We have reached the open sea

Lymond, cats, books, c-dramas, more Lymond. Linguistics and history nerd. Queer Jew. She/they.

[erinaceina]

First two homegrown tomatoes of the year. Yes, I am pleased with myself.

[rotzaprachim]

Emily Wilson: I dislike having to defend Nolan against you

but according to Wilson’s own commentary of the odyssey it needed to be done

Emily Wilson · An Uncomplicated Man

As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Christopher Nolan has read at least the first line of my...

Buckle up lads. While I do agree with many of Wilson’s critiques of the issues of women in particular, others feel unkind to outright obfuscating in the depiction of the social and moral worlds of Homeric epic according to her own analysis and framework of it in ways I found very chewy and often contradictory. Here be spoilers.

this is such an interesting review in combining some critiques that are dead on the money - the minimization of women, the fact the “race blind” casting clearly isn’t race blind at all because virtually all of the people of color are cast as side kicks and magic inspirations for a fairly lily white and non Mediterranean cast. But these valid critiques are mixed in with some others that are just stupid - like the sea being grey rather than purple even when the visual clearly went to a lot of extent to make the ocean look as close to wine colored as possible and anyway, this is the color of the Mediterranean without the filter of verbal description - and others are just taking adaptational decisions that are difficult for any director in as unkind a way as possible in a way that feels more like personal academic grudge than serious commentary on Homer and reception history.

For instance her critique that the movie looks too much like the sword and sandal epics and lord of the rings instead of this:

“The film has none of the stylish sparseness of Uberto Pasolini’s The Return(2024), starring a scarred, desperate, mostly naked Ralph Fiennes, conflicted about his homecoming to a convincingly unhappy Juliet Binoche. Lacking the budget for gods or special effects, that film invited us to wonder what remains of The Odyssey and its hero when stripped down to the sinews and the hungry heart. Nolan gives us an all-inclusive buffet.”

A lot of archaeologists and historians have criticized previous classical Greek things as TOO sparse and focused on an overly stripped back aesthetic based on remaining archeological finds rather than the worlds of soft pillows and fluffy blankets that human beings actually live in. sparseness versus lack therefor of is a not a moral issue but one of film maker taste and while I don’t think it’s a problem that uberto pasolini went for such a stripped back ithaka, the world of the odyssey AS Wilson translated it IS a lurid, over the top, messy one, complete with everything from home furnishings to horrid flesh eating monsters. Furthermore, it is reductive of pasolini to say that there are no gods due to budget concerns - the gods appear in the odyssey in human forms no more expensive then Odysseus and Penelope. The reason they are not in this movie is because Pasolini didn’t want them there and this is a fine matter of artistic opinion. In fact, Nolan continues the trend by also not having the gods appear on screen and this, in my opinion, is where things go deeply haywire, because while Pasolini can get away with stripping the gods from a more human-centric sample strip of family drama, Nolan cannot get away with stripping the presence of Athena from the whole story without having to change things drastically in ways Wilson herself critiques. The removal of Athena strips the story of a consistent female presence and the removal of Athena and Poseidon’s quarrels to trap Odysseus on ogygia requires introducing other and equally confusing plot elements around the lotus flowers. But moreover the bizarre final plot twist of Odysseus and Penelope leaving by sea is a plot effect of no longer having a physical Athena to calm the angry suitor and wrap everything up. It isn’t in these cases that Nolan’s decisions were right or wrong but that Wilson isn’t seriously taking them on the level of the movie and what they mean for it.

“Nolan may have been sensible to leave them out. Even Zendaya’s underwritten Athena turns out to be a vulnerable victim of war, or perhaps a projection of Odysseus’ conscience – not a scheming and bloodthirsty war goddess.” - I have complicated feelings on this because it was a moment that made me gasp on screen and felt like serious commentary on the women of Troy seen through characters like hecuba and andromache, but not Athena. Right thing, wrong character. Nevertheless as messy a designation this is for Athena another purposefully obtuse comment that leaves out the fact that Athena takes a ridiculous number of faces throughout the odyssey, including as a vulnerable slave girl.

