"There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible."
The above quote is from Emily Wilson's article in the London Review of Books on Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. The article is one of very few bits of criticism to cause a genuine firestorm of discussion, with even literary folks like Jocye Carol Oates calling it "MAGA-esque" along with plenty other responses as stupid and hysterical (and a few that are measured and nuanced) . I don't want to get at the ins and outs of this for a couple reasons. The most obvious one is that I haven't seen the film and I make it a mission to not have opinions about things I haven't touched. The second is that this is a blog i'm writing for fun in my free time and internet drama is not fun (for me). But I do think this statement articulates something about criticism which I deeply value and which can trip people up, maybe especially other critics. Which is, well, taste.
It's easy to criticize this statement as superficial, overly concerned with faithfulness to the source material, but that misses the mark. What it articulates is an aesthetic value. For Wilson, and for me, Odyssesy's sensuality matters. It is about getting lost, in the chaos and the beauty of nature, in the soft bodies which beckon and repulse, and about the freedom men have and the prisons women are placed in. All of these things are erotic and are (or can be) very sexy. Nolan is, almost remarkably, an unsensual filmmaker. One of Oppenheimer's biggest problems (a movie I very much admire for the record) is its sex scenes, which go for a kind of gonzo parallel between eroticism and death and land with you wondering how on earth the man has sired four children.
Though I wish to remain curious, but I do wonder if that fact might doom his Odyssey for me, as it seems to have doomed it for Wilson. I worry often that my own fiction writing is too cold, too matter-of-fact, and I'm in awe of books like Pierre Guyotat's Idiocy which render the slender cheekbone of a beautiful girl and the meat rotting off a decaying animal corpse alike in total, transfixing detail. As Wilson points, the sea is not wine-dark, but slate grey, a fact which depresses me on its face. It's not just that I care about the Odyssey being beautiful, but that I care about its specific kind of beauty. In any adaptation, I would want to see those things in it. And any one that lacks it, even if other aspects of it are impressive or worthwhile, would (likely) fall flat for me. I would like to watch the Odyssey and I would like it if it proved me wrong--i'm also pretty sure that I would find pleasures in this film that Wilson does not--but this aesthetic preference is quite powerful.
Something I have been accused vis a vis Hades, a game which I have similar grievences about as Wilson's for the Odyssey, is not taking the work on its own terms. Hades is not a profound treatment of a divine world, as much as it is a superheroic family drama, with Greek heroes and gods swapped in. Its aesthetic roots are not anicent but recent, found in indie comics like the wicked + the divine. This is all true and even reasons to not care about Hades' relationship to myth. But the fact is that I can't help but care about Hades treats its source material. The Iliad, in particular, remains absolutely bewitching to me. It's a complex work full of a morality which is foreign and yet a sorrow and rage which feel intimate. Hades treats those characters with a condensing modern eye, conjuring an Achilles who is regretful and peaceful. It is not only that it is different, but that it is meager by comparsion. Achilles is a man of fierce contradiction, at once loving and cruel, petty and hard-working, swinging between rage and violence and sullen indifference. Hades corrects this and in doing so makes him a type. Achilles in the Ilaid is bloody and raw; in Hades, he is an object lesson.
It is pretenious and potentially embarassing to care about these things. It's certainly vulnerable. Wilson basically admits that she wants to watch people having sex and is disappointed that this doesn't happen. It's also human. The role of a critic is to relentlessly and powerfully defend a point-of-view. It matters if that point of view is truthful, or that it points at something true. But that truth can go beyond whether a given critic is "right" about what they are talking about. I think, whatever its faults, Wilson's essay does that. In her work, I feel what she cares about and how she cares about it and for those thousands of words I care about what that means. If someone adapts the Iliad soon or another pop culture artifact touches on the things Wilson cares about, I would like to read her on it. She's a fine writer and a principled critic, something many of the people complaining about her cannot claim. But more fundamentally, I want to defend a critic's right to taste, to object to how something is approached, even if it approaches it with technical skill. That is criticism and it is a useful thing for a critic to do.
PS As penence for writing about this discourse, I would like to point you to this other essay from Wilson in the London Review of Books on rituals of womanhood. Gorgeous read.
PPS It's also... interesting shall we say that Wilson took the time to address the film's shoot on occupied Sahrawi land in the Sahara, while the distractors that i've read have not.