With Andre, which is about as close as you can get to all talk, no action without just having somebody sitting in a chair doing a monologue.

So much for Nolan and Pasolini’s Odysseys now just a bit on mine.

The Odyssey And Me

It must be some sort of flaw in my character, but I am not a big fan of really long poems. I have a hard time reading them. I did read Paradise Lost in college. And a few years ago I read the Epic of Gilgamesh, which I actually liked rather well. My son had recommended it as the “ultimate bromance” and there was of course Darmok – Star Trek Next Generation – Season 5 – Episode 2.

So I never read the whole Odyssey. I did, however, listen to it, which is the only way I could get through it. And I really did like it. It was the same deal with the King James version of the Bible and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. I am not that embarrassed by that. The Odyssey and, arguably, the KJV were meant to be listened to. I also picked up a bit about it from Teaching Company courses by Elizabeth Vandiver. A Teaching Company course was the only way I could learn about Ulysses by James Joyce. I probably hate modernists more than the ERC or crypto. There was also Greek Literature in English, a course by beloved Holy Cross professor Ken Happe.

The thing that disturbed me the most about the Odyssey is in Book 22. After slaughtering the suitors Odysseus orders that 12 of the women of the house who had been involved with them be executed. He wants it done quickly by sword but Telemachus has them hung instead. Nolan’s film sort of alluded to this with one woman character not being allowed to flee the suitor slaughter. It is extremely shocking to contemporary sensibilities and probably comes through more strongly when listening.

My most serious encounter with the Odyssey was when I was sixteen and it was not a mixed experience.

Honors

It has to do with my peculiar high school, which I have written about a bit on this platform. Jesuit, military, a few blocks north of Greenwich Village 1966-1970, commuting in from New Jersey. Freshman year academically we were divided into eight classes. Mine was 1-E, homeroom was Mr. Lux SJ. He was a scholastic on his way to becoming Father Lux SJ. He was also the class’s Latin teacher. I got really good grades. The gold cord of first honors became a fixture on my right shoulder. Remember we are wearing uniforms every day.

The high grades left me with a big decision at the end of freshman year. The next year I could go into one of the honors classes. I had to choose between Science and Classics. Somehow I managed to make a phone call to Mr. Lux SJ. He strongly advised me to go with Classics honors. What was I thinking? He was my fucking Latin teacher. Also we all got to select our modern language. He urged me to do German, because it fit so well with Classics. What the fuck? Why didn’t I take Spanish so I could have talked with the guys I worked with in the dress factory years later. I was a fatherless fourteen year old boy, the victim of advisory malpractice.

So sophomore year it was 2-G. Mr. Hands SJ was our homeroom teacher and taught us Greek. Our Latin teacher was John Scott, chair of the classics department. We had to know his first name, because his brother Jim taught English at the school. Mr. Hands marched us up country with Xenophon’s Anabasis. An army without a mission trying to fight its way home. Perfect story for American male teenagers in pseudo-Army uniforms in 1967-1968 learning Military Science from soldiers just back from Vietnam. At the end of the year we did a bit of New Testament. The New Testament was written in Koine Greek by people whose native language was Aramaic. I know you know that but I have met smart people who think the New Testament was written in Latin. Then there are the King James only people, who maybe aren’t all that smart.

Junior year was the Odyssey. We had John Scott for Greek in our 3-F homeroom and five of us also had him for AP Latin. He was an impressive guy. We had a text book of some sort and this thing that was almost like a little pamphlet that had the part of the Odyssey that we were spending the whole year translating. I used to do my Greek homework on the Orange & Black bus coming in. I got very discouraged by Greek, it seemed pretty pointless and my feeling showed through. Mr. Scott kind of made a point about it. One marking period I got 79 in Greek which was likely more than I deserved. The requirement for first honors was an average of 95 with nothing below 90. Second honors was average of 85 with nothing below 80. So one day in AP Latin Mr. Scott compliments my four buddies on their honor cord and asks me where mine is. I told him that he had given me a 79 in Greek and he said “I know.”

It wasn’t getting even with him, but we kind of broke Mr. Scott’s heart the next year. The State of New York changed its standards to require two years of science, so there would be no Greek for us senior year. We had to choose between Latin and Calculus. We all took Calculus.

Here is the one thing that I remember from my year struggling with the Odyssey. Odysseus gets Polyphemus by sticking him in his one eye with a sharpened stick that is burning. It made a hissing sound just like the sound that is created when someone sticks hot iron into a bucket of cold water – for this, strange to say, is what gives iron its strength. There was something really great about throwing in that little technical detail.

I interviewed somebody who went through the same classics honors program at Xavier as I did three years ahead of me. In between a BA and JD from Yale, he studied classics at Clare College in Cambridge. Judge Albert Lauber of the United States Tax Court explained to me that his study of Greek influenced his textualism in judicial reasoning something he shares with the late Antonin Scalia, also a Xavier graduate. Maybe if I had studied Greek better rather than moaning about inflated values of conservation easements, I’d be blowing them up like Judge Lauber. We all have our own odysseys.

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The Odyssey – Christopher Nolan’s, Uberto Pasolini’s And Mine