Real and apparent magic

My Odyssey take (Real Adornian patriots in control)

Roman carnelian gem, Odysseus und die Sirenen (1st century AD); Gustave Moreau, "The Mermaids" (1885)

I watched The Odyssey (in 70mm IMAX! yippee) last week. I’ve never written a movie review before, and I’m very far from starting a Letterboxd or something like that, but I did want to get my thoughts in.

To satisfy my boyfriend who really hates when reviews only talk about the film’s ideas and not the film itself: My initial impressions were that it was visually better than expected, very rich looking—looking, in fact, like Beau travail (1999) at points, with the color grading and all the soldiers laboring on beaches in foreign lands. Indeed, somebody else also identified the way parts of this movie felt like a less-competent Beau travail. (Claire Denis does it much better fwiw, the murky interiority of Denis Lavant’s character’s guilt over his violation of soldierly brotherhood cross-cut to his present-day in Marseille.) Anyways, the sense is communicated well, if a bit heavy-handedly, of a vast, unknowable world where being blown off-course can land you in the realm of monsters and the dead, this premodern understanding.

Onto the ideas. The movie is ultimately too trapped in contemporary Hollywood sentimentalities and Christian tropes (e.g. washing the feet of beggars) for a supposedly pre-Christian, pre-capitalist setting. Nolan has stripped out or otherwise severely downplayed the cleverness of Odysseus and the mythological aspects in such a way that it renders the film ideologically incoherent, but to understand why that’s the case we should look at how the Odyssey epic is taken up by Adorno and Horkheimer (A&H) in my very favorite chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment (DoE)—to whom I have a parasocial relationship akin to how many young men treat their close personal friends, the hosts of the former podcast Cum Town.

The Enlightenment of myth, the myth of Enlightenment

Here’s the deal with DoE, crudely. One standard narrative of civilized humanity’s belief systems progresses like this: first there was the age of mythology, then that of religion, then of science and of Enlightenment-style rationality. But in the post-Enlightenment era the ways in which people interact with scientific rationality is as a form of dogma which replicates the mythological state of people worshiping idols and the gods¹, because scientism is its own form of ideology, produced and shaped by the conditions under which it emerged: capitalism and imperialism. The Age of Reason and of Empires and capitalism did not all develop together by coincidence, we (meaning Europeans*) conquered the world to command and enslave, to primitively accumulate and dispossess, but also to map, to survey its flora and fauna, to have full knowledge of its peoples; this narrative I’ve sketched is itself a form of mythmaking around it.

*I know this isn’t necessarily obvious (/s), but I’m actually Chinese

We deploy this Enlightenment rationality instrumentally, which A&H identify in contrast to what they call objective reason. In the alienated world we use an instrumental reason: the capacity for selecting appropriate means to whatever ends, which are often selected for us from without (Kant’s heteronomy). Objective reason is that reasoning about—about whether our ends are rational, whether they express our longing for freedom—which was undermined by the Enlightenment when it should have informed the Enlightenment, and grows increasingly rare.

The Enlightenment succeeded in defeating mythological reasoning but a new form of mythology has emerged under the capitalist mode of production. Myth contains the seeds of enlightenment, expressing our desire to dominate nature; our technologies developed under post-Enlightenment conditions give the illusion of control over an indifferent Nature. Enlightenment reason is crystallized to its very, literally subatomic, tip in the atomic bomb, the greatest physics ever discovered and theoretically developed to wreak the most destruction over people and nature, but that’s a story for another day. (The natural follow-on to this piece is an Günther Anders-ian read on Oppenheimer but I’m not strong enough for that right now lol.)

Aside: In this way I think Sam Kriss is doing pretty standard Adornian cultural critique with the “Reading is magic” essay among others where he claims the conditions of modernity are causing us to revert to premodern belief systems and practices. First, we don’t understand anything, treating oracles (Delphic, bone) as a way to probe the world; then the Enlightenment dispels the usage of oracles. We understand the world; with this understanding we create technology (including, sigh, LLMs) that we then treat as oracles once more. It’s good, we need more Adornite thought leaders, Adorno has been vindicated a million times over by contemporary conditions.