“But the film wants to have it both ways. There are no gods, and yet shipwrecks and death are presented as the inevitable consequence of blinding the son of Poseidon and devouring the Cattle of the Sun. Zeus’ law is portrayed as being crucially important, and yet there is no Zeus.” - again these are complex issues with adaptation but this is in fact how this whole tableau looks from Odysseus’s viewpoint. This is how it feels to Odysseus in the world of the odyssey. The decision not to physically have Athena labeled as such is a complicated one but the decision not to physically represent poseidon is a possible reading of the text from Odysseus’s point of view because he never sees Poseidon, just the waves

anyway I think Wilson’s biggest missed piece here is that she misses a point she should really grasp as the translator of both of Homer’s epics: much of the machination of this film and its divergences from Homer come from trying for squeeze the Iliad and the odyssey into the Hollywood work and this is in my view not an inherently bad thing it all as it situates the audience strongly within a postwar world. Many of the things she complains about are specifically aspects of the adaptation of the Iliad into this, a poem which is gruesome, violent, and full of unnecessary spectacle - EXATLY as she translated it as. The inclusion of the Iliad within the broader frame of the odyssey is the source of much which doesn’t work in the film - the erasure of the Odyssey’s women in favour of the more masculine Iliad - and a whole lot of what does when the film can thus portray itself as the story of a war and what happens afterwards. In doing this review I realize this is what works for me about this movie more than any other odyssey adaptation I’ve seen live: the brutal, grueling recentering of the odyssey not as fun adventure story but brutal survivor’s tale in which war crimes are stated and the city that burns is full of women and children and even soldiers die with the sound of arrows hitting flesh.

thus this refusal to engage with the Iliad and the imposition of the Iliad on odyssey lead to some of Wilson’s critiques that bother me most:

“This muddled subplot is foisted on the film in order to make Nolan’s relentlessly didactic point about the contemporary Anglophone world: that the lies and xenophobia of the war on terror and Brexit began a cultural decline that is now destroying the values ‘we’ hold most dear”

except that it isn’t that didactic or that ahistorical a reading of “the contemporary Anglophone world” onto the ILIAD, a poem full of the brutal and constant deaths of named characters due to the jealousies and dramas and love affairs of mortals shown to be totally petty and ephemeral, a fact WILSON HERSELF says about the Iliad in her audio and analysis of it. Wilson’s critiques of her reading of nolan’s reading feel like a punch at “political correctness” or Hollywood liberalism covering up the TRUE reading of the odyssey when this is really a very fair reading of the Iliad, one that’s not that far from what she’s said herself.

“Zeus’ law is a version of archaic Greek xenia: the idealised relationships between strangers, hosts and guests, who must treat one another with mutual respect, thereby forming multi-generational bonds between unrelated families. In the film, xenia is filtered through contemporary American ideas about the importance of philanthropic charity: wealthy people should be gracious towards the poor and hungry in their midst (without necessarily doing anything to mitigate their poverty). Many of the film’s implicit values directly contradict those of Homer’s poem. Deception, warmongering, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abusing women and yearning for honour – all perfectly fine in the world of Homer – are, in this version, very bad.”

Allll of this is purposefully obtuse from the perspectives wilson gives of her own readings and translations of Homer, at times contradicting her own academic work. She defines “Xenia” in historical terms, but it actually appears in the text in a pretty identical way to what’s shown in the movie: as something Odysseus benefits from from unrelated families outside of these kinds of family bonds and even though he is the owner of a house with slaves. This is NOT a contemporary American liberal philanthropic mindset. It is a fundamental thing that comes as a conundrum for later readers of the text: it is good to offer food and wine to poor strangers, and yet it is not morally bad to keep human beings in bondage. To critique this film for not critiquing wealth inequality is ridiculous: if anything the modern lens is to go so far in doing so. The fact that the hero of the odyssey is a slave owner is a fundamental aspect of a world that physically ran on slavery. That Wilson, the translator who in part made a name for herself by translating “slaves” as such, should gloss a tiny fraction of the representation of that expectation of xenia existing simultaneously with social inequality (slavery, but the film only uses the word “slave” once and Wilson doesn’t state this in her critique) as spineless American liberalism is ridiculous

