Hey folks, Fireside this week, as I am fresh back from a short family trip before the jaws of the Fall semester close upon me. I did get a chance to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and I wrote a review of it for Foreign Policy (alas, paywalled, I assume), although by far the most discussed review has been that of Emily Wilson, noted translator of Homer. I have a few scattered thoughts about the film that either didn’t fit into the FP piece or have been occasioned since then, which I thought I’d put here. Spoiler warnings, I suppose – Nolan does actually have a surprise or two (he is willing to bend the poem a bit to get it) – so if you don’t want that, skip to the second cat picture to get to recommendations.
First off as level setting, my general impression of the film: it was good. It aims to evoke emotions and largely does so. The actors are very skilled and it shows. Christopher Nolan does not like dialogue and that…also shows. As I said in my review, however, this is a ‘remix’ not a cover; Nolan feels perfectly free to put his own spin on the story, to shift themes around and so on. And that’s fine, people have been remixing the Odyssey since forever.1
I think this is one place where Wilson and I part ways in our review. As a Homerist, Wilson sees everything missing in Nolan’s film, which is fine to point out but at the same time of course there is no way that anyone was going to fit all of the subtly and themes of 12,000 lines of Greek into a film that needs to run a bit under three hours. At the same time, Wilson has written her review quite sharply, with some lines that come off more cutting than necessary given that, while The Odyssey might not have been the film of Wilson’s dreams, it is evidently a ‘good’ film to judge by audience reactions.
More broadly, I can’t help but think that, in a moment where the field of Classics is quite evidently sinking, it would have been helpful to be seen as sailing with the wind of a popular new adaptation of Homer, rather than nitpicking against it. In a way, Wilson’s critique because it is written so sharply (quoth Wilson, “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script”) comes off as excessively contemptuous of both the film and its audience. There are, I would suggest, ways to make these very same critiques which avoid being so alienating in a context where Wilson must know that the media was bound to make her the ‘face’ of Classics (as indeed, they have done). Such a sharp critique risks coming off as belittling or condescending to a large audience of very enthused movie-goers (the film has a 97% positive audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and it is simply not a very good time for the public’s sense of classicists (such as they think of us at all) to be “The Odyssey was good and I like Homer but classicists are mean snotty killjoys who get angry when I enjoy things the ‘wrong’ way.” That public perception is a recipe for more department closures, especially at public institutions (Wilson teaches at a private, Ivy League institution).
There is a resolute refusal for the highest profile members of the field (and this goes for history as much as for classics) to ever consider for a moment that they might be in a position of speaking for the field which might bring with it deeper and greater obligations; instead we acknowledge no such obligations (except as pertain to more junior scholars at less impressive schools, of course) and then act surprised as the field wilts. This is especially true of figures in tenured positions at elite private universities who are wholly insulated from the costs of alienating the public – their jobs will never be at risk – but who are often elevated in the media to speak for the field as a whole.
To return to the film, prior to release there was a lot of discussion of its ‘historical accuracy.’ Seeing the film, I think much of that discussion missed the point, as the vibe here was in some ways ‘grounded’ but also impressionistic, almost dreamlike in quality. This is especially true of the flashback sequences, told from the perspective of Odysseus or Menelaus. Notably, these are the sequences in which nearly all of the supernatural stuff happens and one gets the sense that neither of these fellows might be entirely reliable narrators. A lot of the wild armor and costumes (like Agamenon’s horse-spine helmet) exist in these sequences, where we’re really not all that tethered to literal reality anyway.
More broadly, this is a film that isn’t trying for specific accuracy to either the 8th century of the poem’s composition of the 12th century of the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Instead, it is using the Odyssey to evoke some specific ideas: the rupture of norms (particularly those involving kindness towards strangers, foreigners, immigrants) and civilizational collapse. And while Homer’s Odyssey doesn’t have a collapse of civilization narrative, it is there in broader Greek mythological thought: the heroes of the Trojan War are the last full generation of heroes. The generation of their children seem almost like a half-generation, by and large restricted to working out the consequences of their more consequential parents and living (and dying) in their shadows (think Orestes, Electra, Neoptolemus/Pyrrhus, Telemachus himself, etc).
Using the Odyssey in particular to do this lets Nolan position himself as speaking for, rather than against the western tradition or western canon. Thus the irony that I noted in my Foreign Policy piece that the ‘chuds’ hated this movie before it came out because of the casting, but if they had seen it and also understood subtext, they would hate the movie because it is a full-throated, violent rejection of them and their entire worldview. Effectively Christopher Nolan donning a mask of Homer to declare, on behalf of the tradition the chuds claim they stand for, “you know nothing of my work.” Not because Nolan is ‘super-woke’ – the film is, if anything, quite conservative in outlook – but rather because he isn’t and thus can argue for norms from a traditionalist lens.
None of which means everyone has to like the movie. I will say right now, a lot of the dialogue is stilted. In particular, Nolan is a subtle as a brick about connecting this to the Late Bronze Age Collapse, with characters saying things like “our Age of Bronze is collapsing” and “you are the Sea Peoples?” I can imagine someone more familiar with the background here, who has thus already picked up on the subtext (and it isn’t all that subtle as subtext) would be annoyed by it suddenly becoming text as Christopher Nolan basically has Anne Hathaway and Matt Damon walk into the audience to explain, “And now the moral of the story is…”
On the other hand, if I have come to realize just about anything about the general audiences for films these days it is that a lot of folks really do not grasp subtext at all. Watching folks revel obliviously in movies that revile them has given me a new appreciation for the Greek Chorus walking on stage and just straight up singing the moral at the audience between acts. So while I did find some of the very on-the-nose lines a bit off-putting, I find I understand the instinct to include them anyway.
By way of example, I saw more than one person on social media complaining that Athena (played by Zendaya in the film) looked wrong, because she didn’t look like a divinity, was simply dressed, didn’t wear Athena’s distinctive helmet and breastplate (the aegis with its distinctive gorgoneion) and looked too young for the role. Which misses – and this is the spoiler if you do not want the spoiler, stop reading because here is the spoiler – the point that Odysseus is seeing the form of a young Trojan priestess of Athena that his men murdered in cold blood in front of him during the sack of the city which we see later in the film.
Now the film is quite deliberately ambiguous as to if this is just Odysseus processing his trauma and what we’re seeing is trauma disassociation – I think ‘Athena’ never tells Odysseus anything he couldn’t himself know, for instance – or if this is Athena taking the form of this slain woman to communicate to Odysseus (since Athena regularly takes such disguises in the poem!).
Likewise, some of the chatter about the fate of Odysseus’ men misses the (re)framing of the film as a complete whole. We’re flat out told in the Underworld that Odysseus’ men are going to die, that conditions will be put before them to kill them relentlessly until they do and we also – and this is a departure from the poem – we also see exactly why, because once we finally get the full flashback to the fall of Troy, while Odysseus stands basically stunned by the horror of it (and only fights other armed men), his soldiers take part in the butchery of civilians, including, most evocatively, Zendaya’s priestess. In that moment, we see that Circe’s description of them – delivered earlier in the film but later chronologically – was not about something they might do to her but about things they had already done at Troy.
And so we get this motif: the men take part of Circe’s food and Odysseus does not, they take part of Helios’ cattle and Odysseus does not because they took part in the brutal sack of Troy in a way that Odysseus did not (and don’t show any remorse for it afterwards, unlike Odysseus). Odysseus’ men have already done the core violation and they are going to get one occasion after another until they break a rule so hard that it kills them.
If it seems strange that an angry Greek god might want to lure someone into a further act of sacrilege in order to punish them for it, that’s actually something that does happen! I am put in mind of a brief bit in Herodotus (Hdt. 1.157-161). Pactyes of Lydia has fled the wrath of the Persians and taken shelter as a suppliant – a protected refugee, in essence – in Cyme and the Cymeans are understandably worried that the Persians will attack them, so they want an excuse to get this guy gone. So they send a man to an oracle of Apollo to try to get a favorable oracle.
And the god Apollo gives them the oracle they seek, but the guy they sent (Aristodicus) is clever enough to know that something is up, so he makes a show of rousting out some of Apollo’s sacred birds and when Apollo essentially demands, ‘what the hell, man?’Aristodicus replies with, ‘yeah, I want to know why you are telling us to betray a suppliant too?’ to which Apollo replies (and this is a direct quote, trans. A.D. Godley), “Yes, I do command them, so that you may perish all the sooner for your impiety, and never again come to inquire of my oracle about giving up those that seek refuge with you.”
Basically, Herodotus has Apollo so angry that the Cymeans are even asking the question, trying to wriggle out of their duty here, that he is giving them the wrong answer so as to further justify his divine wrath. In the event, the Cymeans figure it out and move Pactyes along to another city and when that city also tries to betray him, they smuggle him out at the last minute to a third city (which also betrayed him, no one wants to get wrecked by Persia), thereby satisfying their obligation and thus avoiding Apollo’s wrath.
So the idea of the sacred cattle being a lure to bring the already-condemned-for-sacrilege men of Odysseus to their death is perfectly fitting with the way Greek gods roll in mythology.
On to Recommendations.
And I suppose we can start with the Odyssey discourse. First, of course, my own review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is at Foreign Policy, where I am mostly focused on the themes of the film rather than any question of accuracy. Emily Wilson’s (upon whose translation Nolan reportedly based his adaption) own review of the film, rather more negative, is both interesting and sharp-elbowed. But I also wanted to highlight Spencer McDaniel’s really detailed discussion at her blog, Tales of Times Forgotten which really gets into the weeds of the original poem, the history of the period and how the adaptation interacts with them, which gives, I think, a pretty good sense of “what is a classicist seeing and hearing when they watch this movie?”
And then in a sort-of-related recommendation, I thought there were quite a few good points in one of Jamelle Bouie’s recent Takes over in YouTube, “There are no white people on Middle-Earth.” It touches on modern culture war politics, of course, but the fundamental point he is making, I think is important and valid that our modern conception of race is just that: quite modern. And so while people in the past (or in fictional worlds) can obviously see skin tone, the broader categories of ‘white,’ ‘non-white’ and ‘black’ didn’t exist (or may not exist, for the fictional worlds) for them in the same way. Bouie doesn’t use this example, but I come back to a short comment in the Odyssey that Odysseus thought Memnon, the King of the Ethiopians, to have been the most attractive man he had ever seen – the idea that ‘whiteness’ was a universal beauty standard for all genders simply doesn’t exist in Homer’s world. And while we’re here, a careful look at Tolkien’s text suggests that his world is not quite so fair-skinned as it is usually cast: Samwise Gamgee, in a sense the truest hero of the work, has his skin described as brown more than once and while you might assume that’s because he’s outside all the time, he is a descendant of Harfoots who in turn are described as darker in complexion than other Hobbits. But that simply doesn’t matter to anyone because ‘white’ and ‘black’ aren’t the categories in Middle Earth that they are in our Earth.
Meanwhile, in civil-military thinking, I ran back over an April piece at History Does You by the always-worthwhile Secretary of Defense Rock on “The Myths of McMasterism” which is well worth the time. I think read alongside something like Kori Shake’s recent The State and the Soldier (2025) – which I need to give a closer read but may end up recommended here before too long too – it brings out how the sense in the American military that they had largely ‘solved’ the problem of civil-military relations has been an illusion, quite vividly exposed as such. Of course I had my own thoughts on this last year as well.
For this week’s book recommendation, I thought I might make a bunch of recommendations together to answer a question I (and every other classicist) get asked regularly: what translations of the Iliad and Odyssey do I recommend?
The thing is, there are a lot of very capable translations of both works and so choosing between them is basically always going to be something of a matter of taste and de gustibus non est disputandum (“on taste, there can be no disputes”). As we’ve discussed before, a translator (especially of poetry) is dealing with trying to balance incompatible demands of meaning, style, rhythm, and brevity. So Instead of offering one translation, I’ll suggest three with what I think are their relative merits and then you can have your pick.
First, for my personal favorite translation, I would suggest the Richmond Lattimore translation, The Iliad of Homer (1951) and The Odyssey of Homer (1965). Lattimore’s translation is, of the three I am going to recommend the most faithful to the original Greek, which is to say it tries the hardest to keep to the literal meaning of the Greek, while also keeping to original line numbers. That also means it is clunkiest of the bunch here, though not horribly so. That clunk is, of course, somewhat increased by its age and of the bunch Lattimore comes off feeling the most ‘ye olde Homer’ even though it is very much in ‘modern’ (that is, 1950s) English, albeit with an elevated style.
For something that is a bit looser but flows better, I always recommend Robert Fagles’ The Iliad (1990) and The Odyssey (1996). The big thing to know about Fagles is that he does not keep at all to the original line numbering: all of his books run ‘long’ compared to the original poem. That allows him to ‘stretch out’ a lot to produce a translation that still captures most of the poems while being smoother and more elegant than Lattimore. That said, Fagles is definitely less faithful than Lattimore as well, though this is still very much a solid translation. Just beware of those line numbers because Fagles will not match up with anyone else. Fagles also translates in what I would describe as an ‘elevated’ style, an effort to capture Homer’s dialect – already archaic and artificial in the eight century BC – and give the poems a formal air despite these translations only being about 30 years old. A lot of readers really like that elevated style – they want to feel like they are reading capital-L Literature – but it bothers other readers. For that last group, we have my last recommendation which you knew was coming which is…
For something that is much more modern and pithier, but meaningfully more willing to bend the text to get there, Emily Wilson’s The Iliad (2024) and The Odyssey (2018). Wilson translates into modern, common vernacular English rather than an artificial ‘elevated’ style, which some folks like and some folks don’t. More importantly, I think, Wilson holds like iron to Homer’s line numbers and also insists on delivering both poems in iambic pentameter – her goal is to capture the punchy brevity of Homer’s Greek which I will be honest, neither Lattimore or especially not Fagles really capture. The result is a poem, in English, which scans and can be sung or chanted and which better manages the feeling of momentum the Greek has. The downside, of course, is that Wilson has to play a lot looser with the meaning of individual phrases to achieve this and so this is the least purely ‘faithful’ of the translations, though it is still very much Homer.
So there you go: if you value a maximally literal, one-to-one translation, go with Lattimore. If you want something elevated and complete, even if it bends meaning and maybe gets a bit ‘flabby,’ read Fagles (Fagles does read very well). If you want something that feels modern and captures the brevity and momentum of the Greek (but sometimes loses some of its subtler shades of meaning), go with Wilson. If you want the whole poem, utterly complete with all of its meaning, style and verve preserved, learn ancient Greek.
Possible typo:
“has his skin described as grown more than once”
Grown or brown?
“Percy thinks this is his tent. It is not his tent.”
I’m pretty sure that feline rules of territorial acquisition trump all others.
Exactly. Bret is also wrong about the cat bed. It’s not two cat beds on top of each other, it’s a single cat bed that happens to be made of two components. Expecting Ollie to rest on just one of those components would be like expecting somebody eating their meal off a table consisting only of its legs.
“has his skin described as grown more than once”
Is grown supposed to be brown here? I don’t remember skins being described as grown relating to skin color.
This subscriber to your blog has enjoyed your takes on The Odyssey film culture warriors. Thank you for taking the time. It’s nice to sense through your takes too, that you are enjoying seeing the various takes and making your own. This is probably an example of liking doing one’s job. 🙂
> Watching folks revel obliviously in movies that revile them has given me a new appreciation for the Greek Chorus walking on stage and just straight up singing the moral at the audience between acts.
You mean, the part of the play where everybody gets up to go to the bathroom? Which I assume the Ancient Greeks did too. (Gonna post a Youtube link in a second comment with “The Song in the Musical Nobody Likes”.)
And here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXKUgjYh7lo
Aeschylus’ “The Persians” was performed just 6 years after the Persian invasion of Greece and sack of Athens, and showed the sorrow that the Persian women back home felt about hearing of their army’s defeat. It won first prize at the festival it was performed at, and accounts are that the Athenian audience was deeply moved towards empathy of their recent foe. It went on to be one of the most celebrated tragedies of the classical Canon. Doesn’t sound like they all went to the toilet and ignored the morale being – quite literally – sung to their face.
Ancient peoples hydrated less, shortening their lifespans but gaining a net increase in their quality of life if they were theatergoers.
“Samwise Gamgee, in a sense the truest hero of the work, has his skin described as grown more than once”
Should this be “brown”?
I don’t have a copy of Lord of the Rings handy, but my recollection is that the Haradrim (particularly when they’re introduced in The Two Towers) are described in pretty modern racial terms. I could be misremembering, though.
I enjoyed the movie review. I notice that you seem pretty unconcerned with the ahistorical armor choices in a way strikes me as different from the way you’ve written about the armor in some totally fictional settings (Game of Thrones, Rings of Power, Baldur’s Gate, Dragon Age, etc.). Is that because the armor was plausible, even if not historically accurate? (I haven’t seen the movie, but some of the stills look a little questionable to me.) Or was that just not what you were interested in focusing on in the review?
Yeah, that last part surprised me as well. I expect that, even though Agamemnon’s armor is clearly not historical, the rest of the clothing and equipment will be responsible for teaching a new generation an entirely wrong idea about what the past looked like.
Which passages are you thinking of? There’s a passage where the narrator comments that the Haradrim look a bit like trolls, during the Battle of the Pelennor Fields; but on the other hand, there’s a passage where Sam sees a dying Harad (is that the singular?) – the oliphaunt passage – and wonders whether he had any ideological allegiance to Sauron at all.
One thing I realised a few years back is that it’s implied that orcs have the same skin colour as humans at the same latitude. Misty Mountain orcs are paler than Mordor orcs. (The Peter Jackson LotR films give a misleading problematic picture, and the Jackson Hobbit films overcompensate and so don’t fix the problem).
Gollum says: “And further still there are more lands, they say, but the Yellow Face is very hot there, and there are seldom any clouds, and the men are fierce and have dark faces.” Should we pretend these are not black Africans?
As for the orcs, their appearance and character is inspired by East Asians, specifically the Mongolian type that forms hordes as numerous as insects. Apart from aliens in low-budget films, I am not aware of of races that differ in nothing but their skin tone, nor do I know films that consciously focus on Albinos to make a point about racism.
These conversations always feel like they’re at best talking past each other and at worst the “Race wasn’t a thing in X” side entirely consist of trolls, a mirror image of the right wingers who only care about “owning the libs”. This is an especially extreme case where the original setting was blatantly written with modern racial categories in mind, even if racism may not exist in-universe, but it’s not much better when you’re talking about Greece and the issue is seemingly that someone said “black” instead of “a 6 on the Kinsey scale”. Odysseus might not think Memnon was “black” in the way we do, but he could still see his dark skin and associate that with Aethiopia.
Damnit I wish there was an edit button. *Fitzpatrick* scale, not Kinsey scale. Hopefully the error is obvious from context regardless.
“I can forgive the other inaccuracies, but they made ancient Greece straight”.
Black Africans? or people from the southern Indian subcontinent?
There’s no indication in the text that anyone cares about the difference or assigns any significance to people having dark faces beyond the purely visual.
Probably black Africans are meant, but belief in race goes beyond noticing that different people have different skin tones that correlate roughly with latitude.
“As for the orcs, their appearance and character is inspired by East Asians, specifically the Mongolian type that forms hordes as numerous as insects.”
Do you have any evidence to support this?
Tolkien already has a culture inspired by the East Asians, specifically the Mongolian type: the wane-riders. They come from the East, ride horses, and live out of wagons (little detail is given to the specifics of their lifestyle). Seems silly to think that there two cultures based on the same people, especially cultures so different from one another.
In my reading, both of Tolkien’s works and some analyses of them, Orcs appear to be inspired by historical myths and legends, like a lot of the other things in Tolkien’s universe. Tolkien himself said he was inspired by “The Princess and the Goblin”.
Tolkien’s Letter 210, in which he describes the appearance of orcs (appropriately, in the context of critiquing an adaptation of his work to film) as “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.”
It has however be granted that this refers purely to appearance and says nothing about culture.
Huh. Thanks! Always fun to learn something new!
Orcs are in other places described as “swart” or black-skinned, and having black blood. I take this to mean literally black, not chocolate-brown. With red, slit eyes. And yet other descriptions of Orcs and/or Goblins notes “sallow” features/skin. I’m not sure Tolkien ever was consistent, or possibly intended different flesh tones for different breeds of Goblin, Orc, or Uruk-hai or half-breeds.
The humans in Gondor are swarthy.
While Pippin and Merry are captives, Ugluk is a “black orc” and the Isengarders are “swart slant-eyed”; the implication is that this distinguishes them from the Mordor orcs and the Northerners.
I cannot talk for Tolkien, but I would like to note that “swarthy” has changed a lot in its meaning. Famously, Benjami Franklin described Swedes as “swarthy”, which was probably correct: most Swedes he would have met would have been Swedish sailors, with well-tanned skin.
It may seem incredible, but many European countries were so extremely white until after WWII that “brown” or “black” would be completely acceptable descriptions of a white person’s complexion: “a black man” might very well describe a white man with black hair and tanned, but clearly “white” skin. (My own grandparents would use this kind of description quite naturally.) This is well demonstrated by the common surnames “Brown” and “Black”.
This, of course, has very little to say about how Tolkien saw Sam Gamgee in his mind’s eye.
Harad is not singular, it means south.
I suspect Haradrim is singular and plural.
I did a bit of googling and found that it’s actually Sindarin “Harad” meaning “south” plus “rim” which means “host or people”. So Harad-rim, the people of the south. Galadh-rim, “tree-people”, the wood elves. Rohirrim is Roch-hir-rim, “horse-lord-people”, the horse-riders. A single member of the Haradrim would presumably be a Haradadan, just as a Man of the West is a Dunadan.
https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Rim
I think there’s several different kinds of arguments here, which can often blend into each other and thus become contentious as people are talking about different things. Here’s some thoughts I have concerning different ways to think about the matter of Race in Lord of the Rings:
“Do the people of Middle Earth are aware of different skin colours and ethnic groupings?” The answer clearly has to be “Yes, they are.” On that basis, one might defend a phenotype-based casting of a LotR adaptation – the shire is at the latitude of England, so it “should” cast actors of a skin colour that fits that latitude, but Gondor is at a Mediterranean latitude and “should” cast actors of a skin colour fitting that milieu. “Should” in quotes because it’s not an argument I’d personally make and which one can easily argue against.
“Do the people of Middle Earth think in racial terms, and if so, do these racial terms map to modern conceptions of ‘Whites’ (or ‘Western’) and ‘Others’?” I haven’t done the deep dive to look for quotes, but any such discussion would quickly have to focus on the question of what the phrase “Free Peoples of Middle-Earth” encompasses and who it excludes, because it’s based on my memories the one evoked most frequently to argue to solidarity on a super-national level.
