I had a lot to say almost immediately after seeing the movie on opening night, but then I was sleepy (read: deeply burnt out) and then in Maine and then suddenly it had been a full calendar month. But better late than never, right?

Here are my credentials: I started taking Latin in middle school alongside Spanish (because even then I couldn’t not do too much). Spanish lasted two years, but Latin lasted through high school. That was in large part due to the Latin Club culture at my school.

Look, I know it sounds impossible, but Latin Club wasn’t, like … uncool. I won’t say it was actively ~cool~ either, but we were not socially shunned.

And it was fun!! There was this whole group of us who loved learning the language, the history, the mythology, all of it. We would celebrate Roman holidays like Cerealia and Saturnalia. We dressed up in togas for the homecoming parade (and still were not socially shunned, believe it or not!).

Latin Club was fun all year, but the main event was OJCL: the annual Ohio Junior Classical League convention in Columbus. We would take a bus down to the state capital, passing the iconic Grandpa’s Cheesebarn, and ultimately arriving at a Ramada Inn. Once there, between shitty ham sandwiches and late night Diet Cokes, we took tests and played the Jeopardy-style competition game Certamen. The coolest kids were the smartest ones; the Certamen stars were celebrities inside the walls of the Ramada Inn (in loving memory 🙏)1.

Because of this culture around the classics, where everyone had a crush on our best Certamen player (heyyyy Terry 😉) and everyone was always either memorizing Latin poetry recitations or studying for a mythology or history test, I added another language class to the rotation. A few of us started taking Ancient Greek with our Latin teacher before school three times a week. I think I took it technically for three years, but because we would inevitably show up late to the 7am class and get Mr. White talking about his tiny dog Hercules, we got through mayyyyybe one year’s worth of lessons in those three years.

That said, we did spend some of that time translating excerpts of The Odyssey. Between that and the general heaps of reading and studying and talking about ancient Greco-Roman mythology and history during a formative time in my life, I feel like I have a solid grasp on the story.

2 So, even though I don’t need to give you my credentials because ✨ you signed up for this ✨ (if you don’t want my thoughts on this movie, you simply don’t have to be here <3) … these are my credentials: I have a film degree and an adolescent obsession with Ancient Rome and Greece.

And I have thoughts!

My primary objection to Christopher Nolan’s take on the Odyssey is that I’m not sure he’s read it. Or rather, he’s read it enough to like … know the names and the general plot beats, but he fundamentally misunderstood it.

OR he did understand the story and its themes, but just didn’t care.

I had a long and fascinating text/voice memo conversation about this movie with a new friend (hi, Marianna!!), and (among many other brilliant observations) she made a great comparison: Nolan’s The Odyssey is an adaptation of the original poem in the same way Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s book (which is to say… not). If it were marketed as something different (the way Troy is not pretending to be an adaptation of The Iliad), I don’t think I would have been nearly as irritated. But alas, just as Fennell did pretend to make a Wuthering Heights adaptation, Nolan did claim to adapt The Odyssey, and thus it is fair play to review the movies as adaptations. And by that metric, I believe he failed!

Nolan’s Odysseus played by Matt Damon is a haunted, traumatized, honorable man whose Trojan Horse tactic broke Zeus’s Law and brought him guilt and a cursed existence.

The OG Odysseus? Not that honorable! In fact, I’ve always felt that his whole thing is not being honorable. He’s wily. His main epithet is “cunning” or “deceitful” or “sly”. Emily Wilson translates it in some incredible, creative ways: “the master of deception”, “Odysseus the trickster”, “crafty Odysseus”, “Odysseus, the lord of lies”. These are not exactly aligned with “honorable” by the usual Ancient Greek definitions.

They are, however, more interesting. At least to me, a cunning character is far more interesting than a guy who’s just ~ honorable ~. But this is just one of many things that Nolan flattened. He stripped out so much of what makes the character and the story interesting.

And look, I know an adaptation has to be slimmer, more streamlined. It’s a 3-hour movie, not a 24-book epic poem. But there were ways to make choices that kept the richness and the themes of the original, and Chris Nolan chose instead to drain it dry of any depth.

