The Odysseus of Homer’s epic poem was laying pipe nightly on an island, while a sea away, his wife, Penelope, was fending off drunk suitors who would go off to have quickies with the servants. In Christopher Nolan’s modern adaptation, no one gets so much as a boner.
In Nolan’s world, women are merely vehicles to propel the antiwar message forward, which explains how little screen time they get. They are merely victims of desire, not wielders of it. The movie neglects to include that Odysseus stays with Circe for a year and becomes her lover or that Calypso (Charlize Theron) holds Odysseus essentially as a sex slave after he washes onto her shore. In the text, he sleeps with her every night for seven years until the gods intervene to send him home. (Calypso then criticizes the gods for applying a double standard against the goddesses.) In the film, Calypso is cast as a benevolent, if deceiving, healer who feeds Odysseus lotus flowers to help him overcome PTSD — albeit one with the physical form of a vixen.
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Posted by Fun-Ad3626
33 Comments
Christopher Nolan can’t write women for shit and he can’t do sexy at all so this on brand…
The movie was nearly three hours long. If they added romance to it we’d have to sign a lease to move into the movie theatre for how long it’d be lol
But in all seriousness I do get the authors point, but I think the direction Christopher Nolan wanted to portray in his film was that Odysseus was a stand up, noble guy, like Ned Stark in game of thrones and if he was seen getting it on with the other women then maybe we wouldn’t be rooting for him to reunite with Penelope?
> The movie neglects to include that Odysseus stays with Circe for a year and becomes her lover or that Calypso (Charlize Theron) holds Odysseus essentially as a sex slave after he washes onto her shore. In the text, he sleeps with her every night for seven years until the gods intervene to send him home.
Maybe Nolan wanted to change that to make Odysseus utterly devoted to his wife as she was to him while she was at home.
But then, in Nolan’s version, we really don’t know what went on with he and Calypso past her feeding him the Lotus flowers to make him forget.
I thought Odysseus was a little unlikeable (especially in act 1) and could be difficult to sympathize/empathize with – having him bang every woman he met while his wife refuses all suitors wouldn’t exactly help with that lol
Honestly don’t mind. When I finished reading the Oddysey I hated Odysseus. Like he was even a huge asshole by the “hero” standards of those days.
If they included all the asshole shit Odysseus did in The Oddysey. You would not root for the guy to come home. So i will take an heroic take on Odysseus instead, for my own sanity.
“historical inaccuracies” mind you the entire story of the Odyssey is a work of fiction. It’s all made up.
If it’s no sex or whatever the fuck that Florence Pugh interrogation scene in Oppenheimer was, I’ll take no sex. Chris Nolan is really bad at being sexy.
I like that the feminist critique of The Odyssey is that Odysseus doesn’t get laid enough and that there needs to be more heaving bosoms.
It feels like a weirdly full circle moment.
Yes, he neglected that part of the story because it didn’t really add anything to the tale he wanted to tell. Odysseus in this film was more of a “family man” type (albeit flawed).
Realistically, the real sex should have been between the men on the ship.
What a weird thing to criticize. I hate having softcore porn forced on me when I’m trying to enjoy a story so there being no sex motivates me even more to go watch it.
He also didn’t include any of the sex slaves his men took from Troy. I guess there wasn’t any room to put them on the viking long boats.
Nolan is the last director I want to see portray sex and romance on screen.
Pretty sure it was a choice. I think it would have muddled the message.
I’m not a prude but I also don’t care for any of that in the context of this particular retelling.
Nolan directing any of that stuff wouldn’t be sexy, and by the very nature of Calypso and Odysseus’ relationship, why would you want to see prolonged rape anyway?
I don’t know why certain people act like they’re always robbed when anything they watch isn’t overtly sexual. There’s plenty of shit to watch if thats what you want.
I think OOP just needs to consider that it’s not another general *’Everyone is Hot and No One is Horny’* issue, but just that Nolan doesn’t know how to write fun or thrilling dynamics, and his characters tend all to be all be muted in general, if not straight up one-dimensional.
He has an impersonal touch in character-writing, is what I’m trying to say. Like, you can’t expect him to write great sexual tension or great affection or admiration or even love in this film because he never could, in general.
That’s ignoring the fact that he writes women in a very meh way as well.
I thought the same thing about Saving Private Ryan.
Ah we’ve come full circle.
Haven’t seen the movie yet but this quote is wild. Probably the first time I’ve heard someone who calls themselves “a feminist” complain about the female characters in a movie not being sexualized ENOUGH.
It’s Nolan, no one was expecting sexy lol
Nixing the consensual sex also let him leave out the rape.
I feel like I shouldn’t have to say this so much recently:
The oddesey is a historical story. The oddesey is not history.
You can’t be “historically inaccurate” in a story with magic and monsters.