“Did the author sometimes express things in ways we now can read as being kind of racist, without maybe intending to?” This to me is useful also in regard to the next question. We have some stuff that taken in isolation do read as pretty straightforward “Certain people are superior because of their ancestry” endorsements, like the matter of whiter hobbits being better leaders, Denethor and Faramir being superior for the purity of the blood of Westernesse in their veins, and of course the infamous letter in which Tolkien makes clear he imagines the orcs as looking like Mongols. And I’ll not as such defend any such statements as not being harmful, but I think it’s important to note the context in which such things slipped by. The hobbit ethnic groupings are imagined as basically strains of linguistic development coming apart and back together, in what is clearly an analogue of linguistic studies in Tolkien’s day, in which the premise of “A language spreading in a place means people spreading to that place” was not challenged as often as it is today. The comment about the blood of Westernesse is another evocation of the theme of the “divine bloodline” that forms part of Aragorn’s claim to rule and which Tolkien took from medieval literature.
You can find something similar in Pratchett, whose writing was very humanist and outspoken against discrimination, but still includes passages like this: “Honest men start bowing and bobbing just because someone’s grandad was a bigger murdering bastard than theirs was. Listen! We probably had good kings, once! But kings breed other kings! And blood tells, and you end up with a bunch of arrogant, murdering bastards!” (These particular words are spoken by Vimes, but the narration indulges in similar phrasing elsewhere). This is not actually a critique of the idea of inheritability of personality and worth, rather it reifies the concept to argue the opposite of what it usually does. Which I doubt is intentional on Pratchett’s part, it was just that he didn’t quite notice what he was doing there because this low-key eugenicism was just normal when he wrote (and frankly is still believed by a lot of people now).
“Does the racial presentation of the people in the story *matter* for the actual message of the story?” That’s the question that Jamelle Bouie answers confidently with “No” in the video essay above, and which I do think is important to see as being not the same as the questions above. I would generally agree with his “No”, but grant that this is not a given. Lord of the Rings is a tale featuring a war in which the two sides do marshal different races to fight for them – you don’t have dwarves or elves siding with Sauron and no orcs and trolls siding with Gondor – and therefore I would not outright dismiss any serious argument that any re-telling or adaptation should also consider racial categorisation. But to me at least, it’s pretty clear that far more important to the themes of the story is the contentment and rural lifestyle of the hobbits, rather than their skin colour.
” the shire is at the latitude of England, so it “should” cast actors of a skin colour that fits that latitude”
The whole concept of “a skin colour that fits that latitude” is very strange. I can go to latitude 40 S and find people who are native to that area and whose skin is naturally very, very dark brown (Australian aborigines ) or I can go to latitude 40 N and find people equally native that that area whose skin is naturally pretty much as pale as human skin gets (Koreans). Thailand is on the same parallel as Sudan! Congo is pretty much on the same parallel as Peru!
Which is why the “should” is in scare quotes – that’s exactly the easily accessible counterargument I was thinking of. Human skin colour is also about sexual selection and historical contingency and not just about the amount of sunshine.
Still, if a LoTR director would sit down and be like “Here’s my monograph of the reconstruction of the genetic drifting and admixtures in Middle Earth over the last few thousand years, based on the Silmarillion and the Appendices, here’s my reasoning of which of these genetic lines I assign which Earth phenotype and why, and here’s my statistical analysis of why my casting therefore fits the expected distributions of phenotypes within a standard deviation” then I’d be perfectly willing to grant that such a skin colour conscious casting would be a valid choice.
“Which is why the “should” is in scare quotes – that’s exactly the easily accessible counterargument I was thinking of.”
Then you should have put “fits” in scare quotes, not “should”. As you wrote it, your argument was that there are skin tones which in some way fit certain latitudes on Earth, and others which do not, but that it is not necessary for someone casting LOTR to ensure she casts actors with the right skin tones.
A fair criticism. Unfortunately, WordPress does not have an edit function.
Australia also happens to be largely sun-baked desert while Britain has fewer sunny days than rainy. Certainly latitude alone does not determine complexion, but it is dishonest to act as though people talking about the correlation between latitude and complexion are unaware that environmental factors are also relevant.
I am hoping that our host will at least cover the descriptions of clothing and armor in Homer’s original epics, and talk about how well or poorly this matches up with what we know about the approximate time period the Trojan War took place in.
The short answer is “extremely poorly”, a couple of notable specific exceptions notwithstanding.
And what about the Aeneid? What translation would you recommend for Virgil?
I am also curious here.
I enjoyed the Fagles translation for Virgil. It is likely that the same issues in Fagles Iliad and Odyssey pointed out by our host still apply to the Aeneid.
That’s the one I’ve read, but also, considering that I learned more about poetry than Latin in 3rd year Latin class, when we tried to read it badly in the original, I doubt his approach is the best.
As I understand it, Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of the Aeneid is highly thought of. (As is his Odyssey.) It works as a piece of English poetry certainly.
Now I wonder how Paradox: Cats of Iron would be like.
Typo watch:
“More broadly, this is a film that isn’t trying for specific accuracy to either the 8th century of the poem’s composition of the 12th century of the Late Bronze Age Collapse.”
The second one of the “of”s in that sentence should be an “or”.
Presumably Cats of Iron would be like those gacha games with tanks or battleships that are actually cute anime girls, just serving a different kink.
May I introduce to you: Arclight Games’ “Barbarossa”
https://youtu.be/hH3TNHKjMPY?t=987
I certainly see your point about needing to rep your field well re the Emily review BUT frankly as a writer I think it pretty unconscionable for a man like Nolan to redo a famous piece of WRITING and then treat the words as unimportant. Worse, to make the words that formerly could be sung–stilted even in spoken word.
If he has no respect for words then don’t take on one of the great works of literature. If he has no respect for intelligence, don’t portray one of the most iconic trickster characters in literature and if the entire point of women in his film is to listen to others–don’t take on a text which has numerous powerful goddesses, sprites and queens doing what such beings do.
Nolan’s films always engage and feel like Auteur films but as bravada to bravery I rarely come away feeling they are the real thing.
Also, I think this film hit women quite differently from men. Penelope was not the only women inappropriately put behind a zenna, so to speak. I came away from it feeling, as I do often with George Martin, that at least some of the sub-text was that we women were nothing and should know our damn place.
I haven’t seen the film and can’t comment on its specifics, but the demands you make here seem like a recipe for just never adapting anything.
Every artist has their priorities. There’s always going to be something like “not caring for dialogue” that we can pick at. Adapting stories is still a good thing to do.
Indeed. The most influential and respected twentieth century version of the Odyssey changes almost every aspect of the text, up to and including setting the story in twentieth century Dublin. Adaptations do not need to be literal to be good. The question is not whether they depart from the text, but why.
That said, I do see why people have criticisms to make about the way women are adapted in the film.
I don’t see where in Smith-Harris’ comment she had called for a literal interpretation – and it certainly didn’t read to me like hypothetically following her wishes preclude adapting anything.
I am yet to read Joyce’s Ulysses, unfortunately, so I cannot discuss it properly, but here’s another work with the same title that can be fully experienced in a little over 5 minutes. That is, I refer to a song by Mantus (a reference to Etruscan mythology which our host would certainly be familiar with); the bolded text is original German, the unbolded one machine translation. (You should definitely listen to it as you read, though.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxgStK6_N_w
So, as you can tell, this is a mood piece which seeks to capture emotions of the character at a specific moment. (Like their (much) earlier interpretation of the Hunchback of Notre Dame.) It is definitely not authentic to the original setting (it’s set on a train, after all!) and only loosely correlates to the theme. And I can absolutely understand rejecting the unrelenting misery of the lyrics. And yet, even if you do so, I don’t think you can reasonably accuse Martin Schindler of treating the words as unimportant.
In contrast, the dialogue in Nolan’s Odyssey is frequently plain bad. The absolute worst of it is when they talk of Bronze Age collapse in a way that is very clearly addressed to the audience and is not something that would be said in a conversation; but the first time I was jerked by such dialogue was actually in Odysseus’ and Penelope’s bedside conversation where he just straight-up says “Agamemnon only wants an excuse to control the trade routes” or the like. It’s the kind of line that has no literary merit AND which would only be said to explain things to an (unseen audience): in an interpersonal conversation, one would not use a generic “trade route” vs. “trade to Phoenicia” or the like. In fact, it’s the kind of thing which the contemporary Russian criticism calls “канцелярит” (i.e. “concentrated bureaucratic language”); ironically, it’s most often turned inwards (i.e. onto a dozen or so “Russian Fallout 2s”), yet so many conversations in this film read just like this.
Hence, I do in fact have to by-and-large agree with Wilson regarding this script. To quote her:
Nolan has always had a tin ear for dialogue.
See, for example, the big fight at the end of The Dark Knight Rises, when Bane and Batman are about to face off for the final time:
Bane: “So, you came to die with your city.”
Batman: “I came to stop you!”
It’s clunky and cliche.
Now imagine this exchange:
Bane: “So, you came to die with your city.”
Batman: “For my city.”
Fits thematically with the rest of the movie, it’s punchier, and it resonates.
I mean two of the most popular adaptations of the Odyssey are am animated musical (Epic: the musical) and a comedy set in depression era Mississippi (O brother, where art thou?). Their dialogue is, obviously, *unrecognizable*.
We only critique movies for accuracy when they aesthetically match the source somewhat, but to be frank stylistic elements like that are an illusion with such an ancient work anyway; we barely know what should be accurate to that period and *know* it’s not what Homer *said* was there. It’s more of a critique that given the *Hollywood language* used, that of “historical” sets and props, the text doesn’t follow the source.
Which, to be frank, speaks more to the Hollywood language of filmmaking than the actual text of the screenplay. Does the film even qualify for the critique? Bret doesn’t think so, it’s heavily stylized. Deviations in text flow from that.
Ms. Smith-Harris, I didn’t come away from the movie with this same sense that it was saying “women are nothing and should know their place,” as you seem to have. But I know that I am not always the most subtle and alert of mind, so it is quite likely that there is more than just a difference in tastes at work here. Would you care to expand on what you’re saying about this? Perhaps by highlighting how specific female characters’ portrayal comes across to you?
FWIW, I had a very different reaction to the female characters in the film (as a female viewer). I was pleasantly surprised that they were as compelling as they were, especially Samantha Morton’s Circe. Penelope, Athena and Helen/Clytemnestra were all more memorable than I anticipated, too. Their moral rage at their treatment was palpable and powerful. (I thought Calypso was miscast and insipid.)
But my response was shaped by my low expectations. I am not a huge Nolan fan, since I find some of his films pretension and cold, As a woman, I have found his films exasperating when it comes to female characters.(I thought Oppenheimer was overrated, and have no idea how Emily Blunt won an Oscar for such a badly written role.) Plus I haven’t read the Odyssey since I was an undergraduate – and I didn’t like it much then. So I went into The Odyssey expecting a mildly entertaining bro-fest at best, and instead, I enjoyed it quite a bit.
It is possible that if my expectations had not been so low, I would have felt more like Smith-Harris about the female characters.
Nothing about Calypso in the movie really impressed me and I have no wish to defend either the characterization or the casting. But I would be interested to hear a more detailed assessment of the ‘insipidity’ or other flaws in how Nolan handled the character, if you are interested.
I thought Calypso was miscast because Charlize Theron looked like she had stepped out of a 21st Century perfume advertisement into the movie. Obviously, none of the lead performers looked particularly Mediterranean, so I don’t mean it in a historical or ethnic sense. She didn’t fit the vibe of the rest of the movie to me. Maybe it was her styling? I kept getting distracted at her fashionably plucked eyebrows. My friend hated her wardrobe, complaining that it looked like Eileen Fisher for castaways. I did not feel this way about any of the other actresses, many of whom were also very beautifully presented.
As for “insipid”, if I recall the poem, Calypso is a (demi-) goddess who holds Odysseus captive with her power. There needs to be an Olympian intervention before she lets him go. She is also besotted with Odysseus in an obsessive, disturbing way. But this Calypso is neither powerful, nor dangerous, although I believe Theron can play both. I think Nolan wanted her to be nurturing and in love with Odysseus. But for me, Theron did not read as nurturing, and the “in love” came across as an implausible, sappy crush.
Richmond Lattimore
Fixed
For someone who has made themselves into an internet personality of sort by criticising historical inaccuracy in media, I am rather (pleasantly) surprised that our host liked that film! Calling it a remix rather than a cover is a fantastic way of describing it, and I think the only way to approach the film in a way that allows it to be enjoyed. But I understand why people who are very close to the text would struggle to do that.
I concur entirely that a lot of it felt dream like and removed from any particular point of place in time. For that reason the surreal costumes, diverse casting, and colloquial language didn’t bother me once I got used to them 15min into the film. Certainly less annoying than the only commercially likely alternative – having everyone looking like Pericles. If anything, the fantasy-esque aesthetics heightened the sense of this being a universal story that said something about humanity as a whole. But mentioning the LBAC and the sea people ran utterly counter to that, sending the setting crashing down to a specific time and place. But that’s a rather small flaw, and the only noteworthy one beyond the writing and performance for Telemachus, for a film that made 3h fly like a breeze. Not Nolan’s greatest IMHO, but very good nonetheless, and hopefully will get more people interested in Homer, the Classics, and History in general.
>But mentioning the LBAC and the sea people ran utterly counter to that, sending the setting crashing down to a specific time and place.
I think this is a big flaw because it goes against what we are shown. We are told that the civilized world will collapse and that writing will disappear. But we are shown ruins, musky warrior kings and lawlessness. We aren’t shown any trade. We aren’t shown any bureaucrats. Is there a single character who can write in the whole movie? The movie tells us that it’s pre-apocalyptic but it shows us only post-apocalypse.
Perhaps we’re meant to understand that Greece already fell and it’s the rest of civilization that’s falling? I think the movie trips over it’s own shoes a bit because the historical record is spotty at best and it needs to muddy with cause and effect for the story. I’m not sure it could have been coherent within its constraints.
To explain, my personal at best speculative model of the collapse is that the palace economies fell in Greece, which likely involved the rise of a warlord based ruling class replacing the original authorities, who seem to have been a less martial class (priest kings?). These warlords are remembered as the heroes of the Odyssey and Illiad. These warlords had raised armies that had an impetus to conquer and plunder which fed on itself, as their authority was fundementally weak and relied on appeasing their men.
Hence my interpretation of the illiad in that context is that it’s the half remembered *second* phase of this, where the newly minted warlords, Agamemnon at their head, go off to plunder the Mediterranean. But there is little textual to the illiad or Odyssey that the warlords we see are a new innovation; they are presented as the kings associated with nearly timeless authorities which are actually contemporary with Homer and nearly prehistoric in origin.
I think *that* part is false, a product of oral storytelling having a bias towards continuity, and I think you can end up with a coherent model and message of the collapse of you reject this continuity and view the warlords as the prime symptom of the problem, not its architects. The movie lacks the time and will to openly challenge the legitimacy of the kings and protagonists we see, so the war itself and the war crimes therin are treated as the inciting incident.
In other words, if you actually want to tell the story of the bronze age collapse you need to start with a prequel to the illiad, which means a lot of original writing and speculation from weak evidence. Good luck.
An old university friend of mine wrote a review for the Nerds of a Feather blog, which I really appreciated for how much it unpacked the role of hospitality, its violations and the punishment for that in the version of the story put on film:
> This is a film about ξενία, a film about a specific reading of The Odyssey as a story, to which he has subordinated all other aspects, the visuals, the dialogue, even the historicity. It’s a story which cares about the text and how to read it in conversation with itself, its world, and ours.
http://www.nerds-feather.com/2026/07/to-burn-walls-of-troy-to-break-world.html
God destroyed Sodom because of the way they treated strangers. That’s what they taught me in Hebrew school.
“here is Ollie – sitting, as he does, on a cat bed that is on a cat bed”
That’s not sitting, that’s loynging.
I still love Fitzgerald best
“Odysseus is seeing the form of a young Trojan priestess of Athena that his men murdered in cold blood”
I’ve seen a few others point out this scene also, and I actually interpreted it exactly the opposite way when I saw the movie. When they are killing the priestess, Odysseus is seeing *not* the priestess but *Athena herself.* Meaning that the Greeks aren’t just looting a temple, they are killing the gods. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s what I thought in the moment.
A fascinating reading of the scene!
I can see 3 possible interpretations:
1) Devereaux’s interpretation: this was just a priestess of Athena whom the Greeks murdered, and who later comes to represent Athena in Odysseus’ mind (or else becomes a guise Athena uses when speaking to Odysseus).
2) More or less as above, except the murdered priestess was literally Athena is disguise. This would accord with the idea of Zeus’s law, and the possibility of strangers being gods in disguise.
3) What Odysseus actually saw was just the destruction of the statue of Athena, but this is symbolically shown to us as the murder of the goddess herself. This is what I thought briefly in the theater due to the juxtaposition of the beheadings of the priestess and the statue, but in hindsight, it seems like the least likely of the three.
I will note that all 3 of these interpretations are slightly ironic considering that, in the Illiad, Athena is actually in favour of the destruction of Troy, to the point where, IIRC, she pushes the Trojans to break a sacred truce with the Greeks in order to create an excuse to punish them (in a similar way that our host describes Apollo doing).
I do seem to recall that even the anti-Trojan gods were pissed at their priests being butchered and their temples desecrated…
Exactly my reading of the scene as well. I think it fits well with both the movie’s theme that gods may walk disguised among mortals, and with motifs which are familiar to the audience (“for I was hungry and you gave me something to eat…”). I wonder what was Nolan’s intended interpretation here.
As far as translations go, judging as an English poem, I rather like Caroline Alexander’s free verse Iliad. I don’t know how accurate it is textually?
Emily Watson’s diction occasionally strikes me as a bit conditioned by the way modern literature academics write introductory lectures (“complicated man” seems very much introductory lecture); but she can handle iambic pentameter. As English poems, I find the six-ish stresses line that Lattimore and Fagles and many other modern translators use rather neither one thing nor the other.
I haven’t seen the film myself, but have heard people comment on it as “fantasy myth, but clearly based on some kind of history.” Which I felt echoed the points previously expressed here, that even works of fantasy have to be careful not to accidentally give misleading impressions.
The awkward thing with a work like the oddysey is that toeing that line is difficult, given that it ‘based on some kind of history’ is literally true. As in ‘homer’s poems might not be a particularly accurate historical account, but they were supposed to tell a story about a past event that both the author and the audience knew had, indeed, happened in the past’, which means that any adaptation is based on some kind of history (the poems themselves being a work of history), they are just not based on a kind of history that is particularly accurate to reality. After all, from my understanding, the original might be often metaphorical and contain many original (as in made up) characters, but the ancient greeks believed they had fought against the trojans (after all, they probably did, more than once, given Troy was a city IN greece, and not one we have much evidence for devoutly adhering to pacifism in all circumstances), and, as our host likes to point out ‘people in the past believed in their own religions’. In short, there’s a difference in genre between Star Wars and Sharpe, even though both are technically set in the past, and the Oddysey is, from what i remember, written as historical fiction, even if modern readers who believe that the greek gods simply didn’t exist and grew up reading comics and books who use them as fictional aspects of the setting would assume it was written in the same genre as Conan (sure the hyborian age is supposed to be the past, but it’s not a historical setting).
Well, not really. To the extent the Odyssey is “historical fiction” it’s more in the vein of King Arthur than Sharpe.
Sort of. The Odyssey mentions a lunsr eclipse and a couple of other astronomical happenstances that allow it to be dated surprisingly nicely to a certain date that makes sense in the overall chronology of Bronze Age. And unlike King Arthur’s locations, which are mainly fantastic, Troy, Ithaca and a surprising number of cities mentioned in Iliad do exist. I would say that Odyssey had, for its contemporary audience, about the same relationship to history as Shakespeare’s plays on English kings. Nobody thought – I think – that Falstaff should be a historical character, while Henry IV was one.
In general, I think that Herodotos and Platon show very nicely, in their critiques, the way the Greeks thought about history and poetry: I think they actually thought that a poet, when writing good epic poetry, was inspired to some extent by gods, and his fiction was actually revelation about wie es eigentlich gewesen ist. (This can be imputed from Herodotos’s recurring complaints that it ain’t so.)
Eclipses are pretty common – over the multi-hundred year period between when the Odyssey is nominally set and when it was substantially composed there are plenty of them. This means that trying to argue for its historicity on that basis is pretty weak.
In contrast, both the Iliad and the Odyssey have a lot of detail which speaks to the 700s and later of their composition, not the mythic Bronze age of their purported settings. The cult of Athena in Troy is one obvious such element, many of the mentioned details of clothing are another, several points about equipment etc (bronze-faced shields) are still another. There are some anachronisms, but they are not consistent and there’s no clear pattern of setting either work in an understood Bronze-age past.
That’s why I think the Sharpe comparison really misses the mark, and King Arthur is a much better parallel. When Geoffrey of Monmouth and de Troyes develop the mythic/romantic Arthurian canon we know today, they’re doing so in an imagined past not a documented one. The setting of the Iliad and the Odyssey is the same.
Falstaff was originally named Oldcastle, who was a historical character. It seems that Shakespeare renamed him when his descendants took offence.
“Nobody thought – I think – that Falstaff should be a historical character, while Henry IV was one.”
Falstaff was a combination of historical characters – the real John Oldcastle, and the real John Fastolf.
The approach to writing about the past found in Archaic Greece is so loose with standards of accuracy and plausibility that authors from Classical Greece were annoyed by it. Herodotus goes to pains to establish the credentials by which he describes a sequence of events, Homer describes an Ithaca that sounds like somebody who has never actually seen Ithaca.
School of War just hosted James Diggle and John Underhill to talk about the search for Ithaca. They make a very strong case for having located it elsewhere than what is called Ithaca today.
I don’t if you set it as a gift article or if it would be this way even if I had found it via Google, but your review was not paywalled for me.
The idea that an expert in a piece of literature might end up discouraging others from pursuing related fields isn’t really surprising to me. Putting children off reading seems to have been the primary aim of high school English Literature classes since they were first introduced.
I get your hatred of Literature (it wasn’t my favourite subject in school either), but it’s more constructive to see its output of making children hate reading a systemic issue, rather than jokingly as the primary aim.
What to my understanding it’s meant to teach is critical reading and by extension, critical thinking, so that the children can interact with a medium on a deeper level and not just notice “This fight with a guy riding a rhinoceros is cool” but also “This script seems weirdly obsessed with men expressing their manliness through violence”. And the issue is that it’s really hard to teach this, for many reasons:
Firstly, critical questioning of a text is a hard thing to teach. The teacher sort of pushing the criticality on from outside is going to create a hostile reaction (especially in teenagers). Instead of having a debate about the messages of the text, it becomes an emotional rejection of the questioning and framing by the teacher.
