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We’re excited to announce the launch of “Voices from the Hill” a podcast dedicated to showcasing the incredible talent right here in our literary backyard. As a proud member of this vibrant community, Telegraph Hill Arts & Literature believes our local authors deserve a platform to share not just their published works, but the stories behind them.
If you’re a Bay Area author interested in being on the show, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us at submissions@telhilit.org.
Today on Voices from the Hill I am joined by Phil Cousineau, one of America's foremost mythologists, storytellers, explorers of human journey, and local North Beach author. Philip is the author of more than 40 books, including the bestselling of the art of pilgrimage. And he spent decades studying enduring wisdom of mythology. A longtime collaborator of Joseph Campbell, in particular as a co writer and author of the Heroes Journey, the role of Joseph Campbell. He's a consultant to Pixar, Lucasfilm, Warner Brothers.
Jennifer Barone:He's a filmmaker, a teacher, and a cultural historian. Phil has devoted his life to asking why ancient stories continue to shape modern lives. His newest book, The Wisdom of the Odyssey, 24 Life Lessons from Homer's Epic, invites us to see Odysseus' journey, not simply as an adventure, but as a profound exploration of human homecoming and a search for meaning. So let's dive in. Phil, welcome to Voices from the Hill, live in North Beach from Telegraph Hill Books.
Phil Cousineau:Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you. Thanks for everybody coming up. It's a Saturday night. I know you've got music to go over here.
Phil Cousineau:Friends to see, follow-up on TV series that you haven't seen for a while. But we love bookstores, right? That's why we're here. We're trying to support great local bookstores, the freedom of expression and the long thread of epic literature. Right?
Phil Cousineau:That's why we're here. That's why we're here. It's under threat. I was with Joe at ALA, American Library Association, conference in Chicago just a couple of weeks ago, and it was rhapsodic, a word I will keep coming back to over the next hour or so, because we were in the world of six to 8,000 librarians trying to preserve freedom of speech. And half of them were wearing I read banned books T shirts.
Phil Cousineau:So we're here to explore this glorious notion of why stories matter, why books matter, why it matters for people to gather in groups to see movies and books and then talk about them for goodness sakes. So let me let me start there, and then I will segue into something local, which is what I've tried to do all my career. If I'm in Detroit, I talk about Motown. If I'm in New York, I might mention the Yankees. Keep it local, right?
Phil Cousineau:So when when I was growing up, we had I grew up in a castle full of books. We had hundreds of books in the house, so much so my mother, just before she died, told me at one point four or five of her friends came up to the house and said, Rosemary, we love you. We love Stanley. We love your kids. But these books, they're really pretentious.
Phil Cousineau:We don't feel comfortable when we come to visit. Do you think you could put them in the closet and then we could have our coffee and tea? So is anybody ashamed of the books they have in their house? No, we love our books. Mike Joseph, we love our books.
Phil Cousineau:We also have magazines. We subscribe to Life Magazine. And I remember my father one time reading from a Look Magazine article, Life Magazine article, with the great James Baldwin, in which Baldwin was asked, this is 1963, Why read? Why care about books and literature? Or as Joe Campbell used say, literature, that great Bronx accent.
Phil Cousineau:And Baldwin says, and this is a very close paraphrase, he says, Just when you think you are all alone with your pain and your suffering, You've suffered more than anyone in the history of the world. Comma, one of the great commas in literary history. Then you read. And that, to me, is part of the mystery of what we're going to be talking about tonight. People have been listening to, with a liar, of course, reading and now viewing this magnificent story, The Odyssey, for about three thousand years.
Phil Cousineau:And I have to ask why? Why does it keep coming back? Again and again, so many art forms from it's estimated within one hundred years or so of the poet known as Homer, a neutral way to talk about Homer. Within one hundred years, the images from the Elephant and Odyssey were already appearing on vases, mosaics, murals on the walls of Delphi, for example. And we are still obsessed with being turned on by and now arguing about the images.
Phil Cousineau:Let me give you a local example of how this happens. We are sitting in the ruins, the transformation of a beautiful bakery, the old Italian American bakery. Anybody ever get their bread here? Remember? Okay, good.
