I didn’t count the number of times actors in Odyssey, a new film, uttered the phrase “Zeus’s Law.” That’s because I didn’t know going into it they would say it so many times.
They said it over and over again. Several times, near the end, I wondered, “Willst mine ears, as I sitte upon this theatre seate, soon have alighted upon them no more the phrase ‘Zeus’s Law?’”
The answer was yes, eventually. I would hear the phrase no more. It was because, after a long time, the movie ended.
I know everyone reading this wants to know if I liked Odyssey: The Motion Picture. All I can say is that I like seeing Samantha Morton in things, and that if Odyssey wins the Oscar for best picture, and Sinners doesn’t, I will be furious.
I make that wonderful joke because the thought just occurred to me that although I didn’t love Sinners as much as lots of people did I liked it more than Odyssey. I think it’s a much better film, and I had a better time watching it than I did Odyssey. I felt like the people who made it didn’t absolutely hate themselves every minute of every day of their wretched lives.
There was more in Sinners of what I might call joy, but would rather call passion. Maybe inspiration.
There was more of it, too, in One Battle after Another. I was surprised more by both of those films than I was by Odyssey.
I know the most obvious explanation for my lack of surprise, watching Odyssey, is that it’s adapted from a poem I have read more than once. But an adaptation of something familiar can still be surprising. It can jump at you.
I want things to jump at me. I want passion.
But it seems only right that in this new Odyssey there is no joy. There isn’t a fun moment where Odysseus tricks the Cyclops into making a fool of himself by saying his name is “Noman”—or “Nobody,” as he says in the TV miniseries from the 1990s starring Armand Assante that I watched in high school. I think they changed it from “Noman” to “Nobody” for that adaptation because “Nobody” sounds more modern. I thought it worked.
I remember Hermes appears in the 1997 Odyssey, to tell Calypso to let Odysseus go home. I didn’t realize it at the time I watched that miniseries, but, according to online, Bernadette Peters played Circe—which almost makes me want to watch it again.
But I was watching new Odyssey and thinking something I’m not sure I really believe. I’m pretty certain I don’t believe it, in fact, but I will write it anyway.
I was thinking that in our culture these days we can have one of two things: cotton candy that tastes like cotton candy, or cotton candy that tastes angostura bitters. You can have Tom Holland playing dad-free Spider-man and having a great time, or you can have Tom Holland playing dad-free Telemachus and constantly frowning.
Everything has to be either shallow and fun or shallow and miserable. Nothing exists between those poles.
That’s what I was thinking. But it’s obviously not true. You still have Sinners. You have other things I haven’t had time to watch, which have substance and are good.
Black Bag was good. I don’t remember when it came out, but it had substance and style, and when I watched it I felt great.
Zendaya frowns a lot in The Odyssey, much more than she does in Spider-Man films.
I liked the Hades scene. But, on the whole, I thought new Odyssey was miserable. And I think that’s as it should be.
Look at what has happened to this country. Look who is in charge, from the president who loves to kill people for riding on boats (221 victims and counting!) down to the police who love to kill people for other reasons. Look at what we’re doing with air power. We’re blowing up power plants, bridges, and schools. At least, we were a few days ago. We’ll start again soon.
The new Odyssey feels a little bit to me like the gods have said to us, So, you want to go and see a movie? You want to beat the heat that’s at record levels because of what you people have done to the world? You want to take your mind off the 120 girls who were incinerated partway through math class five months ago, thanks to your bloodthirsty president and his Secretary of War? He would have personally disemboweled every one of those children, if given the chance, and then bragged about it later. That is the sort of man who is considered the best of you now. Here is your Odyssey. Have fun.
Maybe if we take our country back, and turn our machines of death and ruin into engines of beauty and goodwill, we can have an Odyssey where Polyphemus is given more lines.
As it happens, one of my distant relatives, Benjamin Rush, published an essay in the eighteenth century proposing the US government establish a Department of Peace. It would be an analogue to the Department of War—which is what they called it back then. His ideas were flawed, but the essay has its moments. He urged the government to establish “an office for promoting and preserving perpetual peace in our country.”