Secondly, there is the issue of reading material. It’s hard to make a student read a text critically if they feel like they’re forced to read the text and are not enjoying it. The amount of people who’d casually pick up “Romeo and Juliet” and read it (also, it’s a *play*, why are you *reading* it?) is small even in a world in which it wasn’t required reading material in school and thus not everyone hates it. If the students were able to see these principles of critical thought employed against something they enjoy and don’t mind re-reading several times, it would be easier for them to grasp the matter.
Except thirdly, you can’t expect the teachers to be able to keep up with this – they’re not instant experts themselves, and will want to rely on tried-and-true material providing them with guidance. Which basically by definition can’t be about whatever movie or book the current generation of young people is obsessed with.
And that’s how you end up with a hard-to-teach skill being attempted to teach using material the students can’t really connect with and makes everyone unhappy.
“it’s a *play*, why are you *reading* it?”
Funnily enough, I actually tended to enjoy the plays we read in high school English (in particular, The Crucible, A Doll’s House, and A Streetcar Named Desire) more than the novels (I never actually finished Great Expectations). In part, I think was precisely because they were written as dialogue rather than prose, and thus had to get to the point more quickly.
Fair’s fair, especially given that as a fiction writer, I do also have a tendency to just have long back-and-forth dialogues where I have to remind myself to insert some narration. I still think it’s a bit curious that students are made to experience this piece of literature in a way it wasn’t meant to be experienced. I also remember when one of my teachers read out the script of the Parrot Sketch from Monty Python because they couldn’t find the tape with the recording on it – which of course lacked the energy of the original delivery and thus made the intended critical dissection of why it was funny somewhat less productive.
I watch a fair amount of review material on YouTube, and my impression is that young people do critical thinking and reading all the time, but very few are actually good at it. I’ve also read about horror stories from K-12 school and college about teachers pushing an agenda under the guise of “critical analysis”. I would argue that a teacher “pushing the criticality on from outside” actually deserves somewhat of a hostile response. The way I’ve come to approach critical analysis is fourfold: The actual created work itself (the actual words on the text, or the painting on the canvas or the action on screen), the time period the creator is living in (and, if different, the time period the creator is channeling) what the creator has actually said about the work in interviews, letters, etc., and lastly what the work mean to YOU personally. Do you understand what the creator meant, do you think they were successful in communicating what they meant, do you agree with the message, if any, they were trying to send? IMHO, a good review should cover all four points, and a good teacher should teach how to account for all four.
I totally agree with what you said. Your last point is not quite what I was trying to get at, but it’s valid nevertheless.
What I meant is that the crucial question for critical thinking, “Does this movie say more than ‘Riding a rhino is cool’?” and it’s followup of “Why? Explain your reasoning.” are necessarily confrontational and can result in this perception that the teacher is saying “You’re having badwrongfun and you’re bad for liking this text and the way you’re engaging with it.” It’s much more comfortable if the student arrives at that question by themselves via introspection.
My own appreciation of reading texts critically came indirectly, in that I tried writing fiction myself, thus was forced to also confront the question of “What is the theme of my writing?”, plus somewhat of a political radicalization that made me more aware of what the deeper values are I’d like to see expressed. Together, this then allowed me to also approach the works of others as pieces of word-craft meant to express certain themes and ideas. But that to me feels like a non-starter as an approach in a school setting.
(Also, one of the reasons I keep bringing up Pratchett a lot recently in this comment section and appear to often be quite critical of him is also due to an indirect approach to critical reading. I love his work, and have read it very often recreationally, and that is why I can sort of pull at less obvious threads and point out hidden shortcomings, because I’ve got such a familiarity with the words and the story.)
“(also, it’s a *play*, why are you *reading* it?)”
One of my biggest criticisms against how we teach Shakespeare. It’s like trying to appreciate “Seinfeld” by reading the script–an idea that is so moronically stupid that no one would entertain it. Yet with Shakespeare we consider it normal.
I think you forget a major reason why the texts are selected: Naked snobbery. There’s been a LOOONG history of snobbery in literature. G. K. Chesterton’s “In Defense of Penny Dreadfuls” goes into this, for example. Modern books, TV, and movies, outside the “artistic” ones, simply aren’t considered high-brow enough to warrant inclusion in a curriculum. The ironic part is that you can map these arguments and see that quite often yesterday’s pulp trash is today’s high-brow literature. Happened with LOTR, for example.
I’m weird; I’ve read the high-brow literature for fun. But as Chesterton pointed out, no one starts that way. I started off reading Donald Duck comics and bad fantasy adventure books. What schools fail to understand is that the high-brow stuff is, quite often, the end of a very long process of learning to appreciate literature. Expecting a kid to understand the high-brow stuff is like expecting a guy to move from the ground to the top of a mountain without touching it. You’ve got to start with getting the kids interested in literature, then teach them how to get more out of it through analyzing the text, then show them better literature with more depth, until you get to the heights of literary greatness.
The other problem is that teachers often try to add stuff that’s not in the book. I think it was “I Am the Walrus” where the songwriter put in random nonsense specifically to mess with people trying to do that. Sometimes a cigar really IS just a cigar. After a certain point kids realize that they’re being conned–not that all literary analysis is a con, just that it’s rife with false interpretations–and reject the idea.
I didn’t include that point because of forgetfulness, but because of good faith. Even if we assume that curricula are chosen to teach critical reading and not snobbery and nation-building, we still have to contend with systemic issues. I totally agree that starting with these “Great Works” whose language and themes are by now completely outdated is part of the reason kids get alienated, and that often literary criticism can get over its skis and put way too much into a text, and that this is also not helping with getting the kids to take this seriously.
“I didn’t include that point because of forgetfulness, but because of good faith.”
I don’t think it’s bad faith to say things someone has admitted they’re doing. There’s absolutely an openly classist element to the works generally selected. I’ve had more than a few conversations with English teachers and literature professors about this, because the history is frankly hilarious–it’s completely impossible to tell with any reliability what works today will become “great works” tomorrow, and the criteria they use is, well, classist. (It’s even more fun when you point out that the diction they consider appropriate is likewise classist in nature, but that’s a whole different discussion.)
“I totally agree that starting with these “Great Works” whose language and themes are by now completely outdated …..”
That’s actually not what I’m saying. I’m a big advocate of reading works you disagree with, especially in the context of teaching critical thinking/critical reading. If nothing else the motivation to p’wn one’s adversaries provides a certain amount of incentive!
The issue is more a matter of audience. The Western Cannon, such as it is, was written for people with broad literary backgrounds, established habits of critical reading, and a shared jargon. Kids starting out have precisely none of these, by definition. Focusing on works that are difficult to understand turns something that could be a joy into a dry, dreary drudgery.
I will happily grant that attempts are made for age-appropriate works to a certain extent (they usually miss the mark, but bless their hearts they try). But there’s an active push against CULTURALLY appropriate works–by which I mean works that are age appropriate today, that kids today can engage with naturally by being part of the culture they’re in. Given that we’ve undergone some of the biggest cultural changes in centuries over the past few decades (the rise of the internet alone is huge), this means that what we’re treating as a point of entry for children is actually a huge effort on their part. And then we only make it harder.
It’s ironic that we’re documenting this change in real time. Watch “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” today and note how many plot points could be resolved by smartphones. Or read the Stephanie Plumb books and note how technology changes how people approach resolving issues. Our culture is changing insanely fast, and we’re documenting in ways that folks like Bret can only dream of–yet many of our educational institutions refuse to acknowledge this.
I feel like we’re agreeing on a lot of the substance of my argument and more haggling over the presentation. A lot of what you bring up to me seems like it overlaps with my points 2 and 3, just framed differently.
To me, the question of “Was this work of literature selected as a ‘Great Work’ for classist reasons?” is not quite as relevant as the question of “Do students enjoy reading it?” Shakespeare did write his plays with an eye towards broad appeal, but that’s no longer relevant when the language has shifted so much that his “mayhaps”s and “thou”s have become a barrier to reading the text, even as we land on the same position of “The current canon of works used for Literature is off-putting to the students.”
(Also, I didn’t mean “outdated themes” in the sense of being disagreeable, but more in the sense of being inaccessible. Take The Great Gatsby as an example – the central conflict of the work revolves around the concept of somebody being rich, and yet not being accepted by the Rich as a class. The book itself is critical of this concept even as it portrays it, so it’s certainly a useful tool for discussing this idea. Except we’re not living in a world where this conflict is alive any more, we now live in a world where you can be just some guy, get lucky with some investments and suddenly be a respected major voice in charge of a think tank or a government agency. But yes, I grant that “Who is this new rich guy” is also not broadly accessible for being relevant to a limited class of people.)
I also am totally on board that teaching should pick up the students from where they are, instead of trying to shove them into “high art” they’re not ready for. If my school had tried to dissect Harry Potter instead of some poem from the middle ages, a lot more students would likely have found use in it.
But I have to acknowledge the systemic problem which is point 3 that I raise: Can we actually restructure the teaching system to achieve this? Can we expect teachers, already an overworked and undersupported profession, to basically keep on the ball with the current kid’s fad, critically read it themselves *and* prepare teaching material for it, year after year? Plus of course the issue that AAM raises indirectly: When you dissect a popular work and find its themes to be hollow or problematic, this can also push the students away. The “advantage” of the current fixed if outdated canon approach is that these works have been vindicated by history and many generations of critical reading as being suitable for pulling deep themes out of them (Are they the only works of literature with deep themes? Of course not. I’d not even argue they’re the most exemplary or the deepest works by any measure. I am fully on board that literary criticism should also take “mass appeal” works of media seriously, the way that Bret took both Gladiator II and The Odyssey seriously. It’s a separate discussion, but the fact that the categories of “movies that make the Oscar short list” and “movies people actually flock to the theaters for” are very separate categories is an indictment of media criticism as practiced.)
I think it was “I Am the Walrus” where the songwriter put in random nonsense specifically to mess with people trying to do that.
I’m a very big superfan of Bob Dylan, and a fairly big fan of Leonard Cohen, but sometimes I wonder if some of their more….elliptical lyrics were exactly that, having a bit of fun with their own fans by throwing out some gobbledygook and then watching the fans spin their wheels trying to discern profound meaning in it.
I’ve read a lot for pleasure since leaving school, I think largely because I’d enjoyed reading before being forced to dissect the most banal aspects of a random assortments of books in literature class.
I actually did see the subjects techniques employed against two books I had previously read and enjoyed. Both were left diminished and made to seem more empty as a result.
The thing is, I went through a system that put quite a lot of value on critical thinking and had required a separate Theory of Knowledge class regardless of your electives. The other classes taught critical thinking skills far better than the English classes ever did, that seemed more designed to make books seem a tedious and agonising experience to be withstood as little as possible.
For my money, “I enjoy this” should also be part of any critical analysis. To me it feels most productive if the end state is something like “Sure, this movie is complete garbage with plot holes and no real deep themes, but emotionally I sometimes need to watch the hammiest Dracula to overact all over the screen.”
Outstanding and balanced!
“Instead, it is using the Odyssey to evoke some specific ideas: the rupture of norms (particularly those involving kindness towards strangers, foreigners, immigrants)”
I’d be careful about taking this too far. In Nolan’s version the original violation of norms is the Trojan Horse itself–that is, the Greeks smuggle themselves into Troy using the Trojans’ adherence to the norms and end up destroying it.
This is the right-wing critique of the modern immigration regime.
Note: this is not a comment on whether this is what is happening in real life. This is a comment on the contents of the movie.
I’m not sure how accurate ‘giant statues are probably full of foreign soldiers’ is to right wing critiques of immigration. Obviously the phrase ‘trojan horse’ is used for many things that aren’t big wooden horses, including as part of right wing critique of immigration, but this isn’t using the phrase, it’s using an actual wooden horse. Hell, the horse isn’t even Trojan, it’s Greek, as evidenced by the fact it’s full of Greek soldiers.
“Obviously the phrase ‘trojan horse’ is used for many things that aren’t big wooden horses, including as part of right wing critique of immigration, but this isn’t using the phrase, it’s using an actual wooden horse.”
Yes, because this is the origin of the phrase.
“Hell, the horse isn’t even Trojan, it’s Greek, as evidenced by the fact it’s full of Greek soldiers.”
Yes, and this disproves what I’m saying…how?
Look, if you want to argue about whether the Greeks smuggling themselves into Troy via manipulating the Trojans’ adherence to the norms so that they will bring a wooden statue full of Greeks inside the walls is actually a violation of the laws of hospitality or not, I’m open to that discussion, but that is how Nolan presents it in this movie.
I cannot speak for others, but I have certainly come across one guy online arguing that the suitors were just like immigrants – taking things from the natives and doing nothing in return.
Ding. Exactly.
I don’t know if it was what Nolan intended, but I think what he ended up writing was a very normie centrist take on the matter: “Guests and hosts *both* have an obligation to not abuse the relationship.”
Which *should* be utterly uncontroversial, but this is the stupid timeline.
“Exactly” how? The average immigrant works harder for lower wages than the average birthright citizen, and also commits fewer crimes. There is no “Taking things from natives and giving nothing in return” the way this guy argued when you look at actual material reality.
Yes, people have an obligation to the state they live in, I fully agree. But if that is the measure, then the ire should not be directed at immigrants.
“Exactly” as in “this is exactly the kind of argumentation you can make based on the film as written.”
Anyway, quick thing:
This statement is defensible: “The average immigrant works harder for lower wages than the average birthright citizen, and also commits fewer crimes.”
Now, this is because we (and every other country) filter for the factors that correlate with criminality, rather than because foreigners are inherently better than the native-born, but it is a true statement.
However, this statement is not defensible: “There is no “Taking things from natives and giving nothing in return””
The reason for this is because, y’know, immigrants are people. and sometimes the filtering process doesn’t work. Pretending otherwise leads to people doing egregiously dumb things.
its been a bit since read the stories,
dunno, sounds like a fun movie, cool that it is out there.
Hope you enjoyed it.
> Instead, it is using the Odyssey to evoke some specific ideas: the rupture of norms (particularly those involving kindness towards strangers, foreigners, immigrants) and civilizational collapse.
And there you have it! Hospitality is not kindness, in fact it is anything but. (One may observe which places are known for it; obviously the Middle East, Afghanistan ought to be, perhaps the Balkans, rural areas, the American South…) Odysseus of course does not mind sacking a town (with murder, rape and pillage) on his way home, or raiding in his neighbourhood to get more sheep. It might be interesting to analyse how hospitality actually works in Homer’s poem, because I expect the results to be instructive.
It is a few years since I read Odyssey (in Finnish translation by Pentti Saarikoski), but if I remeber correctly, there are two main ways to claim hospitality:
a) either as a guest who enjoys the well-established hospitality relationship, where you mutually host each other on your travels and exchange gifts on irregular but mutual basis. This is something that allows Telemakhos to visit the cities his father has been helping.
b) as a supplicant, where you seize the knees of a master of the house sitting at his hearth and beg for protection. It would be possible, but bad manners to refuse.
The third form, of accepting an itinerant stranger into your house and hosting them, is the highest form of hospitality, but I don’t think I remember anyone doing that in an honest form during the whole of Odyssey – except the swine herd Eumaeus, I guess. (Circe and Calypso are a bit too demanding and self-interested to be good hosts.) He is the only one who shows the hospitality like Baucis and Philemon.
Arguably the Phaecians exhibit perfect hospitality!
Indeed, Odysseus’ view of “hospitality” seems to be “we get to barge into your home uninvited and eat your food, and you can’t refuse us because of Zeus’ law”.
There’s an interesting discussion of the Odyssey film on the Engelsberg Ideas podcast by Orlando Gibbs: https://engelsbergideas.com/podcast/the-alien-world-of-homers-odyssey/
I haven’t seen the film, but my mom saw it and was telling me she had some problems with it, including the way it mostly ignored the gods or relegated them to offscreen? If so, I would find that pretty annoying (either as a concession to modern secular American sensibilities, or as a failure of imaginative capacities), and a good reason not to spend my time and money.
I realize that portraying deities, the supernatural, etc. is difficult in a film or TV medium, but if you don’t think you’re up to the task, then maybe pick a different storie to base your movie on?
The film’s take on the gods is cleverly ambiguous imo. Firstly, the god’s are mentioned all the time and implicitly held to be real by everyone. Zeus’ law is name dropped every scene, the Cyclops weeps his lamentations to Poseidon, Polemachus hopes every stranger is a god in disguise, and more. Secondly, we see Athena quite a lot, but always from Odysseus’ perspective, so there’s ambiguity in whether she’s real and there for everyone to see, or if she’s a manifestation of his subconscious. This is quite similar to how Homer does it tbh – gods reveal themselves to individuals (and to each other) but not openly in public to all in a way that is beyond question. There is no god-to-god dialogue or scene however, and that is a fairly big part of Homer. Lastly it explicitly shows without caveats the direct existence of a whole bunch of super natural, quasi-divine beings: the Cyclops, Scylla, Circes, and more.
It didn’t feel like a Bowdlerized take that removed the gods to pander to modern American audiences at all. It emphasises how alien the perception of divinity in that world is to us. It shows – possibly too bluntly – on how belief in the gods affects society, regardless of what the gods actually do or don’t it. More of an anthropological take on the gods than a Disney one.
@Ulysses,
Fair enough, I should probably give it a shot then. Like I said, I was just quoting my mother’s impression, secondhand.
Also like I said, I do concede that it’s very difficult to portray the divine and/or supernatural in a TV or film medium, not least because religious and/or magical texts are often pretty clear that these beings and experiences can only really be describe in analogical terms, and that in their pure form they are kind of, well, indescribable.
The gods are not ignored, they’re talked about constantly and numerous things are attributed to them (and arguably too serendipitous to have taken place without them). The film’s overall tone has a sense of groundedness and human moral responsibility that makes the presence of the gods being more subtle or abstract feel very deliberate, without revising into something that comes off as trying to take place in completely prosaic reality.
Generally agree with this, but I think you’re overly generous to Emily Wilson’s review? Especially the section referring to all the POC she noticed as functionally acting as black best friends? That genuinely made me wonder if we’d watched the same movie?
>Percy hard at work helping me plan out my Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron series.
Start with HoI2 (or Darkest Hour). They are more straight forward.
As much fun as the custom units are there is no rhyme or reason to what is and isn’t strong.
Well…I have not been reviewing films much on my Letterboxd lately (not that anyone seems to miss it), and maybe I would have skipped it for this film as well, but I guess this is a special occasion.
Disclaimer: I wrote this just before reading either this post, the review linked in FP or Wilson’s review, so you can say my impressions are relatively unfiltered. (In contrast to e.g. my review of Odysseus’ immediately preceding adaptation, Uberto Pasolini’s The Return, which ended up heavily shaped by Spencer McDaniel’s analysis I read immediately after.) I don’t claim that my prose or topical insight arises to the same level as either yours of Wilson, but perhaps this will interest some here, particularly as it is (comparatively) spoiler-free.
(I was going to search for that last scene, but I instead found the full film (about a WWII Japanese ship full of British prisoners getting torpedoed by the US submarine, and the population of a nearby Chinese outlying island rising up against a Japanese garrison to rescue them) on YouTube (until the inevitable strike, I guess), so here’s the timestamped link to the scene.)
https://youtu.be/2DhN26HUMF8?t=6698
I think it’s quite clear my view ultimately comes down much closer to that of Wilson than that of our host. I think we probably have similar ratings, even (I settled on 3 stars, and while Wilson’s text is unrated, the grudging admission at the end – “Despite all this, the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate.” – feels like a 2-3 star range.)
Some additional thoughts/elaborations, now with full spoilers:
* The horse left so close to the shore half the men are at risk of drowning at high tide is just idiotic. If there’s one thing the Greeks would have known after 10 years, it’s where the tide rises and falls. Since I doubt very much the original text included that (not double-checking, but simply the fact this version loosely incorporates a character from the Aeneid strongly suggests not), it really seems like nothing more but a self-indulgent callback to Dunkirk.
** I was so baffled by the above, my one desperate justification while sitting in the cinema was that the tide was intended to wash away the accumulated filth and thus prevent them from being given away by the smell. However, the odds of that working as intended without leaving tell-tale stains on the outside seem…low. (Not to mention that a statue of waterlogged, salt-eaten wood seems much less likely to be brought inside in the first place.)
* I don’t quite understand our host’s focus on the flashback to Troy’s carnage retroactively (from the viewers’ perspective, rather than the characters’, for whom it was linear) justifying Circe’s actions. The first post-Troy scene we see is some unnamed village abandoned in terror before Odysseus’ fleet – so their response is to burn it. That alone is justification enough. I honestly don’t understand why that scene was kept while e.g. Cassandra and Laocoon are cut.
** To elaborate: I can’t buy Odysseus wracked with regret after the massacre at Troy when he doesn’t do anything about pillage on their first stop. Likewise, the issue with this interpretation of the source material (“Odysseus’ men have already done the core violation and they are going to get one occasion after another until they break a rule so hard that it kills them”) – is that it renders what was Odysseus’ original core sin – his treatment of the Cyclops – completely irrelevant. This is why I feel a more resonant depiction would have been one where the Odysseus’ men are saved from certain death on the beach by Poseidon summoning the sea snakes to consume Laocoon – and then Poseidon is repaid for it via the blinding and mockery of his son. Given all the other changes to that scene, perhaps making it so that there could have been a solution (i.e. perhaps Cyclops would have consumed some equivalent amount to the sheep they slaughtered and let the rest go) but they went straight to violence and were doomed would have been ideal. I suppose one issue is that it then deemphasizes the slaughter at Troy (like the original epic, to be fair) – but there could have been ways around it.
* Likewise, I am unsure how I feel about the reinterpretation of Athena in this version – given that from my recollection of the Iliad, she was by far the most insistent on aiding Greeks and punishing the Trojans. I suppose one could reconcile this by assuming she intended her priestess and temple at least would be protected after everything she’s done for the Greeks/Ithacans – but that point isn’t apparent in this version at all, and I think it would only be strengthened if we saw it delineated at the same time as the Laocoon/Poseidon connection. I.e. the Ithacans repay two of their most powerful divine patrons with ingratitude and die for it. In fact, if it were implied that Athena directed the Ithacans to Cyclops’ island in revenge for her temple at Troy, knowing they would be unable to help themselves from provoking Poseidon’s son, that ought to have resolved the issue above as well.
* While the part about Helios’ cattle appears more-or-less completely true to myth, I can’t help but wonder: isn’t the whole point of oars to enable the ship to move against the wind? Feels jarring we do not even see them attempt that – even as the characters otherwise often talk through alternative courses of action – often blindingly obvious. (I even had to double-check if those ships had oars in the myth in the first place; one of Odysseus’ ships definitely did, but I think that might have been post-Calypso?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnowing_Oar
* Speaking of Calypso: perhaps one of the greatest differences between my impressions’ and Wilson’s is that since the last time I read the Odyssey was as a primary school summary decades ago, I had no way to tell her character was simplified to such a severe extent as what Wilson apparently describes. Even then, she still comes across comparatively well.
