Now, goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times
Nolan’s Odyssey and a classical musician perspective on historical accuracy
1k ish words, skip segments if you wish! main body is after the wilson translation quote
Let me say first: I get it, I really do. I am a classical violinist first. My entire education has been about performing historical works with accuracy. I have been slammed for so much as breathing out of character for a Bach partita. And watching classical music portrayed in movies with anything less than striking realism is funny at best, torture at worst. Make it real. Respect history.
For me, there is no doubt that Nolan respects this story. This is not a Wuthering Heights situation. A love of the tale itself fills the film from start to end, the core archetypal story is alive and thrumming. The immersion is incredible. His vision carries the film and is executed so consistently that to someone like me costuming, plot omissions (Though I have to admit I felt the loss of the wind bag and the Nobody joke a little personally) and whatever other criticism has been thrown about is minor.
This is not to say the film is totally to my tastes. I found the dialogue both overly mythical and overly modern at the same time, which is an impressive feat to achieve simultaneously. For me, these things were the immersion breakers. For others, I'm certain, the historical issues work the same way.
But this is not my telling, it's Nolan’s. And the controversies to me are proof of an excellent storyteller with razor sharp intent, making choices that are worth respecting. As nothing more than a violinist and a grown up PJO kid who never stopped reading deeper… hear me out.
Nolan used Wilson's translation as reference, and hers opening invocation concludes in this way, excuse the spacing:
{…..} Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning.
Watch Nolan’s choices in his framing of this tale. A bard, a rapper. The final lines of the movie referencing the future telling of this tale, in song only, until the ages of men rise to greater heights once again. This is a story of oral tradition, elevated through a new medium.
Even the controversially modern language is intentional– notice he does not remove the poetic, rhythmic and legend-like speak of the lines even as he uses modern words. He is not distorting the telling, he is very intentionally taking it from a precise angle, with a precise target. This bow is strung the way only he can string it, and no mistake has been made. This is not negligence, it is skill.
So let's take the most common objection: Dad instead of father– not carelessly but for tone, tone in a deeper sense than the initial shock of it. Dad, and we lose that feeling of coldness, of high fantasy formality, we bring the register down into something lived. Dad, and we understand: familiarity, warmth, love.
Jarring maybe, but a careless choice or stupidity? Not at all. He is telling an ancient story, and he is breaking the awful distance that is the curse of classical art, music, writing. This span of space and time and knowledge you need to appreciate the art in a semblance of the way that the ancient audience would have, easily. Of course not exactly like them, it can never be exactly, again– and that is the point.
I play Bach on my modern violin, my strings are metal and not catgut, and there is a multitude of ways to do it; historically informed, improvisational, romantic and lush in the 1920s style. Some are more literally accurate, but Bach, like Homer, is a single written version of an entire performance tradition known implicitly. We modern people can never be privy to all of that. But we still play. It's still Bach.
The exactitude that Nolan is aiming for is not recreation, it is not precision in a literal sense, but a kind of emotional fidelity– atmospheric, thematic, human-to-human connection from the living core of the Odyssey into our own. This tale is timeless, archetypal, and Nolan creates a film that has maintained the heartbeat forms and figures and colored them, translucent, with the beating psychological heart of the world we live in, of the struggles modern men face, the ocean in the self, the glory we chase and watch crumble to worthless nothing.
The Odyssey has always been an internal metaphor as much as a literal epic. That is what makes it so great, what has let it survive. It can be told in versions and versions, changing and evolving, but there is a core spirit that is so utterly human it survived thousands of years and still resonates. Odysseus is a hero, he is an everyman, he is better than any of us, he is no better than any of us. Nolan has created something no amount of academic study and rigor can give en masse, he has opened a door and allowed people to feel for this man.
We can know a story, we can know a story very well. But to have it ring real and brutal, sympathetic vibrations across time and space– as a classical musician, I know how difficult that is.
There can be this old, fantastic work of art you know has some of the best of humanity with it in its purest form, but the simple fact is that high art has a barrier. It requires time, education, a depth that modernity does not cultivate in us.
Nolan, in this way, makes magic. This film is digestible without being shallow. It is epic and still painfully human. It feels like the Odyssey, and moreover, it feels. Not just tells, not just explains. He exploits cinema so perfectly for the one thing it can and must do better than a textual retelling: it allows us to live inside it, it invites us in, it opens doors in solid walls that would remain difficult to scale otherwise. I hate to use the world accessibility– to me it carries too many connotations of diluting, polluting, rehashing in a way that cares more for easy consumption than true storytelling power. But this film cuts with intention, with respect, with vision.Any story must be viewed from a lens, must be interpreted.
Every translator of the book knows this, they are living in a time, space, and body, writing through a medium, they are not a perfect, clear glass to pass the story through. the light will fractal. there lies the beauty.
So for me: watch Nolan, as a translator, a translation in the realest sense– nothing can be perfectly passed from one form to another and it needn't be. It shouldn't be.
As the classic invocation itself is often interpreted, the Muses sing in the storyteller, not at them. And they sing in this film. Through modern man, for our modern times. All that is necessary, from a muse-sung man, from a storyteller, a filmmaker, a bard, is skill and conviction and a clear vision– we know the people who made this film have all this in spades. Watch what new comes out through them. Watch what remains the same. An old story for our modern age, in every sense. Always, always beautiful.
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