I just went and saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey at the Imax on the weekend. I love Greek mythology. I did a year of classics in first year university where I read the Odyssey, and had a British professor, Dr Murgatroyd, who would wear these fantastic snug red jeans to lecture in the late 90s while showing us The Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts. There was even a student in my class who wrote a myth (fan fic) about my red jean clad prof and submitted it as an assignment, to only have Dr. Murgatroyd read it aloud one day in lecture to us.
Anyway, this article is to not argue accuracy, as I believe the original fictional work will always be different than the interruption. Right? We have Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, and we have Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. They serve different purposes. And I think it’s important to show mass society older narratives and provide interest. So, if Nolan’s version of the Odyssey puts a highlight on antiquity, and gets people into classics, that’s a win in my books.
With that said, I do want to mention an edit in Nolan’s version of the Odyssey that I was disappointed in-and that was of the two female ‘monsters’ Charybdis and Scylla. At one point in the Odyssey, Odysseus and his men have a choice to either aim towards the whirlpool Charybdis, or hug the cliffs where Scylla is located. Circe tells Odysseus that Charybdis is the bigger threat, so he turns the boat towards the cliffs, and where Scylla resides and eventually kills some of his men. Both Charybdis and Scylla are known as taking the lives of men in the sea.
Let’s talk female representation-and how important the female characters are, in the Odyssey. So, Charybdis and Scylla are often talked about together, because of their physical location. They are both female-Charybdis (depending on the telling) is the daughter of Poseidon and Gaia and was said to have been punished by Zeus to the bottom of the sea, where she is endlessly hungry. A punished woman, isolated and endlessly hungry.
Scylla was also another woman, possibly a nymph, and depending on the myth her mother was Hecate-triple bodied goddess know to be the mother of ‘anima mundi’-the soul of the world. She also played an important part with Demeter, helping to guide her during the night to retrieve her daughter Persephone who was abducted by Hades. Like Charybdis, Hecate’s daughter Scylla was also transformed into a monster, with barking dogs around her waist, and long tentacles with heads showing raiser like teeth. Depending on the story, she was either rejected by Glaucus and turned into a monster by the jealous sorcerous Circe, or she was desired by Poseidon, and poisoned by his jealous wife. Very similar stories as to what happened to Medusa-another victim of Poseidon.
Nolan doesn’t provide any backstory as to who these ‘monsters’ are, nor does he show a detailed visualization of them. I really wanted to see Scylla represented-but all we see are her long arms grabbing Odysseus’s men from his ship. I think it’s important to understand the backstories of these characters, because we see these these archetypes and even pathologies in modern life. We know the story of the crazy scorned woman. With Charybdis, I can’t help think about the image and metaphor of being sucked down with someone’s pain and trauma. She is endlessly hungry. This is something we also see with attachment issues, where people are hungry for love and belonging. Borderline personality disorder (BPD) for instance, is often stereotyped as a destructive force. We also know the metaphor of the drowning person, and how to extend a hand rather than jump in the ocean with them, because their act of survival may take us down with them. They are not ‘just monsters,’ they were women who were taken advantaged of, mistreated, neglected, and abused.
The women in the Odyssey play a huge role, as there is definitely a duality of their representation of virtue, duty, celibacy, and loyalty with Penelope’s character, who spends 20 years of her life waiting for Odysseus to return, and than there is cunningness, desire, destruction, temptation with the women Odysseus encounters on his journey home-on the ‘Hero’s Journey.’