* Again, Circe’s scene is at least as impressive as the Cyclops’, if not more so, but there are also so many questions there. I.e. Odysseus’ and his men are not only not surprised at all to see so many different animals in what they presumably know is not the right climate for them (and they do not think to inquire Circe about them, either) but they are completely and utterly unconcerned any of those big cats might attack them? And after Odysseus gets Circe to revert them, they just forget about the rest? In theory, they could have asked to have them join their ship; did they decide fresh hands to offset those they lost by now weren’t worth the additional strain to provisions?
* Last but not least: it’s hard not to emphasize regarding your concerns about Wilson’s approach polarizing people against the classics/humanities as a field – yet it is likewise hard to not read it as being motivated by the same kind of logic as my fellow STEM calling on their institutions to sacrifice some humanities on the assumption their own, less politically controversial work would be safeguarded by this compromise (the folly of which we have seen with RFK Jr., NCAR, Argo, and too many other examples to count). One could have made the exact same arguments when ACOUP started out to suggest going soft on the Game of Thrones – or either Gladiator, more recently. I think this version of the Odyssey very much warrants the same kind of a series you have done on Gondor/Helm’s Deep, with comparisons between the text and the screen, and discussion of tactics and logistics of either. (I.e. I am genuinely curious if Odysseus was also so arrogant as to assume he would not need scouts when on e.g. the Laestrygonian island in the original, or if that is “adaptational stupidity”.)
I don’t believe Laocoon is mentioned in the Odyssey (although neither is Sinon, who did make it into the film).
“While the part about Helios’ cattle appears more-or-less completely true to myth, I can’t help but wonder: isn’t the whole point of oars to enable the ship to move against the wind? Feels jarring we do not even see them attempt that – even as the characters otherwise often talk through alternative courses of action – often blindingly obvious. (I even had to double-check if those ships had oars in the myth in the first place; one of Odysseus’ ships definitely did, but I think that might have been post-Calypso?)”
A completely oarless ship also cannot move in calm. And simple rigging means that a simply rigged ship cannot sail particularly close hauled. Which rules out, for example, tacking.
It seems quite possible for a ship with a moderate amount of oars to be capable of using oars to tack, to maneuver into port or when becalmed, but be helpless to row against wind for any distance – the rowers would quickly tire of the sprint.
Yes, classical Greek trieres were faster – but they were also overmanned to the point they had to take port every night and needed friendly ports with food supply at short intervals.
I’d found myself wondering why the hell they didn’t just leave the horse further inland, but I didn’t make the Dunkirk connection until you pointed it out here.
Also, thanks for bringing Dongji Rescue to my attention; I’ll definitely have to go watch the whole thing now.
I haven’t read all the above posts yet, but want to chime up with a request for learned opinions of Stanley Lombardo’s translations of Iliad and Odyssey. I have really enjoyed them, and have encountered younger readers who were just knocked out by them, saying they were the only translations they were able to get thru and actually enjoy. That tells me something about the appeal. Vivid, expressive, and somewhere in between Fagles and Wilson? What say ye?
The movie it most reminded me of was John Boormans Excalibur. So much for the Arthurian scholar to nitpick, insanely anachronistic armor, but a great movie from a auteur director drawn directly from a great cultural work.
I was thinking of Arthurian legend while reading this review. NO existing version of Arthur gets things right. Most are about as wrong as putting Richard the Lion-Heart in an Abrams. But that really doesn’t matter because the core of the story isn’t the armor or the setting, it’s the themes and the characters. EVERY retelling of a myth changes it, to bring certain messages to the forefront and to make it relevant to the target audience (a concept that many critics have forgotten exists). It makes precisely zero sense to me to complain that someone re-telling a myth does what everyone re-telling a myth always does. It’s like complaining that a cup holds water, or that a knife is sharp.
Excalibur would be my point of comparison too. Not in any way the plot, the characters, the style; just that Nolan’s The Odyssey treats the story as an epic, a piece of mythology. Much as I enjoyed Conan (1982) and Gladiator, they’re both “guy with sword kills the evil overlord who murdered his family.”
As prof Devereaux points out the dialogue in this film is frequently clunky, but as he also points out there isn’t much of it. And no quipping!
Thank you for pointing us to McDaniel’s discussion. I learned so much from it and appreciated all the background information.
The bronze age collapse and sea peoples references were outright painful both in how awkward the dialogue got to refer to them directly and in how ill-fitting they were to the rest of the movie. Is Odysseus the snake in the garden of Eden, ending a mythic age of harmony, or is he ending an actual historical era by sacking Mediterranean ports and disrupting trade? Despite the seeming overlap the two concepts coexist terribly, far more so than the similar themes in Oppenheimer.
If we admit to the existence of the wider bronze age world with its powerful competing empires, the idea that Odysseus is innovating some original sin and that war for trade routes, ruses of war, and the sacking of cities were all unknown becomes ridiculous. The film itself seems uninterested in implying that the world beyond Greece is much inhabited, with the episodes that involve Odysseus visiting actual cities after Troy – the attack on Ismarus or his stay at Scherie – among those cut, restricting his visits to deserted coastline alone. That focus makes the historical references to a wider world, emphasized late in the movie, feel incredibly out-of-place.
I think the movie would have been better for just picking one. Is this a story about guilt and a wandering divine punishment, or historical consequence? Deviating further from the original story to pursue the latter might have honestly been more entertaining for me than the muddled pursuit of the original themes we got – imagine that instead of a bunch of armored giants appearing from nowhere in a forest, Odysseus loses his other ships attempting to raid up the Nile. While we’re making a mess of the costuming throw in the ridiculous animal-headed Egyptian warriors from the old RomeTW. I would have cheered, at least.
I think we’re supposed to understand that, in Nolan’s view, it was the ten years of full deployment/war economy for the entire Greek world that was the apocalypse. Everything from the sack of Troy to the end of the film is people coming to terms with the idea that they killed the world rather than a depiction of said killing. It’s rather like The Road Warrior, where mortally wounded institutions are directing Max to uphold civilization but ultimately he decides that civilization is already gone.
Thank you for including the link to my post! I appreciate the shoutout.
Regarding your point about Athena, I had a different interpretation of the scene you describe. Right before Zendaya’s character is beheaded, one of the Greek soldiers beheads Athena’s statue. Since Zendaya had already been introduced as Athena, and she was wearing the same costume she wears when she plays Athena, I interpreted the scene of the soldiers beheading her as Odysseus imagining them beheading Athena herself in reaction to seeing them behead Athena’s statue. I didn’t pick up on the fact that Zendaya was supposed to be playing a different role in that scene.
It does make more sense why Athena appears in the form she does in the film if you interpret the girl beheaded in the temple as a separate character.
I guess from the lack of denouncements about armour and weapons seen in the film, the absence of catastrophic critiques about the ships featured, and all the rest such things, that Ollie and Percy wrote this week’s blog and that Bret Devereaux will be back sometime as yet unknown.
“Samwise Gamgee, in a sense the truest hero of the work, has his skin described as brown more than once”
Tom Bombadil also has brown hands.
By the way, the whole Helen story is commonly believed to be based upon an older Egyptian legend. These guys were also quite the mixed bunch.
I’m honestly curious – do your thoughts on Wilson’s review change any of your thoughts on how you’ve approached 300 and Sparta?
It’s the only one of your series I’ve never finished, because more than any other series it’s the one that feels tone-wise as though it’s telling me I’m “having fun wrong.” For all that I know the Myth of Sparta is nothing but a myth, and I do appreciate the education. I still greatly enjoy the over-the-top unapologetic masculinity it portrays, even if I agree that it is (for example) a horrible thing to base our military philosophy on.
Yeah, I wouldn’t say that was his strongest series. Sparta certainly seems to be a quite unpleasant place (and frankly even a fairly cursory look should get an idea of this), but it feels he is taking it a bit to personally and overstates things at times. I think the fremen series also tends toward that, perhaps because in both cases the people he disagrees with for those are largely ones he despises politically.
“…perhaps because in both cases the people he disagrees with for those are largely ones he despises politically.”
He is equally harsh against GRRM, an author he says he enjoys (and to be clear, I believe him).
This is how ideas are taken seriously in at least many corners of academia. If anything, I’d expect him to be harsher against those things he enjoys, precisely to overcome the bias you accuse him of. The first thing is to not fool yourself, and all that. And a common criticism of a thorough review and criticism of an idea that’s wrong is that it’s harsh. And yeah, it is. But….well, ideas are treated harshly among those who work with them for a living.
I think part of the issue is not understanding the difference between “harsh” and “thorough”. Bret is….long-winded, and detail-oriented, and very thorough. When he’s disagreeing with an idea it can feel like he’s beating the idea to death, but if you look he’s just as thorough with ideas he agrees with. How many essays does he have on battles in Middle-Earth? And at least for the movies the result is positive.
I also think that part of the issue is that Bret never intended the essays to be a fair and balanced review of Spartan culture. He was critiquing the myth and seeing if it held up to actual facts. The question wasn’t “What was Sparta like?” It was “Is Sparta worth emulating?” Same with the Freman Mirage. I think he does a good job explaining them, but ultimately his point wasn’t to present the good and the bad. His point was to show that the bad was really, really bad in both cases–dangerously so–and that no amount of good can overcome it.
These two essays are some of my favorites. And I’m somewhat sympathetic to the idea of the Freman Mirage (Sparta was a stain on human existence and the only good thing about it is that it was eliminated). I prefer the Tolkien essays personally, but these are good too.
I liked his Sparta series, and since we know a good deal about the historical Battle of Thermopylae and those who fought in it, it makes sense to dissect a popular portrayal of it like the 300. Since our main record of the Trojan War is itself a heavily anachronistic retelling, one can give adaptations of said “record” a bit more leeway. That being said, I can’t help but think his take on Nolan’s Odyssey is influenced by politics. Our host increasingly seems to be focusing more on rebutting the far-right in a way that I’ve never seen him do with the far-left. In his social media and here on this blog he tends to go for the low-hanging fruit dangled by the “chuds”, criticizing and responding at length, but when people push back, it seems that the more reasonable the disagreement, the more likely that he’ll just ignore it. I can’t help but think that if Nolan or anyone else took more of a “300” approach to the Odyssey, even if he didn’t pronounce it “the worst thing ever”, Prof. Devreaux wouldn’t hesitate to point out every inaccuracy in costume, setting, and character motivation, and probably connect it to fascism.
While I am to the left of Dr. Devereaux (and so by extension of yourself), I must admit that a lot of this rings true to what I have observed on Bluesky in recent months. In particular, “the more reasonable the disagreement, the more likely that he’ll just ignore it” is a distressingly apt characterization of the Liberal Currents magazine crew who now effectively represent the center of political thought on that platform – though with that platform’s userbase being what it is, it generally defines their interactions with “the far left”.
I.e. the nature of that platform is such that those who are not “far left” (using quotes because the primary dividing line really appears to be whether one believes American military power is/can be a force for good and/or if the American hegemony is a bedrock feature of this century more akin to gravity rather than something brittle and bound up in countless conditionals) tend to be pushed into alignment with the LC people and adopt more of their mannerisms (and vice versa), and our host also appears to have been affected by this ideological sorting. Ironically, one of the highest-profile figures on there, Will Stancil, (perhaps best known to offline people as a near-metaphorical “Hero of Minneapolis” if they know of him at all – and best known online for…many other things) harps on the way social media molds people towards the perceived consensus beliefs regardless of their external validity with the insistence of a woodpecker* – and yet not only does he perhaps best represent the “low-hanging fruit” approach to social media, but the drift in his own opinions (towards the so-called center) can seemingly be tracked on a monthly basis by now.
I apologize to our host if this is veering too far into unedifying drama from outside the blog, so I likely ought to drop this subject now. Instead, I’ll refer back to another very early (and seemingly oft-forgotten) piece of writing here – the deeply critical take on The Last Jedi.
https://acoup.blog/2019/12/29/miscellanea-the-latest-jedi/
I believe all of us remember that back then, one’s position on The Last Jedi (IMO, a confused, muddled, 2/5 movie) was transformed into a “culture war litmus test” (in what was and is a great loss to actual culture) – and yet, Dr. Devereaux of 2019 was not afraid to write a piece which placed him “on the same side” as “the chuds” in the minds of the people subscribing to this insipid “team sports” approach to media criticism. Suffice it to say, I have great doubts regarding whether Dr. Devereaux of 2026 would have written a piece remotely similar to that one. In some ways, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing (i.e. that post fails to double-check how a key character’s name is spelled in-universe and so proceeds to misspell it thirty (!) times), but otherwise, it’s hard not to see it as an unfortunate step back.
*Given that he (Stancil) had compared his critics to hamsters at least once (who have admittedly often been much more vicious to him in too many ways to count), I don’t think this metaphor would constitute a breach of civility.
“Our host increasingly seems to be focusing more on rebutting the far-right in a way that I’ve never seen him do with the far-left.”
The Far Right is using his field of study–badly–to push agendas and policies that are detrimental to society at large, large segments specifically, are dangerous in predictable ways, and are actively detrimental to his field of study in particular. To give but one example, pseudo-history books are on the reading lists for US military officers. They’ve invaded his field and are trying to use history’s prestige to mask their actions while actively destroying history as a discipline.
I’m curious as to how you expect a historian to respond.
The Far Left doesn’t use pseudohistory to push their agenda. They misuse other fields. Bret, being a historian, would logically leave those criticisms to those better equipped to handle them. Again, not really sure how you expect him to respond.
As for your last sentence, you’ve made up a scenario in your head, decided what someone else will do, and are holding that other person accountable for the fictional actions you ascribed to them. That’s…..rather silly. At minimum you must accept that it is not evidence of any sort in this discussion, and that it’s perfectly reasonable for folks to simply ignore it as emotive language that at best can only demonstrate your internal frustrations.
I’ll grant my hypothetical was a bit of a cheap shot, but I have to disagree about the Far Left and history. I believe they are indeed misusing history at the mainstream level. The 1619 Project, for one example, and contrast our host’s treatment of Netflix’s Cleopatra documentary with his treatment of Gladiator II. I don’t disagree with his take on the latter, but I feel like he was softer on the former than it deserved, especially since it was constructed as a documentary instead of historical fiction. Speaking of Cleo, perhaps you are not aware of the “Afrocentrism” movement which attempts to claim various historical figures as black Africans despite evidence of such being scant at best.
@YARD Well, over the last few years, our host had made multiple series nitpicking The Rings of Power (including an extremely critical 5-part series on the siege of Eregion a bit over a year ago), a show which has similarly become a bit of a culture war litmus test. So I’m not sure his response to a hypothetical 2026 The Last Jedi would be that different.
Honestly, I find Devereaux’s criticisms of Wilson to be a bit baffling, because it isn’t as though he has pulled any punches when it came to discussing Rings of Power, or Gladiator 2, or various other media properties.
I think it has to be noted in context that, as Bret notes, Wilson has a far greater reach than he does. The fact that she wrote a scathing review made the homepage not only of the NYT, but the BBC and Al Jazeera English.
@Gamereg
“and contrast our host’s treatment of Netflix’s Cleopatra documentary with his treatment of Gladiator II. I don’t disagree with his take on the latter, but I feel like he was softer on the former than it deserved, especially since it was constructed as a documentary instead of historical fiction.”
My impression is that in the one post in which he mentions it, he doesn’t say much of it, but what little he says is not exactly friendly.
True, he did say that the Netlfix doc deserved a takedown and received several, but he didn’t link to any besides the Rotten Tomatoes site. Whenever he reviews a work which commits historical errors seemingly in service of a right-wing agenda, he doesn’t hesitate to call that out specifically. When something errs seemingly in service of a left-wing agenda, he dismisses the conservative complaints (even when they’re made by more than just the chuds) and moves on to other elements.
When he covers the issue of Cleopatra’s race, he does a very thorough job exploring her geneology and explaining the gaps, but he avoids stating the obvious: Whether Cleo was (as he put it) three-quarters Macedonian and one-quarter Egyptian or mostly “pure” Macedonian with a touch of Persian ancenstry, it is incredibly unlikely that her mysterious mother or grandmother were sub-saharan African, and hence, almost certainly not “black” as we would define the term today. So when he says her ethnicity is “uncertain”, it feels like he’s playing it safe rather than taking a stand for historical accuracy.
@YARD On reflection, I think you have more of a point than I initially conceded. In addition to TLJ, I think a good point of comparison is his review of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
https://acoup.blog/2020/11/20/miscellanea-my-thoughts-on-assassins-creed-valhalla/
Now, this is a game that was similarly criticized by “the chuds”, and for similar reasons as Nolan’s Odyssey. However, that didn’t stop our host from criticizing it harshly for, among other things, massively downplaying Norse slavery.
> This problem is infinitely compounded by the way the game treats, or more correctly does not treat, the Norse practice of slavery. Thralls – that is, enslaved persons forced to work, typically, as menial laborers – are mentioned only at the very beginning of the game and never subsequently recur. This is an enormous problem in terms of representing Norse society and a stunning one given that slavery was not left out of Odyssey. Slavery was extremely common in the Norse and Danish world of this period. As far as we can tell most free households would have had at least a few enslaved ‘thralls’ and larger households would often have had dozens. Eivor and Sigurd – the main characters – being effectively nobility (a Huscarl) and royalty (a jarl and king’s son) respectively would both have many enslaved thralls in their households.
>(…)
> Imagine the equivalent of a game set in the American South or the Caribbean pre-1865 in which slavery was simply not present at all
and you have the rough scope of the problem here
(The “Odyssey” mentioned in the quote is another Assassin’s Creed game).
Nolan’s Odyssey goes even further than ACV here, in that it doesn’t so much as mention slavery at all (I don’t think the slaves in Odysseus’ palace are ever referred to as such). Sinilarly to ACV, it doesn’t want to have to acknowledge that its aristocratic protagonist would logically own many slaves, and it would also seriously complicate Nolan’s “fall of civilization” narrative if he acknowledged that the pre-Trojan War Greek civilization had some very morally repugnant aspects.
However, this fact did not merit so much as a mention from out host here, despite him rarely being slow to criticize this sort of thing previously. This makes me suspect that you may be right.
@Hastings,
I largely agree with your criticisms of the “Fremen Mirage” series, but I actually learned a ton from the Sparta series. I was completely unaware of how much the Spartan society relied on slavery, or how much they seem to have despised actual work.
I would say that with the Spartan series, the main aspect which sticks out to me as a probable example of letting politics influence one’s judgement is the “Spartan Season Batting Average” seen in part VI, which flattens everything down to a binary win-loss distinction (OK, there are a couple of draws in there as well) which leaves out so many other factors – such as the size of the force taken to field and the casualty ratio.
https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vi-spartan-battle/
Now, I understand the argument that e.g. ensuring one will always have a numerical superiority in any battle itself represents a triumph of strategy and logistics and so winning with smaller forces is not necessarily something to be proud of if your forces are small because of those logistical reasons. In interests of fairness, I’ll replicate his follow-up comment from that thread:
And yet, I think it’s worth noting that as far as I can remember, this “batting average” approach is not applied anywhere else in the blog – and nor does it seem to have been applied by anyone else regarding anyone else’s military performance. I can’t help but wonder if this is because applying it universally would soon lead one towards conclusions that would appear obviously ridiculous and/or unpalatable if arrived at with more conventional means. I.e. I have reason to suspect that applying this “batting average” approach to 19th century military history would see the Imperial Russia with a superior record than the United States – after all, in that century, the former had only really lost the Crimean War (and even that had some notable victories early on, like the naval Battle of Sinop, with an approximate 1:100 casualty ratio) and the early Coalition Wars against Napoleon (before ultimately defeating him), and otherwise had a more-or-less unbroken streak of victories vs. the Ottoman and the Persian Empires. Meanwhile, the US’ performance in the War of 1812 and the Civil War is…patchy (for the latter, a roughly 1:1 casualty ratio in a war that had been won territorially and where your side has approx. 3X of everything is not something to be proud of, and does not happen without a sizeable string of early losses) and I doubt the victories in e.g. Mexican-American or Spanish-American Wars are sufficiently numerous to properly offset those when viewed through the lens of such “batting averages”. Somehow, I don’t think many would consider an outcome of this exercise to be particularly useful analytically.
P.S. To come back to his analysis of the 300 in particular, here’s a remarkable line from the start of that series.
Well, heatstroke does not care about such things either! And yet, somehow, it is now not necessary to point that out regarding all those “rowing in dark, metal armour in the sun” scenes in Nolan’s Odyssey! Unfortunately, I really don’t know if one can attribute this difference to anything other than political leanings.
I feel like you have missed the fundamental points he is making with the Spartan and Fremen Mirage series. Both series directly address commonly held beliefs in modern military and popular culture that he feels are incorrect and harmful.
In the case of the Spartan series, he is arguing against the idea that Sparta produced such extraordinary warriors and military success that their society should be admired and imitated. He is basically saying “naming your infantry platoon/video game super soldiers after Sparta is stupid because they had a 50/50 track record and they did horrible things to their slaves”. He is a historian annoyed with a pop culture view of a subject he is an expert in.
In the case of the Fremen Mirage series he is arguing against the “hard times make hard men, soft times make soft men” concept, in particular that civilized decadence leads to military failure. Living in a desert doesn’t make good soldiers or win wars – logistics, training, strategy and tactics make good soldiers and win wars.
Chris Nolan’s movie isn’t about any of these things. Chris Nolan’s movie is about the trauma of war and the collapse of social norms being destructive to society. He just happens to have decided to use the Trojan War as the setting to tell that story.
…Please point me to any sentence in the comment you had just replied to which even mentions the Fremen Mirage! Can we please discuss the arguments that are actually presented, rather than the ones we might wish our interlocutors would be making? If you want to argue with the people critical of that series, you have two other commenters to do that with!
Without going back and rereading the whole thing, I actually do not recall having any major criticisms of that series – perhaps the closest I came to having one was that the offhand “Decline is not inevitable, nor irreversible” in part II could be seen as being in tension with this statement from a (much) later Fireside.
https://acoup.blog/2025/01/10/fireside-friday-january-10-2025/
Anyway, I understood what he was going for in both series well. The point being argued was a separate one – whether it’s justifiable to claim (as the more critical commenters earlier in the thread do!) that the historical evidence was being marshaled in those series towards a desired outcome in a way which might be described as “unfair”. My interpretation is that the closest thing to such in the Spartan series is probably the “batting average” index, which is perhaps overfitted to produce a desired outcome for that series, but might break down if applied in other contexts. If so, it is not as strong of a rebuttal as what had been intended. Since it apparently needs spelling out, suggesting that a process used to make a point might be flawed does not actually mean you have to disagree with the point being made!