Of course, there were things I would have loved to see that I can ultimately get over because choices must be made: Nausicaa and the Phaeacian kingdom, Aeolus and his family and his bag of winds, the cameo appearances from mythology’s greatest women when Odysseus visits Tiresias… I was never going to feel like an Odyssey movie was complete, because I don’t think it ever can be in this format.

And there are choices Nolan made that I really liked! I love all the practical effects he uses in his filmmaking. It makes me believe in the beautiful, powerful art of cinema! I thought the shape of the Trojan Horse, while impractical for a structure built from the scraps of 10-year-old washed-up ships, created a visceral view of the men stuck inside watching each other drown as the tide came in. I loved the line “ten years of rage came out in one night” — in that one line of dialogue, I felt the significance and violence of the Trojan Horse more than I ever have before. I loved what Nolan and actress Samantha Morton did with Circe, injecting justified feminine rage into her story, where in the original she’s more malicious than sympathetic.

Nolan’s choices in the Circe sequence, in fact, were proof that he can adapt source material in a way that deepens and enriches it, that is in conversation with the original text as opposed to smothering it with the blanket of his own poorly-fitting themes.

Which makes it all the more disappointing when he chooses not to. For example, the choice to combine Calypso with the Lotus-Eaters only serves to diminish them both. The visit to the Lotus-Eaters is interesting in part because it’s Odysseus and his men who eat the lotus flowers and forget about home. Odysseus’s time on Calypso’s island is interesting mostly because he does remember home but stays for seven years anyway, haunted by the memory of Ithaca and his wife Penelope.

By blending the two, we lose all of that. All we get is a damp, inexplicably-fishnet-clad Charlize Theron feeding him lotus flowers and (presumably) fucking for seven years.

The Laestrygonians too are a good example. What makes them interesting in the original text is that Odysseus and his men approach the Laestrygonians seeking hospitality, when the king snatches up one of the visitors as a little midday snack: surprise cannibals!

Instead, we just get an ambush of large silver-armored guys attacking Odysseus’s men in the woods with no context about who they are or why this is so alarming (except that they are large).

Similarly, the omission of the cyclops Polyphemus’s conversations with his cyclops brethren across caves strips away his humanity that makes that encounter interesting and powerful. Sure, we get a small taste of it when Polyphemus mutters under his breath in pain. But we lose Odysseus actively choosing to trick Polyphemus, this creature with friends and family who would come to save him if only they knew his plight.

The original story shows Odysseus as the cunning, deceitful, crafty little bitch he truly is and we don’t get that at all in Nolan’s movie. (Similarly, his son Telemachus is portrayed as far too wholesome. Tom Holland is a delight of course, but Telemachus is supposed to be more of a brat! He’s occasionally rude to his mom! He’s ultimately a 20-year-old boy and is kinda dumb and useless at times! We deserved to see that, I believe!)

Arguably the biggest change though was … the curse. Why it takes Odysseus ten calendar years to get home.

It’s implied, but Nolan’s argument seems to be that Odysseus’s journey is cursed due to his masterminding of the Trojan Horse and the ways that defiled Zeus’s Law.

I cannot emphasize enough how much the gods do not give a single flying fuck. Zeus and Athena both love Odysseus. They do not care about the deaths of a bunch of random Trojan citizens!

The gods, for the most part, only care about something when it is personal to them. And that is the root of Odysseus’s actual curse: he insults and tricks and injures Poseidon’s son, the cyclops Polyphemus.3 For that crime, the ocean god Poseidon makes the seafaring journey hell for Odysseus and his men. We get the briefest mention of that as the men flee from the cyclops’s cave, but that’s it… for the primary reason the whole rest of the movie even happens…

And speaking of gods, Christopher Nolan absolutely neutered my girl Athena. His inability to write a compelling woman with agency and depth apparently extends to goddesses (see Calypso above as well). In Athena’s case, it’s especially egregious though, because she is the architect of the entire story. Athena is the reason that Odysseus makes it home at all. She changes Odysseus’s shape, she changes her own shape, she rescues him from Circe and Calypso, she tells him where to go next nearly every step of the way. Not only does Nolan remove all of that power and puppet-mastering, but he turns Athena into an under-utilized Zendaya who pops up every so often to shoot Odysseus a disappointed frown.

