Whether you choose to see it or not see it, whether you love it or hate it, or feel something in between, The Odyssey remains a movie, a few hours of entertainment that has absolutely no real impact on your life even should it go on to make a trillion dollars.
Long before the rise of social media, much less Artificial Intelligence, my father used to say that people in the modern world had too much time on their hands. Less than a century ago, living was hard. The average person worked six days a week, twelve or so hours per day if they were lucky to have a job, and work around the house wasn’t much easier without dishwashers, laundry machines, dryers, and more. Unless you were wealthy, a person spent most of their time focused on simply surviving, lacking the mental bandwidth to worry about much beyond meeting their day-to-day needs, forget seeking plentiful forms of entertainment using a wireless device. In the 1950s, that began to change when the emergence of America as a global economic superpower after World War II and the rise of consumerism introduced the concepts of leisure time and disposable income. Between the wide availability of new gadgets and rapidly rising incomes, people found themselves with both more time on their hands and more money to spend on simply having fun. Generally speaking, this has been a positive development, improving the lives of hundreds of millions in the United States and billions around the world, but like everything else in life, there have been some unfortunate, unintended consequences. As late as 1976, the legendary singer and songwriter Billy Joel noted how just surviving was a noble fight in his classic “Angry Young Man,” but now that most of us have no trouble surviving and devote less and less time to the tasks required to do so, we appear to have refocused our effort and energy on battles that are much, much less noble. If social media is any indication, many of us waste our lives fighting over anything and everything as though it was a life or death issue, regardless of how frivolous or the underlying reality that time spent in pointless battles is time completely wasted when we could be enjoying ourselves or doing something productive.
Perhaps nothing over the past few months encapsulates this phenomena more than the debate raging over Christopher Nolan’s new film, The Odyssey, in limited release today and wide release tomorrow. To hear promoters and detractors, many of whom haven’t seen the movie yet, tell it, the success or failure of this film at the box – criteria which is rarely defined either way – is of galactic importance, as though every dollar the film makes or doesn’t make goes into their pocket. Variety actually reported on a woman delaying her pregnancy to be there opening day, despite having to drive three hours back and forth. As they described, it “Nothing is going to keep Amber Connaghan, a 29-year-old tech editor who lives in the California desert, from seeing Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey on opening day. Connaghan bought her ticket over a year ago and has been gearing up for the three-hour drive to the closest theater playing the film in Imax 70mm.” “One of my friends got pregnant last year, and she’s like, ‘OK, it’s time for you to have your second child,’” Ms. Connaghan explained. “I was like, ‘No, I have to wait a few months. Otherwise, it’s going to be too close to ‘The Odyssey.’” She might be extreme, but she’s certainly not alone, at least partially due to the appeal of seeing it in IMAX for whatever reason, “people are crossing state lines, snapping up tickets to multiple showtimes months in advance or even settling for 2 a.m. screenings of the nearly three-hour epic just so they can be part of the moviegoing phenomenon.” “This is the biggest movie of the year from the biggest director of our lifetime,” explained Hogan Shay, a 27-year-old Dallas-based software advisor who plans to see the film in Imax 70mm twice in two weeks. “We grew up with Nolan’s work. He’s a household name for my generation like Spielberg or Scorsese were for my parents.” Incredibly, Variety found one individual who was flying from Pittsburg to LA, “Few can match the commute of Tim McHugh. The 33-year-old healthcare consultant is flying from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles in order to see The Odyssey in Imax 70mm at Universal City Walk. McHugh and his brother often take a vacation to visit different ballparks in America, but their home city doesn’t have many Imax screens, so they decided to take a cinematic detour on their next trip.” “Seeing something in Imax 70mm has been a bucket list item for me since I saw Ryan Coogler do a video about the screenings for ‘Sinners,’” he said.
Perhaps needless to say, the detractors are far less enthused. Indeed some might describe them as horrified as a result of certain admittedly questionable casting choices, acting as though the film is a mortal threat to all of Western Civilization. Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, has somehow found time to weigh in while running his many companies, blasting Mr. Nolan repeatedly on his social media website X in a perfect representation of the phenomena. While accusing him of simply wanting more awards, “Shame on Chris Nolan for desecrating Homer! He will never live it down,” he claimed. “Chris Nolan is pissing on Homer’s grave. Chris Nolan has shown total contempt for the Greek people,” he insisted. While Mr. Musk may have been among the most vociferous, many have taken aim at the decision to cast Lupito Nyong’o, a black woman of Kenyan descent as Helen of Troy, who is described as white haired and golden armed in the original text. Conservative podcaster Matt Walsh echoed the idea that Mr. Nolan had only made that choice out of a cultural fear, claiming “Not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is ‘the most beautiful woman in the world.’ But Christopher Nolan knows that he would be called racist if he gave ‘the most beautiful woman’ role to a white woman.” Mel Gibson, the legendary actor and himself a director, said much the same, combining the two things into a single statement, “I never expected a filmmaker like Nolan to race-swap Helen of Troy and dismiss the opinions of millions of moviegoers concerned about Greek mythology being devalued.” Chrissie Mayer, a prominent right-wing commentator and blogger simply called it “disgusting.” Less prominent social media users have variously insisted Mr. Nolan chose to “grovel on his knees and bow to an immoral, dying [woke] agenda,” he was making “woke garbage,” and also was “devaluing Greek culture.” Ultimately, some of the feedback was so negative and frequent the producers restricted comments on official channels and at least some were so horrified, they poured through Mr. Nolan’s earlier work for signs of potential woke blasphemy, concluding that this wasn’t a surprise because he already glorified a commie in Oppenheimer or something similar.