Phil Cousineau:This is my tribe. Often in the room, June, I've been here about thirty years. Often I've been right through the night at the top of the hill and I would saunter, tumble, as we sometimes say, tumble down the hill after an all night session, six a. M, and I would bump into Lawrence Ferlinghetti here. Sometimes we would wait for this to open in the morning so we could come in and get our first cup of coffee of the day and our bread.
Phil Cousineau:So Lawrence, I remember one morning we would chat a bit before he went off painting in his blue pickup truck, and I would go to a cafe to get four or five more cups of coffee to keep going. One time he stood out here and he said, Oh, you know, know you know George Whitman, right? Because I was one of the writers in residence at Shakespeare Company in Paris for seven months. I got to live up in the old library there. And he said, Yeah, George inspired me to open City Lights.
Phil Cousineau:So that was cool. That's a cool connection, right? Paris, Shakespeare and Company? That's our twin sister bookstores. That's right.
Phil Cousineau:And he said, When I first opened up the bookstore, I had to keep three books in stock. He said, First, it was Homer's Odyssey. Had to have that. People were coming from all around the world. They had to get a copy of Homer's Odyssey, both the older versions, Alexander Pope, but also later the E.
Phil Cousineau:V. Rue prose translation, which is pure story. And it's poignant to me because Rue translated this in prose. While the bombs were falling on London between '44 '46, Evie Rue is the one who came up with the whole notion of the Penguin Classics. Does anybody have a Penguin Classic in their library at home?
Phil Cousineau:So that's the origin. Why? Because of a phrase that came to him that is mentioned at least three times in Christopher Nolan's version. I'm not calling it the IMAX, obviously. Rue believed that civilization was ending, and so he had to preserve.
Phil Cousineau:He said, once all the horror of this, 100,000,000 people die in World War II, we are going to have to scrape and cobble together civilization again. And we begin by preserving the great books, the books that are spoken to heart and soul all these years. While he was doing it, he began his first prose translation of The Odyssey. And that book helped keep the doors open Ferlinghetti. And then the second book was my mentor's famous book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Phil Cousineau:He said playwrights and poets. All these people were coming. They wanted Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. And the other one was more obscure. Fernando Pessoa, do any of you know him?
Phil Cousineau:Great Portuguese poet. Great. And one of the guys just come back from 991 living there over in Portugal for a while, and we both loved him. And that line that we share, we love everything. It's something else besides.
Phil Cousineau:That's the way I like to approach the movie. You've got the spectacle. You've got the surface, both of books, but also music. But then the movie, something. There's a story behind the story behind the story.
Phil Cousineau:For those who are taking notes, and I know the way the elbow goes out and the pen comes out, so I know what Larry is doing in the back there. Fernando Pessoa. Everything is something else besides. So I love that as a way to kind of sanctify this building. Lot of people came here to get their coffee and go on with their day.
Phil Cousineau:But a couple more. So stay with me. You walk down Grant Avenue, you'll come to what was the old bagel shop. It was a place where musicians, the Smothers Brothers played there. Lenny Bruce actually sang out his satire there.
Phil Cousineau:It's where poets and writers came together, including Jack Kerouac. And I mentioned Kerouac because I've just been invited by the Beat Museum, which is now also the Culture Counter Cultural Museum in Haight Asheboro to come and give a talk on the Odyssey. So I did fifteen minutes of research and found out between the two when Jack Kerouac was at Columbia, he made some notes that said he read The Iliad in three days and then The Odyssey in three days. And shortly after that, on the road, which has been often called the American Odyssey. Right?
Phil Cousineau:So you feel where we're going with this. The influence that spreads out in so many unexpected ways. Going down Grant Avenue, turn right to go to Francis Ford Coppola's Cafe Zotrop. It's also a cafe, beautiful, wonderful restaurant cafe. Upstairs is where he's been editing films since the 1970s.
Phil Cousineau:Do you remember Apocalypse Now? He wants to write the definitive movie not just about Vietnam, but of war. How do you write the definitive any anything except going back to the original template? So he found he and his screenwriter, John Melius, if you know that whole story with that, they go back to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which is a way to talk about the Odyssey. That's the central axis of Mundi of the Odyssey.
Phil Cousineau:Odysseus going down into hell so he can be reborn and finally get home again. What is Heart of Darkness based on Homer's Odyssey? So, you've got the story within the story within the story. You keep moving. Just one more example here, because it's fun.
