By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
In the wartime succession stories now screening in your neighbourhood – that’s President Donald Trump’s and President Vladimir Putin’s — the money does the talking which the special effects on the Imax screen cannot.
At the London BFI Imax cinema, the Odyssey film is booked out through its scheduled run from now until mid-September, which has encouraged the rig bettors like the Trump family to place their money on blockbuster profit after the film recovers its costs of $250 million to make; $125 million to market; $300 million-$400 million in cinema margin; for a break-even of between $625 million to $750 million.
“Despite the reviews, going to a billion or well over may be a bridge too far in terms of forecasting,” reports the retail investor bible Forbes, “but it’s certainly not impossible.”
At Variety, the Hollywood bettors’ book, there’s apprehension that this will be, like Penelope’s suitors in the film, a premature ejaculation.
“The Odyssey added $25.9 million domestically on Friday, and by Sunday it’s expected to make $84.5 million. That figure represents just a 32% drop from its excellent $124 million debut. Through two weekends of release, The Odyssey’s North American total should land around $283 million. Over opening weekend, The Odyssey earned $264.1 million worldwide, an outstanding feat considering it’s an adult-skewing drama that clocks in at almost three hours. That godly haul was Nolan’s best global debut ever, legging out The Dark Knight Rises, which earned $249 million back in 2012. That film also happens to be the director’s highest-grossing film ever, at just over a $1 billion. At this pace, The Odyssey is gunning for that record as well.”
Not in New York City, however, where advance bookings for August have already collapsed.
In actuality – that’s to say, after the money is counted for the blockbuster — the film is a bloc buster. It aims to bust the ideological conventions of the blocs – they are the power elites, ruling classes, and empire warmaking systems as we currently know and belong to in the West. Unless it’s the opposite — a reverse bloc buster to reinforce the ideological conventions of those inside the Trump empire who are making the money and running the wars. A well-known substacker isn’t convinced which it is, claiming the makers of the new Odyssey film “intend[ed it] to act as a continuation of the long Marxist march towards a multicultural west and the end of white history as we know it.”
This author doesn’t know either Homer or Marx; Marx knew his Homer in the original Greek, but even he misquoted the original Odyssey with a book and line reference which are non-existent in order to reinforce what Marx thought of as his own idea about labour, class, markets, and money. In point of fact, as the new archeology of ancient Rome is beginning to reveal, Marx was thoroughly mistaken about each one of those things. And the bourgeois, anti-Marxist classicists also.
So what is to be made of the new film — made in mind, not in money, and in wartime too? What is to be interpreted from the film’s lines like:
“Help me go home.”
“This is a household waiting for a master.”
“They’re pining for a daddy.”
“My dad is coming home bringing vengeance. Bringing it all.”
“I need everyone in this party dead.”
“You’re a man who needs to control his fate.”
“No one could stand between me and and home. Not even the goods.”
It isn’t clear to Emily Wilson, who is credited as translating a new version of Homer’s The Odyssey, that the film is either faithful to her translation, or to anything at all. “I’m interested,” Wilson told a reporter in a Greek taverna for the series, Lunch with the Financial Times, “if the Nolan film is going to be imposing a contemporary idea about what [Odysseus and Penelope’s] marriage is, and suggesting it’s a marriage of equals. Which I think many readers want it to be but I don’t think it’s that at all…“There are so many sides to Odysseus that you can treat him as a Rorschach test. People can latch on to whatever element of Odysseus you want to have…So if the ridiculous gender stuff got you there it’s fine. I am just sick of having it as my primary epithet.”
As for the movie hero for now, and Homer’s hero for his time, she says: “as an imaginative expression of qualities that are very useful in the world he’s an interesting character. And interesting is all you need for a literary creation. You don’t need all characters in books to be nice people.”
Definitely not President Trump, the FT reporter got the classicist to insert. “He [Trump] definitely wants to live for ever, which Achilles chooses not to, as does Odysseus.” For her, there is only one Greek hero with Trump’s qualities: Agamemnon, the proud and petulant supreme leader of the Greeks besieging Troy, who expected his allies to bring tribute at every turn — and lost his temper when they did not. Trump is more of an Agamemnon character. He’s amassing wealth as well as social influence . . . In his mind if he ever makes a mistake it was Zeus’s fault, not his.”
Robin Lane Fox, the Oxford University classicist and gardener who wrote a fine interpretation of Homer’s Odyssey up to the archeological use-by date of 2008, refused the Financial Times’s commission to look at the film. Instead, he reviewed the three gardens of Homer’s Odyssey which don’t appear in the film at all. The lede of Lane Fox’s review is “Thank the gods: Nolan steers clear of Homer’s epic gardens in The Odyssey. Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie may do many things well but it can’t match the original’s
horticultural prowess.”
Lane Fox was putting the god Mammon (Roman; Greek equivalent Plutus) a nose ahead of Homer. “I have not yet seen Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey, but others have reassured me. There is not a garden to be seen in it. The characters who immortalise its top two gardens are not even cast in the film. Thank you, Nolan, for not trampling on hallowed ground: you simply left it out.”
Not left out of the $125 million marketing budget for the film are the Homeric values which remain the ideological foundation for the wars to destroy Palestine and Iran as Homer believed Troy deserved, as well as the slaughter of the 108 Ithaca rebels near the end of the poem. In Homer’s similes, their killing is likened as natural as gadflies on cattle, vultures on carcasses, lions on oxen, fishermen on fish.
No PR devices are used by Homer to describe Odysseus’s execution by hanging of the twelve slave women after he had forced them to mop up the blood of the men. “They gasped, feet twitching for a little while, but not for long,” in Wilson’s translation.
The new film leaves out that killing, and also Homer’s climax after that – that’s where in the mutilation of Melanthios, μήδεα τ᾽ ἐξέρυσαν (Book 22, line 476) – they “drew out his privy parts for the dogs to eat raw” (William Morris translation 1887); “drew out his vitals for the dogs to eat raw” (A.T. Murray translation 1919); “ripped away his genitals to feed raw to the dogs” (Wilson translation 2017).
In the light of this ethos of male violence as moral kingship, here is an application of Lane Fox’s Iliad to the wars against Russia, Palestine and Iran:
Never one to be outdone in the vain brains department, Mikhail Gorbachev late in life treated Putin as Odysseus treated Argos, but never quite said as much. Neither of them ever quoted Homer in public. Neither did Vladimir Lenin or Joseph Stalin. The latter had a library of more than 20,000 books: The Odyssey and The Iliad have not been found among them.
The only Russian leader to quote Homer was Leon Trotsky, but that was in 1902-03, at the beginning of his career and in his very first publication.
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