He wanted the Dept of Peace to distribute Bibles. But he made other proposals, too:
IV. Let the following sentence be inscribed in letters of gold over the doors of every State and Court house in the United States:
Probably the most interesting part of the essay is at the end, where he presents his ideas for how to decorate the analogous Department of War, so that no one will misapprehend its purpose:
In order to more deeply affect the minds of the citizens of the United States with the blessings of peace, by contrasting them with the evils of war, let the following inscriptions be painted upon the sign which is placed over the door of the War Office:
An office for butchering the human species.
A Widow- and Orphan-making office.
A broken-bone-making office.
A wooden-leg-making office.
An office for the creating of public and private vices.
An office for creating a public debt.
An office for creating speculators, stock jobbers, and bankrupts.
An office for creating famine.
An office for creating pestilential diseases.
An office for creating poverty, and the destruction of liberty and national happiness.
In the lobby of this office let there be painted representations of all the common military instruments of death, also human skulls, broken bones, unburied and putrefying dead bodies, hospitals crowded with sick and wounded soldiers, villages on fire, mothers in besieged towns eating the flesh of their children, ships sinking in the ocean, rivers dyed with blood, and extensive plains without a tree or fence or any object but the ruins of deserted farm houses.
Above this group of woeful figures, let the following words be inserted, in red characters to represent human blood:
NATIONAL GLORY
What was with the trailers they showed before the Odyssey movie? One of the ones we saw wasn’t a trailer, really, but an extended scene taken from a film in which a man diving in SCUBA gear is almost crushed to death by a whale. He is then almost swallowed by the whale.
The dialogue from that long scene went like this: “Uhh! Ghh! Ahh! Nngh! Uhh! Ghh! Uhh! Uhh!”
It went on an on and on.
Why did it have to do that?
Why, when I go to see a movie I choose to subject myself to, am I subjected to thirty minutes of unwatchable nightmares?
Almost every movie they advertised to me and my family were horror films.
There was an essay I wanted to write but didn’t, five years ago, about nonfiction horror. Not long before then, I’d read part of a book by Naomi Klein that convinced me the world was ending—which it is, sort of—and I was freaked out for days. I felt then the way I felt after I watched The Shining.
I was seventeen when I watched The Shining. It was 1998. The Armand Assante Odyssey series was just one year old.
After the Naomi Klein book, I read one by Eula Biss, about buying a house. It had this creeping sense of dread I associate with books like The Haunting of Hill House—a horror novel. Something in the sentences felt like horror fiction to me.
Then I read Baseless, by Nicholson Baker, which was excellent and harrowing. It’s about how the government of our country probably/definitely used biological weapons in the Korean War, and made a lot of innocent people sick, and killed them, in order to make a distant country weaker, or maybe because some Yale graduates at the CIA felt inspired to do it, by amphetamines, white supremacy, and the enormous budget they’d been allotted to commit the worst crimes they could think of.
The contents of Baseless are horrifying, and the way it is written feels at times much like horror fiction.
I grew convinced that horror nonfiction was a genre we could see in other places if we looked for it.
I wanted to write about it, but I never did, except as part of a book that never got published.
But when I was listening to a podcast today, an ad for another podcast came on. I think it was about someone disappearing, never to be found—it was something like that. The way it was presented, the thing sounded like a work of horror fiction. But it was about real life.
After watching those trailers before The Odyssey, and after watching The Odyssey, I had to wonder if everything in our culture has to be a little bit horror, now. I wonder if maybe since our government is a perpetrator of tremendous horrors all that we can be permitted to see, now, are horrors.
One of the trailers was for the latest installment in the Meet the Parents cinematic universe. It wasn’t funny. It was disgusting.
I don’t really believe we’re living in the Age of Horror, in which everything that’s produced has the appearance of horror. But it’s what I have been thinking about, and so it’s what I’m writing here.
That is how it works. I have no choice. So sayeth Zendaya’s Law.