Phil Cousineau:It's fun, right? You go down to the Transamerica Building. Everybody hated it. Hurricane hated it when it was first built. Now it's become one of the icons of San Francisco.
Phil Cousineau:What it replaced was an old Filipino American hotel, but before that was a hotel where Mark Twain lived. Also, Robert Louis Stevenson had spent some time there. Hart Crane, for those of you who know some of the great literary associations here. And once in a while, Mark Twain, after he was a reporter here in San Francisco for a while, he would get tired and walk across the street to a saloon run by the name by guy whose name was Tom Sawyer. That's where you get the title for the Tom Sawyer book.
Phil Cousineau:So if you do a little more homework with that, you start to wonder, is there another American? Odyssey, Somebody recently said, Who has been the American homer? I think it was Atlantic Monthly magazine, and different scholars and writers had different opinions about this. Recently So they found in the archives in Hannibal, Missouri that after he wrote his American Odyssey, the story of Huckleberry Finn, which I read when I was a kid with my father, He began an outline for a parody of the Odyssey. He said this has been classics or books everybody loves.
Phil Cousineau:Nobody reads, and I want to find out why. Why don't we read these classics? So there's my Argus over here on the side here. So what I'm leaning up to is a wonderful comment that helps set the stage. Is one of those moments when I found a great thing that I wanted to put into a book, but I just pressed send on my laptop.
Phil Cousineau:The book was already with my editor and you know what it was. It's a passage in Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize acceptance speech from 2016. Dylan, who used to hang out with the Beats right down the street here, in which he says right in the middle of this piece, remember, didn't go there to accept a speech there in Stockholm. Instead, he sent in a speech a year later, and right in the middle of it, he was Odysseus. Odysseus was a traveling man, and he had to face a lot of obstacles and ordeals, and he went through a lot of pain, and somehow he survived.
Phil Cousineau:He kept going. Pause is a bit of an ellipsis there, and then he says. A lot of you have gone through the same thing. And I thought, my God, what a glorious way to talk about this thing in ancient Greece. They used to call my mimesis, which gives us our word mine or to copy something.
Phil Cousineau:The Greeks entered the ancient and the classical Greeks believe this whole notion of watching an athlete, watching an actor perform in a play, listening to a musician, listening to a bard perform something like the Iliad and the Odyssey is what allows the archetypes that are behind our beautiful stories to get into us, get into the bloodstream. That is what endures, not just plot, not just structure, not just history. These stories that we can deeply identify with when you say, Oh my God, how did Homer know what I was going through? How did Jane Austen know what we would be going through three hundred years from now? So that's what I want to explore tonight, this mystery of identification with the stories, the poems, and now the movies that we love.
Phil Cousineau:How's it?
Jennifer Barone:I went to see the movie on Tuesday night, and I was so thrilled that I just finished his book like two days before. And I had this gorgeous lens of perceiving and making it through, what are the learnings? You know, what is the wisdom that it's coming from these experiences? And and it was more profound, probably, than seeing it without reading this book. And so I highly recommend you haven't seen it.
Phil Cousineau:It worked. But
Jennifer Barone:I'm a poet.
Phil Cousineau:Sure.
Jennifer Barone:You talked about The Roots for Lingetti, too, and City Lights and Kerouac. This is an epic poem. And I wanted to ask you about that format too in this modern day, in this modern time. So you say, for instance, in your book, you have a line up. In Greece, there is more than what is visible.
Jennifer Barone:There is the invisible, what is known only through the eyes of myth in poetry. So I kind of want to ask you, what is it that can only be understood through the eyes of poetry in particular, which is the original form that this was written in? And is there an aspect to its being in poetic form that makes it so special?
Phil Cousineau:Thank you. Thank you. That's what Woody Allen said at the end of Annie Hall. It's total heavy ossity. Do you remember that line?
Phil Cousineau:Well, getting into the meter for one image that I have in the book that speaks to this. The ancient Greeks believed that Homer's dactylic hexameter, which is 10 to 12 syllables in some of the longer lines, even up to 17 syllables, replicated the sound of the oars in the sea. Now, doesn't that take your breath away? It should anyway. That's that's what the Greeks felt, that this is a poem after our own soul, Right?
