Did Nolan “whitewash” Homer? Should he have?
The self-styled “champions of Western civilization” who are outraged by Christopher Nolan’s revisionist version of the Odyssey should be defending it instead. Why? The Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, who may have lived circa the 8thC BCE, retell Bronze Age myths that preceded their author by some 500 years. So Homer’s retelling of these myths was not only influenced by the mores of his own time and place, but also by what he imagined the lives of Bronze Age Acheans to have been. In a word, or rather three of Hobbes’s: nasty, brutish, and short. Men were violent, cruel, greedy, deeply ignorant and superstitious. They were also misogynist. In Homer’s retelling, women and demi-goddesses seduced men to betray and enthrall them. The infidelity of Sparta’s queen Helen is the justification for launching “a thousand ships” of war against Troy. Calypso and Circe lure, deceive, blackmail, and enslave Odysseus and his men. Only patient Penelope falls on the right side of the “Madonna or whore” divide.
Is this the edifying image of Western Civilization that we wish to present? Critics of Nolan’s film who accuse him of whitewashing Homer’s stories are quite right, he does so. He presents his protagonists as men of conscience and honor, and attributes to them the moral and intellectual virtues developed over the intervening 32 centuries of progress in history, religion and philosophy. The civilizing centuries that brought us Aristotle and the Abrahamic religions, Rousseau and the Enlightenment, Newton and space exploration. The centuries that separate us, we hope, from the mindless, guzzling man-pigs of Circe’s Bronze Age.