The Odyssey chapter is A&H’s way of teasing out what myths the Enlightenment has produced. It examines the dialectical relationship between “Myth is already Enlightenment” and “Enlightenment reverts to myth” through a reading of the Odyssey, which contains an entwinement of prehistory and history where some parts are mythic and other putatively historical. The relationship between myth (the deeds of gods) and epic (those of men) is complicated—dialectical, in fact—because at points the gods intervene indirectly (through Nature), or humans are set in motion by the gods who act directly through other individuals (e.g. Athena disguised as Mentes and then Mentor to influence Telemachus), but these individuals (the ones with autonomy, i.e. Odysseus, Telemachus) can choose to obey or defy godly commands, sometimes successfully and sometimes punished, bringing into question whether free will is possible and for whom.

This “freedom as autonomy” comes from Kant—humans’ dignity lies in our capacity for freedom of thought and action—we are always free but not always autonomous (the condition of heteronomy). The Odyssey is nakedly about a humanist rationalism which triumphs over irrational, mythic nature, through Odysseus who prototypes bourgeois instrumental reason. He, a nobleman and gentleman, encounters fantastical adventures as “dangerous temptations that pull the self from the course of its own logic”², and overcomes them with polymēchania (technological intelligence) and cunning³—in part by bargaining the lives of his men whose labour-power was coerced, treating them as means to his own ends, denying their autonomy, instrumentalizing them in service of his story.

But the notion that Homer is antimythological and enlightened is only partially true, because, dialectically, myth contains the seeds of enlightenment. “Mythology itself set into motion the endless process of enlightenment by which, with ineluctable necessity, every definite theoretical view is subjected to the annihilating criticism that it is only a belief, until even the concepts of mind, truth, and indeed enlightenment itself have been reduced to animistic magic.” One example A&H give is that sacrifice to the gods as practiced by Homeric heroes is to some degree rational, a mode of deceptive exchange⁴; human acts of sacrifice suborn the gods to the primacy of human purposes. Likewise the mythic monsters Odysseus encounters “confront him with ossified covenants, legal claims of immemorial times”⁵; Scylla and Charybdis present him with an essentially legal dilemma, “for the right of the mythic figures…depends solely on the impossibility of fulfilling its statutes.”⁶

‘Enlightenment reverts to myth’; we often employ reason uncritically (instrumentally) and reproduce irrationality around us. Odysseus employs instrumental reason to advance his self-interest and escape the mythological world, and return to his rightful place as the rightful king (as oppressor) of Ithaca, a myth he weaves around himself by dominating Penelope, Telemachus, the suitors, the slave women &c. with cunning and incredible violence—showing how instrumental reason can combat myth but at the cost of re-establishing a new myth. In this way Odyssey is an allegory for the failure of the project of enlightenment, for the merely apparent triumph of modernism (capitalism, instrumental reason) over myth (savagery, magical thinking).

How the film fails:

All of this is to say that Nolan doesn’t consider any of this at all, and in fact he cannot. Of course Nolan isn’t going to direct an ‘based Frankfurt-School Marxist’ Odyssey because his Odysseus is hardly clever at all, only a guilt-ridden straight-laced amnesiac war veteran (Calypso as therapist and not seductress, Athena as Protestant Personal Jesus who’s basically functioning as Einstein did in Oppenheimer, etc.) One change he makes is having Odysseus recount his story to Calypso from the frame of recovering his lost memories after seven years of lotus-induced amnesia, which necessarily makes his narration limited—he cannot reflect or spin the story because he can’t remember. Contrast to the canonical frame under which he recounts many of the stories of his journey, under his full faculties in the Phaeacian court, where there’s this added interpretive task of figuring out what he’s fabulating, what he’s saying to make himself look better—another aspect of his polytropos, how much of his greatness can be believed (how much of bourgeois rationality’s greatness, the self-mythology of its development, can be believed).

Everything that is interesting about the Odyssey is stripped away when Odysseus’s cunning is whittled down to that which makes the plot still ‘work’. Here is what is lost by removing, for example, the dialogues with Polyphemus, and particularly the ‘Nobody’ episode. By muting Polyphemus, taking away his own speech, he becomes dumb and uninteresting, a plain old monster rather than in the representing a previous iteration of humanity, “the barbaric age of hunters and shepherds”⁷; who in the epic poem cannot solve the bourgeois puzzles of how Odysseus’s men escaped the cave or the double entendre of Odysseus’s name, but shows a tender paternal care for his sheep. The Nobody episode demonstrates cunning as a mode of almost-economic exchange, “one in which everything takes place above-board, in which the contract is fulfilled and yet one party is cheated”⁸. In the film he might as well not be humanoid at all, his form is that inconsequential since he cannot be communicated with.

