Penn professor Emily Wilson compares Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ to water ice — ‘mostly sugar,’ ‘makes no nutritional sense’
Wilson, whose translation of 'The Odyssey' was used as a reference for the film adaptation, wrote a review of the film that has the internet abuzz.
Classics scholar Emily Wilson’s widely-acclaimed translation of Homer’s The Odyssey was cited as a reference for Christoper Nolan in his recent film adaptation of the epic. It helped her book to sell over a million copies.
Now she’s written another talker: Wilson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the first woman to publish an English translation of The Odyssey, penned a review of Nolan’s film for London Review of Books this weekend, and her reaction was less than favorable.
Her main critique was that the adaptation lacked depth, stating: “It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbors.”
“Its narrative structure is gimmicky,” she wrote. “The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words.”
With the essay being lengthy, she also took to Bluesky to summarize her main points.
“This Odyssey is not a rich, satisfying Homeric banquet, but sometimes in the heat, an ice-cold Philly water ice is all you want — even it’s mostly sugar and food coloring, and makes no nutritional sense,” she wrote on the social media site. It’s a line Wilson says summarizes her feelings but was cut from the essay.
She had particular criticisms over the film’s female and non-white characters, finding them to be “underwritten.” Wilson states, “Most of the non-white actors — Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott — play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist.”
A uniquely progressive aspect of Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey is her devotion to fighting back against gendered biases from previous translations. For example, she replaced the terms “sluts” and “whores” used to describe the Ithaca servant women with “slaves” and “house girls.”
Wilson continues, “Charlize Theron’s Calypso looks gorgeous, but she is never angry, never funny, not skilled in rhetoric, and never consumed by lust for her scraggly mortal victim. She’s an unpaid therapist, soothing the soul of the bedraggled, PTSD-ridden Odysseus with drugs, and graciously listening to his disjointed tale of woe.”
Online discourse has naturally erupted, with people both defending her literary merit and others (largely hard core Nolan fans) attacking her review.
One Nolan fan account expressed their disappointment, theorizing that she was simply “frustrated that she didn’t get the adaptation she had imagined.” A reply, one of hundreds, comes to her defense, stating “[Nolan]’s scripts are usually garbage this one is no different.”
There is also discourse surrounding her take on the non-white characters, specifically. One X user writes that Wilson’s paragraph discussing the “Black best friend” trope “lacks refinement and is racist in the way she reduces these actors to what they’re clearly not. If she sees them as that, then that’s a reflection of her.”
Despite her critiques, Wilson maintains that “the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate." Ultimately, she argues, the success of this film adaptation is encouraging people to buy translations of the book, which is a win for literature and the humanities.