Athena is NOT disappointed in Odysseus! He is her GUY! She is literally the goddess of war! My girl loooooves that he massacred the Trojans!

I can appreciate the point Nolan was trying to make or the questions he was trying to raise: perhaps the gods aren’t real and instead are manifestations of things like Odysseus’s PTSD.

That’s all well and good, but you’re purporting to tell the story of the Odyssey; the gods are fundamental to that story (and to all Ancient Greek mythology and literature). If you’re giving us the monsters (Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens) and the lesser gods (Calypso, Circe, Helios) anyway, then you’re already not making the point about them not being real. So why would you then essentially remove the most important ones? The gods that actually drive the story?

Odysseus is clever and cunning and “a master strategist” and all that, but he’s also a pawn of the gods (as are most human characters in mythology). There’s a whole exchange in the first book of the poem, in fact, in which Athena and Zeus scheme together on how to get Odysseus home despite how “Lord Poseidon rages, unrelenting”. Zeus says: “Come then, we must plan: how can he get back home?” In response, Athena sends the messenger god Hermes down to free Odysseus from Calypso’s grip. This is just one example, but it’s an illustrative one — the gods orchestrate nearly the entire plot, but that fact is fully omitted from the movie.

Adapting any text into a different form will always require making changes. I’m not someone who needs an adaptation to be completely faithful to the original. I actually love it when it’s not, if the changes will make me think more deeply or in a different way about the core story. But the vast majority of Nolan’s changes don’t deepen the story; they flatten and muddy it.

By the way, before I wrote this post, I read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey to refresh my memory of the story and check my work, as it were. I must add my voice to the legions saying that she is brilliant. In particular, her introduction and translator’s note are fascinating. They illustrate her deep understanding of the story from the language to the historical context to the narrative and poetic tradition. I haven’t yet read her review of the movie because I wanted to write my equally important and widely-read review without accidentally absorbing her opinions as my own. But now that I’ve written this, I’m going to dive right in. I can’t wait to read her Iliad too; we are so lucky to live in a time where someone as smart and thoughtful and rigorous as Emily Wilson is translating these texts.

I know I’m more than a month late to this conversation, but I would still love to hear all your Odyssey thoughts! Argue with me!! <3

1

VERY shortly after my brother and I both graduated from high school, this particular Ramada Inn went under — pretty wild to watch a detailed 20-minute video exploring the abandoned hotel, when mere years ago I walked around the building like I owned it… (sick graffiti though)

2

Emma and Allyna requested an addendum to this caption (i love my friends 🥹):

Then I consciously slowed down, savoring the rest in single-chapter bites over several weeks because I didn’t want it to end.

The writing about music is in turns beautiful and irreverent. Turns of phrase highlight the genuine love the author has for this music1, but he also never takes it too seriously. In fact, he pokes fun at the self-serious pretension that has always come hand-in-hand with indie music2.

DeVille also pokes fun at himself as part of that world: referencing the movie (500) Days of Summer), he writes, “it was as if she was validating my own belief that there is no greater expression of love than sharing my own exquisite taste” and describes guys like himself “who came to think of ourselves as protagonists and our well-curated media libraries as some kind of virtue”. Which, look… that is a particular kind of guy, and they usually aren’t that self-aware. We all know one. Some of us have unfortunately dated one.

But if I’m honest with myself, I too am that guy… my love language is sharing playlists (of my own exquisite taste) and my well-curated media library IS a virtue…

… ANYWAY, enough about me for now …

This book doesn’t shy away from the politics of indie. DeVille names the scene as historically white and male and often upper-middle class, drawn towards indie aesthetics partly as a way to find belonging and to differentiate oneself from the basic suburban masses. He talks about indie hip-hop and R&B, the way Black artists get labeled as one or the other, as opposed to pop or rock3. He talks about how and why white hipsters flocked to Black subgenres like backpack rap and Black artists like Clipse and Tyler the Creator’s Odd Future collective. He also talks (not enough, in my opinion, but some) about the treatment of women in indie spaces and how that has fortunately shifted in the past decade.

