"It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth ... The writing is abysmal."
- From classicist Emily Wilson's scathing review of Christopher Nolan's blockbuster movie The Odyssey.
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To go and see Christopher Nolan's blockbuster movie The Odyssey or not to go and see it? That is the question.
And it is especially a question for well-read intellectual snobs, like your columnist. The whole world is talking about the movie but everywhere the well-read who have seen it, and who have previously read and loved Homer's written version of The Odyssey are being scathing about Nolan's film version of it. Well-read intellectual snobs (like your columnist) fear that exposure to the influential and probably unforgettable three hours of the bogan blockbuster may contaminate and displace (for the brain has only limited room) our fond, cultured appreciations of the written classic.
Some who have seen it and hated it (they include Emily Wilson, and Nolan says he was moved to make the movie after he'd read the opening sentence of Wilson's acclaimed translation of Homer's epic) sound quite emotionally and culturally offended by the experience. No wonder then that your sensitive, well-read columnist is agonising over whether or not to go and see the movie, worried I might in anger hurl my boysenberry Choc Top at the screen.
Meanwhile, while making up my mind whether or not to drag my apprehensive mind to the movie, I am reading A.S. Kline's noble, elegant, literary 2004 translation of The Odyssey. I am reading it on my big desktop's quite big screen, never once feeling an urge to throw a Choc Top. Kline's translation is, thanks to Homer and to Kline, thrillingly, movingly beautiful.
Unlike Nolan's film (as assessed by the impressively tattooed and impressively brainy Emily Wilson), Homer's and Kline's version of The Odyssey has everything convincing to say about time, memory, history and war and has psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. There are sex scenes galore, too, for Ulysses' noble libido is an essence of who he is.
But Nolan's film's much-reported sexlessness (when Homer's story is sexually rich) is said to be a marketing-driven ploy to make sure that even under-16s in their pre-pubescent millions will be able to pay to flock to see it.
Oh dear. Yet again fine art is trampled on by capitalism's hobnailed boots.
"JAIL ON THE BRINK" the headline shrilled from the front page of last Sabbath's Canberra Times, pointing to the latest story about the ongoing hellishness of the overcrowded and corrupted Alexander Maconochie Centre, Canberra's adult prison.
You would never know it from Canberra's public conversation (because no politician would dare speak up on the subject) but there is worldwide and in Australia, active campaigning for the abolition of prisons.
This columnist is ever alert to that campaigning. Its arguments (that imprisonment tortures the imprisoned, does nothing to rehabilitate them but only brutalises them and their families further and all this to satisfy societies' worst and most primitive appetites for the savage punishing of unfortunates) have always struck me as being humane, societally sensible and, above all, true.
We abolitionists point out that it is always, always, the underprivileged the disadvantaged in life who get slammed into prison. This is obscenely true of the United States and of course of Australia where Indigenous lawyer and land rights activist Noel Pearson has just pointed out his wronged people are the most imprisoned people on earth and that governments would rather spend money on the detention than on the education and advancement of First Nations peoples.
Alert to all this, I am alert to fresh debate on the subject being kindled by reactions to a catchily-titled new book, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration. Authors Matthew D.C. Larsen and Mark Letteney are scholars but also are passionate prison abolitionists, highly informed ones, with a lot to say about just how pointlessly barbarous-vindictive our ancient and modern fondness for imprisoning people is.
I well recall how abolitionist notions never got a mention anywhere in Canberra as - beginning about 20 years ago - discussion began of establishing Canberra's very own prison. The unhappy Alexander Maconochie Centre opened for business 15 years ago.
None of the then debate against Canberra having its own prison was of an ethical, prison-abolitionist kind. Rather, Canberra's worst-in-the-world NIMBYs worked themselves into knickers-knotting anxieties over the possibility (horror!) the prison might be built somewhere near them or (just as atrocious) somewhere where it could actually (horror!) be seen by the NIMBYs, thus besmirching the normally breathtaking views from the grand balconies of their mansions.
They, the NIMBYs, were successful in this. And so the Alexander Maconochie Centre (which will be closed when I come to power) was established far, far from smug suburbia. It was tucked anonymously into a frost-pocket gully on a God-forsaken plain where it and its inmates are comfortingly out of sight.
And comfortably out of mind, too, until and unless one reads of them, shudderingly, on occasional Sundays in occasional editions of The Canberra Times.
