Emily Wilson has critiqued Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey for being shallow. Thinker of ethics Kathryn Lawson goes additional. Utilizing Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas and Simone Weil — three thinkers who turned to Homer to make sense of atrocity after the World Wars — Lawson argues that by giving Odysseus a up to date conscience, Nolan made a harmful mistake. Homer’s Odysseus feels no guilt for his violence which serves as a warning that energy not often recognises its personal cruelty and desires one thing exterior to cease it. By erasing that for a guilt-ridden hero, Nolan cuts the story’s moral depth and leaves us with the fantasy that the highly effective will change themselves as soon as they perceive what they’ve performed. Actuality, Lawson argues, suggests in any other case.
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On this summer time’s blockbuster film adaptation of Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, the important thing theme is a variation of the Previous Testomony Hebrews 13:2, maybe finest recognized to literary sorts because the welcoming phrases written on the wall of the well-known Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Firm:
“Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.”
Author/director Christopher Nolan’s important theme within the movie blends this regulation of hospitality with the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you’d have performed to you,” one other biblical invocation, this time within the New Testomony’s Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:13. Collectively, these imperatives type the movie’s “Legislation of Zeus”. Maybe stunning for a summer time blockbuster, the film is predominantly a meditation on the moral calls for of the stranger, with an analogous lesson to Nolan’s 2023 summer time blockbuster Oppenheimer.
Movie critics apart, the film has had blended opinions from philosophers and classicists alike. Classicist Emily Wilson found it to be shamefully written, though entertaining in a plebeian type of manner, whereas thinker Slavoj Žižek argued that it was not the monster blockbuster he anticipated, but rather a modest chamber drama. However find it irresistible or hate it, it’s simple that the principle theme is a well timed reflection upon our age of steadily rising social and political polarization and xenophobia. Right here I can’t provide a strict “assessment” of the movie however somewhat invite a dialog between it and the twentieth-century philosophers Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Simone Weil, all of whom turned to Homer to think about this very theme throughout their very own darkish occasions. On this dialog between ages, I’ll contemplate the quietly hopeful arc of the movie and why it finally fails to entry the true crux of the moral demand of the stranger.
Homeric ethics and the need of violence
For Arendt and Weil, Homer’s poem The Odyssey and its predecessor, The Iliad, are so miraculous as a result of they narrate the struggle from the angle of each the conquerors and the conquered. The implication of this narrative selection is that the poet(s) are in a position to acknowledge the humanity of these “enemies” within the metropolis they’ve destroyed. The poem is ready to ponder a duty for atrocities with out succumbing to the staggering abyss which will observe recognizing one’s personal heinous crimes.