Meanwhile, the US’ performance in the War of 1812 and the Civil War is…patchy (for the latter, a roughly 1:1 casualty ratio in a war that had been won territorially and where your side has approx. 3X of everything is not something to be proud of, and does not happen without a sizeable string of early losses) and I doubt the victories in e.g. Mexican-American or Spanish-American Wars are sufficiently numerous to properly offset those when viewed through the lens of such “batting averages”
I mean, if you include US victories against Native American polities, and consider each of the conflicts separately, then the US had a massively successful record in the 19th c.
Obviously I don’t think those victories are something to take pride in, and they certainly weren’t against peer competitors.
Which I think exposes one of the major problems with the “batting average” analysis. A country that contents itself with picking on much weaker polities will have a much better “batting average” than one which regularly fights peer adversaries, but I don’t think most would therefore conclude that the former is better at war.
@Hector @Ben L Well, that blog, and that section, does include this:
Now, Native American confederations are not 1:1 equivalents to helots by any means, but I think it’s probably fair to exclude battles involving them using the same general reasoning as above. Moreover, even if they were included in the American “batting average”, this would logically necessitate including Russian Empire’s parallel and ultimately similarly militarily successful engagements in the Caucasus as well (much like the genocide of the Native Americans, the Circassian genocide does not happen without military victories setting the stage), so both averages probably go up similarly, and it’s unlikely to alter the relative standing of either.
(I suppose it is in a strict sense possible to go about this from the other direction – to argue that the Confederate South should not be counted as a state and so neither the defeats nor victories against it ought to count – but I don’t think many will abide by this interpretation.)
Well, our host did in fact argue that the primary military failure of fascism consisted in picking fights that were unwinnable from the outset, which seems congruent with this train of thought?
https://acoup.blog/2024/02/23/fireside-friday-february-23-2024-on-the-military-failures-of-fascism/
I suppose “the batting average” concept could be more usefully criticized for not seeming to discriminate between e.g. size of the battles, so seeking to force one decisive engagement would punish a state vs. one which had many tactically successful yet strategically meaningless ones? (Then again, the final post in the Spartan series is specifically about the strategic outcomes.)
P.S. This part of the linked post is really disappointing.
Besides noting that this definition of Baathism is far from universal (the Wikipedia page on “Assadism” lists over a dozen academic sources from across several decades all describing it as left-wing – which is independent of the discussion of its merits or lack thereof), the most charitable read of the Six-Day War being described as a war of choice for Syria is that any intervention to support an ally under attack is ipso facto a war of choice.* I.e. by the same token, WWII was a war of choice for the UK and France (admittedly, other commenters seem to have made that point back then in that thread) and every NATO country (as well as non-NATO allies like us in Australia and the Kiwis) that joined the US in Afghanistan had also committed to a war of choice – which is not a definition most people seem to use!
For that matter, the 1973 war was undertaken almost entirely on an Egyptian timetable. While I suppose it was theoretically conceivable for Syria to stay out of an attempt to recover its own internationally recognized territory, it would have been highly politically challenging for any system. (I.e. Finland in 1941 did effectively the same thing as Syria in 1973 – does the fact that the “Continuation War” had ultimately ended with tens of thousands more Finnish dead**, further territorial losses and reparations represent military failures of democracy?)
*And given that it was Israeli choice to escalate an Egyptian blockade to a ground war and that no ground battles between Israel and Syria took place in the Golan Heights until after Syria had announced a ceasefire to its shelling, it doesn’t exactly seem implausible to suggest that once Israel had struck Egypt and Jordan, it was going to attack Syria either way.
** “But war is not a game – no one cares what your KDA is if you lose and your state is extinguished. All that matters is strategic outcomes: war is fought for no other purpose because war is an extension of policy (drink!)” – from the same post, in case estimates of Finland’s “favourable KDA” in the Continuation War are used as a strategic justification for it.
@YARD,
The tactical facts that the Continuation War had huge Soviet losses are definitely not a justification for the war. The military cemeteries at every parish of Finland demonstrate pur losses in a way that is extremely visual: you can read, on the headstones, the battles in which each fallen hero was killed, and you can easily make a case that the temporary conquest of East Karelia was not worth it. (Taking back the lost part of Finnish Karelia was a moral imperative, as it seemed well within reach.)
However, from the strategic point of view, the question was not about neutrality or war. It was about waging war on the German side, which was not clearly hostile, or waging war on the Soviet side, which had tried to topple Finnish government in Winter War and again in the autumn of 1940, and had already genocided tens of thousands of Finns who had emigrated there to build commumism. In Estonia, the Soviets had already demonstrated the willingness to destroy the political independence of a country who had trusted them. For us in the summer 1941, the Soviet Union was an enemy that was clearly worse than the Nazis.
In addition, Soviet Union did demonstrate its willingness to start an offensive against us, when we remained neutral in the very beginning of Operation Barbarossa, by bombarding Finnish cities. There was no possibility to stay out of the war – and if you need to fight a war, then doing so actively and with the view of gaining some lasting fruits was sensible. Finally, strategically, we were able to select a course where we remained independent, so the choice was not clearly incorrect. We lost, but demonstrated to Stalin that occupation would be too expensive, and were thus able to retain our democracy. If anything, these choices demonstrated the worth of democracy: only a government with popular legitimacy could have made the extreme choices that Finland made during the course of the war.
@Finnish reader
I can certainly understand the current Finnish narrative; though, having been born in a city which multiple historians allege Finland’s then-leadership had asked Hitler to raze to the ground should he manage to capture it, there are very sharp limits on how much I can emphasize with it.
If so, then the Syrian participation in the Yom Kippur War had been a “moral imperative” as well – contra the way it had been depicted by our host some 2.5 years ago. I presume you can see that the whole reason I had invoked “the Continuation War” in the first place was to highlight the way Anglosphere/European commentators routinely appear much more likely to accept this framing when it comes from the people like you, and are a lot more likely to second-guess, focus on the outcomes, dismiss outright, etc. when it comes from Syrians or others like them.
There’s also another complicating factor, to put it mildly. You would have to know better than me that the Ryti-Mannerheim administration had conscripted so many men as to imperil agriculture across the country (which they had to have anticipated). Grain harvests halved – and the shortfall was made up for by shipments from the self-proclaimed Third Reich. Those shipments were personally authorized by Hitler at the same time as the territories occupied by the Nazis starved, which Finnish intelligence had to know about, and had to be able to foresee. After all, according to a blueprint adopted on 29 April 1941 – before Barbarossa – the Polish were allocated 70% of the rations which went to the Germans, the Greeks 30% and the Jews 20%. Hence, it’s not hard to imagine at whose expense those annual 180,000 tons of grain to Finland came from.
To put it bluntly, there are undoubtedly all too many graves (mostly of the old…or the very young) across the formerly Nazi-occupied countries which are there as an indirect yet nevertheless inescapable outcome of following said “moral imperative”. It’s not nice to say it, but history rarely is nice. (Note that this isn’t even going into the “debate” regarding whether the Finnish troops had sufficiently helped the Wehrmacht in cutting off Leningrad to be held collectively responsible alongside them for the hundreds of thousands deaths from starvation which followed.) It is perhaps worth noting that I do not think a similar connection can be drawn regarding Syria’s actions in 1967 or 1973. (The ripple effects of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo probably did include an indirect death toll, but even there, it’s much harder to hold the Syrians or even the Egyptians responsible for an action taken on their behalf under the circumstances they clearly didn’t plan for.)
It might be hard to believe now, but that had the entirely opposite intention. As our host had detailed nearly 4 years ago, Douhet’s theory that 300 tons of bombs dropped onto a country’s civilians would intimidate the leadership into a desired political outcome had been highly influential during the interwar period; moreover, the highly publicized bombing of Guernica and the capitulation of the Netherlands after Rotterdam bombings seemed to provide proof of the theory. Hence, the assumption was that a massive air raid would provide awesome proof of Soviet power and intimidate the country into staying out of the war; as we both know, it had backfired. (Horthy’s Hungary was bombed in a similar manner, for the same reasons, and with a similar outcome.)
https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower-101/
Either way, much as with Israel’s response to Syria in 1967, it is worth noting that while being bombed or shelled certainly provides an ironclad casus belli, it does not obligate the country to act on it via a full-scale invasion. I.e. India, Pakistan and the two Koreas both provide fairly recent examples of leadership taking the opposite tack in such circumstances. (Though whether they would have done so if nuclear weapons weren’t involved is…less certain.)
Again, a common narrative, but it rarely appears to address that Bulgaria had managed to stay out of the war until its closing stages – and it had suffered significantly fewer casualties than Finland even in the absolute terms, never mind the relative ones (already possessing >2X the population at the time.) Yes, it ended up losing its independence as a Warsaw Pact state afterwards – however, it also had a significantly more pro-Soviet domestic political climate in the first place, so it is far from given that Finland attempting a more Bulgarian strategy would have been met with the same outcome. (I am not even invoking Spain or Portugal here, since neither were a frontline state.)
As for the “lasting fruits” – not only did the attempt at territorial expansion fail, but it also served as the final straw turning the largest democracies against the country, with Britain outright declaring war. If Lend-Lease was said to be powerful enough to have made the difference between victory and defeat for the USSR, one could only imagine what it would have done for Finland; instead, it ended up turned against it in 1944, when countless Studebeckers drove across the ruins of the VT line.
Yes, it is perhaps hardly surprising that since virtually no meaningful aid from the democratic countries had reached Finland in time to be used for the Winter War (and the aid which did arrive included, e.g. 19th century artillery from France much closer to US Civil War cannons than what is normally thought of as WWII artillery), the Finnish leadership would have lost faith in the ability of other democracies to provide – particularly when e.g. fascist Italy managed to send modern anti-aircraft autocannons. In that case, though, they had allowed their emotions to blind them to the mobilization potential of the US economy and had paid the price for it.
@YARD,
Moreover, even if they were included in the American “batting average”, this would logically necessitate including Russian Empire’s parallel and ultimately similarly militarily successful engagements in the Caucasus as well (much like the genocide of the Native Americans, the Circassian genocide does not happen without military victories setting the stage), so both averages probably go up similarly, and it’s unlikely to alter the relative standing of either.
I mean, yes, I’d entirely agree the same could be said of the Russian Empire too (not just in terms of the Caucasus but also in terms of Siberia, and to a lesser extent Central Asia). After all, Russia did become a world-spanning superpower (just like America and the British Empire), largely through a long series of defeats of much weaker non-European nations, so you could certainly argue that these three countries were all pursuing a massively successful strategy (for some definitions of “successful”), whether or not they’re impressive military powers on a pound-for-pound basis.
Besides noting that this definition of Baathism is far from universal (the Wikipedia page on “Assadism” lists over a dozen academic sources from across several decades all describing it as left-wing – which is independent of the discussion of its merits or lack thereof),
Yes, I agree that Bret’s treatment of the Baathist powers was kind of sloppy and casual. I do think you could make a claim that Baathism had some commonalities with fascism (it would revolve around the “national regeneration through conflict/violence” definition, I guess), but in that you’d have to concede that it was a left-wing variant of fascism as opposed to the right-wing variants in Nazi Germany or elsewhre.
but it rarely appears to address that Bulgaria had managed to stay out of the war until its closing stages – and it had suffered significantly fewer casualties than Finland even in the absolute terms, never mind the relative ones (already possessing >2X the population at the time.)
While I’m certainly not going to defend Finland in WWII, I’m not sure I would consider Bulgaria neutral in the meaningful sense either. Yes, they were formally neutral in the Nazi-Soviet war, but they did cooperate with the Nazis in other ways, so I think it was reasonable for the Soviets, and for anti-fascist Bulgarian forces, to see the Bulgarian regime as part of the broadly defined enemy.
@YARD,
The point about Bulgaria is a bit dishonest: Bulgaria did not border Soviet Union, and as soon as it became physically possible for the Soviet Union to invade Bulgaria, they did this, neglecting Bulgarian attempts at neutrality. A better comparison is Estonia, which took the Soviet side, lost its independence, experienced a semi-genocide of its educated population, and then became a passive battleground between great powers.
The Soviet military doctrine called for attack as the primary means of strategic defence, and the Soviet pre-Barbarossa defence plans were based on invading Finland. Neutrality was not an option – it had been attempted before the Winter War, when Finnish governments maintained a strict neutrality policy and was rewarded by an unprovoked Soviet invasion. The only other possible avenue for security policy after the Winter War, an alliance or union with Sweden, had been prevented by a Soviet ultimatum in summer 1940.
All questions about the morality of Finnish participation are subordinate to the fact that Soviet Union was, objectively, equally bad as, and in the knowledge available to the Finnish government in winter 1940-41, probably worse dictatorship than Nazi Germany.
“I can’t help but wonder ….”
Bret specifically stated why he went with this method: The Spartan myth (stretching back to antiquity) states that Sparta is uniquely good at war, and that Spartan culture made men uniquely good at war. It is hardly mysterious why someone would look at the culture’s track record to help determine if they are, in fact, uniquely good at war. If I say I’m an amazing chess player it’s perfectly reasonable to look at my win/loss ration, both in general and over time.
Two things to bear in mind:
First, Bret discusses other reasons why we should think Sparta wasn’t particularly exceptional at war (such as [in]famously running out of food multiple times within easy march of a friendly town and while fighting in a breadbasket). A culture that claims to be the best at war but which can’t handle logistics fails at being exceptional at war.
Second, Bret does discuss the various groups Sparta went to war against in that essay (and several others). You are correct in stating that a pure win/loss ratio doesn’t say much; maybe Sparta was constantly against people that hit way above Sparta’s weight class! But we see that no, Sparta manages a reasonable percentage of wins against lower-tier groups, but is pretty sad against peer and near-peer polities. And since the Spartan myth is that they’re exceptional at war, a losing ratio against peer and near-peer adversaries is evidence against the myth.
(As a third, Bret does occasionally go into a rather long-winded listing of battles by various groups. I tend to skim over those, but they certainly appear elsewhere in the blog.)
My point isn’t that you’re wrong in your conclusions; my point is that you missed some pretty significant parts of the essay series. If you skip the part where the person explains why they do something a bit unusual OF COURSE it will seem weird that they do it. The blame can hardly be put at the feet of the author, however.
“And yet, somehow, it is now not necessary to point that out regarding all those “rowing in dark, metal armour in the sun” scenes in Nolan’s Odyssey!”
I’ve not seen “The Odyssey”. I would object to portraying folks rowing in armor, on the grounds that it’s a really good way to kill people–as you say, heat stroke is a thing and people knew it (see the Crusades). Armor also isn’t going to be comfortable rowing in, and would likely get damaged by the salt water. Makes more sense to row over in comfortable cloths and protect the armor until you land, at which point you put it on.
But my question is, what’s the point of showing the rowing? In 300 the point is to show that Leonidus is the biggest badass that ever badassed–that he can survive anything under any condition because he’s just that manly and hard. That he’s completely inured to all discomfort, including things that would kill lesser men. That BECAUE Leonidus is so ultra-manly he is therefore morally destined to win any fight (300 equates physical prowess to moral superiority, quite directly; see the “Spartans! What is your occupation!” scene). And as I say elsewhere, this is a thing modern militaries do. Bret specifically posted images from I think the Chinese military to show that this mentality is not purely in the mind of a filmmaker, but something that’s part of actual current military doctrine. (Remember, Bret’s thesis for the essay wasn’t “Sparta is bad”, but rather “Emulating the myth of Spartan excellence is bad and dangerous”.)
Can you say that the rowing scene in “The Odessey” 1) is intended to show that the rowers are ultra-badass and thus morally obliged to win? and 2) is something that current military leaders are doing? If not, than it’s understandable why Bret wasn’t equally harsh to the scene. The scene in 300 exemplifies the entire thesis of the movie and of Bret’s criticism against it; if the rowing scene in “The Odessey” doesn’t, it’s fair to skip over it.
I get the impression that a lot of arguments against the “This Isn’t Sparta” series are based on isolated arguments taken out of context. Which….yeah, if you take them out of context they seem a bit silly. Which is why the first page or so of every blog post on this blog is context, and why a series often starts out with a “Why am I even bothering to do this?” sort of context-giving essay.
Sure; but is it also mysterious as to why someone might be curious regarding what kind of conclusions we would get if we were to apply this same method, which had currently given us the desired outcome (the Spartans were not particularly good at war) in other contexts?
Let me give you an example close to me; the most basic task in climate modelling is to be able to simulate the historical climate we know well, across the period for which we have consistent instrumental records, which is 1850-present. Every proper (i.e. supercomputer-scale) climate model can do it easily and produce the same outcome; however, once you start to ask them to go into the future, small differences begin to add up and their predictions begin to diverge in magnitude over the upcoming decades and especially centuries (while still pointing in the same direction for temperature; precipitation is unfortunately far more complicated to model and there’s considerably less consistency in different regions).
Since we cannot truly know the future, we cannot know which one of them is more accurate without further evidence. Instead, one approach some of us take is to make models simulate climates much further into the past, for which we only have geological evidence. The logic is that if a model ends up with a result that diverges from the such evidence (too hot/cold, too wet/dry, etc.) then it indicates its future predictions would likely also have systematic errors pointing in the same direction, and we need to consider how to compensate for that. (Here’s a paper for anyone curious regarding this subject.)
https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/17/1065/2021/
Now, “the batting average” is clearly not a climate model – but it is nevertheless an analytical approach which presumably intends to illuminate our understanding of the past. Hence, I think it’s a useful “sanity check” to inquire whether its output would still make sense to us if it were applied in other contexts. That reveals whether invoking it makes for a strong argument or a weak one. (Again, as you correctly point out, other arguments are used to support “emulating the myth of Spartan excellence is bad and dangerous” thesis! Even if that method could be demonstrated to be flawed, it does not invalidate those other arguments – but it does help to answer whether he is taking it a bit to [sic] personally and overstates things at times, as Hastings had put it near the beginning of this thread.
It is simply something you notice every single time they are on their ships. (And of course, it’s near-impossible to depict the Sirens or Scylla and Charybdis without rowers being in frame at times.) Granted, you have a point that the lack of an ideological dimension means that it is perhaps not appropriate to invoke a passage from that series, even if it seems to perfectly mirror the situation on its surface. However, criticisms of armour in Rings of Power (i.e. similarly incidental shots revealing that the “mail” is literally painted on sleeves) would appear to be in exactly the same vein as this, so it’s fair to notice this work is not being held to the same standard.
(Admittedly, as Ben L had already reminded me, the “ideological battle lines” over Rings of Power were drawn somewhat similarly to the Odyssey, which would be evidence against a “crude” form of the political bias hypothesis, at least. Although, I also believe there was never remotely as much enthusiasm for RoP – and therefore the interpersonal penalty sustained for being critical of it was also markedly lower.)
“Sure; but is it also mysterious as to why someone might be curious regarding what kind of conclusions we would get if we were to apply this same method, which had currently given us the desired outcome (the Spartans were not particularly good at war) in other contexts?”
Not entirely–AS LONG AS you recognize why the methodology was used in the first place.
Think of it this way: If someone said “X is the greatest football coach of all time!” a reasonable starting point (not end point, but starting point) would be to see if they’d won more games than they’d lost. The best coach of all time should win, right? That is, after all, the point of football! If they were the best coach of all time you’d expect them to win substantially more than they lose, right? If they lose more than they win, that’s pretty damning evidence against the conclusion. Not proof, certainly, but strong evidence.
In contrast, if the claim is “X is really good at teaching new kids fundamentals”, a win/loss analysis isn’t as useful. One can have rock-solid fundamentals and still lose more than they win, as they are not focused on the winning but on improving individual players. And if someone says “X has the best uniforms!” a look at the win/loss ratio is rather silly and beside the point.
“…the most basic task in climate modelling is to be able to simulate the historical climate we know well, across the period for which we have consistent instrumental records, which is 1850-present.”
The GCMs I’m familiar with use OIS-11 to calibrate the model, because 1850-present is not long enough to capture significant climate change. You don’t get the celestial cycles (I can never spell that name), and the entire Holocene is one single interglacial. This doesn’t impact your point at all, just a curious difference in our experiences.
That said, when you look at climate modeling at OIS-11 or present you are fundamentally asking the same question: Does the model accurately reflect reality? Given certain known information, can the model accurately predict conditions in the future? My argument is that you’re doing something different with the win/loss thing with Sparta. If we’re looking at cultures that say they’re superior militarily it makes sense to look at that; however, if we’re NOT looking at cultures that say they’re the best militaries, it does not. It would be fair to look at Alexander the Great’s win/loss ratio (which Bret did); it would be far less fair to look at Henry VIII’s, to give an example.
“It is simply something you notice every single time they are on their ships.”
Okay–we could stop here. You’ve answered the question: The rowing is shown for fundamentally different reasons than the loin cloth. Ergo it’s fitting that the loin cloth scene (which is the entire plot and theme of the movie in miniature) gets a more detailed analysis, and the rowing (which is an insignificant costume choice with no depth at all) gets ignored.
“However, criticisms of armour in Rings of Power….”
Context matters here. LOTR had some of the best fantasy armor ever, going to tremendous detail to get the armor to be viable and accurate (for a given value of “accurate”). They invented a way to make maille for movies, for example. Since RoP has a similar budget if not greater, and is part of the franchise that gave us literally the best armor shown on screen to that point, the failures of RoP’s armor illustrate the frankly insulting lack of concern shown by the production team, in contrast to the deep concern shown by the production team in LOTR.
It was never about the armor, in other words. It was about the abysmal lack of care for the final product. The rather laughably bad armor in RoP is merely one example of this.
Are you arguing that some similarly significant point can be made with The Odessey’s armor? If not, we’re back where we are with the loin cloth scene: You’re looking at the details and ignoring the context of the argument entirely, then blaming Bret for not doing something he never attempted to do in the first place.
This is what I mean when I say it feels like a lot of these critiques are of individual points stripped of context. On the surface it looks like you’re right–armor is armor, right? But if you look at the actual argument being made and the context within which the argument is made, these are fundamentally different questions. They are being used to support fundamentally different conclusions.
A far better argument for your side, by the way, would be the Baulder’s Gate and Game of Thrones discussions of armor. In both the point of the discussion was that movie armor is how people think of the past and egregious failures to even try to be historically accurate cause harm to the public’s understanding of history. The Odessey will paint the public’s perception of the Trojan War, and of Greek warfare in general, for a generation. It would be worth investigating. Not sure if our host will make an essay on that regarding The Odessey or not; we’ll have to wait and see.
