Homer's Hollywood Odyssey: Joel Christensen on How Christopher Nolan Gave Us the Odysseus We Deserve

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. On July the 17th, Christopher Nolan's new blockbuster movie, The Odyssey, is out. It promises to be a remarkable cultural event. It's already getting a lot of press, all sorts of articles about what it means to us in symbolic terms, historical terms. And I thought that we might talk to an expert on The Odyssey. My guest today is Joel Christensen. He's at CUNY Graduate Center. He's written all sorts of books on antiquity. And his book, Why Odysseus, came out last week. I'm actually talking to Joel just before either of us have seen the film. Joel, you're seeing it on Thursday?

**Joel Christensen** (1:14)
Yeah, on Thursday.

**Andrew Keen** (1:16)
How excited are you, Joel?

**Joel Christensen** (1:18)
Well, I'm not quite sure I'd say excited, interested, intrigued, maybe relieved to sort of get through it after hearing about it for so many months.
But I'm definitely getting to the point where if I could advance the clock a little bit, I'd do it. So I guess excited, it's fair. Scale of 1 to 10, probably crossing 8 into 9 at this point.

**Andrew Keen** (1:38)
That's pretty high. Do you feel you and your academic colleagues, perhaps a sense of ownership? You wrote in 2013, Homer, A Beginner's Guide. As I said, this new book just came out on why Odysseus, of course, presumably published in association with the movie.
Do you have a sense of ownership? I mean, if Nolan, in your view at least, profoundly misrepresents Homer and Odysseus, would you be disappointed?

**Joel Christensen** (2:10)
I think it's fair to say I would be disappointed. You know, the most recent movie that came out based on The Odyssey was the Pasolini's The Return. They came out in 2024
And if I get, you know, on the one hand, it's good for people to be interested in Homer and to want to learn more about it. But on the other, it's really some, you know, confounding at times to see how people reread it.
And so I'll be looking for in particular, whether or not the events at the end of the epic actually show up in the movie, because they rarely do. When Odysseus actually gets home after Penelope and he meets his father, reunites with his people. So it's something like ownership. But it's more deep investment. You know, you spend your life studying something that people raise an eyebrow about. And then suddenly everybody's talking about it and it's not the same thing. It can be a little alienating.

**Andrew Keen** (2:59)
Your high currency, I'm sure, at your cocktail parties.
So just reminding us, Joel, before we talk about what you would and wouldn't expect of the movie and the characters, remind us of the main characters. Of course, everybody, I would assume, knows about Odysseus, but there are many other characters. You mentioned Lady Penelope, and there are other less major characters like Telemachus and Circe. How would you describe all these characters?

**Joel Christensen** (3:28)
Well, I think, you know, the Odyssey is a bit different than the Iliad in that it has a small, much smaller cast of characters. So it's Odysseus, but we don't actually see Odysseus until about one fifth of the way through the epic, because the first part of the story is about his son Telemachus, who's never actually met his father. He's sitting alone in Ithaca, waiting for his dad to come home. Athena comes and sends him along on a journey, news of his father. And so we have Telemachus, his mother Penelope, who had just married Odysseus and had Telemachus before Odysseus went off to war. And then there's a whole group of shadowy figures called the suitors, who are young men from Ithaca and surrounding islands, who've come to seek Penelope's hand to lead the city in Odysseus' absence because no one's heard word of him in almost a decade. So those are the main players. And then you flush out Odysseus' family. His father Laertes shows up near the end of the epic. There are enslaved people who are part of his household who are important to the story, like Eurycleia, who was his nurse, Eumaeus, the swineherd. And then you have people he visits along the way.
So he ends up with Circe in Book 10 of the epic. Calypso has been hiding him for seven years. The Phaeacians who entertain him and bring him home.
And then for those who are interested in deeper cuts of myth, Telemachus does visit Agamemnon, sorry, Menelaus from the Iliad, Nestor from the Iliad. Odysseus takes us through a tour of fantastic figures like Cyclops, the sirens, and other figures who are really popular in the history of art. But the main three figures to remember are Odysseus, Telemachus' son, and his wife Penelope.