Phil Cousineau:So here's one of my theories about story that I use when I teach screenwriting down at the American Film Institute for decades now. I still teach people like Larry at travel writing over at the Book Passage Conference that think of a story as a circle like this. It's also been an emblem for the soul. Then goes, I think life is round. The mysterious line in a letter to his brother Teo.
Phil Cousineau:So if you think of a story as a circle, it does not go clockwise. That's Kronos time, chronological time. Story time, myth time is dream time and it's counterclockwise. That was one of the great innovations by my mentor, Campbell. All storytimes go against the clock.
Phil Cousineau:That's why we have these wonderful phrases in the language against the grain. My main man, Bob Seger from Detroit, against the wind. Do you remember that? It's because when you're really following your purpose, your destiny, you have to break away from your parents or the church that you grew up in, whatever it might be, you break away. You are not in Kronos time.
Phil Cousineau:You're in poetry time. You're in a state of rhapsody and or reverie, which is going against the clock. So that I see the destruction. Every people has a history and every everybody. There isn't a single culture in the world that hasn't had folklore, poetry, myth, dream work, dream analysis, dream therapy.
Phil Cousineau:So I like to think it was the overstory. This is the plot. This is what's happening. This is what the journalists, God bless those journalists, who are risking their lives every day to get the story. That's the overstory.
Phil Cousineau:The understory is where I live. I was a journalist for six years between '16 and '22. I've done that. But I became so much more interested in the soul and spirit of stories of art. I want to know what moves the human heart and soul.
Phil Cousineau:That's where poetry lives, and that's why the Greeks fell under the spell of Homer. It wasn't just interesting. They had already the nascent histories by Herodotus through Thucydides and then later the playwrights. But it was Homer that fed the soul. And it's one reason why they are so let's call it exercise about the movie and the liberties that have been made to make the movie the way it does.
Phil Cousineau:And I am trying to be in the overlap between the two because I've also worked in the movies. And I know you've got two different kinds of language. You've got the written word, which I hope everybody in this room loves, but you've also got a certain exigency, a transformation, almost an alchemical transformation has to happen to the written word, the oral word for it to become a movie. There is a transformation there. I think a real quick start because so many of you know my relationship with Campbell.
Phil Cousineau:He had not seen a movie since, as he told me, since the talkies came in. His lab, the last movie he had seen was 1927, a Charlie Chaplin comedy, and he just stopped. Remember, he went and lived in Europe and he was hanging out with Carl Jung, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, all these cats, musicians. He was also a saxophone player when he came back to the talkies came in. The problem with the talkies is they're too literal.
Phil Cousineau:He said, I want poetry. He said, I want heart. I want soul. So he didn't see a movie for years. He and his wife, Jean, famous dancer with the Martha Graham Company.
Phil Cousineau:And finally, in 1968, she felt a little flu ish one night, and he startled her. I got the backup story from her as well by saying, Jeannie, let's go see a movie tonight. They had been married for forty years. They had never seen a movie together. So, they live in the village.
Phil Cousineau:They walk around from Waverly Place. What's the nearest movie theater, if any of you know the village there? The Waverly Theater, which is now one of the centers for independent filmmaking in the world. They didn't even look at the marquee. So, they just walked inside the theater.
Phil Cousineau:Joe just wanted to keep her happy for a couple hours, right? They walk in, they sit down, the curtain parts. And if you get a thrill when the curtain parts, you're right. The music comes on. Thus spake Zarathustra.
Phil Cousineau:So Campbell goes from Charlie Chaplin to Stanley Kubrick in forty one years. It gets better. Five minutes into the movie, if you remember how it starts with the scenes of the Australopithecines in the caves and then the tools and so on, killing the gazelles and so At the scene, and this is very relevant for what's happening in the Odyssey, and this is what Nolan is trying to capture, and we can discuss whether he does or not. It's fair game. When you get this big, it's fair game.
Phil Cousineau:He elbows Jean and says, They've been reading my books. How could that happen? Well, the story goes, it's an analogy for what we can talk about with the Odyssey Christopher Nolan. And it's this. Kubrick had found short story by Arthur C.
Phil Cousineau:Clarke in 1951 called The Sentinel. It was a short story that dazzled him because it's very metaphorical language, again, metaphor poetry about human evolution. And if you remember the famous slab, it's a big trivia question. Who plays the monolith in 2,001 Space Odyssey? Well, appears four times in 2,001 Space Odyssey, which is a rip on what?