Regardless of any real or perceived controversy, the so-called critics, meanwhile, appear to be falling all over themselves to find new ways to praise the final product with the film boasting an incredible 98% positive rating on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing. Even before the full reviews were out, the film was described in terms that at least I wouldn’t normally apply to a movie, any movie, or perhaps would never apply to anything in this imperfect world after the earliest screenings. It was “flawless,” “every inch an epic,” “an astonishing achievement,” a “triumphant, spectacular epic,” featuring performances that are “genuinely grand,” “an experience,” “something monumental,” “is the kinda movie where you find yourself completely forgetting you’re even watching a movie. it felt like i was dreaming.” “im absolutely speechless. what an experience.” The full reviews weren’t much less over the top, calling the the film “an absolute triumph, a constant delight,” “a masterpiece,” an “incredible showcase of filmmaking prowess,” “a cinematic triumph,” a “feat of blockbuster filmmaking,” a “towering achievement,” a “tremendous artistic triumph,” “an undeniably astounding achievement in filmmaking,” we’re “truly blessed to have a filmmaker like Nolan,” “a blockbuster of literally unprecedented scale,” “stunning and captivating,” “monumental spectacle that blends breathtaking scale with surprising emotional depth,” “a movie that’s so massive, so comprehensive, so emotional, and so overwhelming that it feels like more than a movie,” “a fluid river of thrilling triumph and agonizing pain,” “a genuine masterclass in filmmaking that’s awe-inducing, breathtaking and impeccably composed, filled with soul-shattering performances and standout craftsmanship,” “the cinematic equivalent of Mount Olympus, a soulful and ambitious monument that only he could construct,” a “critique of the world that is worth the price of admission alone.”
As someone who went to film school myself, one can be forgiven to wonder if these critics merely watched a movie, had some sort of religious experience, had the best sex of their lives with the person they loved the most in the world, took strong, psychotropic drugs and traveled to some higher plane, perhaps hit their head on the way in and had some kind of bizarre dream they took for reality, or some combination of all of these and more. Call me a cynic, call me crazy, call me whatever you like but these are simply not the kind of words one associates with a movie. Even should The Odyssey prove to the best film ever made and the best film that will ever be made, no movie should ever prompt one to describe it as soul shattering or a river of whatever. Especially as a freaking critic, which means someone who “evaluates, analyzes, or judges the merits and faults of something,” those quoted shouldn’t be debasing themselves in outright idolatry and if they had any shame, they’d be embarrassed. Fortunately or unfortunately, the same is true of many of the detractors and at least some segment of the early moving going audience, rearranging their lives over what will be streaming in a few months for free. Whether you choose to see it or not see it, whether you love it or hate it, or feel something in between, The Odyssey remains a movie, a few hours of entertainment that has absolutely no real impact on your life even should it go on to make a trillion dollars. The real question no one seems to want to answer: How on Earth could we care so much, transforming ourselves into Mr. Joel’s Angry Young Man – or Old, or Young Woman, or Old Woman – over a freaking film that we have no control over whatsoever and has no impact on us at all anyway?
Perhaps if this were the only instance of the phenomenon, we might dismiss it as some kind of collective psychosis, but anyone who’s seen the debate over the merits of something as benign as changing the clocks forward and backward a couple of times a year, knows that isn’t the case. As a culture, we’re obsessed with making mountains out of molehills as they used to say, and turning everything no matter how insignificant or irrelevant into a matter of life or death. Why? Circling back to my father’s comment, it’s hard not to believe that many of us have far too much time on our hands. While we remain deeply pessimistic and divided about the future with poll after poll showing that Americans believe we have huge problems – only 35.7 percent according to the Real Clear Politics average believe the country is moving in the right direction – we somehow have time to waste on what I said earlier is essentially frivolous. This suggests two things. Either we are unwilling to confront real problems any longer and are instead focusing on frivolities, or we are greatly overstating the real problems. Given the continuous political discourse, wherein everyone on social media is an expert and supposedly real problems are beaten past the point of no return on a daily basis, I’m inclined to think it’s mostly the latter and this is not surprising. Humans are hardwired to identify and obsess over problems even when there aren’t any. Our ancestors didn’t survive life on the savannah because we pretended everything would be fine. We survived because we expected and prepared for the worst, believing the shift of every blade of grass was a potential predator ready to eat us. This tendency still exists in the modern world, except it manifests in increasingly bizarre ways. While there’s nothing I can do to change that, I’d recommend following Eddie Murphy’s advice in the classic Raw, where he impersonates the late, great Richard Pryor: Have a coke and a smile and shut the fuck up for a while. Failing that, how about get a freaking life already?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 