A Little Odyssey Through Time
It seems that the vast majority of film critics, both the professional ones and the peculiar number of amateurs among the public chattering class who felt they just had to insert themselves into this particular discussion, are agreed that Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey is an exceptionally good film, falling somewhere within a range from “epic masterpiece” (my combination of the two words that probably appear most often in the blurbs I have scanned, apart from “a” and “the”) on the low end of the scale, to “the single-greatest cinematic adaptation of a great work of literature in the 113-year history of the motion picture as a popular art form” — a real quotation from conservative commentator John Podhoretz — at the heights.
This hail-to-the-king clamor, for a film that has been available for review for less than two weeks, highlights the essential problem with today’s abysmal standard of “arts criticism,” mired as it is in two of the most prominent and vulgar obsessions of late modern social decay in general: immediacy and vanity. The need to express one’s ultimate and most extreme opinion without a moment’s hesitation, to get the word out before the last audience member has made it from the theater to the parking lot on opening night, has nothing to do with the sober reflection and intellectual self-restraint that define a genuinely critical mind — do any of these shills remember the old phrase “critical distance”? — and everything to do with profiteering opportunism and self-important attention-seeking. What, for example, could have been in the heart of Mr. Podhoretz, a highly educated, well-read, experienced writer about American politics and global art, when he wrote and published, clearly within a couple of days of seeing The Odyssey, the sentence about the “single-greatest cinematic adaptation” in history that I cited above? Surely his motivation here could not have been anything more mature or serious than a giddy voice in his head crying, “Quote me! Quote me!”
How can a film be judged any sort of greatest “in the 113-year history of the motion picture” so quickly? Did Podhoretz stop for even two minutes, when that wild judgment popped into his excited mind, to ponder all the films ever made based on important literature (including the many he has presumably never seen), in order to fairly compare their achievements to those of the film whose trendy and comfortingly familiar noise was still ringing in his ears while he committed his nonsense appraisal to paper? Did he, before publishing that sentence and the entire review consistent with it, carefully rewatch Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) or Anthony Asquith’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1952)? Did Podhoretz, an opera aficionado, take into account when passing his judgment such an essential factor of cinema as musical score — weighing the synthesized pop sludge accompanying Nolan’s film against William Walton’s orchestral score for the aforementioned Hamlet, or Aaron Copeland’s for Lewis Milestone’s excellent and wonderfully acted Of Mice and Men (1939)? Above all, did he spend an hour reflecting, as a good conservative should be expected to do, on the way the goddess Atë (folly) tends to have her way with those who leap wantonly into the embrace of the latest hot item, rather than cooling their heads with the well-established wisdom that Time, i.e., the collective assessment of generations of humanity, rather than one man’s enthusiastic haste, will be the ultimate judge of most things, and certainly most things related to taste and the beautiful?
These quick and easy hosannas from the mainstream, elite and proletariat, erudite and illiterate, are undoubtedly inspired in part by frustration at the kneejerk vitriol spewed at this movie by the right-wing populists. Yet in the end I suspect they will turn out to be at least as absurd as what they are responding to. It is true that the “anti-woke” (i.e., New Woke) online mobs condemned the film as progressive propaganda months in advance and sight-unseen, and attacked Nolan himself as little more than a mouthpiece for Marxism, merely because he made some annoyingly non-standard, and obviously Oscar-baiting, casting decisions. (Gee, imagine a millionaire pop star doing whatever he thinks he has to do to win awards! But if Nolan doesn’t win Best Picture this year, will he claim the vote was rigged and encourage his fans to arm themselves and storm the Academy offices? That, after all, is the current standard of pathetic fame-whoring, at least in the good old USA.) But with their excessive and unreflective rush to beatify Nolan, and to sanctify his thematically and psychologically modernized Odyssey, are not these gushingly pious advocates of their favorite movie director’s latest tidbit at least as guilty as the anti-wokers of making uninformed and shortsighted judgments that are bound to look like the silly adulation of adolescent idol-worshippers in a few months or years, not to mention a few decades or centuries?
By the fourth century B.C., when Plato was ripping The Odyssey and The Iliad to pieces in his dialogues for their moral and metaphysical missteps, hundreds of years of Homeric influence had already passed, and it was obvious, to Plato as to everyone else, that Homer’s poetry was an “epic masterpiece” for all time. Will anyone even remember Nolan’s film version in, say, 113 years (to use the relatively small number Podhoretz uses in an attempt to give gravity to his praise)? Not having seen the film, or any other Nolan film, and therefore having no emotional vested interest in his fame and success, I am inclined to assume the answer is no. The conservative in me, and the admirer of the permanent glow of true greatness as opposed to the blinding flash of passing glory, will happily commit to that judgment. I am a believer in keeping my head about me when it comes to society’s endless series of latest thrills, defying Atë with the cold light of reason: most of what happens at any given moment, including most of what passes for the great or the beautiful, will be reduced to smallness and insignificance soon enough. Let’s wait 113 years and see, shall we?
