Anticipating Nolan’s Odyssey

NOLAN'S ODYSSEY OPENS FRIDAY JULY 17. HERE'S WHAT I WANT US TO REMEMBER BEFORE THE ARGUING STARTS.

I have spent twenty years telling the Trojan War and the Odyssey — in live stage shows, in classrooms, on two long form podcasts, and now in a book. Somewhere along the way I started calling myself a "21st-century Homeric bard." It's a ridiculous title. It is also, more or less, the job description.

I have stood in front of audiences and tried to make Achilles live again. I've argued that Agamemnon isn't merely a bad boss but perhaps the worst boss in Western literature. I've defended Odysseus while wanting to shake him. I've tried to give Helen back her complexity, Cassandra her dignity, Priam his heartbreaking courage — and the gods, well, I still don't know what to do with the gods.

Putting yourself out there — on stages, on microphones, in books — teaches you something about what happens when people care.

Most of it is wonderful. People write to me with generous, thoughtful, argumentative responses. They tell me where the stories found them. They disagree with me. They catch things I missed. They remind me that these are not museum pieces — they're alive precisely because people keep debating them.

But every so often, something else happens. A disagreement curdles into something darker. Not "I think you're wrong, Jeff" but "I would like you, Jeff, to feel personally punished for having even thought this."

My first reaction is never anger. It's baffled hurt — which, I admit, is not a very heroic response. Achilles would already be raging. But I am not Achilles. I am a middle-aged Canadian man with a microphone, a book, and a long-standing weakness for Greek epic. Baffled hurt is about my speed.

Here's the thing, though: disagreement about a nearly 3,000-year-old story should be fun.

The closest analogy I've got is hockey. I am a devoted fan of one NHL team, and when I'm watching a game I become a highly engaged citizen of the Republic of Unreasonable Feelings — hot and bothered about referee calls, line changes, trades, and the mysterious inability of professional athletes to do the obviously correct thing I've identified from my couch.

If someone across the bar is wearing the other team's jersey, they become my sworn enemy for two and a half hours. We glare. We groan. We offer spirited commentary on each other's eyesight and moral upbringing.

But underneath the noise, we both know something: we're not actually enemies. We're both in love with the same game. That's what makes the argument fun — and when it ends well, we stand each other to a drink.

It's when someone keys your car, or decides your jersey makes you stupid or vile, that the whole thing collapses. The shared love disappears. The jersey becomes an excuse for cruelty.

If that's true of hockey — a magnificent, ridiculous invention barely a century old — how much more true is it of Homer, who's been inviting people into arguments for three thousand years?

Already I can see the signs, as Nolan's Odyssey approaches: the worrying about casting, the worrying about fidelity, the pre-emptive rage, the pre-emptive worship, the hot takes circling overhead waiting for a corpse. And I say this with love, because I am not above any of it — I've cursed at screens, railed at favorite stories flattened into summary or twisted into tired polemic. I've opined on Troy, on Troy: Fall of a City, on translations, on fan fiction, even on Percy Jackson.

This is what fans do. Fans care, fans notice, fans remember, fans get emotionally invested in details that no balanced adult should be able to explain at such length.

But "fan" comes from "fanatic," and while fans have great fun caring, fanatics are no fun at all. Fanatics treat the text as sacred, fixed, immutable. Greek epic has never worked that way — there's Homer, yes, but there are also tragedians, vase painters, Roman poets, medieval retellings, translations, films, podcasts, and several thousand years of people saying "actually, if you look a little deeper..."

Greek epic is one long, messy argument. It always has been. Did Achilles really have an invulnerable heel? Did Odysseus need to hang the slave girls? Was Helen abducted, seduced, complicit, or innocent? Welcome to the three-thousand-year-old argument. It isn't a weakness in the material — it's the engine that's kept it alive. These stories survive because they can be reimagined and retold.

That doesn't mean every retelling is good. Some are lazy, timid, cynical, or just plain stupid, and they deserve to be laughed at or escorted from the room. But criticism isn't the same thing as a fanatic's rage.

So here's my plea, before Nolan's Odyssey arrives: let's be fans. Let's argue about Cyclopes, suitors, sirens, gods, boats, bowstrings, and whether Odysseus is the cleverest man in the Aegean or the most culpable. Let's bring knowledge. Let's bring passion.

But most of all, let's bring proportion — because Homer's Odyssey is bigger than Nolan, bigger than my podcasts, bigger than my book, and certainly bigger than whatever oddly specific grievance any of us is sharpening in advance.

I hope the film is brilliant. I hope it sends people back toward Homer, toward myth, toward the impossible question of who Odysseus is and why we can't stop talking about him.

And if it isn't brilliant? We'll grumble. Some of us will write far too many words about it. But in honour of the stories themselves, maybe we can resist the temptation to mistake disappointment for catastrophe, and descend from fans into fanatics.

Let's argue fiercely. Let's disagree passionately. Let's be learned, funny, irritated, delighted, baffled, and occasionally insufferable.

But let's remember that the person in the other jersey isn't our enemy — just another lover of the game.

And instead of keying his car, why not buy him a drink?