Carandini: “We have lost our tradition. Today, the Odyssey seems like a story told by a Martian.”

“Instead of going to see the film, I’d tell young people to read The Odyssey, something they’ve never done.” These are the clear words of Count and archaeologist Andrea Carandini on Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey”, which has just been released in cinemas worldwide. A film which, the professor points out, “I haven’t seen and won’t be going to see. But the problem doesn’t lie with this new film; it lies in the lack of points of comparison, because there is no longer any memory transformed into a tradition – not one to be preserved unchanged, but one to be ‘betrayed’,” explains Carandini, using this verb in its original sense, namely to hand over, entrust or pass on. The problem, however, is that behind us “we have nothing left because we are engulfed by current events; for days we have been preoccupied with the story of the family in the woods, but there are many other examples. Now the epic has become the most mundane news item.”

Tradition, then. Philological criticism, comparing the two epic poems par excellence, has always highlighted that whilst in the Iliad all the characters in the story live a life predetermined by fate – a force superior even to the father of the gods himself – in the Odyssey the doors are opened to what would later become the Renaissance man, that is, the homo faber fortuna suae. Until now, however, because now "this vision of Odysseus is over," says Carandini, "but not because there has been a break with bourgeois civilisation – which would be a minor matter – but because there has been a break with three thousand years of civilisation. There is a connection between Odysseus and a bourgeois, but we have been completely overwhelmed by technology, which offers so many conveniences and distractions that we have become mentally enfeebled. Whereas Odysseus is the πολύτροπος man, multiform and industrious par excellence.”

As is often the case with film adaptations of monumental works, when attempting to condense the entire Odyssey into a three-hour film, it is inevitable that content must be selected. Nolan has sidelined the Phaeacians, given greater prominence to the swineherd Eumaeus and Telemachus, and omitted the scene in which Odysseus tricks the cyclops Polyphemus by claiming his name is ‘Nobody’. However, what sparked a great deal of controversy was the decision to cast a Black woman, Lupita Nyong’o, in the role of Helen, when in fact the text refers to the Queen of Sparta as ‘white-armed’. ‘Why does she have to be Black?’ asks the professor, ‘because it’s alternative, it’s politically correct, and people love that to bits’. Carandini tells us about the time he went to Paris to see "Hamlet" performed by a very talented Black actor: “In this case, it’s perfectly fine. The issue isn’t that a Black actor can’t play the part of a white person, because otherwise they’d never be able to perform in any of our classics. Here it’s different; they didn’t cast that actress because she was the best at playing Helen, but precisely because of the colour of her skin. Because the masses must be appeased; they must be stroked with the grain, never against it.”

Essentially, tradition has been supplanted by current affairs. The Odyssey is the tale of a nostos, a return home, and, playing on the meanings, Carandini explains that ‘we must return to Homer. But no: there’s a film that I don’t think will be this great masterpiece, but which is simply deified for one reason alone – because it’s topical. These days, however, anything will do, provided it’s sensational, and we get carried away’. The tale of Odysseus’s ten-year journey to return to Ithaca, like all other works linked to ancient epic poetry, was passed down orally from 1,200 BC until the second half of the 6th century BC when, according to tradition, the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus had the forty-eight books of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" put into writing. So for six hundred years, “people learnt those stories by heart. The Greeks and Romans were educated on these texts; we were not. It is a whole world that has vanished. Today, talking about the Odyssey is like a Martian telling us one of his stories. A young person doesn’t care about the king of Ithaca because, if they want to know who he was, they can immediately find a summary using artificial intelligence.”

Starting afresh with Homer, according to Carandini, “would be an extraordinary starting point for re-embracing that marvellous adventure which is humanity’s journey through the centuries. A reality that is tragic yet also comic. All this provided an enormous mental space in which the present became a mere footnote and was assessed in the light of the whole”. So what is this film in the light of mankind’s journey? The professor asks rhetorically: “Is it an added value, or is it something that helps us to stop looking at this past? In my opinion, it is the latter, because it gives the masses the illusion of taking possession of Homer. But they know nothing about Homer.”