If I were to try to give a rationale for why the rowers are shown wearing armour, it would be because the movie never wants us to forget that they are warriors. In other words, being warriors is a core part of their identity, rather than something they do some of the time. (Similarly, to if you ask someone to picture a knight, they’ll probably picture a man in armour, even though knights logically would spend most of their lives out of armour). So, in a sense, it isn’t actually that dissimilar to the “what is your profession?” scene.
Now, from what I understand, the view that being a warrior was an all-encompassing identity actually accords pretty well with the Homeric texts. However, it clashes with, i.e. the scene where Odysseus drafts soldiers by lot, which accords much more with a citizen-soldier model.
So, while I don’t think the silly detail of people rowing in armour is nearly as objectionable as anything in 300, I don’t think it’s exactly ideologically neutral either.
Showing rowers in armour is a stylistic choice, and it didn’t bother me at all because I was watching an epic mythological / fantasy story, not a grounded realistic story.
John Boorman did the same thing in Excalibur, where the knights (both Arthurian and other) wear their plate armour all the time, even for some rather intimate activities.
“So, in a sense, it isn’t actually that dissimilar to the “what is your profession?” scene.”
I was talking about the opening scene with the loin cloth and the wolf, but okay…..
The point of the “What is your profession?” scene was to shame those who were not warriors. It was literally saying “We are morally superior to you lot because we are professional killers and you’re only hobbyists.” Once again, it’s the entire theme of the movie condensed into a few lines of dialogue.
Is that what you are saying the rowers in armor is? The literal theme of the movie, condensed into a costume choice? Because if not, the comparison between the scenes is spurious.
My guess is that they put the rowers in armor for the same reason they put armies into blocks: Because we have a long-established visual language for film, and “men in armor” is how we code for ancient/Medieval militaries. Viewers would be confused to see soldiers NOT in armor; they would wonder why civilians are rowing, or would think the rowers were supposed to be slaves. After all, throughout film-making history slaves have been shown as rowers (think Ben-Hur). Putting the rowers in armor is a visual indication that they’re at least not slaves, they are part of the army. Is it right? No. Is it historically accurate? No. Does it mean the film makers think “warrior” is an all-encompassing identity that we should hold as superior to all others? Probably not. It’s a way to quickly and efficiently signal who these people are and what their status is (humans are REALLY sensitive to such things) without wasting any dialogue.
Dinwar, you should really get around to watching the film if you are going to keep writing comments defending it! That is, it already has one scene where Odysseus’ men take off armour (and put away weapons) – it’s when they enter Circe’s hut (at her insistence, of course).
Except that this framing is fatally undermined by the dialogue, which very frequently goes for the exact opposite! Did the story feel like an epic after lines like “It (or he?) can talk. Why didn’t it/he do it before?/ Do you talk to ants?” (if you haven’t seen it, you probably wouldn’t appreciate that these lines’ delivery also very much aims for “groundedness”.) I have already quoted a passage from Wilson’s review where she makes this point elsewhere in this thread; I don’t feel like doing it again.
You are right on the merits, of course. I forgot I was talking to a geologist and was mostly trying to get across the idea that the major differences between GCMs, such as their ECS, still do not preclude them from being fairly accurate within the bounds of the recent instrumental point. Unfortunately, I do not think this is at all at obvious to many people. (Remember – a third of Americans still claim that what we are seeing now is a natural variation.) No idea how I would have had to phrase my analogy to get the intended point across if I also had to pause to explain oxygen isotope stages in the process…
https://news.gallup.com/poll/708050/climate-change-concern-near-high-point.aspx
My main issue with the “Spartan Batting Average” is that he tries to use it to claim that Herodotus had ideological reasons for claiming that Sparta was uniquely good at war.
The problem is that when you look at the list of battles provided, Sparta does very well before the Peloponnesian Wars, has a winning but not spectacular record during the Peloponnesian Wars, and then absolutely *tanks* after the Peloponnesian Wars.
When does Herodotus write? During the Peloponnesian Wars, that is to say, at a time when the Spartan Batting Average was considerably better than the 50/50 it came out to over the course of their complete history. So, for Herodotus, it would have looked like the Spartans were, in fact, pretty good at war.
Now, that guys like Xenophon wrote about the Spartans like they were war gods is less understandable, since he was writing during the rise of Thebes, but I thought that trying to attribute praise of Sparta’s military prowess primarily to some kind of ideological motivation rather than the facts on the ground at the time was somewhat sloppy argumentation on his part, despite the rest of the series being a pretty solid evaluation of Spartan society, based on what I knew about it previously.
Regarding translations, I shopped around a bit and settled on Fitzgerald’s, as it seems the most beautiful to me, head and shoulders above.
I agree. It’s more lively than Lattimore, less corpulent than Fagles, and less… opinionated than Wilson
Georg Nagy and Martin are the two leading Homeric scholars of the 21st century and they didagree about almost everything. One thing they do agree on is that the Homeric texts were written down only in the 6th century and that before that you could only have heard bards sing episodes in performances back to the 12th century that would be quite different both between performances and over time and that many episodes (e.g., the Cyclops, the archery contest) go ack to the Indo-European culture. So can we stop saying that the Homeric Epics are 8th century works?
Martin West
I think I read it in Walter Ong, but it’s really interesting that he (IIRC) presents evidence that the “bards” of oral tradition have a different view of what “the same” means to them. That is, there are recordings of oral epics, delivered by the same person, who would swear that he was doing the *same* thing each time, but where the recordings show that–to us and our reckoning–that this is not the case.
The monologue where he has “the age of bronze is ending” pissed me off so bad because, Christopher, YOU HAVE NO GODDAMN BRONZE IN YOUR MOVIE. It seems it ended, maybe never began seeing as you’ve decided to continue the tradition of indistinguishable matte black that has been overused since the LotR films.
I have no sympathy for people who are complaining about black/transgender/whatever people in the Odyssey.
But then I have no sympathy for a lot of people who are calling the former stupid. Because many of them have pushed the “Homer is a dead white european male” and “movies/plays/whatever should be culturally authentic (and so black people should be played by black people and white people should not write poc characters” narratives. And “there should not be black people in the Odyssey” is a very simple logical inference from that.
Any chance we should not look at this through any modern mentalités, but through a very foreign-to-us lens, because perhaps Nolan has heard of Julian Jaynes’ weird and wonderful theory?
In any one place and time, the people who constitute the society living there are not identical, they differ from each other in how their minds work, just as they differ in skills and physical attributes. However, this cannot be compared in the same way, only talked about in words, which by itself would wash away minor differences. Moreover, there are (sometimes useful!) fashions whereby some mental features are considered shameful to talk about in polite society, so anyone wanting to get taken seriously will sanewash the things they say and e.g. not admit they are envious but come up with a pretextual motivation. (Again, this can be a somewhat loadbearing feature; the world would be worse if people openly admitted to being driven by “ugly” emotions. But an impartial observer will nonetheless be mislead into thinking such mental features are substantially less common than they are. Furthermore, they will overestimate their badness and extremeness, since people will be known to have them (including for harmless ones) only if they are unable to keep them hidden, or if they are “punks” who do them just to piss off polite society.)
But a fashion and even the underlying theoretical framework can differ between societies. So, someone today reciting a long text may (or may not, depending on person) experience this as their internal voice saying the text along with them saying it out loud. But in another culture, the exact same experience may be described as the voice of an entity separate from this person (since their voice doesn’t always sound much like the actual person’s speaking voice, even internally). And so this culture may consider it perfectly normal to start a poem with “sing, o muse, of…“.
If anything, this is amplified for works of high culture. Even if it came to be known, without causing an immediate scandal, that some prominent figure (let’s say politician for simplicity) e.g. has low-key multiple personality disorder, this wouldn’t be among the details that we would consider fit, never mind important enough, to write down in an Authoritative work. Correspondingly, in a society where it is taken for granted that gods large and small exist and routinely advise people, nobody would go out of their way to say, much less commit to society’s scarce collective memory, that “uh guys actually I don’t receive divine inspiration”.
The issue is that characters in Nolan’s Odyssey clearly have a theory of mind (i.e. Penelope gives Odysseus a distinctive pin so she can tell whether travellers are telling the truth about having seen him, which at least implies she would pass the Sally-Anne test). So (assuming that the linked article is an accurate summary of Jaynes’ argument), that wouldn’t appear to be what Nolan is going for.
I like to imagine that a bunch of the complainers didn’t much care about black Helen, but were really disappointed that they did not get to see a big-budget faithful reconstruction of Mycenean material culture.
I mean, I’m not saying this is true, but I like to imagine it is.
I think part of the reason some missed the theme of Odysseus’ men violating norms while Odysseus himself remains (relatively) innocent, is because the situation with the Cyclops (the first time we really see how Odysseus operates) seems to suggest the reverse. Odysseus’ men seem to mostly just want to get out of there alive, and it’s Odysseus himself who unnecessarily provokes the Cyclops by shooting it with an arrow after they’ve already escaped from the cave (I’m still not sure what he thought he would accomplish with that). I’m not actually sure if this was meant as a deliberate subversion (initially setting up Odysseus as the asshole, only to slowly reveal that his men are much worse), or if this was just messiness due to clashes between the characterization of Odysseus in the original poem, and Nolan’s take on him.
The Cyclops scene is the one I understand least. Polyphemos eats Odysseus’ men who have done him no harm, and then he complains that they fight back? Why is fighting for one’s life *in self-defense* against a man-eating giant considered some sort of norm breaking that deserves punishment (yes he happens to be the son of Poseidon but that doesn’t make it fair or consistent)? My understanding is that this inconsistency is due to Homer, not Nolan (who shortened the scene considerably) and I wonder why nobody else seems to be confised by it.
The giant knights (who I read elsewhere are meant to be Laestrygonians) made me recall your earlier series about how pre-modern iron was made and worked. As you described, this requires a lot of fuel, which seems a bit incongruous with the dense forests where they live. Perhaps magic is involved.
I have to really strongly disagree with the idea that Emily Wilson maybe should have been nicer to the film in order to avoid alienating people who liked it. If a film review doesn’t give the reviewers honest opinion then there’s no reason for it to exist at all. If all that matters is the audience rotten tomatoes score, why have film critics?
There are two sides to this argument.
On the one hand, you’re correct, a film reviewer should say their honest opinions. If the film is bad, they should say that–and give reasons why. The latter is more important to me than the former, because the latter actually helps ME decide if *I* will like it. Some things that other people care deeply about I don’t, and there are things I care deeply about that others don’t.
On the flip side, such things as tact and civility do exist. It’s entirely possible to say you dislike something without bashing it. Unfortunately the internet rewards viciousness, with demonstrably detrimental impacts on society at large. A reviewer that can’t tell someone to go to Hell in such a way as to make them look forward to the trip is an objectively bad reviewer.
The job of a film reviewer as such is to provide, well, a review of the film. There are two goals, one commercial and one academic. The commercial goal is to tell the public what the film is and provide enough information to allow us to determine if we want to see it. They are answering the question “Is this film worth my money?” And to that end, they need to provide enough information to allow a broad audience to make that determination. These are not moral questions, but factual questions.
The academic goal can be more vicious. There the questions are things like “What is this film trying to say?” and “Does this film succeed in saying it?” and “How does this fit into the broader cultural discussion?” Note that all of these can be independent of the quality of the film. And here we enter into moral questions, which have more profound implications for society. Sometimes the movies are actively dangerous to groups, and it’s fair to be vicious calling those out harshly. One who calls for attacks, abuse, and even death of entire groups in an artwork can hardly claim that someone telling them to sit and spin is violating the rules of civility. (I would contend that someone glorifying a culture that horrifically abused entire classes of people also doesn’t get to claim that a harsh, even vicious review violates the rules of civility.)
Indeed! And even before the Laestrygonians appear en-masse (i.e. when we only see their boy at first), I was already puzzled as to where do the Odysseus’ men expect the food to actually come from?
https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/
Even five acres per person is still quite a bit of cleared space that ought to be apparent from quite a distance when multiplied by a (few) dozen or more. Instead, they disembark, go straight into a tall, dense coniferous (I think?) forest and apparently expect to find farms somewhere in the middle of it with no real visual indication of their presence?
Hmm ‘has his skin described as brown more than once’ I would /suggest/ in the context of Tolkien writing in the first half of the 20th century and firmly romanticising the 19th in this context, that implies just tanned in the same way that ‘black’ used to just mean hair colour. There are black (well middle eastern coded) people in LOTR but unfortunately they’re the bad guys.
I do think that one of Wilson’s more cogent critiques is that the movie makes Odysseus less complicated. He’s not wily or clever or artful or any of those things. And I’m not sure it would even be that hard to combine that with the shell-shocked veteran thing Nolan was going for.
Well, you and I would think that, yet for what it’s worth; this had apparently been hard enough that this is now the 2nd adaptation in a row to fail at that. While there are a number of areas where Uberto Pasolini’s The Return is the superior adaptation, it actually leans even harder into stripping those traits from Odysseus to emphasize “shellshock”, as he talks even less than Damon’s version and essentially just sits silently and stares into the fire whenever someone brings up Troy next to him.
It’s a dramatic visage, and Fiennes tries his hardest to sell it, but it’s really not faithful to the text – and, as our own host had pointed out years ago, it’s likely not even accurate to that period! (I.e. “shellshock” probably does not really exist before the advent of mass shelling.)
https://acoup.blog/2020/04/24/fireside-friday-april-24-2020/
I saw this movie earlier and I really didn’t like it, but I’m not sure how much of that was that I found the sound mixing to be at once confusing and physically painful. About 1/3 of the time I was covering my ears and another third I was cupping my hands to them to try and hear what people were saying, and I left the theatre with a headache. Did anyone else have this issue or was this a theatre issue? I want to know if it’s worth watching again.
Haven’t seen it yet but I’ve read/heard others make the same complaint, and it sounds similar to complaints I and others had with “Dark Knight Rises”. It appears to be a cinematography thing.
Nolan believes that if you haven’t elected to watch his films in IMAX, it’s your problem, not his. It is what it is.
https://www.looper.com/1340779/every-christopher-nolan-movie-exact-same-problem-audio-sound-mixing-oppenheimer/
(Remarkably, the author of the above takes Nolan’s side regarding Interstellar – which I and many others consider the apotheosis of Nolan’s detrimental attitude to sound mixing.)
I had a similar problem, and overall, I disliked the film about as much as I liked it (maybe even more) becaus of purely technical mattersa alone. I couldn’t even engross myself in the story and characters because I found the sound and the cinematography way too unpleasant. And it was too long across the board.
I have not yet seen the film,
I enjoyed your review. It confirms my plan to read the more modern translation.
I was somewhat disappointed not to see your views on the actual military side of things. Tome it seems that almost all films reduce ancient combat to uncontrolled masses of men engaged in individual slaughter without any tactics or command/control on the part of generals or officers aside from the initial order to “charge.”
For me only the film to attempt to accurately present tactics of small units and legion size formations is the TV serial Rome. I am far from an expert on the subject…
I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the accuracy or lack thereof, of small unit tactics and legion size formations will not affect whether you enjoy The Odyssey. Or alternatively, the title not being The Iliad is because this is about Odysseus and his voyage home, not the siege of Troy.
There’s really nothing to talk about there – or at least, nothing to talk about in a non-derogatory sense. Well, the one interesting moment was altering the suitors’ massacre so that one of them (I honestly can’t remember not only his name, but if he had any real dialogue before that) succeeds at escaping the hall…and chooses to obey Pattinson’s command to run to the room upstairs where all the suitors’ weapons were moved, breaking a hole in the floor with a polearm and tossing weapons to the rest (until he is finally killed by Telemachus – whom he manages to knock down earlier but then inexplicably elects not to slit his throat and goes back to tossing stuff into the room because apparently the one thing the ancient epic needed was a modern application of Plot Armour.)
Nevertheless, it’s an interesting moment, both visually and tactically – even if I am rather unsure of the likelihood he wouldn’t have simply ran to the harbour the moment he left the hall. I guess he might have expected that if the suitors managed to overwhelm Odysseus, then the survivors would have given him a great share of the palace’s riches – but the suitors in general are characterized as the epitome of low-cohesion fighters unlikely to make such a decision individually. (I suppose that if we are judging it by Nolan’s standards, it is at least not on the level of those guys in Tenet who stood, fought and died for a boss who literally wanted to end their/our world. Sure, it’s unlikely they knew of his goal, but nevertheless, their motivation to fight opponents as well-trained as the main characters appearing out of nowhere for purely mercenary reasons ought to have been limited – and outright non-existent if they could have been convinced of the actual purpose of what they are guarding.)
Otherwise, the fall of Troy is basically in line with what you describe. The other big group battle scene, vs. the Laestrygonians, is basically the Ithacans running away as soon as they see them while they try to cut down as many as they can (and Odysseus snipes one or maybe two through gaps in armour at the throat.) The smaller fight vs. the suitors (the ones attempting to intercept Telemachus) is over in like 5 seconds. (That scene is also another thing Pasolini’s The Return handled better, I would say – only two die there vs. six or so in Nolan’s version, but we actually see the second, wounded one, get stabbed on the ground with the camera taking his perspective, Odysseus towering over him – and then the camera zooming out as Odysseus starts to walk away, and we see suitor’s blood literally foam on the sand. Bafflingly, Nolan very much does not shy away from gore and brutality in the earlier scenes of the Cyclops (can’t remember if his name, Polyphemus, is actually ever said out loud) devouring some of Odysseus’ men, half a torso at a time, so it’s hard to explain why more conventional violence is treated far more cursorily.)
P.S. I am also pretty sure I witnessed a Trojan get shot with an arrow through a metal breastplate at least once – i.e. exactly the kind of thing our host drew attention to in one of his absolute earliest blogs when it happened in LOTR.
https://acoup.blog/2019/06/21/collections-punching-through-some-armor-myths/
That wasn’t one of the suitors; that was Melanthius, Odysseus’ cow-herding slave, who had thrown in with service to Antinous and been abusive towards Eumaeus and Argos the dog. Continuing to serve will come from some combination of “Antinous may reward me”, “Odysseus will punish me” and “where else am I supposed to go”.
OK, I’ll admit to failing to keep track of this character. (He’s also Melantho’s brother, right? Trying to recall if we see them interact much.) On the flip side, this means all of that Telemachus’ weapon training we were shown early on (in scenes which appear to be another example of Dune influence, since the blog had already noted weapon training was rarely practiced in the Ancient Greece – and Spencer McDaniel also makes the same point in the already-linked post) merely allows him to overcome a slave? (and with visible effort, at that.)
https://acoup.blog/2026/01/16/collections-hoplite-wars-part-ivb-training-hoplites/
Moreover, Telemachus’ arc is really “be young and clearly lacking in leadership experience – train in combat (a bit more) – sail to Sparta – talk to Menelaus and Helen – sail back – get ambushed and rescued by Dad – kill a cow herd – become King”?! When Smith-Harris had commented with her criticism of the status of women in the film, I suspected a lot of that was motivated by this particular alteration of the tale (rather than Odysseus reclaiming his place, Telemachus gets the throne with no apparent oversight in spite of really limited evidence of having grown into the role, and Penelope, with her 20 years of experience, nevertheless immediately sails off into the sunset alongside Odysseus “as is her place”) – and I guess understanding Telemachus did not even have the “prestige” of killing a free man who might have had proper combat experience at the apex of his arc as he’s nevertheless considered “worthy” would only add to that sour impression.
I’m really surprised the audience reaction was so overwhelmingly positive; I couldn’t wait for the movie to end (and I had to wait a long time.) And not for any high-minded analytical reason, I just found it really boring. The dialogue was rough and the world totally failed to suck me in; maybe the combination of being grounded but also hazy and dreamlike just landed in a very strange place for me.
The issue wasn’t historical inaccuracy, but just that the world felt really empty. They keep talking about civilization ending, but what civilization? Some darkly lit plain stone buildings and vague gestures at Greek religion. They’re woried about losing writing but I don’t think anyone reads or writes a single time in the film. And trying to tie it into the actual Late Bronze Age Collapse felt really weird with its lack of historical grounding.
But, I’m glad other people liked it. Its awesome to see the biggest movie of the summer be based on classical epic poetry. The Kalevala starring Hugh Jackman coming 2028?
No, not really.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/aug/03/spiderman-brand-new-day-global-box-office
And even if the above were disregarded for one reason or the other, this Odyssey might well still end up well behind Toy Story 5; after all, it grossed $124.5 million in the US and Canada and $264.1 million worldwide over its opening weekend vs. the latter’s $159.7 and $310.2 million, respectively. Admittedly, Nolan’s film has been gaining at a faster rate (it’s apparently at $911.4 million now whereas Pixar’s film is at $1.065 billion – and since the latter released a month earlier, it’s entirely plausible Nolan could overtake it yet in global receipts, though probably not in the domestic ones.)
Again, though, this most recent Spider-Man is already at >$927 million. As much as many of us might be eager to declare the era of the superhero at the cinema dead and buried (and the recent Supergirl failing to even break into top 10 for this summer in the US’ box office, alongside a number of earlier superhero underperformances certainly gave many reason to believe that), it appears the cinema landscape is instead getting reset to where it was about 20 years ago, when the audiences had consistently shown up for Spider-Man and for Batman (even the most recent film with Pattinson, which I thought was going to get dismissed as unnecessary and literally never heard discussed in my social circles, had in practice easily outperformed Gunn’s Superman, with ~$772M B.O. vs. ~$619M) and I guess for X-Men (Marvel’s upcoming reboot will test that theory) and cared fairly little for the other cape-wearers. (Unless it was a star vehicle like Will Smith’s Hancock, that is. A film whose reception could be charitably described as “mixed” and which few seem to remember nowadays – yet which had beaten both the original Iron Man in that year and</strong the most recent Superman at the B.O (even before accounting for inflation, which makes the comparison even less favorable to Gunn.*))
Having said all that, BY FAR the most influential story of this summer is not going to be the success of Spider-Man or Toy Story sequels (long priced in by every credible analyst) or that of The Odyssey (again, not many in the industry thought the culture war had seriously threatened its prospects), but rather, that of Obsession and Backrooms, the two cheap horror movies (Backrooms is priced at <$10M, which is a fair amount for the genre but a small fraction of tentpole budgets, while Obsession cost a mere ~$750k) humiliating a Star Wars film, which grossed just under $350M at the global B.O (and much less at home), whereas these two are at >$460M and at ~$390M, respectively. (Admittedly, that Star Wars film was The Mandalorian and Grogu, apparently a wholly unnecessary conclusion to the TV series – yet still an incredible achievement, particularly if you remember how The Mandalorian was once feted as “the only good modern Star Wars” in the wake of The Last Jedi. (Granted, that was pre-Andor and pre- that series’ own culture war.)