Phil Cousineau:Homer's Odyssey. It was intentional for that. And every time the monolith appears, there's a huge jump in human evolution. What would trigger that? What would trigger that?
Phil Cousineau:That's how a filmmaker is thinking. I've got a short story, but I want it to be a two and a half hour, three hour movie. So he found the work of Campbell. His article called Primitive Mythology, in which there's a passage that says, The beginning of human consciousness, which is a concern of Homer, by the way. There is an argument to be made that Odysseus is the first thinking character in Western literature and Western civilization.
Phil Cousineau:He does not act by pure instinct. He is thinking his way through these twenty years that he's gone. And so, yeah, Kubert takes Campbell's notion that the beginning of human consciousness is the awakening of awe and wonder. This is what moves us on from being just brute instinct. I'm what I believe is what my father told me to think or what my husband told me to think or what the Pope.
Phil Cousineau:I heard this growing up French Catholic. I don't know what I think until I read what the Pope has to say about it. I just want to throw my hands up. All right. I'm out of church now.
Phil Cousineau:I'm out of here. It's the study of this. And that's why the analogy is important for me here with this. Nolan wants to make a movie about one of the most important stories ever. But he begins with the human heart.
Phil Cousineau:If anybody saw the interview with Stephen Colbert, the second to last interview that Colbert actually has in the program, he finally asked at the end of your interview, an hour, you know this, He asks for his last question, what we would have asked the first. What inspired you finally to make the movie? Remember, he had been appointed the director of the movie that became Troy with Brad Pitt, But he had another obligation. So Wolfgang Petersen ended up directing Troy, and he always wanted to come back, come back and take this on himself. So what was it?
Phil Cousineau:This is my entry also into my version of The Odyssey, which is that it is the first tender and tough epic. It's not just tough. It's not just about testosterone. It's about tenderness and love. Love is the magic formula here that brings Odysseus home again.
Phil Cousineau:How do you get to this? So Nolan says, surprisingly, he said, I didn't have a dog when I was a kid, and I really resented it. And when we raised our three kids, my wife and I, we were too busy to get a dog. A couple of years ago. We had a small break in our home life.
Phil Cousineau:The kids were out of the roost. So we finally bought a dog. And then here's a beautiful thing. He says, I pick up that dog, and I remember the famous scene in Book 17 out of the 24 books of The Odyssey in which Odysseus and his loyal friend, Eumaeus, one of the most beautiful portraits of friendship in all of literature. Eumaeus and Odysseus in disguise are going up to the palace.
Phil Cousineau:They have to be careful or they could be murdered if they're found too soon. Very careful. It's all kinds of testing in antiquity. And what do they find as a twisted staircase leading up to the Citadel, up to the palace? They find Argus, noble hunting dog, waiting for him after twenty years.
Phil Cousineau:And now comes the rise of something that's so sublime in the story. This is not a testosterone driven hero. He's the opposite of that. He's what's called Polytropos. His mind is constantly turning around every issue around every experience he's thinking for himself.
Phil Cousineau:He's also tender, so he knows at this moment if he jumps down and recognizes his dog who's growling right now, she knows I'm talking about dogs again. So he reveals what if any of you sports fans out there, you know the quality that I remember. Charles Schultz used to describe in Joe Montana. Cool Joe. Joe Cool.
Phil Cousineau:Remember that? Or now when we talk about Steph Curry, it's different about Steph Curry out there on the court. Keeping a cool head as opposed to being a hothead, which most heroes in epic literature are. So at this moment, Odysseus displays with the Greeks called Sophrosine. It's the ability in a marriage argument, argument with your kids, an argument with somebody over here at Union And Columbus who's cut you off because he's late for an appointment.
Phil Cousineau:Has anybody been cut off over here before? Can you stay cool? This is one of the distinctions in the great Odysseus. He can stay cool. Why?
Phil Cousineau:If he bends down, pets the dog, recognizes the dog, he will be immediately shot and his wife Penelope, his son Telemachus and all his friends will be immediately murdered in the palace. There's a metaphor here. Something is coming in this book that's not in the Elliott, that's not in any of the other literature of the time, and it's a signal that we can break the cycle of vengeance.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. So you talked multiple times throughout your book about the Kylo's, which I found fascinating. But and you also talk about how see if having a level of self mastery developing that exhibit self restraint. I think that's what you're describing. Can you talk a little bit about what it takes to get to the Kairos moment?