Deception, warmongering, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abusing women and yearning for honour – all perfectly fine in the world of Homer – are, in this version, very bad.”

this is an oversimplification of Homer of exactly the type that she accuses Nolan of doing. The value of deception, warmongering, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abusing women, and yearning for honor are in fact tightly bound to conceptual webs and frameworks of times they were and were NOT ok within the world of Homer, just like are today. To say that “abusing women” is “perfectly fine” in the world of Homer is clearly not the case when the fact that chryseis’s father is a priest of Apollo makes it the case that it is not alright to kill her, for instance. Nor is it anything other than “very bad” when a married woman wants to engage in extramarital sex in a series of social rules tightly bound within classical Greek culture to the rules of the patriarchy. For Wilson to say that both “abusing women” and “extra marital sex” were “perfectly fine” in the world of Homer is to do a real disservice to her own work about the complexities of women within the text. Anyway, the film does a surprisingly good job of labeling the specific contexts in WHICH they are bad: it’s bad when Odysseus’s men eat the sun-god’s cattle, which is literally written in the first paragraph of the odyssey. It’s bad when the suitors bother Penelope about marriage in the context where they absolutely mean to rape and impregnate her, as, in the film, Antinous makes clear. It’s so bad that Odysseus slaughters them for it. Even the comment about warmongering is kind of a mess : most wouldn’t describe the Iliad as an outright anti-war text, but to describe warmongering as portrayed as “perfectly fine” in a universe where she translated the opening segment as the story of how a hero’s epic wrath lead to the murder of his own men and their corpses becoming “a fest for the birds” is, again, an extreme oversimplification to the point of outright obfuscation. Wilson’s claims here irritate me specifically because they feel like exactly the kind of image of Homer she’s spent a career trying to push back against: that the ancient Homeric epic world was inherently one solely of violence, cruelty, sex, and patriarchal destruction in which any kind of crime was “perfectly fine.” Clearly it wasn’t. Clearly homer can face understood solely according to the rules and complexes of our time, but why be angry when a film depicts exactly the kinda of rules and social bindings she has described in the text?

anyway, this review and the fact it’s been passed around gave me a lot to chew on and there will be more but mostly I feel like: how dare you, emily Wilson, for making me defend Christopher fucking Nolan against the body of your work

[rotzaprachim]

”Nolan’s spectacle threatens to drown out his story just as the towering waves of the wine-dark sea – more grey than purple – threaten to overwhelm his hero’s ship.”

[rotzaprachim]

lol I finally finished the review and there’s more. There’s a lot more. It ended up moving from a series of Huh moments to outright academic irritation, because the review is at best disingenuous about the film’s representation of many of the odysseys’s internal contradictions and dissonances. Many of these are not in any way “settled” as Wilson makes them out to be, and while many have haunted and inspired scholars for hundreds of years, the fact of the odyssey and Iliad as often internally contradictory and dissonant especially in terms of moral behavior is one of the things many scholars would agree upon. (Neither is Wilson the only classics scholar or the only translator of Homer in the modern era.) spoilers will abound

After the claim of “warmongering” as “ perfectly fine” within the world of Homer, Wilson states that:

“This is not in itself a problem, but it is a problem if the film’s own values and vision don’t hang together, and if the characters’ motivations don’t make sense on their own terms.”

the problem is that much of the odyssey doesn’t hang together. The problem is that many of the character’s motivations do not hang together on a single and simple set of terms and this has driven scholars for a very long time, as well as those continuously drawn into the complex and shockingly detailed psychological portraits contained within the odyssey, especially about what it is to survive war and exile. It doesn’t mean the film is perfect but it does mean that to make things murky isn’t actually a problematic representation of Homer. However at this point I’m not even talking about Nolan’s odyssey nearly as much as I’m also talking about Wilson’s portrayal of her own expertise to a mass audience.