Throw in the way these two had also beaten Spielberg’s most recent attempt to reclaim his E.T./Close Encounters of the Third Kind glory days, Disclosure Day and yet another unnecessary live-action Disney remake, Moana**, plus beating the Zootopia 2 cartoon at the U.S. B.O. (though that one did better globally) and easily crushing a few other would-be tentpoles like the aforementioned Supergirl, Mortal Kombat II or Masters of the Universe, and account for their incredible profit margins (a film is usually considered to have earned a profit in the theater, before its home platform afterlife begins, if it earns >2.5X its budget – these earned >61X and >39X, respectively) and well, the foreseeable direction of the industry looks less like Kalevala and more like these two.
(For what it’s worth: I didn’t initially intend to see either in the cinema, but after my mixed response to this Odyssey and realizing that Obsession is still in the cinemas here, 10 weeks after it first released, I finally went for its only screening of the day – and found almost as many people as were at my Odyssey screening. I very quickly understood why – while I wouldn’t call it the best horror/thriller of the recent years (Bring Her Back, Late Night with the Devil, Smile 2 and perhaps the original Black Phone are a few comparable-ish films I would consider altogether superior – and the terribly commercially unlucky Grafted was nearly as good), it is undoubtedly very strong for what it is. I.e. by and large, The Odyssey‘s dialogue is not even in the same archipelago. Subjectively, I would also say it “deserved” to go viral much more than e.g. last year’s Weapons, which I despised.)
*Since a lot of people criticizing Gunn’s version online are Snyderites, I am unfortunately obligated to clarify that I have always despised Snyder’s version and I think Gunn’s take is a marked improvement over that. I just also think that it’s horrifically overstuffed, so much as I appreciated a lot of what it was going for, I also found myself just waiting for it to be OVER half an hour before an actual ending. The last time I recall admiring a film and being bored by it in equal measure was probably with Ava DuVernay’s Origin.
**Again, truly remarkable when you recall that these uniformly unnecessary live-action remakes had routinely grossed around a billion worldwide, and the most recent example, Lilo & Stitch, was the highest-grossing film in the US 12 months ago, only beaten by Ne Zha 2 worldwide and Zootopia 2 later on. Further, in the same year, How to Train Your Dragon remake might have “only” grossed half of that – yet it still passed Gunn’s Superman at the global B.O. Admittedly, Webb’s Snow White remake was the same year and fared even worse than this Moana (which many attributed to the casting of Ziegler, but both How to Train Your Dragon and The Odyssey suggest Gal Gadot was far more relevant) but it very much looked like an exception – whereas it might now be a harbinger of an end of this era of remakes..
Since WordPress has no edit button, a correction: “plus beating the Zootopia 2 cartoon at the U.S. B.O. (though that one did better globally)” was meant to say Minions & Monsters; so far, that grossed ~168M in the US/Canada (only a little less than The Mandalorian and Grogu’s $177M), whereas Backrooms is at ~$197M and Obsession is at $262M to date. Globally, however, Illumination’s latest had comfortably outperformed Backrooms ($450M vs. $390M) but is currently behind Obsession ($475M and counting); since both remain in the cinemas, it’s unclear which one will ultimately pass the other.
Absolutely no doubt which one is more profitable, of course; though since Minions & Monsters cost a “mere” $85M (vs. e.g. $250M of this Odyssey or of Toy Story 5), it is nevertheless very profitable by “normal movie” standards – merely not as profitable as this one breakout hit or as the historical norm for that series, which is currently the most profitable animated franchise ever, with a combined B.O. of >$6 billion across 7 films.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_animated_films#Highest-grossing_animated_franchises_and_film_series
I think it’s hard to gauge any trends for superhero movies from Spider-Man, because I think Spider-Man is beloved in a manner distinct from the superhero norm.
The concept of putting temptation in front someone to make them fail really badly, like the Greek gods did to Odysseus’ men, is not wholly alien to English. Consider the phrase, “We’ll give them enough rope to hang themselves.”
It’s also a frequent premise of horror fiction, particularly in the recent years! As I describe above, the greatest hit of the year (in both cost-to-profit terms and in terms of virtually nobody expecting it) had been Obsession – and whoever (or, more likely, whatever) manufactures “One Wish Willows” and leaves them in stores for mere $7 in that story only appears motivated in luring people to disaster – any entity with self-interest would have used this power to alter the world in far grander ways.
Two years earlier, The Substance could also be said to fall into this territory – although the titular item has enough trappings of being a physical thing that could exist in the real world and be manufactured for purely commercial reasons that it’s a lot more debatable whether this was necessarily the intention (to said story’s detriment). There had also been a (truly dreadful) The Monkey (adaptation of a Steven King story about a wind-up toy which causes someone in the vicinity to die Final Destination-style once activated, and so tempts people into using it in the hope it’ll end those they hate, but generally kills anyone but the intended target.)
To reach back for earlier, less acclaimed examples, the trashy 1990s Leprechaun horror films generally had his victims wish on his gold for something, and actually get it – only for him to show up a few hours later and turn the wish into a set-up for a ghastly demise. Late 1990s Wishmaster trilogy had been even more blatant regarding the same. And the final (to date) film of Richard Kelly, best known for his debut Donnie Darko (IMO overrated on its own, but a pivotal part of post-2000 culture as the inspiration for Life is Strange; that game might not have ever existed without it) had been 2009’s The Box, where people are tempted to press a button inside said mysterious box to instantly kill a random person anywhere in the world and receive a million USD for it.
Or, if one wants a wholly non-supernatural example: everyone in Squid Game is tempted by the completely material reward, knowing that statistically, they are highly unlikely to survive and receive it. (In a marked difference from most other examples of the “death game/battle royale” genre, where the participants usually had the choice made for them in one way or the other.) This had a perfect real-life coda when someone made Squid Game cryptocurrency then rugpulled it. As many have pointed out, one person getting all the money and the rest joining in to lose everything had been the truest way to live out the spirit of the show.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Squid_Game_cryptocurrency_scam
One of my keenest pleasures is watching pompous mediocrity go cannibal on each other. Popcorn time!
Whilst there are excellent translations of Homer out there: Pope, Cowper, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Fagles, Chapman of course… Wilson isn’t one of them. She is doing the standard schtick of trying to cover up mediocrity with controversy. Hence her attempting to make Helen into a Stronk Wamman Wid Ajansay. Hence Wilson’s translation claims Helen is hounded, whereas of course the phrase that Homer uses, “dog-faced, dog-eyed,” is one of his strongest condemnations. It really does translate as “shameless bitch”.
This is easy for anyonewho knows anything about the poems. The two characters referred to as godlike in Homer are Achilles and Helen and it’s not a compliment. By “godlike” he means the Greek gods, which is to say so insanely powerful they can do whatever they want whenever they please, no matter what devastation it causes to anybody else. It means that they’re completely irresponsible. Achilles’ power is violence while Helen’s is sexual
(The ancient Bronze Age Greeks were terribly unenlightened. Do you know they never even _heard_ of Dworkin?).
For the record, I was against this sort of nonsense even back with Troy (2004) which had Paris never see combat (right) and Hector Mankiller say that there was nothing glorious about it (riiiiiiggght).
Nolan foolishly went along with that and then she stabs him in the back. I love it. Nolan boy should have read more Homer. He warns you about trusting dog-faced women.
Now let’s not all dance around here. The subtext, practically text, of all this, is racial politics. Many see Homer not just as an essential part of Greek culture and heritage but of white European culture and heritage and have little patience with seeing it appropriated.
But wait! (I hear you cry. And wail.) White identity? We can’t have that! That’s horrid and hateful and mean!
Well maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t, but either way it’s tough beans. This doesn’t come out of nowhere. This comes after decade after decade of complaining that such and such a thing was too white, this was too white, and that was too white, et cetera, et cetera. A quick poke around Devereaux’s university found enough specious drivel about “NC State’s Connections to White Supremacy”, “Deconstructing Whiteness”, readings of Robin DiAgelo’s godawful “White Fragility”….
(that last one is particularly hilarious. DiAngelo demands all whites be constantly aware of their own whiteness – got what you were asking for!)
There’s an old saw about race being a social construct. Well, you guys constructed this. I’m not saying that white racial identity should exist as a matter of principle. I’m just saying it exists as a matter of fact. You asked for it. You argued for it, and you spent decades creating it. Now suck it up and deal with it.
Now, me, personally? I would vastly prefer universal cosmopolitanism. But I just _love_ Schadenfreude. So I am going to sit back, munch some popcorn and watch the infighting.
Let me make sure I understand your argument:
One That Wilson’s translation is flawed and that this is somehow best exemplified by the translation of “dog-eyed”, a word that she never actually translated because it doesn’t fit into her scansion?
Two That somehow the depiction of Helen is the most clear and pivotal example of how Nolan is bowing to the Left, despite the fact that she’s barely in the movie?
Three That Nolan made that movie specifically to appeal to Leftists and that these are represented by Wilson, so that it’s meaningful that Wilson “stabs him in the back” by publishing a review, which is read by fewer people than the amount of people who pay to see his movie?
Four That somehow Nolan should have foreseen this based on the fact that Helen is dog-eyed. This is a very strange argument to make, because you just previously argued that Helen is unique and special, and thus not comparable, not even to other women within the same text. Therefore, what exactly is the measure by which Wilson is comparable to this “god-like” figure so that Nolan should have been able to apply the lesson from Helen to Wilson?
Five That despite your long attempt at explication, this is apparently not relevant because this is a discussion about race instead of gender. If it’s irrelevant, why did you argue so strongly to establish your position?
Six That the presence of training material on the website of his university regarding racial equity is indicative of the political bias of an adjunct teaching there. I fail to see the relevance.
Seven That these Leftist materials are to be blamed for the current outcry around race, because they construct race by talking about it. I see two very big weak points in this argument that I’d like you to address:
Seven A Why has only training material about racial equity the power to construct race, but not the writing of racists? If “White Fragility” constructed race, why didn’t “The Bell Curve”?
Seven B Why is writing by politically not well connected authors the most important factor for constructing race, and not the history of race being used in laws and their enforcement? Shouldn’t we look at things like anti-miscegenation laws, Dredd Scott and race-based slavery to figure out why race is such an important factor in American society? Or maybe the ::checks notes:: sitting president of the United States clearly shaping immigration along racial lines?
Eight That your personal commitment to mutli-culturalism is best expressed by constantly pointing at the people you’re supposedly allied with and going “You’re doing it wrong, and that the Right is deranged is your fault!”
My dear @Alien@System,
You do not need to ask what I am saying when I have just said it, when it is hanging right there, white on grey, for you and anyone to read what I say.
The only reason you phrase it that way is to restate and distort what I say so you can have something easier to attack. Proof: your entire post. You brought up Left and Right, not I. So, shhh 🙂 If you want to know what I am saying you can read my writing where I am saying it.
The only argument that you bring up, that is worth taking seriously, is about things like segregation. You prove my point: all that was essential to constructing _black_ racial identity. I used to say that I never met blacks in Africa, though I met Zulu, Xhosa, Kikuyu etc.
The point is that, until quite recently, a post-racial or non-racial society looked like an ideal we might have. It was de rigeur on all sides of the political spectrum, and also the culture. I was watching old documentaries from the 80s and 90s and was struck by how unselfconsciously everyone assumed that a united mankind was the obvious ideal to strive for. Today, white identity is quite explicit, and it is a cultural and political force. This isn’t some survival from the dark past, it is a new – very new – thing formed in reaction to establishment stupidity.
I have no ability to affect this, one way or the other. All I can do is not lie about it. So I am going to stay honest, much popcorn and laugh at your self-caused misfortunes 🙂 To paraphrase Mencken, I believe that intellectuals don’t know what they are asking for but do deserve to get it, good and hard
Your responses on this, and other, posts are consistently demeaning to other commenters. There is a way to engage with others without writing all these not to veiled insults and personal attacks.
Please be better. You can argue your point without ridiculing the person you are responding to. A change on your side that will also invite others to take your own posts seriously, turning a mud slinging contest back into an interesting discussion.
One thing I find somewhat amusing about this is that, a while ago, back when he first came here, he was already acting that way towards other commenters, but was, for a while, apparently trying to suck up to Bret himself.
Again, where is your argument that the arising of white supremacy as a political force is down to the writing of people trying to achieve racial equity? Why are you in favour of documentaries praising the idea of a multi-cultural, inclusive society, but proudly state that you will enjoy retribution being meted out to the people who are attempting to bring about this society?
I am going to say again: I am not interested in playing your silly game where you rewrite what I say so you can deliberately misunderstand me 🙂 Not playing, okay? 🙂
Case in point, who said anything about “white supremacy”? Only you. The whole second part of your comment is just more of the same rewriting and deliberate misunderstanding.
Tata for now. If you want to engage with what I actually write, let me know
Very well, let us aside the word “supremacy” and look at your claim again. So your argument is that “white” as a political category is a recent phenomenon and constructed by people talking about racial equity.
You claim that all previous race-based policies served only to create the category “Black”, but not the category “White”. This is not a credible argument, because a category can also be defined as negative space, as “Everything except these things”. If “Black” is a legal status with codified worse treatment, then by simple logical inference “Not Black” is also a legal status with *better* treatment.
And to head off the immediate counter-argument that “Not Black” is not equivalent to “White” because it includes people from other places than Africa, note that there is the Chinese Exclusion Act or the Japanese Interment Camps which were materially worse treatment enforced on these groups. So there is some overlap between all these negative spaces that constructs a privileged group that is equivalent to the group “White”.
And this also affects the time period you consider so relevant. It’s not a stretch to notice that a presidential candidate (and later president) who goes out of his way to denigrate black people, Muslims, Chinese people and Mexicans is defining his political constituency through negative space, and that he only considers people who are not in any of such categories (i.e. white people) worthy of political power.
But there’s actually a much bigger problem with your whole theory, which is that you assume that “White” had to be constructed in the early 00’s. Why then has it been a constant entry on the US census form since 1930, if it was not a salient political group? A form you’re forced to fill out is a much more immediate source for the social construction of a group than an author writing a book.
Correction, 1790, not 1930. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/11/03/the-changing-categories-the-us-has-used-to-measure-race/
You are overthinking and overarguing things.
I said that white identity now exists as a matter of fact. Even 20 years ago, it was normal for whites to think of themselves in terms of other categories – to think in terms of racial identity is was taboo.
What changed?
20 years of stupidity, of the kind of morondom we now call “woke”. That is what changed. 20 years of especially young whites being reviled as whites. It is absolutely idle to pretend that this happened by people suddenly thinking that the Asian exclusion act was a good idea; no, what happens is a young white reads one too many articles accusing him of being the root of all evil, and decides “Fuck it”.
Pop culture is particularly important. There has been a tiresome playbook for at leas a decade that goes something like this: 1) Realize you are mediocre, 2) make mediocre or awful product in a previously beloved franchise or setting (Doctor Who, Lord of the Rings), 3) Cry about racism & sexism when people challenge it.
You might say that these are minor matters and on that basis the new white identity doesn’t “deserve” to exist. Well, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it”. It exists. What are you going to do about it? There isn’t anything you can do.
I will here quote from “Screwtape proposes a toast”:
“Meanwhile, as a delightful by-product, the few (fewer every day) who will not be made Normal or Regular and Like Folks and Integrated increasingly become in reality the prigs and cranks which the rabble would in any case have believed them to be. For suspicion often creates what it expects. (“Since, whatever I do, the neighbors are going to think me a witch, or a Communist agent, I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, and become one in reality.”)”
“Suspicion often creates what it expects” – when you have a culture that yells that, in effect, that a taste for good music, or dance, or literature, or science, is an incurable proof of white identity, you create what you condemn (think I am joking? Just google “science too white”, “ballet too white”, “classics too white” etc)
Your comment about Trump makes my point. Trump is definitely comfortable with the new white identity. And he also increased his party’s share of the nonwhite vote by an unprecedented margin. Because the new identity is reactive and defensive, not supremacist and oppressive.
There is absolutely nothing you can do about this. Or me for that matter. That is why I am going to just munch popcorn and laugh from the sidelines.
You’re forcing yourself to not see something that is there and are putting the blame on the victims.
Yes, it’s correct there has been a pattern that mediocre works by minority creators have been defended on the basis of the critics being racist and misogynist. Which is because there’s been a pattern of minority creators being viciously and disproportionally attacked for creating works of any quality, and where their perceived failures were immediately used to argue for the continued exclusion of everyone of their kind from whatever field they were in. You yourself engage in this when you advise Nolan to read more Homer so he learns to stay away from women. Why exactly is Wilson’s gender the most relevant part of her character to you in this situation?
Where you are right in a descriptive matter, but fail to convince anyone as for the cause is the fact that yes, the political identifications can shift, and that they did shift somewhat over the time frame you specify. But it’s not because of what academics wrote or how people defended their work, but political strategy.
In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, the Republican party followed the advice of Lee Atwater and settled on an electoral strategy that only talked about race indirectly by pretending it was about personal freedoms and economic issues. Note for example how in response to the LA race riots, Dan Quayle gave a speech about “family values” instead of actually anything relevant – the not-so-hidden message of course being that black families are just inherently worse. (Democrats unfortunately fell for it too, with both Clinton and Obama favorably mentioning the Moynihan report which did the exact same thing). And then Trump comes out of the woodwork, first by openly questioning the birth certificate of the first black president and then of course famously being an out-and-open racist on the campaign trail, and shatters the facade and makes race relevant again.
And yes, with the last election the salient identification has shifted, and again we don’t need to look for some book-based explanation. The Trump campaign openly said that they were angling to focus on masculinity, to throw white women under the bus to hopefully attract colored men to their cause.
Which is why your conclusion “There is nothing you can do” is so hollow. You’re conceding the fight by pretending fists don’t exist, while your opponent is actively punching you. We can fight back against these movements if we want, and the very works you deride as being “woke” are part of how we do it.
(Also, methodology note: What happens if you type “science too woke”, “ballet too woke”, “classics too woke” into Google? And how do we know which of those positions is the one making a coherent argument?)
> You’re forcing yourself to not see something that is there and are putting the blame on the victims.
Once again, please respond to what I actually write. I said nothing about “blame”, I said ‘Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.’ I said, and say again, that white identity doesn’t exist now as a matter of principle, but simply as a matter of fact. It’s where we are, we’re stuck with it, what are we going to do about it? Put a pin into that, I’ll be back later.
You bring up Dan Quayle and make my point for me. He talks about healthy families, you say that’s obviously anti-black. Now, there was a very long time that those on the Right were incensed and would talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations, and endlessly invoke Dr King’s dream. _Now_ you have more and more going, “Oh, being pro-family is anti-black? *shrug* If you say so; I can live with that”
Which is what is wrong about your stuff about “victims”. It isn’t victims of injustice that caused this mess, but pompous nonentities.
Question: who was it who said that essential qualities of white culture were “punctuality”, “responsibility”, “hard work” and so on? The brain-dead mandarins at the Smithsonian did.
So, like I say: I don’t like this new racial politics and culture, but we are where we are. What, exactly, am I supposed to do here? Get all waggy finger like you and Devereaux, saying that this new white identity is horrid and mean? That just makes it worse, not least because everyone can see the hypocrisy. Should I say that two wrongs don’t make a right and appeal for the salvation of their souls? Trouble is, I’m no Jesus of Nazareth or Gautama Siddharta. So, I just choose to get a big thing of popcorn and laugh.
“who was it who said that essential qualities of white culture were “punctuality”, “responsibility”, “hard work” and so on? The brain-dead mandarins at the Smithsonian did.”
What a curious statement to make. I don’t think you could ever be more wrong. The supposed superiority of white people has been the drum that racists have been beating for the entire history of the US. Even during your supposed glory days of the 80’s and 90’s, people were saying so. “The Bell Curve” was published in 1995.
So again your explanation has exactly the same hole I asked you to fill four posts ago, which is that you claim that certain scholars have the power to somehow immediately create a white identity by publishing material on racial equity, but that politicians, news media and out-and-out proud racists publishing books about it do not.
@Alien,
> What a curious statement to make. I don’t think you could ever be more wrong.
Yo. You don’t know do you? Please, please, please just google “Smithsonian white culture poster”.
I am not making any of this up. Back in 2020, the Smithsonian produced a poster, called “Aspects & Assumptions of Whiteness & White Culture” This literally listed, as examples:
– The nuclear Family; father, mother, 2.3 children as the ideal social unit
– Hard work is the key to success
– Work before play
– Plan for tomorrow
– Delayed gratification
– Be polite
As icing on the cake, note that this was done by the sub-division called the “National Museum of African American History and Culture “. In 2020.
I am not making any of this up. Go and see. You can disagree with my conclusions, but you can’t say this didn’t happen.
This is why I say that the current white identity isn’t some hoary survival from the rancid past. It is a strictly modern reaction. Which is why it is far more widespread among the young than the older generations.
Could you please at least put some intellectual effort into arguing for your point? Right now you’re seriously reducing your argument to “The cause of the political shift taking place since 2008 is this poster in the Smithsonian from 2020.”
And this is not me reading too much into your words. The context of the statement is clearly meant to be read that if not for the Smithsonian saying such things, white resentment-based identity would not be a thing. And similarly, you several times said the scholars working on racial equity “deserve it”, which implies that they have responsibility, which in turn implies that they are the major or sole causal factor. And I ask you again: What is your counterargument to my point that we should look at the political rhetoric of the racist, instead of the far less widely circulating work of anti-racism scholars?
This poster is dumb, sure, but that does not make you right. We do not need to talk about a poster from 2020. At this point, the political shift you blame primarily on efforts of scholars being concerned with racial equity was already over a decade old, and Donald Trump had been spewing racist rhetoric for five years from every news channel he could get on. And so had Ben Shapiro. And Charlie Kirk. And the entire lineup of Fox News. So I ask you once more: What is your counterargument to this?
My dear @Alien,
> Could you please at least put some intellectual effort into arguing for your point?
Bruh, I could quite easily write – and have – a 40 page analysis with examples and sources and so on. Heck, the last time we locked horns, I tore apart Devereaux’s comment on classic’s twitter by just looking at the counts he referenced and showing that they did not say what he said.
But this is a _comment’s section_. So I rely on the illustrative example. My argument is that this new white identity is _new_. It’s not some survival from the past, but formed in reaction to really recent stupidity by the establishment. And you don’t get much more establishment than the Smithsonian!
> And similarly, you several times said the scholars working on racial equity “deserve it”,
Actually, what I wrote is that, to paraphase Mencken, that intellectuals don’t know what they are asking for, but do deserve to get it good and hard.
I stand by that. I absolutely love seeing braindead intellectuals being bent over and given the full Al-Zutt (metaphorically speaking). Let me give you one little example, since you have invoked the Evil Orange One.
Here is something you don’t know: his administration, via Marco Rubio, helped broker a peace treaty between Rwanda and the Congo. Do you know how many people died in that hideous conflict? Well over six million. Do you know how this started?