Phil Cousineau:Remember, we talked for just a minute there about the chronological time goes goes the clock. Kairos time is sacred time. It's also the time it's sometimes called the ripe time, the ripe moment. Kairos is a god. He's also the god of synchronicity.
Phil Cousineau:If anybody here loves Jung's ideas on synchronicity, he's the god of that. He's also the god of openings. You have a single minute to walk across that crowded gymnasium floor and ask that pretty girl to dance. That woman will never come back. You've got one minute to turn that phone call that says we're looking for a writer for a new story.
Phil Cousineau:Life comes at us rapidly, and the Greeks personify this as a god. It's a sacred moment. Kairos is a sacred moment. And the Greek poets that I have come to love described this as the infinite moment. If you know how to honor that moment, the sanctity of time, time tends to expand like this.
Phil Cousineau:And the way that I deal with this again poetically. So thanks for the lead on this. If any of you remember the phrase from it's kind of medieval mysticism all the way to paradise is paradise. Remember that famous phrase I play with in this book by saying all the way to Ithaca is Ithaca. How does he keep going?
Phil Cousineau:What pulls him back? Arguably, the first evidence we have in Western literature of the thought of suicide is in the Odyssey. He's lost all his crew. He does not know if his wife and children or child is alive. There's a moment when he almost lets go.
Phil Cousineau:But I think there was something that he grew up with. If you grew up with the North Beach, you're little different than if you grew up in the Sunset or in LA, right? You felt there's something in the land. I think that's where the whole notion of us rooting for our home team comes from. You are sinking roots.
Phil Cousineau:If you say, I'm from Cleveland, I'm from Detroit, I'm from North Beach. If I tell people, remember, we used to coach some kids here in baseball. And when William and I would tell them, you know who grew up here? Three, the three DiMaggio brothers, they grew up here. Right?
Phil Cousineau:You begin to root this. The Odyssey is a story that has rooted the Greeks for three thousand years. And every time Odysseus makes these these difficult decisions, do I keep going or do I give up? Remember, Calypso says, will make love to you for the rest of eternity. What's wrong with that?
Phil Cousineau:I'm beautiful. I'm a goddess. Isn't that enough? Do you remember the line? The translation I love comes from this notion that he learned something powerful about love, not just leadership and all the martial arts.
Phil Cousineau:He learned something about love. He loved the land itself. Henry David Thoreau thought Homer was the first nature writer. That's an enormous statement because the poetry, the lines, the description about nature. You don't need them, but it adds poetry to the story.
Jennifer Barone:I feel like the goddesses are the mythical creatures are spirits of the land.
Phil Cousineau:That's wonderful.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. But like, do you feel that when you say that? Because that's
Phil Cousineau:a wonderful thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Jennifer Barone:It's like mythology or these mythic beings are not to be taken literal. They're actually like land spirits, water spirits, ancient cultures had this visceral experience of the invisible world that you mentioned. Things are invisible, but we have actual relationship with them. We do offerings. They're part of our daily lives.
Jennifer Barone:Like it's actually a really, really invisible world that we have.
Phil Cousineau:Cloud had a God. Every emotion. Love, envy, desire, lust, trust. They were all personified. That's the word to keep thinking about.
Phil Cousineau:Otherwise, you go into the world of the abstract. What is that? Larry, you might remember this. Pico Iyer, the great travel writer, says, There's one thing about travel that's so great is it saves us from a life of the abstract. Go and see it for yourself.
Phil Cousineau:Right? Don't think you know about these things. And as much as I love books and literature, this is my life, there is this wonderful other approach that says read about it and then go see it for yourself. I think that's at the heart of the mystery of Homer himself, to go to these magical places, save these magical lands because they believed in both the visible and the invisible. So who is pulling you forth?
Phil Cousineau:This is a book arguably about enchantment because it's a whole enchantment about Paris and Helen that begins the war. And this is a major mythological statement that you cannot say just in pure prose. Thucydides could not have said this in his histories. The Trojan War symbolically, mythically written was caused by the inextricably mysterious, strange connection between love and war. It's right there.
Phil Cousineau:Who is the goddess of love? Aphrodite? Venus? Right? Who is her lover?