The film historicizes much more than Homer and downplays the mythological element; Nolan flees the discomfort of fantasy for the comfort of the ‘realism’ of war-criminal guilt. This is why he has to get rid of so much of the Gods, he doesn’t know what to do with them; “a time of apparent magic” and so on. The lotus—Nolan having conflated the Lotus-eaters with the Calypso episode—isn’t even interesting as a plot device, being a substitute for ‘generic drug that deadens your emotions and cognition’. A&H characterize the Lotus-eaters episode as cursing, without harming, Odysseus’s men to surrender to a condition without work or struggle, the temptation of regressing to a primitive state “of gathering the fruits of the earth and sea” pre- any mode of production. “The eating of flowers…promises a life whose reproduction would be independent from conscious self-preservation and the bliss of the satiated free of the utility of scheduled nourishment.”⁹ Here, instead, we get ‘playing house with Charlize Theron on the beach’.

The movie strips out both Enlightenment (Odysseus’s cunning) and myth (the gods and more nakedly fantastical elements of the story), leaving vacuity. Nolan can’t write anything meaningful into this gap because under false consciousness he is unable to identify the ideology he breathes and swims in—both the cosmopolitan liberal order that consumes itself¹⁰, as well as the bourgeois cultural myth. In its place we have this completely incoherent narrative with inflections of the GWOT American war hero “shoot and cry” shit. He has to make up this whole murky “the collapse of our age of bronze”, “by burning Troy [violating xenia] we’re burning the civilized world” angle whole cloth (to make it more Oppenheimer-y, I guess).

Without love (Marxism), it cannot be seen

“Why are you ragging on the latest Hollywood adaptation of the Odyssey to air out your pet theory” is certainly a possible response to the concerns raised here, and yes, this was obviously just a pretense for me to talk about Adorno again, and in particular my favorite chapter of DoE (well and above the culture industry essay). Certainly there are many interpretations of the Odyssey, stretching across the entire Western literary tradition, which choose to emphasize or ignore this or that aspect of the epic. None of this would be a problem had Nolan not explicitly said that he was trying to update to the current moment and that the changes were made specifically to situate in modern concerns—and if he had not bungled it so badly, if his editorializing were not such nakedly Kulturindustriell sentimental schlock. I’m bringing up the fact that two theorists have already correctly surmised how the Odyssey can illuminate modernity, though I hold no illusions about Nolan being intellectually up to the task.

Ultimately I think it’s not possible to correctly interpret the stories of humanity without being a Marxoid of some kind. That’s why I just want to watch Pasolini now, whose The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) is criticized for having a too-Marxist Jesus but is widely hailed as capturing the spirit of the Biblical story. I’d like to watch Oedipus Rex (1967) and Medea (1969) — onwards!

References

• Adorno, Theodor W., Max Horkheimer, and Robert Hullot-Kentor. “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment.” New German Critique, no. 56 (1992): 109–41. Accessed on JSTOR, page numbers are from this journal version rather than my print copy of DoE which I don’t have in California.

• Curtis Bowman lecture: “Odysseus and the Siren Call of Reason: The Frankfurt School Critique of Enlightenment” (1996). https://www.othervoices.org/1.1/cubowman/siren.php

1. So really Adorno and Horkheimer were reaming Reddit atheists (“oh my Sagan”, “Sciencemas” etc.) before their time.

2. A&H, 112.

3. “The man of cunning survives only at the price of his own dream, which he bargains off by demystifying himself just as he demystified the external powers. He can never have it all, he must always wait, have patience, do without; he may not eat of the lotus or the cattle of holy Hyperion, and when he steers between Scylla and Charybdes he must calculate how many of his men will be torn from his boat.” A&H, 122.

4. “The purportedly authentic, archaic principle of blood and sacrifice is already marked by the bad conscience and cunning of domination, which are characteristic of that current program of national renewal that uses images of the primordial for purposes of self-advertisement”—i.e., Nazism constructing an Aryan myth. A&H, 111.

5. A&H, 122.

6. A&H, 124.

7. A&H, 128.

8. A&H, 125.

9. A&H, 127.

10. my oomf Crane did make a stab at it as a self-contradictory defense of liberal cosmopolitanism (as well as Letterboxd user Banana Horde). Because Nolan cannot see that xenia destroys itself by being followed he cannot see the same of liberal cosmopolitanism.