“In Nolan’s Odyssey, slaughtering people with the help of trickery, technology and weapons is presented as bad when the Greeks are killing the Trojans, who have violated xenia, but good when Odysseus is killing the suitors, who have violated xenia.” - this is not the only interpretation of this exact series of events in Homer’s odyssey but it is absolutely one of the most common

“Taking something ostensibly abandoned by Odysseus and his comrades is natural and forgivable when the Trojans lay claim to the horse, but unnatural and unforgivable when the suitors lay claim to Odysseus’ palace, food, wine and wife.” - I don’t even think we can call this a contradiction because I think there’s at least a slight difference between a statue abandoned on a beach by a war camp and making explicit sexual threats to a human woman.

“Strangers in Ithaca are to be treated with gracious kindness, as possible gods in disguise; but strangers in foreign lands are usually monstrous, to be blinded, robbed and slaughtered” - literally this is the exact text of the odyssey. Apart from the exclusion of nausicaa and her kingdom the movie’s depiction of scary foreign strangers is pretty much straight out of Odysseus’s depiction to nausicaa and his parents of who killed his crew: cyclops, lastrygonians, Circe, Scylla and charybdis. The movie leaves out the narrative frame of uncertainty that the context is essentially Odysseus’s plea that he did not kill his comrades but almost all adaptations do. Likewise the issue of ithaka welcoming strangers and telemakhos and eumaeus being good men ensure they do so. This is very much in the text

“Defying the gods is noble and brave when Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, son of Poseidon; it’s stupid and greedy when Eurylochus eats the Cattle of the Sun.” - also sort of from the text but I think very ungenerous to why Odysseus did this (also in the text)

“Deception is bad when Odysseus tricks Sinon or the suitors trick Telemachus, but good when Telemachus and Odysseus trick the suitors.” - Simon is an addition from later textual works but the central theme of deception is an ambiguity in the text and one of the reasons Odysseus earns the title “polytropos.” Wilson even titled this pieces based on her own translation of “polytropos” as “complicated” into Odysseus as an “uncomplicated” man. Why is he bothered he’s shown deceiving people in both “good” or “bad” ways? This seems like complexity

“Sharing is good, and Odysseus is seen taking his place at an oar alongside his men; but one-man rule is also unambiguously good, and those who challenge monarchy or autocracy, or try to eat more than their allotted portion, are either evil (the suitors) or foolish (Eurylochus). Either way, they have to die” - these issues of one man rule are fundamental within the structure of the text and as Wilson herself publicly said, this is a world with slavery. It doesn’t mean accepting the Ancient Greek class structure point blank or being uninterested in the roles of lower class individuals and slaves but it does seem like this review contradicts itself by its ongoing rage against a percieved imposition of “American” or “English” values at the same time it questions the films representation of a fundamental aspect of the Bronze Age and its literary universe. Furthermore, the film is not perfect in its representation of working and lower class characters but it is certainly more extensive than almost any adaptation to date with decisions like the full inclusion of Eumaies the goatherd, at least a slight reference to Melantho, the more extensive and human portrayal of the ordinary ithakan men on Odysseus’s crew, at least a slight reference to Eurycleia and her recognition of Odysseus’s scars, and the addition of Simon to serve as the sort of prototypical Greek “Everyman” soldier who died at Troy and comes back to question Odysseus alongside kings in the land of the dead. All of these things add up to an imperfect but far more complex portrayal than almost any adaptation I can think of.

the fact the suitors “had to die” for their crimes is literally one of the Odyssey’s biggest moral sinkholes and like, everyone who has read it knows this. Nolan invented nothing. It’s a fundamental aspect of the text

