The Sad Odyssey of Civilization
Morbid curiosity getting the better of me this morning, I made the momentous decision to give almost two minutes of my earthly life to popular movie director Christopher Nolan. I watched the trailer for his latest award-baiting film, The Odyssey. Well, to be honest, I should say that I gave about fifty seconds of my life to Nolan, after which the trailer continued running on my computer, though no longer receiving more than my casual and distracted attention. What had so distracted me from the final minute or so of this trailer? It was the typical downfall and permanent source of distraction inherent in most modern filmmaking: language. Or rather the lack of it.
Specifically, it took an entire fifty seconds of this trailer for the narrator, Odysseus himself, to squeeze out two short, banal sentences, the kind of pseudo-serious vacuity uttered in breathy, ponderous intonation (spoken over the swelling emptiness of the standard rock music era “dramatic movie soundtrack” sludge) that Hollywood loves to use to instill an unearned sense of portent in the easily manipulated minds of the kind of action movie buffs who judge the quality of art by the number of times they feel like grunting “Yeah!” while clenching their faces and fists in response to some “cool” moment of violence or the anticipation thereof. The two sentences in question: “After years of war, no one could stand between my men and home. Not even me.”
Not even me could stand between my men and home. Me could not stand between them. Me Tarzan, you Jane.
Those two sentences of narration in the trailer — spoken in the dull, non-descript voice of Matt Damon, an actor who himself, hilariously, once received an Academy Award for screenwriting for the embarrassingly sophomoric Good Will Hunting — are used to introduce a film based on one of history’s essential works of literature. One of civilization’s seminal works of art. A poem that helped to define a nation than which none has ever been greater. An epic tale that delves into the essential complexities of our nature in one of mankind’s most remarkable leaps out of the primitive tribalism of the pre-literate ages and into the fully human world of embodied souls — the soul itself being a notion that owes its very existence in large part to Homer’s brilliant metaphorical extension of the ancient Greek word for breath, psyche. After three thousand years, the poem that gave the world its archetypal story of individual self-discovery, not to mention (contra feminism) one of its essential depictions of womanly strength, character, and wit, has been reduced from the inspiring solemnity of a single ancient Greek voice singing to a rapt crowd accompanied by a lyre, to the monotone, gravelly whisper of a trivial Hollywood celebrity accompanied by a synthesizer blasting out Heroic Epic Music Clip #27, inspiring only the “Yeah”-hoos of our post-literate, mindless-spectacle-sated world.
And that monotone, gravelly whisper expresses its grandiose gibberish in the English of today’s illiterate North American high school students — and of the generation of English teachers who evade criticism for their utter failure and abandonment of the human heritage by saying, “But who gets to decide what counts as proper English? Old-fashioned grammatical correctness is for snobs.” Or the most up-to-date version: “Grammar rules are the oppressive construct of white European elites.”
No they are not. Grammar rules are language, and language is the only means we have of escaping the prison of spiritual isolation — of primitivism and fear — to communicate our thoughts and feelings to other human beings; to unite with other souls. Language, and the ability to use it well and properly — which includes expanding it with figurative invention, an art which is only possible for one who first understands the extent of common meaning and usage well enough to perceive their inherent limits, and hence to divine where one may need, judiciously, to breach those limits in the name of deeper spiritual contact — is the essential and indispensable source of the highest beauty and truth that our species has ever attained, or ever could. Language is the crux of civilizational development. Homer stands as one of humanity’s first and foremost defenders and paragons of language as soul, and of the most sublime of all human inventions, literature (and hence, secondarily, literacy), as a wellspring of truth and beauty and our nearly magical means of transporting thought beyond the material boundaries of time and space.
No one should be allowed to stand between mankind and his Homer. Not even I. And certainly not Christopher Nolan.
