Around the year 2300 MHs, the kingdom of Ilias, or Troy, fell.
Or not.
But for many reasons, stories about the fall of Troy, and defeat of said Trojan kingdom at the hands of the Achaeans (we call them Greeks) over a bride theft, has been one of the Western world's founding stories.
Why, out of all the poems or songs or pieces of storytelling is this historical piece the one kept alive by countless generations? Kept alive before most people could read or write, kept alive through the churn of history, and even today in the Iliad and the Odyssey, characters form this story are alive with us.
In the waning days of of the year 5507 MHs (yesterday), Cass and I attended an opening day, 3pm 70 mm IMAX showing of Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey."
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| "Take a picture of the IATSE sign," Cass told me |
That screen seemed the same dimensions as out television, but it was so freaking big. SO big. BIG.
The movie itself is also BIG. But I'll get to that.
Cass and I rode the train from our downtown stop in Long Beach to the Pico stop outside of LA Live and Staples Center Crypto.com Arena. We walked up to a poke´ place so Cass could try it, and then headed over to the Regal IMAX theater by LA Live. (LA Live is an entertainment plaza and studio-zone, kinda like Downtown Disney without that branding. ESPN Studios in LA is housed there, as is the Peacock Theater, and yesterday there was a special showing of LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring.)
We got their early enough so that my mother would be proud, and we chatted. We talked. We talked about movies and books and history and sports. On the train into town I tried to explain why I liked Tenet more than The Prestige, whereas so many film nerds (like me?) prefer The Prestige to nearly any other Nolan film.
Cass asked me what my favorite Nolan film was. That's a hard question to answer, I told him. Inception and Tenet are such big swings, so original and bombastic. I loved the grandness of Interstellar, and the tight compact nature and structure of his three-hour biopic Oppenheimer.
Cass reminded me, "You may even like this one most," meaning the film we were waiting for. I nodded, That's right bud, finished my beer, got some popcorn, candy, and a slushee for the Boy, and we went and found our seat. We were dead-center, or just a seat over from dead-center, and in the very back-back row, the last row in the IMAX house
When I bought the tickets, it was either these seats or a much later show that I wasn't going to subject either of us to. I figured that in this spot, we'd be able to see everything.
And we were. Not being closer and more immersed, but what we could see was outlandish. Chest rattling bass, real boats in real sea water getting pounded, real people dealing with real wind on real beaches. This movie is strikingly beautiful, and especially with every frame nearly a spectacle, especially projected onto such a huge surface.
The set pieces are grand, and the use of CGI, while not non-existent, are reserved for the special moments. The cyclops, for one, was different than I expected, but I couldn't tell you what I did expect. But it was realistic and low-key terrifying way that should prep you for the Circe scene later. That scene boasts some awesome body-horror graphicness that had Cass wide-eyed in shock as it progressed, while I was like, Er, didn't expect to see this today. Needless to say, the weirdness of the cyclops did, in fact, not prepare me for the Circe scene.
Like Oppenheimer before it, Nolan here plays with the timeline and structure, so we get the story of Odysseus leaving for Troy, and like most accounts, almost nothing of the ten years spent on their siege of Troy. We get to see the Trojan Horse, the sacking of Troy, and the return home, but obviously not in that order.
This is a movie about societal collapse, and about what happens when the social compact dissolves and is disrespected often and flamboyantly. In this Bronze Age tale, that social compact is known as Zeus's Law, which states that because you never know if a stranger is a god or not, you must be kind to visitors to your house and offer to share some bounty with them. This is usually scene as food and drink. Now, mix that social understanding with a staunch patriarchy and dozens of men (who avoided the Trojan War) who now view Queen Penelope as a prize, and you get a nonstop party of jerkass "suitors," unwanted and who understand that they will not be asked to leave. For years Penelope has to deal with this. The flaunting of the social compact.
The Trojan Horse plays a part in Odysseus's understanding of his role in the breakdown of society as well. it's also a late-movie set piece that Nolan has his fun with.
At a time this morning when I should gave been sleeping, I dove into scholarship on the Homeric Question, on the Epic Cycle, and even the Theban Cycle. [[Sidenote: My best memory or basic connection to Thebes is, honestly, from Disney's animated Hercules movie. But Thebes was an important Boeotian city, and Boeotia was an important part of Ancient Greece, and despite incorrect historical narrative that they were Philistines, you may have heard of some of the Boeotian myths and characters that have survived: Eros, Narcissus, Hercules, and Orion. Anyway...]]
The fact that the voice of the main narrative parts of the Iliad and the Odyssey seem to be in different dialects is one of the main pieces of evidence that most scholars use to say that attributing both pieces to the same person is incorrect. And yet Homer persists. Was he blind? Was the idea that he was blind stem from the fact that his name translates into "follower," but, in the other dialect is taken much more literally, as "blind?"
Some people see the history of the oral tradition in the Homeric Epics as well. Bronze Age details with an early Iron Age view. As the story is told, over and over, keeping the histories alive and meaningful for the living, as Matt Damon's Odysseus says, "It's so those that can't read can know," the stories invariably change. And this is to be expected.
Was there a Troy, an Ilias? Was it weakly sieged for a decade and then lost in a torrent of fire and murder because of a false gift? That's the story that seems to still be with us, three-thousand years on. And I return to the question I posed near the beginning: why this story? Is the question really "why the Trojan Cycle the most?" Is it because it's about love, scorn, honor, hubris, denying the gods and then acquiescing to the realities of world you can't control?
The movie we watched yesterday is an interesting reflection on what it may have felt like to live through the general Systems Collapse of the Late Bronze Age, and that's the fun part of the big picture, I think, anyway.
That, and where else can you see Matt Damon out on a raft made of ten pieces of picket fence nailed together out on the open ocean? Like, literally out on the frickin' ocean, waves washing over his face, projected as big as an airplane on the side of an indoor building?
As we rode the train back to Long Beach, our seats with our backs on the sun and and our faces shielded, Cass nearly fell asleep on my shoulder. The one thing keeping him awake was the train's voice. The stop-announcer on our A-train, our local light-rail, was off by four stops, and Cass stayed up and mentally grappled with it, even nailing his own prophesy, when someone almost missed their stop because they were relying on the voice and video offered by the train.
Our long journey home was fraught with misinformation, and I smirked at the thought. Our systems in this day and age are fraying, our social compact buckling under the weight of a leadership class that flaunts it for profit. The failing of the machines is just a symptom, one that plenty people ignore happily.
That's was also probably what it felt like in the beginning of the Systems Collapse event.
But there are some kids playing attention at least, kids like Cass who are SO eager to learn the stories of the past, the stories we still tell ourselves. He's starting early. He knows the road is long, but his appetite is sufficient.