I’m also really bothered by Wilson’s characterization of the suitors as people challenging autocracy who eat more than their share because it feels like riling up the crowd over the very real issues of class inequality while like… completely sidestepping the question of Why the suitors are portrayed negatively in both the Homeric text and nolan’s film. No where in Homeric text is their challenge to Penelope or Odysseus a class-based one and their treatment of the women and/or servants in Ithaka does not identify them with the working class. The odyssey is absolutely a world of noblesse oblige but Telemachus generously offering meat and food to strangers depicts the suitor’s problem NOT as one of taking a second helping but of continuously and purposefully depleting Odysseus and Ithaca’s physical wealth in the form of livestock and wine in order to pressure Penelope into a decision. This is the financial abuse of a woman and the suitor’s harassment of Penelope by depleting her kingdom’s supplies, literally sitting in her house and having the bard (also a servant) sing songs about her husband’s death all form psychological pressures to try to get her to marry one of them, something that in this context will allow them unlimited social access to rape her body and impregnate her - something Antinous makes clear in the movie. Within the deeply patriarchal worldview OF the odyssey the problems is of course not only that this is bad to do on the basis of morality but that it is bad to do to our viewpoint character’s wife who is his property but that doesn’t stop the suitor’s explicit threat from being gendered and sexual.

It is bad to fight and kill to accumulate wealth, as Agamemnon does; it is good to fight and kill to preserve the wealth that you have already acquired (even if by war). - I don’t even know where she got the latter part from the movie. I don’t. But the Agamemnon portrayal as a pissy shade of the dead is how he appears in the odyssey

Any one of these moral contradictions could make for an interesting and generative theme in a movie, but Nolan lets the fragments of an incomplete set of big ideas spin around in the epic whirlpool, with no plank of solid, specific human experience to which we might cling. - I don’t think Nolan’s portrayal of many of them was perfect. I do think that the ambiguity and messiness of them is actually a sign of real engagement with the Homeric text.

all this adds up to a strong sense of confusion and just - it’s one thing to criticize an adaptation. It’s another to criticize an adaptation specifically for the inclusion of conundrums long unresolved in the source text. This is what I don’t understand about wilson’s review: she critiques a film on level of the whole for being different than the Homeric text but on the detail level of where it hews much more closely to the original, in many places more closely than almost any adaptation I can think of as a whole (I’m not suggesting Nolan invented anything unprecedented here, simply that many of these above elements actually were included to an extent that many films have not done, likely in part because they ARE ambiguous.) it ends up feeling like an issue with the odyssey, not with the movie, and to me it ends up feeling rather academically disingenuous to present simple readings of the famously messy moral and translation based conundrums Wilson herself made a career off of to the casual reader

[sanguinewolves]

yk what i hate though. is when i find a meme and im like THIS IS SO [cool intimidating mutual i never talk to] I SHOULD SEND IT TO THEM but then i remember ive never talked to them ever and so i cant just like give them a meme out of the blue and so the meme just withers and rots in my camera roll 😔

[autistic-af]

Reblog if a mutual who's never spoken to you can randomly send you memes that made them think of you.

[harpyhormones]

again. bodily autonomy, fundamental bodily autonomy HAS to have room for people doing things with their own bodies that you do not and will not approve of. if it doesnt, it is not bodily autonomy

[unsubconscious]

Iri B., Glass #2 Oil on canvas, 60 x 80cm

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[thefateofcordelia]

[ymutate]

Hazel McNab b.1965, UK

'Kyance, just around the corner' 2026

Linocut print on Somerset paper 250 gsm 63 x 43cm

[ymutate]

Arkhip Kuindzhi (Russian, 1842–1910)

"After a Thunderstorm", 1879.

Oil on Canvas, 102 × 159 cm.

Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, Russia.

[important-animal-images]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Two animals who appreciate the Warm Lamp

[mikkeneko]

[visenyaism]

i do in hindsight really love the concept of complaining about adaptational changes in a 3000 year old oral tradition of which there isn’t really a definitive version so much as a surviving one that is also the most adapted story of all time. my chud forebears in Roman Britain throwing rocks at a bard going nah nah nah the last one said some different other shit at that part you gotta do it again is a comforting image to me

[visenyaism]

Almost one thousand years ago a woman with my exact face and probably better bangs in rural Morgannwyg was defending to the whole village the latest iteration of the marchog gwyrdd where Gwalchmei ap Gwyar is called Gawain and gets a little gay with it even though it’s different than the tale we have earlier heard from a previous bard so that I can fight the same battle on letterboxd today. God bless complaining the worlds oldest activity

[justcatposts]

My 11-month male cat lets my foster kittens nurse on him.

