A witch is a metaphor for a woman. When you’re a woman you always feel like an outsider or different in some way — abnormal — because the male is seen as the standard human being. That can be good or bad, like you can bewitch a man or curse a man, you can be put on a pedestal or burned at the stake. But I think men essentially see us as witches, and I wanted to go into how that feels, that experience of being treated like a dangerous outsider with every little thing you do. I feel like that especially when I’m directing, like people are looking at me askance because there’s a right way to make a film and I’m doing it wrong, and some more normal, reasonable person needs to step in and save me.
“The default stance of conservation is to keep things as unchanged as possible or, alternatively, to return conditions to what they used to be, or somehow to make the Earth ‘more natural’ (which can usually be interpreted as meaning ‘with reduced human impact’). Not only are these untenable aspirations while the world’s human population continues to grow and each of us consumes more resources, but hold-the-line strategies implicitly dismiss as undesirable the continuing biological gains of the human epoch. Where is the logic in this? Attempting to prevent the establishment of ‘alien’ arrivals and to kill ‘impure’ new hybrids so as to maintain our ecosystems and species in some idealized state is not possible, nor is it obvious that the past state of the world is objectively preferable to the new state that is coming into existence.” -page 8
“Rearrangement followed by rearrangement is the norm. That is how species survive climate change. They move around. This is true even of species that are today confined to shrinking distributions in isolated mountains. They have survived because they have been able to move, even if that has only been up and down the same mountain. The greatest risk they face in the future is the possibility that they may not be able to move again.” -page 84
“Any attempt by humans to keep things just as they are is utterly pointless.” -page 84
“It seems to take somewhere between five hundred and two thousand years to convert xenophobia into love.” -page 105
“Intensive conservation efforts are lavished on the hybrid wisent. While conservationists will dismiss this hybridization as too long ago to worry about, measured against the long timeline of life on Earth, this ‘ancient’ hybridization happened at more or less the same time as the modern hybridization between the cattle and American bison. Yet our response to the two events are very different.
There seems to be a deep-seated feeling that every animal should be pure, whereas we know that, in reality, every individual of every species is likely to have at least some degree of past hybridization lurking within its genes. This attitude to genetic purity makes no biological sense, and it is not a viable way of managing the Earth. The exchange of genetic information between organisms that we usually think of as distinct – hybridization – is one of the ways in which new genetic forms come into existence and genetic fitness can potentially be increased.” -page 195
“Even if we were to remove every human from the surface of the planet today, it would not revert to what it once was.” -page 214
“The race-neutral casting of Nolan’s Odyssey was inevitably deplored in some quarters. But there is nothing progressive about it. Most of the non-white actors – Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott – play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist. Scott, as the Ithacan bard, Phemius, yells a few words and pounds a stick, but does not get to sing, tell a story or play the lyre: the most melodic note in the percussive soundtrack comes from the plucking of Odysseus’ bow (a beautiful sonic image of the archer as musician, borrowed from the poem). Nyong’o’s double part as Helen and Clytemnestra is hugely underwritten; she is given only a few minutes of screen time to perform a set of brief tableaux of female victims (the outraged bereaved mother, the abused wife, the repentant adulteress).
There are more female characters than in most Nolan movies, thanks to the source material. But none of them has much to say, in contrast to the characterisations in the poem. Homer’s Calypso has a wonderfully outraged, operatic speech about divine double standards: male gods can kidnap and rape any mortal woman they desire, but when a goddess tries it, Zeus and his cronies scupper her chances. It’s a clever and comical distortion of the mythological ‘facts’: the poem’s listeners know that it is primarily Athena (a female deity) who is taking Calypso’s mortal victim away from her (Hermes, whom she’s complaining to, is merely the messenger) – and Eos, goddess of the dawn, as we’ve been reminded only a few lines earlier, has not been prohibited by the divine patriarchy from holding on to Tithonus. Charlize Theron’s Calypso looks gorgeous, but she is never angry, never funny, not skilled in rhetoric, and never consumed by lust for her scraggly mortal victim. She’s an unpaid therapist, soothing the soul of the bedraggled, PTSD-ridden Odysseus with drugs, and graciously listening to his disjointed tale of woe.
