"Passingly, I think that this might always have been inevitable, that perhaps she had always known it but had wanted to hold on for me, for as long as she could."
I know, I also have self esteem so low that accepting a compliment feels physically painful but basically calling the person who’s complimenting you a liar doesn’t help anybody including yourself.
Filmmakers have the right to adapt academic output for their medium. Academics have the right to criticise how it's done, and the biases betrayed by the execution. Emily Wilson's review of The Odyssey is an excellent addition to the discourse around this film, and how American industry valorises certain character and narrative arcs. Though Nolan's film is largely accepted as a critique, it still sits neatly in his oeuvre of great, but tortured and ahistorically moral, frontier men.
I especially hope that people take the time to digest her penultimate paragraph:
The most troubling ethical problem with Nolan’s Odyssey concerns the decision to film part of the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thus normalising the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahrawi people. It is particularly galling that Nolan used this land simply as a visually striking backdrop for a film that centres, aggrandises and redeems the hero of a territorial war on account of his belated and partial acknowledgment of his own guilt.
— An Uncomplicated Man by Emily Wilson (London Review of Books)
The decision to shoot in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, where the Indigenous people can’t tell their stories without fear of imprisonment
The simple act of holding a camera in my homeland of Western Sahara can be a crime. When Sahrawi film-makers and journalists attempt to document everyday life under Moroccan occupation, they can often end up in prison cells. For the Moroccan regime, a camera in the hands of a Sahrawi threatens its official narrative that Western Sahara is part of Morocco.
In contrast, when celebrated international names in the film industry wish to capture an ideal picture for an epic journey, and decide that our land is exotic enough to shoot the desired scenes, they are welcomed, escorted and granted access by the same authorities that usually deny us that right.
This is the bitter and paradoxical reality in Western Sahara, an occupied territory with many material and immaterial riches. While foreign extractors of all kinds freely plunder Western Sahara’s phosphate minerals, sand, fish, and tomatoes, and commodify our winds, sunlight and picturesque desert landscapes, we the Indigenous Sahrawis are becoming a minority in our own homeland, systematically marginalised, silenced and denied access to the land we roamed as nomads for centuries.
The latest episode of this colonial drama stars the Christopher Nolan blockbuster using parts of our occupied territory as a film set. Sahrawis are aghast that scenes from The Odyssey – an adaptation of Homer’s poem immersed in themes of displacement, family separation, betrayal, and the agonising, decades-long struggle to return home – were shot on our lands. The irony would be comical were it not so tragic: we, the Sahrawi people whose land was used to film parts of the Odyssey, have been living our own brutal odyssey for more than 50 years.
— Mohamed Sleiman Labat
Despite the MAGA overreaction to the bold casting choices in what was bound to be a relatively conservative film, it was Donald Trump that made this colonial backdrop possible:
The Odyssey is the first major Hollywood production to shoot scenes in Western Sahara. This would have been unthinkable prior to 2020, when President Donald Trump broke with decades of US foreign policy and recognized Morocco’s illegally established sovereignty over the territory. The decision was part of a quid pro quo in exchange for Morocco’s normalization of ties with Israel. Now Nolan and crew’s four-day shoot in Dakhla illustrates how quickly Hollywood studios have moved to exploit the opportunities created by Trump’s transactional diplomacy. This subsidized occupation cinema is yet another symptom of the breakdown of whatever remained of a rules-based liberal order.
For Moroccan officials, the presence of The Odyssey crew was a propaganda coup. They have made it clear they see it as just the beginning of Dakhla’s development as a base for international film productions. This is despite the fact that the wider Western Sahara remains the site of an ongoing armed conflict between the country’s military and the Sahrawi pro-independence movement, the Polisario Front. Last month, three Polisario fighters were killed in a Moroccan drone attack close to the 2,700-kilometer sand berm that separates Moroccan-controlled territory from the desert areas held by Polisario.
— Odyssey to Africa’s last colony by Eoghan Gilmartin
sources: l.e.s. by donald glover // this year by the mountain goats // maya hornbacher, madness // watchisjawdrop on tumblr // wuntrum on tumblr // kim kardashian // unknown // godblessryankent on tiktok // nayyirah waheed // unknown // lev st. valentine
[image transcript: Nolan's Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior's glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters have convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible. /End image transcript]
I strongly recommend checking out the full article linked by OP, this isn't even as brutal as Wilson gets.
well-written women who narratively suck are like crack cocaine to me. hello shitty little woman do you need some crumbs of love that you've clearly never been given? lol
i really appreciate everyone reblogging this with other countries but this is specifically about the way europe is trying to frame itself (and has succeeded in the minds of many usamerican liberals) as this sort of fluffy cute haha 'social democracy' 'continent' while drowning thousands of refugees every year and sending millions to israel.
so christopher nolan drilled into an active historical site to rig a scene, dumped a bunch of plastic skeletons into the ocean with no plan to fish them out, and ruined an actual Viking ship on loan from sweden and refuses to pay for damages. all for that garbage movie.
Swedish nonprofit alleges cost to repair replica was $6,000 but Universal – which made $264m on film’s opening weekend – has not stumped up
Concerns about prop disposal as filming on new Nolan film comes to a close | www.italianinsider.it
looking for a news outlet to pick up the archeologist drama over this but you can google the practical effects used for the cyclops and find the pictures pretty easily
nobody UNDERSTANDS this post!! this is NOT about feeling BAD and watching your COMFORT show!!! this is about feeling FINE but then CHOOSING to watch a show that makes you want to KILL YOUR SELF
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