(Source)

[nitewrighter]

[frankierohugejorts]

im sorry these are the funniest tags ive ever seen

[shadowen]

This is an anti-despair checkpoint! You must share something you're looking forward to before scrolling on.

[kaity--did]

Do you know how hard it is to live with a cat that has the intelligence level of literally like a 3 year old but the pure chaos of a high ranking demon?

He’s learned to open the lazy Susan and won’t stop clawing open the flour and rolling in it like a little chinchilla

[kaity--did]

Criminal charges

[kaity--did]

Hey hey hey HEY

He’s been CRAWLING INTO THE BOTTOM CABINETS to TEAR OPEN THE INSTANT POTATOES and EAT BAGS AND BAGS OF THEM I’m livid but also impressed.

[pigcatapult]

Do you have anything with that kind of texture that he can safely play with? This sounds like an understimulation issue.

[kaity--did]

He’s not playing with it

He’s eating it.

I can tell because the bags are nearly empty except for a few small clumps.

I knew he loves mashed potatoes. I just didn’t know the extent he’d go to to get them.

[kaity--did]

We had him tested and in the course of that vet visit he stole

6 tips

3 of the ear light cover things

Our other cats collar

the ear bud of the vets stethoscope 

several hearts

a plastic glove

the vet techs hair tie

Also yeah he’s fine he just likes to steal

[synebluetoo]

Not guilty by reason of deficiency of other people’s stuff

[kaity--did]

This is his ledge

His ledge is taller then my husband who is 6’2”

I am 5’5”

I have to get the step ladder out once a week and see what Orange Sherbert has taken to his ledge for safe keeping. It’s usually the remote.

[cryoverkiltmilk]

Narratively speaking, ending this saga with the reveal that his name is Orange Sherbert was a masterstroke.

[ardentdelirium]

... how many hearts are in the vet office

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

He just stole mine <3

[hollowedskin]

Orange Sherbert!!!!

Bus is a massive food theif too and extremely strong, so we have had to keep all baked goods in the microwave bc he hasn't figured out how to open it and can't pry the door open with his huge muscles.

He literally tore open a plastic cat food tub, he's shredded slow feeders. He once ate half a bag of dry rice, he's eaten dry pasta, flour, icing sugar (you can't even taste sugar what are you doing), half a loaf of bread (at once. Multiple times), entire bucket of greenies treats (ripped the plastic box apart), stole the bone after a leg of lamb and dragged it round the house growling, pizza bases, peanut butter in the jar, the top half of every single iced donut, a dozen pikelets, a bag of frozen peas, and the entire punnet of dirt that I was trying to grow catnip in.

This is not a full list of his crimes.

Bus is also an orange and white man. You gotta be careful.

[salmonbyte]

leek with garlic acrylic paint on paper, applied with cut paper stencil 2023

[cosmovain]

is it weird if i say i genuinely wish there was more positivity aimed at people w large chests

[cosmovain]

"having a large chest is the beauty standard" no having a large chest is the Sexual standard theres a difference. i can only even be Hot and everything i ever wear will be deemed too sexual for every single situation. tank top shows too much cleavege or side boob a button up is always too busty and a crop top will always show too much skin. having a large chest leads to so much back pain and sexualization and complaining about it makes people go "ahh grass is alwahs greener/you are the beauty standard, why complain?" like genuinely i urge yall to watch anything with a larger chested woman and notice, REALLY notice, that her chest is her entire personality. notice that people critiqing misogynist charavter designs alwayd tend to rally in the statement that large chest=misogny, casting aside the Many Many Many women and people who look like Me and just . have a large chest? and exist? and deserve respect and not to be seen as nothing more than a sex symbol by both sides? idk ikdayy

[polkadotmotmot]

Emily Simmons - Curiosity at the Fountain, 2026 - Aquarelle, watercolour on canvas