Such Great Heights

Chapter 10 Soundtrack: The Indie Rockers Warm Up To The Hip-Hop Hipsters

Every chapter in my book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion has a soundtrack. They’re printed in the book, and I’ve been sharing them here intermittently. Recent soundtracks have covered bloghouse and indie folk…

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10 months ago · 9 likes · 1 comment · Chris DeVille

Such Great Heights irons out something that is near-impossible to articulate: what is “indie rock”? Turns out it’s near-impossible to articulate because the answer is sort of … nothing? Even if we break it into its parts, coherent meaning is hazy at best:

• “Indie” is a term that once had some (limited) resonance as a musical genre and ideology, but through mainstreaming and co-option by corporate interests got diffused into … a vibe. The O.C. and Grey’s Anatomy borrowed the soundtrack, while Urban Outfitters and American Apparel sold the aesthetic, making “a hard-to-define bohemian lifestyle accessible to an entire generation of young people growing up in the cookie-cutter suburbs” (according to a Racked critic DeVille quotes).

• And “rock”… well, it hasn’t all been rock music for a very long time. Alongside rock subgenres like blog rock and shoegaze, the book tracks indie genres like folk, electronic, hip-hop, and pop. DeVille masterfully tracks these musical traditions as they weave in and out of one another.

In his writing, DeVille manages something I’m so impressed by and envious of — he writes clearly about genre. I can never seem to wrap my head around genre in music, especially subgenres. It’s all just too complicated and esoteric and abstract. Much like identity labels, I find genre labels often more trouble than they’re worth. But of course, also like identity labels, they’re necessary to clearly communicate what exactly we’re talking about. Freak folk and stomp-clap are different. Power-pop and pop-punk are different. There’s fuzziness between every genre, but as whole entities, they are useful distinctions to make. DeVille’s book helped me appreciate that, as someone who is generally dismissive and lazy and quick to call any music I can’t quickly identify “genre-bending”.

DeVille’s writing isn’t just knowledgable though, it’s enthusiastic. As much as he pokes fun at the indie trends, he also gives credit to the genuine DIY ethos of a lot of it that made space for truly paradigm-shifting art. For example, DeVille says that Bon Iver’s debut album “sounded like [he] had conjured spirits in that cabin, like everything was recorded in darkness but lit up by a faint supernatural glow”. You don’t write something like that about art you’re disdainful of.

But DeVille also notes the album as “a harbinger of far more annoying bands that emerged in Vernon’s wake…a generation of performatively rustic hit-makers who shot to fame by stomping, clapping, and yelling ‘Hey!’”. Nothing is sacred in this book, safe from DeVille’s mildly-cutting humor,4 but it never once feels mean-spirited. In fact, if anything it’s fond. DeVille clearly loves this music and its history. He criticizes it in a way only a true fan can and, as a fellow true fan who lived through the rise and fall of many of these indie moments, that is so fun to read.

DeVille calls out the lemming-like way fans followed outlets like Pitchfork. I wasn’t a big Pitchfork reader in those days, but I did — in a lemming-like manner — follow the playlists of this one tastemaker online. Her name was Corinne and she had a page on HelloGiggles dot com, the lifestyle brand and website by then-indie darling Zoey Deschanel. I’ve said for years that Corinne (whose last name I do not remember, though I could probably easily Google if I felt like it) is single-handedly to blame for much of my music taste. It was through her I learned about so many of the artists named in the middle chapters of this book: from Kate Nash and Lily Allen to Beirut and Feist, from the New Pornographers and Broken Social Scene to M83 and Phoenix.