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It’s a challenge to represent deities on film without veering into Clash of the Titans silliness, so Nolan may have been sensible to leave them out. Even Zendaya’s underwritten Athena turns out to be a vulnerable victim of war, or perhaps a projection of Odysseus’ conscience – not a scheming and bloodthirsty war goddess. Other goddesses appear in cameo – Calypso, the seal-lady Sirens, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis – but there is no sign that we are supposed to realise they are goddesses. Poseidon, Hermes and Helius do not appear in person, although there are some scary storms and shipwrecks. One of my favourite moments was when Zendaya assures Damon that gods are not hard for mortals to understand: ‘Who doesn’t understand thunder? Fire?’ But the film wants to have it both ways. There are no gods, and yet shipwrecks and death are presented as the inevitable consequence of blinding the son of Poseidon and devouring the Cattle of the Sun. Zeus’ law is portrayed as being crucially important, and yet there is no Zeus. Nolan’s vision of the world is not quite big enough to include either real gods or real people who might be different from us.
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The most obvious new spin that Nolan brings to the source material is a subplot based on a story from the Aeneid, describing the way the Trojans were tricked into taking the Trojan Horse (an invention of ‘cruel Ulysses’) into the city, thanks to the machinations of a Greek double agent called Sinon (his name means ‘harmful’). In contrast to the relatively positive representation of cunning intelligence in Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil makes Ulysses cruel and predatory; Sinon is his deceitful accomplice.
In Nolan’s movie, Sinon is played by Elliot Page, and far from being a bad guy he’s the film’s moral centre. He is recruited to the Trojan War as a plucky youngster, thanks to the evil machinations of a teenage draft-dodger, Antinous (played in adulthood by a charismatically slimy Robert Pattinson). The main emotional arc of the film concerns Odysseus’ belated realisation that he is complicit in Sinon’s exploitation because he failed to tell him the truth about the Trojan Horse plot. Once he recovers his memory, Odysseus is racked by guilt. The film doesn’t address the moral dilemmas raised by its own narrative invention, such as why it matters so much whether Batman told the whole truth to valiant Robin, given that he would be killed instantly either way – or why the sinless Sinon wants in on the scheme, if the sack of Troy was as bad as the movie wants to suggest. Odysseus’ lie to Sinon doesn’t start the Trojan War, and the Trojans would presumably have taken the horse into the city anyway – as they do in Homer’s Odyssey. This muddled subplot is foisted on the film in order to make Nolan’s relentlessly didactic point about the contemporary Anglophone world: that the lies and xenophobia of the war on terror and Brexit began a cultural decline that is now destroying the values ‘we’ hold most dear.”
A witch is a metaphor for a woman. When you’re a woman you always feel like an outsider or different in some way — abnormal — because the male is seen as the standard human being. That can be good or bad, like you can bewitch a man or curse a man, you can be put on a pedestal or burned at the stake. But I think men essentially see us as witches, and I wanted to go into how that feels, that experience of being treated like a dangerous outsider with every little thing you do. I feel like that especially when I’m directing, like people are looking at me askance because there’s a right way to make a film and I’m doing it wrong, and some more normal, reasonable person needs to step in and save me.
“The default stance of conservation is to keep things as unchanged as possible or, alternatively, to return conditions to what they used to be, or somehow to make the Earth ‘more natural’ (which can usually be interpreted as meaning ‘with reduced human impact’). Not only are these untenable aspirations while the world’s human population continues to grow and each of us consumes more resources, but hold-the-line strategies implicitly dismiss as undesirable the continuing biological gains of the human epoch. Where is the logic in this? Attempting to prevent the establishment of ‘alien’ arrivals and to kill ‘impure’ new hybrids so as to maintain our ecosystems and species in some idealized state is not possible, nor is it obvious that the past state of the world is objectively preferable to the new state that is coming into existence.” -page 8