The whole movie is about being a polite person and respecting the sanctity of trust. The subtext is there with Circe without necessarily having us be on that island for a year. Spoilers: >!The men become pigs and she even says they should go back into their “disguises” meaning they’re just all pigs. But the entire time they’re on the floor naked it’s like they were having an orgy and after they come to their senses they claim she’s a witch for making them submit to their carnal desires.!<
We can also just imply that there is a lot of sex being had but it very much seems very little of it was consensual. None of the sex we would see in an antiwar film would be sex that isn’t traumatic given the time period it’s set in.
There are certain parts of the original text/narrative that kinda just don’t translate super well to real life/modernity. I think this is a big one: I don’t think modern audiences would be rooting for a huge reunion with his wife if he’s banging everyone.
I don’t know if the author has ever read the Odyssey, but Nolan had a pretty feminist take. Homer was kind of really misogynistic, and everything was the fault of women in his (or their, if they even existed) eyes.
If you want Homer’s Odyssey, go read Homer’s Odyssey. This is an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey created for the audience of people that will see this version. Which, by the way, was exactly what Homer did. Homer adapted a centuries old stories for their contemporary audience.
How is it a feminist critique to be mad that there wasn’t on screen rape? Because the text does really push that Odysseus’ sexual relationships with Calypso and Circe were non-consensual. Hermes tells him to sleep with Circe to get her to turn his crew back into men after they’re turned into pigs, and he cries and begs the Gods to release him from Calypso’s island for 7 years. The story itself is already pretty tough with a lot of violence and trauma, I’m not sure that Odysseus getting raped by the women he meets would really add much to the story, unless they make it more consensual which undermines rooting for this guy to go back to his wife if he’s enthusiastically banging every nymph he stumbles upon.
In a huge epic like this, some stuff is skippable and I don’t really see what would be very feminist about including this. It’s not like Circe and Calypso weren’t included at all.
I thought it was refreshing there was no sex stuff in it
thank god he didn’t. i think the film was complete enough without it and it wouldn’t have added to his intended characterization. it being mythology and all, doesn’t have to be 100% faithful to every single detail in the original text and it would be impossible to do that anyways. the film was long enough already lol. i’m personally over all the unnecessary sexualization in Hollywood.
I didn’t realize they removed the sex. The sex part is one of the biggest reasons I didn’t like the Odyssey when we read it and watched the movie in high school. He was sleeping with everyone but wanted to make sure his wife didn’t cheat?! The hypocrisy was crazy.
I didn’t realize they removed the sex. The sex part is one of the biggest reasons I didn’t like the Odyssey when we read it and watched the movie in high school. He was sleeping with everyone but wanted to make sure his wife didn’t cheat?! The hypocrisy was crazy.
Quickies? Does the author of this piece not know that was depicting rape and sexual violence against female enslaved servants. Those women were not “wielders of desire” being denyed power by Nolan. How is this a feminist critique?
So I’ll start with this- I have not watched all of Christopher Nolan’s filmography, but I have watched a lot of it, so if I missed something in ‘Insomnia’ or ‘Tenet’ or ‘Inception’… I’ll watch those eventually.
I finally watched ‘The Prestige’ last night, and for a film with 3 separate love interests (two wives and a mistress), the sexiest moment was Hugh Jackman briefly kissing his wife’s leg on stage. I was surprised when Scarlett Johannsen mentioned to Christian Bale about being his mistress, as we never saw anything leading up to that moment. We had 3 Batman films that all seemed chaste about the love interests (and that is a critique I have about modern action films- I want more romance), except for Talia, I think. But even then, relatively chaste. ‘Dunkirk’ and ‘Interstellar’ were not about romance at all. Perfectly fine to not include unnecessary scenes, as they would not belong at all.
Flash forward to ‘Oppenheimer’, and from what I remember, the sex scene/nudity involved were relatively unsexy and uncomfortable. During ‘The Odyssey’, when Penelope and Odysseus are in bed before he leaves for Troy, the camera cuts just as they embrace.
I already wrote in a different reply comment about the implications of Calypso (and why I don’t think a lot of audience members would pick up that she was SA’ing Odysseus if it was shown on screen due to his lack of consent, as we already have a consent problem and a media literacy problem), and I am okay with the changes to Circe. The movie’s nearly 3 hours, and as it took Odysseus 10 years to get home, I do think he would have lost sympathy points from the audience if we learned that he spent 1 full year with Circe in which the lines of consent were possibly at question (it’s been awhile since I’ve read the book, I can’t remember all of what happened on her island outside of the pigs and them having sex). From what I could see, the sirens appeared to be fully clothed, but I could be wrong about that (and I did find that choice odd, but we saw them from a distance).
What would have been great to see would be Penelope’s final test to Odysseus regarding whether or not he could move their bed (a trick question, as it was partially built using a living tree).
But Nolan has proven he’s either not interested or not comfortable filming intimacy. And I would rather directors do it for the right reasons, instead of for shock or titillation, but this isn’t something Nolan wants to film.