The Odyssey & how literal thinking kills the metaphorical imagination
Circe (1910) Fredrick Stuart Church. Smithsonian American Art Museum.
(read posts and access the audio version on my Substack, Unsevered)
I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in IMAX at 10am yesterday, along with everybody else in America, and I will just self-own that I am about to levy a critique of cultural criticism.
If you’re as online as I am, you’ve probably seen some raging debates (really, just hot takes) about Nolan’s execution and interpretation of this ancient but timeless tale.
There’s the MAGA-bro grievance that Helen of Troy is Black. There are high school English teachers irked by the relative omission of the Gods. There are feminists dismayed that female characters must tend to an overly brooding male lead.
The list goes on, and it’s right on cue. We cannot seem to resist dismantling popular phenomenons of art and culture through our hyper-specific perspectives and personal grievances. We love a good outrage cycle, and the algorithm reinforces it.
But this rabid dissection of The Odyssey lands differently and veers very obviously into the territory of distortion. The Homeric poem of Odysseus is a foundational archetypal story of the hero’s journey. It is arguably one of the most colorful and magnificent depictions of the process of becoming — of the treacherous journey toward wholeness — in the tradition of Western consciousness.
For those of us in the West, The Odyssey can be viewed as a core part of our psychological heritage — a reflection of the human condition when we become separated from the greater wisdom of the cosmos, when we fall from the Garden of Eden, when we become self-reflective and no longer immersed undifferentiated in the realm of the Gods, when we become mortally flawed and must suffer the great wound of being born in order to find our way home.
But when we take the images on screen so literally we wield Medusa’s powers and turn the beauty of art and soul to stone. By using such a literal gaze, we petrify the magic on screen into tropes, suffocating them into a set of sterilized stereotypes that clog up the Twitter feed.
And we become deadened in the process, unable to access the deeper waters of psyche.
(Some argue that Nolan himself flattened the Odyssey into a prosaic modern trope, but that’s a debate for another time…)
My question is, did you feel something? Were you moved? Overcome? Was something inside of you stirred by the moment of surrender, or the everlasting love, the desecration of the sacred, or the cruelty of war?
Theater and storytelling evoke the unconscious. Myth and fairytale hold metaphors for the human condition. To see Odysseus as an oafish whining man is to trap him in your timeline. He does not belong there.
Odysseus is not a man. He is the masculine principle of consciousness — the egoic energy that strives to slay dragons, overcome adversity, and return home with the gifts of insight and wisdom that are bestowed by the feminine principles of consciousness all around him. He is all of us.
I’ll spare you the depth psychological view on The Odyssey, except to say that art is an imaginal activity, not a literal one. You have the right to be entertained even if the critics shit on your favorite scenes.
If something awakened inside of you as Poseidon levied revenge upon hubris, you’ve experienced the essential and immortal humanity in art. You’ve been moved by mythic imagination. You’re speaking the language of soul. This is enough.
Until next time,
Dr. Erika Raney
Tending to the deeply human in our fragmented digital age.
Jungian-informed depth coaching & consulting.
erikaleighraney.com
