On stories and retellings

Homer, Auden, Orwell, and the idea of "noise." Includes minor spoilers for the new "The Odyssey" film.

Photo by Jonathan Greenaway on Unsplash

I have to admit that I walked out of the new film version of the Odyssey. It was about 45 minutes in, and I’d spent much of that time turning away from the violence on the screen.

I left on a scene where the Trojans begin pulling the wooden horse into the city, which is to say the beginning of the fall of Troy. I had an idea of which elements of the story the film was likely to focus on after that — the cruelest — and didn’t want to see them in this version.

The “The Odyssey” film has been praised by people I respect and admire, so I am ready to be persuaded that it has virtues that I missed.

But in thinking through why I wasn’t willing to stay, I found myself thinking about time, and noise, and about what it means to focus on cruelty in a story.

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The other day I went out in the rain to the old building I use as a writing studio, and did part of a jigsaw puzzle.

I hadn’t intended to stay long, so the phone wasn’t with me. In fact, though, I stayed for more than an hour, simply because of the immense sense of quiet that came with the absence of the phone.

It wasn’t a literal quiet — my phone has few notifications turned on in any case — but rather a psychological one.

I felt calmer than I had felt in a long time.

The little pieces of painted cardboard fit into each other nicely. A satisfying image began to take shape. The rain fell on the garden outside, and the whole experience could have taken place exactly the same way any time in the past 100 years.

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When I was a child in the 1970s, my hippie parents didn’t allow any TV. Also, they kept the telephone unplugged most of the time.

They said that they wanted to “cut down on the noise.” The phone thing made no sense to me at all. How could it be “noise” to have the phone ring occasionally?

Now, with the new phone technology that carries so much else with it, I finally understand. Just the fact of it existing near one’s hand is a source of mental noise. An old-fashioned landline, that did nothing but voice calls, wasn’t that for me, but I begin to see how it possibly could have been for my parents.

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When my brilliant grandmother was elderly, we turned on a TV show that we thought she might like. She couldn’t follow it. It cut back and forth between the present and flashbacks with little or no transition, and it cut back and forth between scenes much more quickly than TV used to do in the past. We hadn’t noticed the change in either technology or style, but her mind was trained to a different kind of storytelling, and this new form was too hard to parse.

When I walked out of the “The Odyssey” film, it mostly had to do with the content — the cruelty, on which more below — but partly too with the vividness and loudness and intensity of how the content was presented.

I don’t have much experience with newer action films. It’s probably been years since I’ve seen one in a theatre. The technology and style, as one of my companions pointed out, has changed since then. Everything is faster and sharper and more real visually. The music literally causes one’s seat to vibrate. As I turned my head away from the violence on the screen, and felt the emotion being pumped up by the noise of the music, I kept thinking of the original Homeric epic and how it would have been experienced: entirely as word-pictures, though painted by a human voice and accompanied by music. I felt the relentlessness of the version I was getting in the theatre, and thought, The human mind isn’t designed to encounter stories in this form, all this intensity of visual detail and motion and music all at once.

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But then, I’m not trained in receiving this kind of storytelling, just as my grandmother wasn’t trained in receiving the kind of TV that was natural to me. There may be entire conventions around how cruelty and violence are portrayed in this format that I simply don’t understand.

Also, I tend to react to noise a bit strongly. The movie was possibly louder for me, and more intense, than for many who saw it.

But then also, maybe there is a limit to what it is good for the mind to be subjected to.

My instinct is that the presence of one’s mobile phone creates mental noise even for those who have never known a time without it.

And I’m not sure that the kind of movie technology I saw in those 45 minutes makes for better storytelling than more word-driven stories that allow the mind to choose its own reactions more; that leave more room for thinking.

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In George Orwell’s novel 1984 there is a scene, I think towards the beginning, where the main character goes to see a newsreel in a movie theatre. It shows horrible things happening to innocent people, for no particular reason. The audience is entertained. This is Orwell’s nightmare version of the future.

I left the new movie because from the opening minutes onward, almost every major beat during that first section included groundless cruelty — a boy cut down, an animal tossed casually off a cliff, a human being eaten — sometimes from a sympathetic character.

That was a storytelling choice, and after 45 minutes it began to feel like a central storytelling choice.

There was also, I thought afterwards, a curious feeling of emptiness during the part that I saw. It was visually beautiful, and incredibly real, but I didn’t really feel any sense of content coming through.

I came home thinking about a comic strip called ”Prince Valiant” that appeared in the Sunday papers when I was small. It was in color, with beautiful images and a little explanatory text. As a little kid I liked the images, but the story usually felt kind of blank. Even though I loved stories, and “Prince Valiant” told the kind of story I loved, I’d get more a sense of gaining something from the other Sunday cartoons, like Charlie Brown.

The new movie had that same feel to me now. Gorgeous visuals, but not really a sense of anything underneath.

I’ll be glad to hear that I was wrong, and that there was in fact a point to the cruelty-related storytelling choices, and a greater sense of depth later on.

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A Homeric retelling that comes into my head sometimes, especially when the world feels harsh, takes an extended passage from the Iliad and makes it more painful than the original.

In the original, the goddess Thetis, the mother of Achilles, asks the god Hephaestus to forge a set of armor for her son. He does, and there is a long description of the marvellous scenes that he depicts on the shield.

In the retelling, a poem by W.H. Auden called “The Shield of Achilles,” the decorations created by the god are horrifying.

Instead of the marvels of the original, the Auden version shows a kind of summary of all of the nightmares of the Second World War.

Here is an extract from the poem:

She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.¹

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This afternoon, before settling down to write, I sat in the garden in front of the flower bed and watched the butterflies as they moved between the flowers. The flowers and butterflies stretched out before the chair in a long line from left to right, almost as if I were watching a movie on a screen.

Anyone could have done the same thing any time in the past hundred years or more.

But I was also thinking about the new movie, and the kind of storytelling that is only possible today, and about Auden. I was trying to figure out the difference between the movie and Auden’s poem; why the first one felt too harsh in its storytelling to stay for, on that day at least, and the other something to reach for when things are tough.

I don’t have an answer, but I was glad for the butterflies, and glad, too, to be thinking about all of these things: Homer, the new movie, the old poem, and then a whole raft of other items, because it was quiet there, and there was not, in fact, a sense of noise.

1. You can read the entire poem at https://poets.org/poem/shield-achilles