What Does Nolan Owe The Odyssey?

**Andrew Heaton** (0:00)
Let's start with the theme. The United States successfully conquers Iraq. Saddam Hussein is vanquished. The forces of the Iraqi Republican Guard scattered and defeated.
But it turns out that there is a difference between conquest and governing, between fighting and building. To really drill down, there is a difference between the war and what happens after the war. And what happens after the war is the difficult part. But there is a twist. It's not just that we are over in Iraq, learning this crucial difference that fighting is not applicable to everything, that a warrior ethos cannot solve everything. There is also trouble back home. Domestically, the war has gobbled up revenue. The debt previously manageable has exploded. And on top of that, more programs have been added. The economic feasibility of our collective house is being devoured from the inside even though we won the war.
And there's something more insidious yet. Abroad, America is learning the very hard lesson that conquest and governing are different skills. That conquest and leadership are different skills. We can warrior our way into things very successfully, but we can't warrior our way out. And weirdly, that dichotomy is mirrored back home, domestically. Because back home, increasingly, Americans are understanding things with that warrior ethos. They're describing politics in terms of combat vocabulary. Winning, crushing, resisting, fighting, owning, destroying, taking the country back. The opposition party as an existential threat. Fifth columns, allies and traitors.
But again, fighting is different than leading, is different than managing. We can't run Iraq by fighting it. We already fought it. And we can't run our country permanently by fighting each other. At some point, somebody actually has to build things. Somebody has to manage. But the population is trapped in a warrior mindset of fighting and opposition. The peace and neighborliness of the land is becoming increasingly tense. All while quietly, relentlessly, one meal at a time, its financial stability is devoured from within.
This is, of course, the literary theme of the epic The Hunger Games, Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins, adapted for film by Peter Craig and Danny Strong. You saw that coming, I know. I know. But bear with me here. I want to take this in a different direction. As you know, The Hunger Games, Mockingjay came out in 2015 But let's say theoretically, for our purposes today, let's say over the next 500 years, Mockingjay becomes the paramount piece of literature in the Western canon for Mars. We build a base there, there's a colony. They're really into 21st century Earth films. And 500 years from now, Martians decide to adapt that epic to their quantum theaters, which are like the regular theaters of today, except that every seat is both reserved and available until you arrive. In reproducing that old Earth film, Martians have to make a few decisions about what is truly relevant, what is the essence that needs to be communicated or adapted, and what cannot be touched.
In one version of the forthcoming Martian script, plot, the themes and the characters for Hunger Games, Mockingjay, are all the same, but for the protagonist. Katniss Everdeen is now a nine-foot-tall robot, because there are a lot of nine-foot-tall robots in this hypothetical future on Mars. So she's a robot, same character, same traits, same travails, is just that she's a robot, okay?
But there's another version of the script, where the casting is more or less the same, same species, everybody's human. But the character that's a human, a human female, is altered intrinsically. Katniss is no longer a self-confident warrior. She's a deeply insecure, emotionally compelling, codependent mess.
Looks the same, sounds the same, actually pretty good impression of, what's her name? Everybody thinks she's really hot. I don't think, it's not that I don't think she's attractive. I just like, I don't think like crazy attractive. Like if I were, I mean, if she hit on, it's like, God, what is that? Jessica Lawrence, I think? I think that's her name. So anyway, the clone that they make is actually a Jessica Lawrence clone, but it's just a different character. All right, and then the final version of the Martian script, the characters and plot and the theme are the same. Nobody's really trying to change it, but Martian audiences have a really short attention span because of quantum TikTok. So the entire film need be distilled into an eight-minute video. They're not trying to change anything, but they do have to cut the whole thing down to about eight minutes. Which of these best preserves the essence of the film? How do we figure out when they're screwing up or dutifully carrying the essence of it? But you know what?
Actually, I have tricked you. I have tricked you and you fell for it because we are not talking about The Hunger Games at all today. We shall be discussing The Odyssey by Homer Simpson. What does it mean? What elements of that ancient epic are still relevant to us today? Crucially, when a filmmaker adapts it for a modern audience, what must be faithfully preserved and what can be, perhaps must be, reinterpreted?