I hadn’t predicated quite how surreal it would feel for music and moments I remember so distinctly and on such a personal scale to be framed as history. Like MGMT, who DeVille describes as “more interested in becoming a brilliant weirdo cult band than stadium-filling superstars, and…already in the process of recoiling from music industry fame”… I remember seeing them perform at Northwestern’s on-campus music festival, Dillo Day, several years later and they were exactly as DeVille describes them: playing their biggest hit “Kids” and “only halfway taking it seriously”, clearly disdainful of their own audience.

This book taught me so much I didn’t know about the early history of indie music. It made connections between musical traditions I never would have considered. The author and the cultural movement are both about a decade older than me, so there are years and phenomena I inherently missed. I was too young for The O.C., so I didn’t feel in real time the mainstreaming of bands like Death Cab for Cutie and Modest Mouse.

In fact, I remember being driven away from the pretension of indie music around that time. An obnoxious boy from youth group loved Death Cab and thought that was proof of moral superiority. It put me off of them for several album cycles; it wasn’t until a decade or so later that I finally gave them a fair listen (turns out they’re great, who knew!).

My personal brand of indie pretension, however? was different and cool, of course. I remember being teased by my family on a high school roadtrip once because my dad asked if the song I’d queued up was “by that Icelandic lady” and my reaction was dripping with scorn. He was thinking of Bjork and this was clearly Lenka…

Reading this book felt like untangling the cultural history of my soul. I might as well have been reading a book by an expert psychologist laying bare my exact cocktail of mental health diagnoses. The way Chris DeVille’s writing shows love for the music and traces evolving tastes in largely the same way mine evolved — I felt seen and like a part of something bigger, in a way I didn’t necessarily at the time.

I didn’t have the community that he talks about bubbling up online. I wasn’t really reading Pitchfork and I’ve never seen Garden State. My friends were listening to Taylor Swift and Beyonce, All Time Low and Fall Out Boy, and (since I was too) I was happy to meet them there.

But on my Sansa and then Zune mp3 players and on my family desktop computer and then clunky laptop on my bedroom floor, I was listening to Neutral Milk Hotel and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Imogen Heap and the New Pornographers and Architecture in Helsinki. I felt validated when my friend’s cool older sister mentioned The Decemberists or when my cool older cousin mentioned Fleet Foxes and I knew about them already. But beyond that, I was happy just to listen. I wasn’t desperate to be at concerts (yet) or to talk about my favorite bands (yet).

I don’t think I ever needed loving this music to mean anything, but it turns out it kind of did.

What’s your favorite indie music? Were you listening to any of this stuff back then? Are you listening to it now? (I still am!)

<3 Isabel

P.S. Chris DeVille has a Substack with the same name as his book and it’s great: https://substack.com/@chrisdeville. He has all the playlists, plus some commentary, and I highly recommend:

Such Great Heights

Chapter 1 Soundtrack: What Do We Mean When We Say "Indie"?

Each chapter of my book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion—which is available for pre-order now—is accompanied by a soundtrack. The sequence of songs will be printed in the book, but I’ll also be posting them as playlists to this Substack in the run-up to publication. As of this post, the first one is live and …

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a year ago · 25 likes · 5 comments · Chris DeVille

3

Great article on this phenomenon from Glasshouse:

Glasshouse

Where Are All the Black Pop Stars?

In most music genres with the exception of hip-hop or R&B, the question of “Where are all the Black people?” has been raised at one point or another. The answer to the question is simple: Google is free, and Black musicians have been here all along. However, the reason why the question is even asked is a li…

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a month ago · 61 likes · 13 comments · Glasshouse and Miki

It feels so silly to be like “wow, middle-aged people are people too!”, but that’s genuinely how the show feels. Part of it is the self-centeredness of being young, but mostly I think it’s how we’ve been taught to think by Western media. The most popular stories are those that are full of youth: coming-of-age stories, romances between hot young people, comedies about 20-somethings learning how to be people.

But I turned 31 this month and watched my dad turn 60 last month, and I find myself more and more interested in finding examples for the next 30, 40, 50 years of life.

