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I want to talk a little bit about film and television adaptions, and why, at least in the last ten to fifteen years, they've done such a bad job at adapting the source material. The first guilty party on this front, is of course Nolan's Odyssey, which I saw this past Tuesday. While entertaining and beautiful to look at, this film failed completely to capture the experience of reading or listening to the poem it's based on. The dialogue was flat, wooden, and filled with exposition dumps. The gods aren't present in any meaningful way, other than through storms and other weather events, which can easily be interpreted through the eyes of atheist Christopher Nolan as natural phenomena. And most importantly, the characters and themes are unrecognizable. Odysseus is just Matt Damon who feels bad about being Matt Damon: there's none of the flirtatious, prideful intelligence that defines his character in the poem. Because of this subversion of Odysseus, Telemachus's character also falls flat— how can you have an effective coming of age story when you subvert and deconstruct every part of what it means to be a man/king/father figure by tearing down Odysseus?
I don't think this phenomena is limited to the Odyssey. The newest version of Wuthering Heights is basically a porno. The final seasons of Games of Thrones devolved into a nihilistic gore-fest, which the source material most certainly is not. Even the Hobbit all the way back in 2012-2014 tried to make the charming, relatively low stakes kids book into another version of The Lord of the Rings.
It's tempting for me to blame woke for a lot of these changes, and that's undoubtedly part of it. If many of the values that were historically important in Western Civilization are now taboo, of course there will have to be heavy modification of the source material. However, I don't think this is the full picture. Many of these movies are doing really well at the box office, and I don't think woke has that much cultural appeal to the average American. Rather, I think a combination of the inherent limitations of visual storytelling and the dumbing down of stories in general because of reductions in attention spans is a more likely set of culprits.
Neil Postman wrote extensively about the first problem in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Visual media neither gives us the interiority that allows us to understand a point of view from the inside, nor really forces us to engage with an artists arguments: the movie will play on with or without our engagement in it.
I don't think this critique is entirely fair. You can certainly do a lot of subtle storytelling with television and film. The problem is now that people's attention spans are so fried that you need to beat them over the head with the themes of the work through dialogue and exposition dumps. The Odyssey is extremely guilty of this, which is probably part of the reason I had such a hard time watching it.
Why do you think visual media, specifically adaptions, have declined in quality over the past decade?
I guess some of the problem is, has the Odyssey actually ever been faithfully adapted? Has most of Greek myth?
It is hard to say that Hollywood has recently gotten bad at adaptations, if they've never been very good at adaptations.
I enjoyed the movie Jason and the Argonauts, but I wouldn't say it is the most faithful adaptation of the Argonautica. I enjoyed Troy, but I wouldn't say it was a totally faithful retelling of the Illiad.
While I agree that Nolan's Odyssey was unfaithful in various ways, I actually thought it was more faithful than a lot of past attempts, since it at least tried to do something with the themes of xenia that almost all modern adaptations adapt out.
I almost wonder if a "faithful" adaptation of something like the Odyssey or Illiad wouldn't use a framing device similar to the Princess Bride. Maybe an opening scene with Homer as a bard, telling the poem to an audience, and then you could include abbreviated versions of the catalogue of ships in the Illiad and other parts that always get dropped in adaptations, while showing how the audience at the time reacted to those sections.
Maybe you could make it so it is not a single bard telling the story, but a series of bards and scholars all adding their own bits. Have the segment where Odysseus first lands back on Ithaca told with a framing story of the neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry telling all of the supposed symbolism of the cave of the nymphs (which gets dropped in almost every adaptation, as a supposedly totally superfluous scene.) Maybe add some of the bits that happen after the Odyssey ends, from the Greek dramas, using the plays as the framing device for that part of the story.
Now granted, my proposed adaptation has the potential to be the most boring and meandering version of the story of the Trojan war ever put to film (people want faithful, but does anyone actually want catalogue-of-ships faithful?), but I think it would at least be a different take some could appreciate.
ISTR seeing a TV miniseries version in the 90s that was a pretty direct port -- it's not like the story is super-complex really?
I think the problem is that Hollywood thinks that everything needs to be "improved" -- not sure when this happened, but I think (for instance) the Biblical epics of the 50s/60s didn't do this?
I've seen that adaptation, and I think it dropped central themes of the story. Xenia truly is central to that story, and I don't remember it being emphasized at all in the TV movie adaptation.
I think there are valid complaints you could make of how hamfistedly Nolan crammed "Zeus's law"/xenia into the narrative, but his choice to try and include it at least makes it feel more like the original epic in some ways.
(I say that even if I also think Nolan removed a lot of opportunities to emphasize the importance of xenia in the story, like Polyphemus saying his xenia was to eat Odysseus last, or Nausicaa and the Phaeacians finally showing how civilized folk treat Odysseus with hospitality, which also works as a good reminder of what sacred laws the suitors are violating right before the final arc of the epic.)
I will say that I would have liked Odysseus' cunning and trickster tendencies to shine through more. I couldn't really see Matt Damon's Odysseus attempting to lie to Athena-in-disguise, much to the latter's delight.
The nature of storytelling is that new retellings emphasize different things than the original.
Almost no Westerner retelling the Prodigal Son story ever mentions the famine that happens in the middle of the story. The Song of Hiawatha emphasizes different things than the original Indian version of the story. Sir Orpheo gives the Orpheus myth a happy ending.
Hollywood didn't invent changing stories.
Surely not -- but at some point it feels like they started doing it themselves -- "The Maltese Falcon" is pretty interchangeable with the book; Cecil B. Demille mostly played it straight in his Biblical epics.
Not sure when this changed -- various mass-market James Clavell/Tom Clancy adaptations into the 90s seemed pretty true to the books, although I'm sure there are counter-examples from this period?
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