What The Odyssey Is Actually About

**Konstantin Kisin** (0:00)
Right, I'm gonna level with you. I'm not a gamer, even though I look like one. I'm not gonna pretend I've been grinding through RPGs between recordings, or that I have strong opinions about which Final Fantasy was the best one. I think it's Japanese, and I think there's a sword. That's genuinely everything I know. But our social media guy showed me this app, and I genuinely thought, that's quite clever. It's called Snacksy. Basically, game publishers need new players, and they're willing to pay to get them. Snacksy just passes that money on to you.
You play games you were probably going to play anyway, you own coins, and you cash them out for real rewards. PayPal, Amazon, Netflix, gift cards. If you prefer gaming credit, you can redeem for PlayStation, Xbox, Steam and Nintendo, or cash out your Inevo wallet. I've got no idea what that means. Actual money not just points that expire. It takes a few minutes to set up. You open the app, swipe through the game offers, pick something that looks decent, play it, earn, redeem. That's the whole thing. There's a sign up bonus worth up to $10 if you use our link, which is in the description of this episode. That's S-N-A-K-Z-Y, Snaxing. Click the link in the description to get started. And when you sign up, use the code TRIGGERpod. That's T-R-I-G-G-E-R-P-O-D to claim your $10 bonus. And the app is mobile only, so click the link from your phone, not your laptop.

**David Butterfield** (1:29)
Christopher Nolan, probably the most important director in the business, has taken on a story which historically has been too big for Hollywood.
It resonates more deeply the older you get by it revealing that many things we're told in life are a sham and a distraction, and to keep us away from the things which deep down we know actually matter. And those are people and place. Life requires that quieter heroism of sacrifice and suffering for whatever one takes to be the higher good. And I think what's really interesting about Nolan taking on the Odyssey is that it's the kind of film Hollywood doesn't want to make. The things I just described are against the grain of what not just Hollywood, but a huge amount of cultural activity has been doing.

**Francis Foster** (2:21)
This episode is sponsored by our friends at Hillsdale College. Right after this episode, go check out their incredible online courses, which are absolutely free at hillsdale.edu/trigger.
Dr. David Butterfield, welcome back to TRIGGERnometry.

**David Butterfield** (2:37)
It's a real joy to be back, gents.

**Francis Foster** (2:38)
Oh, it's great to have you back. We only had you on recently to talk about ancient Greece in particular. It was an amazing conversation. It absolutely crushed people, loved it. And so we thought we'd bring you back on. I don't know if you've heard, there's a movie about the Odyssey coming out. It's based on a story, as I understand it, that's been reimagined through a radical feminist lens, which I'm sure has given it even more accuracy and intellectual and rigor and vigor as we'd expect.
And so we actually thought it might be a good time to talk about the Odyssey and tell that story. But first of all, based on what we've heard so far, some of the interpretations of the Odyssey are quite interesting. What have you made of it?

**David Butterfield** (3:18)
Well, first thing to say is indeed Christopher Nolan, probably the most important director in the business with a huge catalog of fundamentally brilliant films behind him, has taken on a story which historically has been too big for Hollywood. There's really only one attempt to make a film of the Odyssey way back in the 1950s. It's one of those sort of sand and sandals, epics in Technicolor, but it's not a celebrated film, and for the last 70 years, no one has had a go. Now Nolan has stepped forward, and he's taken on what probably is the most important story in the Western tradition. So it's a big deal, and it comes out soon, but of course none of us have seen it. We've only seen the trailers. So there's a big caveat in anything I would want to say about Nolan's Odyssey, which is that no one's seen it, but from the trailers and from other bits of information circulating about it, there certainly are some interesting things going on within it. Like what? Well, for a start, we are attempting to tell the tale with historical realism. This is a thing Nolan has been very clear about in his interviews about the level of research that he, his wife, who actually is a trained classicist, and the team have gone into. In order to recreate what we might think a pure tale of fantasy, but for the Greeks, it was meaningfully real. It was a depiction of their own world in the second millennium BC, in the late Bronze Age, their heroic ancestors, who yes were able to engage with the gods and with various monsters and so on, but they were seen as their forefathers. So there's a serious attempt made in the film to depict what civilisation might have looked like at that moment, just before it actually did collapse, the Bronze Age collapse in the 12th century. So that on the one hand is really interesting, but on the other, there are some real problems when it comes to historical realism if you're trying to tell a film about gods interacting with mortals, that probably has not happened that obviously in the realm of history. So what we can gauge so far is that the film will indeed focus on the one man at its heart, Odysseus, and will attempt possibly following the structure of Homer's poem, possibly not, to chart his long 10-year struggle after the 10 years of the Trojan War to get home to his island, to the son he has never seen since his baby years, and to the wife who is currently beset by 108 men who want to be the man who will marry her and become the new king of his home island, Ithaca.