As much as I often feel like I’m drowning in the relentless whitewater of engagements, bachelorettes, weddings, pregnancy announcements, and baby showers, I also have counter-examples I watch like a lifeline: friends in their mid/late 30s blowing up their lives and rebuilding, friends in their 40s happily childfre…

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It’s a list of people (or pieces of culture or moments in time) that, in retrospect, make it extremely clear that I’ve always been queer.

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One of my favorite things to do by myself and with other people is experience live music. Sharing that experience with someone I love can build some of my very favorite memories, and this week I had the privilege of getting that twice with several different people, in two experiences that felt in conversation with one another.

Both shows were at The Forum, five days apart. Lorde’s Ultrasound tour was long planned, the impetus for this trip (or at least for its timing). Florence + the Machine’s Everybody Scream tour was spontaneous, a decision Anderson and I made the day before.

Both shows I experienced with friends I’ve known since college. Anderson and I have been friends since freshman year when we w…

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Too bad, that’s what you’re getting today.

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Until now!

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And honestly, that’s fair. No one would ever accuse me of being a sports person. But every other year when the Olympics roll around, I lock the fuck in.

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We’re always going to forget things. A year is too long to summarize. A day is too long to summarize! But this year, I did a lot of things I’m proud of and learned a lot of lessons and I’d like to tell you about them.

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Great news for me and all the other 2010 Tumblr Girlies™️ (gender neutral), we have Heated Rivalry.

Note: this post contains spoilers through Episode 5 of Heated Rivalry. Go watch it immediately and then come back. Or read this first and then watch, I actually think it’s just as good when you know what’s coming. (I did not avoid spoilers and I think the anticipation even enhanced my experience.) But you do you. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you. <3

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I’d like to introduce you to a couple of the kids at Pinehaven Camp!

The first one, Mat, is a semi-prominent character. She’s one of the four members of Hazel’s tent and ends up building a sweet relationship with Atlas throughout the summer too.

She’s a bit of a mirror for Atlas, who gets to see some of their own gender journey reflected through this 8-year-old kid. Atlas realizes they have an opportunity to influence Mat for the better — an opportunity they haven’t really seen for themself before in any context. Perhaps Atlas has the capacity to do good in the world, rather than just cause destruction? Much for them to consider!

But for now, here’s Mat:

Mat hated when people used her full name. Matilda. It made her shudder. She knew Tillie also preferred a nickname to Matilda, but Tillie didn’t seem to mind too much when people got it wrong.

Meanwhile, it filled Mat with rage. It made her want to launch herself up a wall. Or into one. She wasn’t picky.

She felt that way other times too. Like when Tillie’s mom wanted the two of them to wear matching dresses for Easter brunch this spring. Mat didn’t mind the dress necessarily. It was fine, a pale pink tulle embroidered with gold and silver sequin stars and a pink satin bow at the waist. She actually thought that Tillie looked really pretty in it, the way her long brown hair floated above the princess fabric.

But when Mat thought about putting it on her own body… the running-up-a-wall feeling rose up in her like sick when she had the stomach flu. She felt hot and itchy.

Tillie would sometimes talk about the things she wanted to do with Mat when they were grown-ups. Tillie would write books and sell them from a bookstore she owned in Maine, somewhere near Pinehaven. She would wear pretty skirts all the time in light fabric that didn’t squeeze her skin. She would always wear her hair in a bun so it wouldn’t tickle her neck.

Mat always tried to play along, but she could never keep up. She just couldn’t imagine it. She would close her eyes and see Tillie, older and taller and still beautiful in a flowy skirt with a stack of books. But when, in her imagination, Mat tried to turn her head to see who stood beside Tillie, she couldn’t. Mat knew that it was her standing next to Tillie. It would always be her there. So why couldn’t she see it?

This passage ended up in compost, but Mat is still around in my current draft and I have no plans for that to change.

This next camper though… I created her for the express purpose of this passage, so when it got sent over to compost, she ceased to exist. Sorry Francine, RIP. Gone but never forgotten. (Except I did forget about her. Until mere moments ago when I was skimming through to find a passage to share here.)

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