With the Rwandan genocide which was given the green light by Bill Clinton, one of the worst Presidents in US history. And after the Tutsi had rallied at the point of annihilation and driven the Interahamwe out into the Congo, Clinton and all the Good People and International Agencies prevented them from finishing the job, but kept supplying “refugee camps” which were in fact staging posts for raids on nearby Tutsi communities. Favourite tactic of these maniacs: kill a woman’s entire family, brand her, rape her, and send her back with a rapist’s child in her. That is what Clinton set loose, when he wasn’t bombing Sudan’s only pharmaceutical plant to save his hide during impeachment.
But how can that be? All the Good People, all the Intellectuals ™ say that he was only persecuted for sex by uptight Republicans. That is to this _day_ the position of the Intellectuals.
These would be the same intellectuals who blocked any attempt to stop the Darfur genocide, saying it all had to be multilateral and through the UN. And so 400,000 were murdered and far more reduced to slavery. The Good People also cheered Obama’s destruction of Libya, which now has slave markets where you can buy an adult African male for two hundred bucks.
Black lives don’t matter, one might say.
Except to – hah! – the Evil Orange One who is one the very few to acknowledge what is happening in Nigeria.
But how can that be? All the Good People vote for Clinton and Obama. Surely, they can’t be wrong – certainly not so wrong as to, gasp, vote for the Evil Orange One! What’s a little genocide here or there in comparison?
So, no, I am not interested in your pearl clutching about the Orange One’s hurty words. Ending that horror in the Congo is way more important than hurty words. Saving the Christians of Nigeria from the fate of Christians in the Sudan is way more important than hurty words.
This is the other part you don’t seem to get. Like I say, modern day white identity is a reaction, and part of it is a reaction to the “scholars working on racial equity” are transparently full of shit. They are the biggest gang of fakes, frauds, phonies and hypocrites one could find in a month of Sundays.
That is the reaction I mean. People do not like being hectored by hypocrites. Even if they don’t know the full extent of the crimes I mention here, they can sense falsity a mile off.
Just so we’re entirely clear, Trump is exonerated by a peace deal for the Kongo from doing all of the following:
– Very blatantly restricting immigration to specific white people based on completely spurious arguments
– Opening literal concentration camps for his blatantly racist attempt at deportations of immigrants, where his rhetoric is transparent that he does not care for actual legal status
– Starting a war of aggression against Iran
– Ending USAID, thereby killing 14 million people
That is your position?
Also, it’s so funny that you protest when I say the word “supremacy”, but immediately assume that all Democrats, at every point in history, are interested in racial equity so that a discussion about the impact of racial equity scholars can be “won” by you listing all the bad things that Bill Clinton has done. I don’t care for Bill Clinton. Pour gasoline over him and set him on fire. I don’t need to defend him. I’ll hand you a lit copy of the Moynihan report as a starter if you like.
By your own logic, Bill Clinton is by the way entirely irrelevant to the discussion because his presidency predates the shift in political camps that you are talking about.
And I note you completely failed to address any of the other people I mentioned. And you also still owe me an actual example from the early 2000’s of scholars saying such evil things about white people like “White people work hard”.
It is very notable that you keep pivoting in the discussion to completely irrelevant things. Helen being called “god-like” has to mean she’s bad because Hector is called a “lion”. Donald Trump’s rhetoric isn’t racist because Bill Clinton is bad. Racist policies in the US didn’t create a “White” identity because there’s no “Black” identity in Africa. None of these are in any way relevant to your initial assertion.
@Alien,
>Just so we’re entirely clear, Trump is exonerated by a peace deal for the Kongo
First of all, learn to spell. It’s “Congo”, not “Kongo”. This is a real place, with real people, not the setting of some Victorian swashbuckler fantasy
Second, again, respond to what I write or don’t expect me to take you seriously. _You_ said “exonerated”, not I. I have no power to exonerate anyone.
I pointed out that present white identity is very much a reaction, and part of what it is a reaction to is hectoring by “racial equity scholars” who are transparently full of shit to anyone who does the slightest investigation. There are a dozen different ways to play this, but I chose to use the most brutal: the “scholars” engage in bigmouth hectoring while ignoring, or excusing, or in many cases enabling, the worst horrors.
Like I say, one can play this many different ways, but they all come down to the same thing: for the last twenty years, when you have someone wailing about “racism” or, especially, “whiteness”, it is very good odds that that person is a fraud, a phony or a huckster. And that produces a reaction.
Just as an aside: I said that I do not much like the new white identity, though I understand it. The reason I don’t like it is that it makes it much harder to make the case for internationalism and solidarity.
So, answer what I actually write, not what you want me to write, or don’t expect a reply.
@Alien@System
“And I ask you again: What is your counterargument to my point that we should look at the political rhetoric of the racist, instead of the far less widely circulating work of anti-racism scholars?”
It’s pretty clear, isn’t it? If the current white, err, identity stuff is simply a continuation of old-school white racism and its fascist and Nazi versions, then that would make Robert Bosch, who is openly feeling schadenfreude about this stuff, look bad. And of course, any line of argument that might lead to Robert Bosch looking bad can’t possibly be valid.
That said, FWIW, I don’t think he’s *completely* wrong on that particular point. While it had been fermenting in some circles for a while, the stuff that now, sometimes, gets called “Woke 1.0” burst into public consciousness in the mid-to-late 2000s and early 2010s, and a few years later, the world got Trump and similar developments elsewhere. It’s perfectly plausible that a lot of people thought something like, “If everyone in politics will reduce me to a collection of demographic traits anyway, I might as well join the people who tell me my demographic traits are great!”
Though, of course, since I really do support universalist cosmopolitanism, instead of just pretending to do so for trolling purposes, I see that development as pretty bad, not as something to feel schadenfreude about.
@Robert Bosch:
“Heck, the last time we locked horns, I tore apart Devereaux’s comment on classic’s twitter by just looking at the counts he referenced and showing that they did not say what he said.”
Your “demonstration” there started out by listing a traditionalist Catholic account and claiming it was not political. Anyone who can seriously claim that there is such a thing as a non-political traditionalist Catholic can hardly claim to be able to show anything in political contexts.
“My argument is that this new white identity is _new_. It’s not some survival from the past, but formed in reaction to really recent stupidity by the establishment.”
How do you get the idea that these two explanations are somehow mutually exclusive?
“Actually, what I wrote is that, to paraphase Mencken, that intellectuals don’t know what they are asking for, but do deserve to get it good and hard.
I stand by that. I absolutely love seeing braindead intellectuals being bent over and given the full Al-Zutt (metaphorically speaking).”
There are other places on the internet where you can post extensive graphical descriptions of fantasies like that. This is not one of those places.
“Here is something you don’t know: his administration, via Marco Rubio, helped broker a peace treaty between Rwanda and the Congo.”
As soon as that treaty is implemented, that will be great. Until then – well, Trump has a known track record of making great announcements about his glorious achievements and counting on people not checking whether those announcements are true.
“With the Rwandan genocide which was given the green light by Bill Clinton, one of the worst Presidents in US history.”
“But how can that be? All the Good People, all the Intellectuals ™ say that he was only persecuted for sex by uptight Republicans. That is to this _day_ the position of the Intellectuals. ”
Nope, there’s been a pretty serious reappraisal of Clinton during Me Too, but that probably doesn’t fit into your general idea of who’s doing or saying what in the world, and why. And younger intellectuals often aren’t fond of him acting too much like a Republican in domestic politics, either. Again, that probably doesn’t fit into your general idea of who’s doing or saying what in the world, and why. *Very* left-wing intellectuals never liked him in the first place. Again, that probably etc.
“With the Rwandan genocide which was given the green light by Bill Clinton, one of the worst Presidents in US history.”
(…)
“These would be the same intellectuals who blocked any attempt to stop the Darfur genocide, saying it all had to be multilateral and through the UN. And so 400,000 were murdered and far more reduced to slavery.”
So, according to you, the fact that Clinton didn’t do what you think he should have done proves that he’s horrible, and the fact that Bush didn’t didn’t do what you think he should have done proves that his *opponents* are horrible, for somehow, in an unexplained way, “blocking” him from doing it. Sure. With such flexible standards of evidence, you can, of course, always prove, to your own satisfaction, that you’re always right about everything, and the people you hate are always wrong about everything.
People asked you before how “blocking” Bush from preventing the Darfur genocide, at the time when he was at the height of his power and popularity, is supposed to have worked. You already ignored those questions back then.
“The Good People also cheered Obama’s destruction of Libya,”
Obama went to war in Libya to prevent the planned massacre in Benghazi which Gaddafi (I don’t care which spelling of his name you prefer) had openly announced he wanted to commit. You can search for the video of him announcing his plans on Youtube.
So, under your standards of logic and evidence, when Clinton didn’t prevent a genocide, that proved Clinton was horrible; when Bush didn’t prevent a genocide, that proved Bush’s *opponents* were and are horrible; and when Obama *did* prevent a massacre, that proved Obama was horrible. Sure. Repeating myself, with such flexible standards of evidence, you can, of course, always prove, to your own satisfaction, that you’re always right about everything, and the people you hate are always wrong about everything.
“So, no, I am not interested in your pearl clutching about the Orange One’s hurty words. Ending that horror in the Congo is way more important than hurty words. Saving the Christians of Nigeria from the fate of Christians in the Sudan is way more important than hurty words. ”
You keep pretending that all anyone can accuse Trump of is “hurty words”. You keep determinedly looking the other way when people provide counter-examples for that claim.
Oh, and what evidence do you have that anything Trump has done has actually improved the situation of Christians in Nigeria. I mean, aside from his own words?
Besides, a whole lot of the things you accuse the intellectuals whom you hate so much of do effectively come down to hurty words by them.
Racist policies in the US didn’t create a “White” identity because there’s no “Black” identity in Africa.
The…weirdest thing about that interesting claim is that he couched it terms of “Zulu” and “Xhosa”. I actually agree that “Black” isn’t a very meaningful term in most of Africa, but he picked two groups from South Africa, the one African country where “Black” actually is a useful and meaningful term. For several pretty obvious historical reasons.
As far as the rest of Robert’s comments about Africa, I’ll just say that “Trump is good for Africa actually” is an….interesting claim that i don’t think I’ve heard even the most brain-dead MAGA-bots say before. Also, as far as I know, there is no mass violence by Muslims against Christians in Nigeria. There are clashes back and forth, with victims on both sides (driven as much by land use patterns as by religion), and then there’s the more organized violence by actual Jihadist groups, the majority of whose victims are Muslim (as you would expect, since the areas they’re striving for control over are majority-Muslim).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_violence_in_Nigeria#Reactions
@Hector:
“As far as the rest of Robert’s comments about Africa, I’ll just say that “Trump is good for Africa actually” is an….interesting claim that i don’t think I’ve heard even the most brain-dead MAGA-bots say before.”
Keep in mind that those “most brain-dead MAGA-bots” are generally America-Firsters who don’t pay much attention to Africa, while Robert is simply one of a specific type of European who sees the USA not so much as a country and more as a kind of tool for fulfilling their wishes about which way the world should go.
“Or maybe the ::checks notes:: sitting president of the United States clearly shaping immigration along racial lines?”
For that matter immigration policy for the USA has been almost entirely racially based since it started, before the USA was a thing as I recall. Plus the racially-segregated communities. Or “scientific racism”. Or the writings of 18th/19th century biologists on the topic of race. Or Ghandi’s comments on Africans. Or the history of the IQ test. Or……
Maybe you should drink a glass of water or two
“It means that they’re completely irresponsible.”
So…..You believe that the Greeks hated their gods and used them as exemplifiers of negative traits. And this is based on the gods being powerful enough to enact their will within their sphere, something that EVERY religion that has gods (not all do) says gods can do.
I would suggest that any argument that starts with “Group X doesn’t believe in their gods” or “Group X believes their gods are demons” is probably wrong. The Greeks–and most ancient peoples–didn’t believe their gods were NICE, certainly. The whole omnibenevolent thing is not a universal trait of deities. But there’s a gulf of difference between “The gods have personalities, and this includes some not so nice bits” and “If I call you god-like I’m insulting you.”
Are there other examples of ancient literature that uses the term god-like as a pejorative? Where being compared to the Divine is considered an insult?
I think that they feared their gods. But I do think that one shouldn’t assume that their values were the same as ours.
Think of Zeus. No one can challenge him, not even all the other gods combined. So what does he do? Bang anything that can’t get away, indulge his appetites and so on. Zeus was an embarrassment to thoughtful pagans, and they kept trying to invent a completely different Zeus when they had half a chance (see the Stoics)
I’m also making a specific claim about how the term is used in Homer. One could also say it is double edged. The point is that both Helen and Achilles are rebuked for using their power irresponsibly.
A parallel: Achilles is likened to a lion. It is fairly clear that Homer doesn’t mean “noble and good, like Aslan” but rather “he’s like 250 kilos of man-killing muscle”
One could ask: but is it _fair_ that Helen is rebuked, that the poem is so constructed? Different question! The Achaian Greeks did not think like us. Remember, the earliest stories of Medusa says she was cursed as a punishment for being _raped_.
I think that one can completely make Helen one of the most likeable and interesting characters: abducted and “married” at 13, she has no loyalty to anyone but herself, because who has shown her any? So, why not let Troy burn and the Greeks bleed for her? But then, seeing the human cost, she changes her mind….
That is a respectable reading! I could go along with that. But I don’t like screwing with the texts to import modern ideas. I didn’t like it when Troy did that with Paris and Hector, and I do not like it here.
“Think of Zeus. No one can challenge him…”
Yeah….I would suggest re-reading the myths. This is absolutely not true. There were multiple groups that challenged Zeus, including a coup. The rest of your statement is pure nonsense. He may or may not have been viewed as someone worth emulating (different people would view this differently), and the Stoics may have thought Zeus should have been an embarrassment, but THE GREEKS WORSHIPED HIM. Your entire thesis relies on us forgetting that part.
As an aside, your list of crimes is you screwing with the texts to import modern ideas–specifically, modern interpretations. Your entire argument–in as much as one can be identified in your ramblings–is nothing but that.
I’m not going to bandy words with you. Either put up or shut up. Provide specific sources from the time of the Trojan War (or the writing of the epic, dealer’s choice) that show that Greeks routinely viewed the gods with loathing, fear, and disgust. If you are unable to do so, you do not have evidence supporting your conclusions. And no, the lion doesn’t count, because the Greeks did not worship lions (and besides, Hercules wasn’t exactly unknown to them). To support your argument you need to provide specific texts that unambiguously show that the Greeks hated their gods. If you can’t, you have no evidence and your idea should properly be dismissed as not even wrong.
Oh dear. There I was thinking I was dealing with an honest disagreement.
I did, in fact, provide a text. It’s called “Homer”. I was discussing how Homer uses the term with respect to Achilles and Helen. Now you want me to defend a completely different claim that you brought up, and pass a bar of evidence that you created, to satisfy you, on penalty of your disapproval.
“How about ‘No’?”
If you want to disagree with what I actually wrote, fine; if you want to make demands I answer what you pretend I wrote, then the answer is No.
“I was discussing how Homer uses the term with respect to Achilles and Helen”
Yes–by making very specific claims about how Greeks viewed their gods. This interpretation about how Greeks viewed their gods is utterly unique in my experience and completely contradicts every other instance I’ve seen. It completely contradicts the idea of the gods being worshiped. It is demands the Greeks not believe their own religion. You are arguing for an exceptional interpretation, and the only evidence you provide is “I don’t like what these gods do”.
Remember, your entire list of “crimes” the gods have committed is YOUR words. Your interpretation of how the gods should be viewed is YOUR interpretation. None of that counts as evidence for your thesis–because those are modern interpretations from a modern culture. Yes, even the list of things Zeus did in the various myths; remember, the Greeks didn’t view these things OR THE MYTHS the same way you view them. You need to provide evidence that the Greeks Homer wrote for would interpret the comparison the same way.
In order to support your argument you need to provide specific texts to support it. Simply waving the word “Homer” around isn’t enough; you need to provide the actual text that supports your interpretation. What words did Homer right that justify this? What other Greek writings show that Greeks would understand comparing a person to a god to be an insult?
(The fact that the claims you make that can be verified are wrong doesn’t help your argument, by the way. If you want to make unique interpretations it behooves you to not get some basic stuff about the mythology in question wrong. It suggests a lack of scholarship on your part.)
At this point I have told you precisely what evidence is required to support your conclusion multiple times. I have all but written the outline of your rebuttal for you; you literally just need to fill in the blanks. And you’ve not merely failed to produce anything even resembling evidence, but also have stated that you believe a request that you substantiate your conclusions to be dishonest. This means you have no evidence, which, again, means your argument can–and should–be dismissed out of hand.
@Dinwar,
You are under a misaprehension. I am under no obligation to meet your arbitrary standards or jump through hoops you set.
You are talking with me. If you want to convince me, or have me engage with you, you need to engage on my terms, and talk honestly with me.
Else, tata
“…that you may learn how much the mightiest I am among you. Try me and find out for yourselves. Hang me a golden chain from heaven, and lay hold of it all of you, gods and goddesses together – tug as you will, you will not drag Zeus the supreme counselor from heaven to earth; but were I to pull at it myself I should draw you up with earth and sea into the bargain, then would I bind the chain about some pinnacle of Olympus and leave you all dangling in the mid firmament. So far am I above all others either of gods or men.”
– Iliad 8.18-27 (Butler)
“I am under no obligation to meet your arbitrary standards or jump through hoops you set.”
These standards are not arbitrary. These are the standards you set for yourself, due to the nature of your claim.
If you don’t understand how “Please provide evidence the Greeks viewed things the way you say they view them” is inherently to a claim about how Greeks would view a comparison of a person to a god, I frankly can’t help you.
> “You are under a misaprehension. I am under no obligation to meet your arbitrary standards or jump through hoops you set.”
Correct, you are not. You are free to make it clear to the world that you’re arguing based on no evidence, using fallacious reasoning, to support a spurious (probably politically motivated) conclusion. You are doing, in essence, exactly what Bret has called out the chuds for doing multiple times on this blog. Congratulations to Dinwar (and Alien before) for putting in the effort to rebuke these claims, and for having more patience than I ever could. It will have no impact on the person making them, but it makes it clear to third parties reading this that it’s all hodgepodge.
I’ve got to say, arguing that other works of Greek literature are completely irrelevant to the interpretation of a translation of the Odyssey, but ::checks notes:: CS Lewis, Andrea Dworkin and 2004’s Troy are is just perfect. You couldn’t invent a more perfect example of arguing in bad faith if you tried.
FWIW, she does translate “dog-faced” in Iliad tho.
” The two characters referred to as godlike in Homer are Achilles and Helen and it’s not a compliment.”
This isn’t actually true. “Godlike” is one of the commonest epithets in the Iliad – it appears 75 times. In every case, in context, it’s a compliment.
Nestor describes Pirithous, Dryas, Ceneus and Theseus as “godlike” and it is unquestionably a compliment – he’s comparing them favourably to the current generation of Achaeans. Iris addresses Hector as “godlike” when encouraging him to action and the narrator does the same several times. Zeus describes Priam as godlike, and so does the narrator. Ajax is described as godlike. Menelaus is described as godlike. Diomedes is described as godlike. Hector describes Paris as godlike!
Note to Dinwar: if you run into people like this again, rather than try to engage them on their own terms, the first step must always be to ask: are they actually telling the truth? Or are they just making stuff up? People like this do make stuff up quite a lot. If you try to debate them they will simply not engage, especially not with people who (pardon me) have user names that suggest they are not white, but that need not stop you pointing out that they are simply not correct.
ajay, I highly doubt that any of the regular commenters here are under any illusion that Robert Bosch or people like him could be reasonably argued with. I guess people who respond to him do so either for the benefit of potential onlookers, or for a grim kind of amusement, or because they just don’t want his claims to stand unanswered. (When I myself got into a now-deleted extended fight with him a while ago, it was mostly because I sometimes enjoy shooting fish in a barrel.)
That said, I have my doubt that he really consciously makes things up He strikes me as too much of a true believer for that. Might be that he’s just extremely sloppy about checking whether anything he assumes to be true really is true whenever he feels strongly about something.
The line between a troll and a true believer fades away when the fundamental belief in question is hating the other camp. People that deep in the well never fact check anything, because the only value a statement has to them is the ability to push an argument. Asking if it’s true or not probably never even occurred to them.
Oh, I’ve been online enough to know I’m dong a stupid. 😀 I just like to argue, and am too willing to give the benefit of the doubt. I like a good argument, and I can enjoy a bad argument.
Interesting about the username. I never considered it being coded non-white. I guess because I made it up–it’s a word from a constructed language I started back when I was a kid, and if anything it’s coded “reptile” or “undead” in my mind. For what it’s worth I’m German-Irish in ancestry. Probably says something interesting that I never considered anyone would view my made-up word as ethnically coded.
I’m half-tempted to use a different username and see if responses are different, as a case-study in how assumptions about ethnicity impact interpretations of arguments among people who frequent history blogs.
“Interesting about the username. I never considered it being coded non-white. ”
Huh. I just assumed it was your actual name – it sounds Arabic or perhaps South Asian to my ear (I presume because of the similarity to actual words and names from that region like Dinawar, Dinesh, Sinwar, tulwar and so on).
@ajay,
Thank you. You are quite right. You’re right and I am wrong here 🙂 I was relying too much on my memory an my beloved Fagles. Thanks for the correction.
I think that the main point is still defensible. “Godlike” doesn’t mean “noble”, or not what we would mean by it, but far above the power of mortals. And in the case of both Achilles and Helen, that means irresponsibility – with the difference that Helen repents of it.
Thanks again for correcting me there!
No, your main point is wrong and unsupported by the text.
And your textual evidence for that is…?
My textual evidence is given in my post above. It is hanging right there, white on grey, for you and anyone to read. So, shhh 🙂 If you want to know what I am saying you can read my writing where I am saying it.
Looks like you’re now openly gloating about the success of a political and cultural development of which, a few threads ago, you very passionately denied that it even exists.
Out of curiosity, do you think that left-wing intellectuals are the only people in the world who matter? Because, having read your posts for a while, I’ve got the strong impression that when something happens of which you, rightly or wrongly, think that it makes left-wing intellectuals sad, then that fact is the only thing that matters to you about the thing in question – any impacts it might have on anyone else is irrelevant to you.
Oh, and if you would see anyone else than you claim to really support X, but at the same time gloat about the success of people who are clearly against X, would you believe them?
> Looks like you’re now openly gloating about the success of a political and cultural development of which, a few threads ago, you very passionately denied that it even exists.
@Raphael,
I have no idea what your are talking about, and I am certain you don’t either.
https://acoup.blog/2026/07/10/friday-friday-july-10-2026-on-the-chud-vision-of-roman-history/