Not a Movie Review

This is not a review of The Odyssey movie. I have not seen The Odyssey and am not planning to see it, because, given Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which I have seen, I doubt his take on The Odyssey will appeal to me. I’m clearly not Nolan’s target audience.

What Nolan cared about in Oppenheimer was the way men pushed against each other, including how men who thought they were powerful, even gods — the physicists in particular — turned out to be subordinate to both the military men and the politicians. I wrote about this when I saw the movie (which, by the way, did get a lot of the history around the bomb right, but wasn’t really about that).

My take was that the movie was “an analysis of how men in a patriarchal society behave toward other men.” Given that The Odyssey is about a very patriarchal society – you can start with Penelope’s son telling her to shut up and keep going from there – I suspect the new movie is also more interested in how men behave toward other men than anything else.

Apparently Odysseus is portrayed as having some angst about the Trojan War, which is in keeping with Oppenheimer’s angst over the bomb. I have no objection to such angst (regardless of whether one considers it appropriate to a story set in such ancient times or not) or to a filmmaker deciding to focus on it, but I’m also not particularly interested in men suffering angst for doing horrible things these days.

Though that’s certainly better than the apparent lack of conscience among the many men (and unfortunately not just men) doing horrible things right now.

I gather that the movie is epic and makes good use of the effects that only movies can provide, and also that those playing the women of the story are excellent actors who contribute something in their own right. In her brilliant review of the movie in the London Review of Books, translator Emily Wilson calls it “a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display – and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.” But I should note that other people whose opinion I respect have enjoyed it.

I suspect it really depends on what you want out of a movie. I certainly don’t want to criticize people for choosing movies for a bit of escape and pure entertainment. I’ve been reading Agatha Christie’s Tuppence and Tommy novels of late for precisely that purpose.

And it is noteworthy that the entertainment movie of the moment is an ancient epic.

If I were in a mood for male-dominated spectacle, I might go. But the only male-dominated spectacle movie I’m willing to watch right now is Seven Samurai, perhaps because in every movie he made Kurosawa gave viewers much more than the simple story. (I’ve seen it many times, including more than once on a big screen, and always find more depth there.)

The truth is, I’m just tired of stories about competition among men to see who can be the manliest, especially in a time when our government is dominated by men who are interested in nothing else. The relentless emphasis by the Secretary of “War” (which is supposed to be Defense, but given how he’s acting, is in fact a war department, though one could also call it the toxic masculinity department) on his ideas of what makes men manly is blatantly absurd, though far too much of the reporting on it doesn’t make it clear what a farce it is.

And the abusive behavior of the grifter occupying our White House makes it even worse. Having started – and already lost – a completely unnecessary war so he can strut his manly stuff, he continues to threaten war crimes and to make preposterous statements.

It’s all exhausting and the gendering of it just makes it worse.

I have lost all patience with this take on what it means to be male. It’s not just the blatant toxicity of much of it; it’s the underlying assumption that if we’re dealing with conflict, these male power games are the only fight that matters.

Interestingly enough, most of the men I spend time with right now don’t play these games at all. These are men who are comfortable with being male, but have no need for power posturing and are open to new ways of getting things done. And they do get things done.

To fix the world we’re living in right now, we’re in desperate need of new stories, but too many of the men making movies apparently aren’t interested in even exploring those. I’ve reached the point where there are certain kinds of disbelief I can no longer suspend.

So I will not be seeing The Odyssey. Your mileage may vary.