"The Odyssey" and The Goddess

Despite its tepid reviews, I did see "The Odyssey" because it seemed like it might have some strong female characters, especially considering the casting. Co-produced by the husband-and-wife team of Emma Thomas (who gets top producing credit) and Christopher Nolan (who wrote the screenplay), it's said to be inspired by a fresh 2017 translation of the Homeric epic by Emily Wilson, the first translation into English by a woman. 

I was hopeful when the Goddess Athena is bestowed as protectress to the warrior Odysseus (Matt Damon) by his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway). Athena, portrayed by Zendaya, briefly visits Odysseus throughout the film. Her best lines came when assuring Damon that gods are not hard for mortals to understand: "Who doesn’t understand thunder? Fire?" Zeus and Poseidon are the gods that seem to have the most effect on the characters. 

In the film, only Odysseus makes it to hang out with the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) in the Land of the Lotus Eaters, and the lotus flower is rather abused by him, only blunting his memories. (Scholars think the Lotus may have been the psychedelic Egyptian blue lotus, or opium.) The scene in which Circe, played by Samantha Morton, turns Odysseus's men into pigs is inventively portrayed, but gone is the holy moly herb given to Odysseus by Hermes that protects him from Circe's magic potion. Even the Sirens are not seen or heard, only Damon's screaming reaction to them. 

Helen of Troy (Lupita Nyong'o) is demoted to launching only 500 ships by her abusive husband, and half of her face is horribly disfigured. There is no mention of nepenthe, Helen’s drug of forgetting one’s sorrow, which Homes depicts serving the drug nepenthe to Telemachus, who is searching for his missing father Odysseus. Scholars speculate nepenthe was a mixture of opium, mandrake, henbane, belladonna and hashish. In a 2023 profile of Wilson in The New Yorker, Judith Thurman calls the queen "Semi-divine Helen, Zeus' daughter," with "a witchy seventh sense, a ventriloquist's voice, and a pharmacy of magic potions." Also absent from the film is Zeus' wife Hera, about whom Wilson says, "Nothing beats Hera, dressing up with super-chic earrings and skin creams to mess with Zeus' plans." 

"More Hermes than Hera." 
Photo of Emily Wilson by Hannah Whitaker
for The New Yorker

In a review of the movie in the London Review of Books, Wilson calls the $250 million action film "a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display – and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth."

"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," Wilson writes. Nyong’o’s double part as Helen and Clytemnestra is "hugely underwritten" and Athena is a "vulnerable victim of war," hardly the "scheming and bloodthirsty war goddess" Homer paints. Mentor (Ryan Hurst) who helps Telemachus (Tom Holland) is not the disguised goddess Athena but "a helpful guy with a beard." 

Theron as Calypso "looks gorgeous, but she's reduced to being an unpaid therapist, soothing the soul of the bedraggled, PTSD-ridden Odysseus with drugs, and graciously listening to his disjointed tale of woe." In Homer's text, the demi-goddess 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."

Wilson notes that the "magical year" Odysseus spends having sex with Circe is also omitted. New York Times art and culture critic Maya Phillips was particularly offended by the depiction of Circe and her pigsty of a home. She notes that in Wilson’s translation, it is a place of “polished stones, on high foundations,” where "nymphs carry fancy cloths, gold cups and silver bowls for guests and where wild animals fawn around her like house pets." Circe was "a character as wily as the hero, and more knowledgeable."

"In Homer’s telling, Odysseus becomes so enamored of her that she becomes a kind of substitute wife," writes Phillips. "When she changes Odysseus’ soldiers back, Homer notes that they’re even more handsome than before, and are bathed in oil and dressed in nice clothes. Odysseus and his men spend a year living happily with Circe and her nymph servant girls, as Wilson writes in her translation: 'Then every day / for a whole year we feasted there on meat / and sweet strong wine.'” 

Comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell is quoted in Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine saying, "The Iliad represents the male-oriented Indo-European world and Zeus, Apollo, and the Olympians in general figure in it the most prominently. Following The Iliad, we come to The Odyssey, where we have the return of the Goddess. It was Samuel Butler [in The Authoress of the Odyssey] who said that The Odyssey was probably written by a woman.  The change in mode and mood from The Iliad and its the male war- and achievement-oriented psychology to that of The Odyssey, where learning about life from the goddess, is very important."

Odysseus and his men go ashore on the way home, and "there they rape the women and ravage the town just for fun," said Campbell. "But when they return to their ships the gods say, 'This is no way for a man to return to his wife!' He needs to be reintroduced, or as they would say today, debriefed. So for ten days the gods blow the ships about until they come ashore at the Land of the Lotus Eaters. From then on they are in the realm of dreams and visions, the world of myth. Odysseus will encounter three nymphs, and not one of them can be pushed around, because he must meet the female principle on her own terms." Campbell says Circe is the temptress, Calypso the wife, and Nausicaa (absent from the film) the virgin. 

"Now, think back on the cause of the Trojan War: three goddesses, Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena, are competing, with Paris as the judge, for the beauty prize....When Paris is asked to judge the three goddesses, says Jane Harrison in her wonderful book Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, it amounts to a male put-down of the Goddess. For here were the three major classical goddesses, the three aspects of the one Goddess who is manifested in these three modes, and here is Paris, a languid young man, judging them as though in an Atlantic City beauty contest! And they are vying for his vote by giving him bribes and promises."

Oh well, what can you expect these days from a movie starring actors from the Marvel universe (Spiderman Tom Holland and his MJ/wife Zendaya, who also stars as a teenage drug user in TV's Euphoria). The emphasis is on battles with giants, like the Cyclops and the "overdressed" Laestrygonians. The most poignant moment for me was, during the taking of Troy, when Athena/her statue are beheaded. It reminded me of the destruction of the Temple of Artemis and the defacing of goddess statues everywhere. 

"At the end of the day, this is a man’s story of greatness," writes Phillips. "Even in Odysseus’ questionable moments, there’s never any question that he is still the noble warrior, the honorable leader. As for the women — the lovers, the betrayers, the goddess and, of course, the witch — they’re no more than the trimmings on our hero’s armor."

We're living in a country where our newly dubbed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has announced he will begin testing soldiers for their testosterone levels, amid a larger effort by the Trump administration to promote and expand public access to testosterone replacement therapies. Tech bros and our Secretary of Health RFK Jr. have managed to get FDA approval for dubious injectable peptides being used for "looks maxing" and goddess knows what else, even as athletes compete on steroids, growth hormones and Adderall in the Thiel-verse, MAGA-backed "Enhanced Games." 

Veterans everywhere report that cannabis helps with pain and PTSD symptoms, including recurring nightmares. VA doctors still don't recommend cannabis, although several bills have been introduced allowing them to do so and now that medical marijuana has been moved to Schedule III, that may change. Meanwhile, the VA is involved in 20 active clinical trials focused on psychedelic therapies to address mental health and high suicide rates among veterans. 

We've got to get a handle on our over reliance on male dominance and the drugs that fuel it, and restore the male/female balance with better healing plants.