Phil Cousineau:Ares, the god of war. Homer is playing this out. Why do we love war? You You think you understand war intellectually? Really?
Phil Cousineau:With all the wars that are still going on now, Will Durant, in his histories, said, in roughly the ten thousand years of history, we have maybe twenty two years without war. Just in recorded history. It is a deep, deep mystery that you have to write poetry about. Sappho, what's that great line of hers? Some say the cavalry returning from war is the most beautiful thing in the world.
Phil Cousineau:Some say the ships coming back from a battle at sea. That's the most beautiful thing in the world. I say I say the most beautiful thing in the world Is the face of the one you love? Do you feel that there's some majesty in there and you can't say that in prose. You can't say that in natural language.
Phil Cousineau:And Homer is trying to record at his time. So we're talking the mid seventh century here. What he felt something was ending the memory of this noble, noble past. Remember, he's writing a time when already the Trojan War was four or 500 years old. So he's writing about a world that fast, fast disappearing.
Phil Cousineau:I think that's one of the many, many tectonic forces inside the poem. Why? Because people have always been at war, and they have always had been sending soldiers out to fight these wars. What was No Country for Old Men? Remember that line?
Phil Cousineau:Became a movie title. Remember that? It's a mystery. Why do all these old men send their young men off to war? They glamorize it.
Phil Cousineau:And where do they glamor begin? In the Iliad. When Achilles is told by his mother, you've got two choices. And this is poetry, sheer poetry. Gorgeous.
Phil Cousineau:If you look at the Iliad, even Emily Wilson's new translation of this, the goddess Thetis turns to a young son Achilles and says, You've got two choices. We are still telling our young men and women going to war. We're still telling them you can either live a long, long, calm life out there as a peasant, as a farmer, maybe as a fisherman, and you'll be at peace. But no one will ever tell your story. People will forget about you within one generation.
Phil Cousineau:But this is the goddess speaking. But she says, if you go off to war, I will make you nearly immortal. Thing she grips, you know why we called it Achilles heel. This is no extra cost on this because she wants to make him immortal. So she grabs her baby.
Phil Cousineau:Infant Achilles drops him in the river, the Leith River to make all the rest of him immortal. But she's where she holds him by his heel doesn't feel the water, which is why that is the most vulnerable place in Achilles. That's where he was finally shot. That's where he dies. And we still have anybody ripped an Achilles heel in the room.
Phil Cousineau:That's where the image comes from. In this case, Achilles says Achilles learns that if he goes to war, he will earn something we are still talking about today. If you die for your country, we will talk about you forever. We will honor you forever, which most of us find is a terrible, terrible lie. It's called Kles.
Phil Cousineau:K L E O S. It's one of the most important words in all of Greek culture. You will go to your grave fighting for glory and fame. And so the key line that point with this is one of the turning points for me in the whole book. And many scholars agree Nolan does this.
Phil Cousineau:It's a risk, but it's so powerfully done. Briefly, remember Searcy says, I will turn your men from pigs back into human beings if you stay with me and make love to me for a year. That's not in the movie. There is no eroticism in the movie. There's hardly any sensuality.
Phil Cousineau:That's one of the missing ingredients here. But it's erotic, and it's also at the heart of the Greek miracle. The Greek miracle constantly says it's love. It's passion that will preserve your home, preserve your marriage, preserve your relationship with your children. It's long.
Phil Cousineau:An Odyssey without this Eros, and I mean the deep Eros that rules the universe, it's not the Odyssey. So the beautiful thing that Searcy says is you will go home. I will help you go home. She gives him directions in the sky. Go off to sea and sail between Orion and the Big Bear.
Phil Cousineau:It's the first indication of navigation in all of human history. It's beautiful. If you ever sailed, this is a gorgeous detail. He goes, but she says you have to go into the underworld. This is our first died and resurrected hero story.
Phil Cousineau:This is seven hundred years before Christ. Is before any of the Indian and Buddhist mythologies. Odysseus is so lost. He's not a lost sailor. He's a lost soul because he's been at war and he has to go to.
Phil Cousineau:And this is metaphorical language. He has to go to hell And survive and come back to talk about it. He's it's not play. It's not going to Essilane for three days. I can say that because I've taught there for thirty years, but you get the metaphor, right?
Phil Cousineau:Essilane won't do it. You've got to go to hell, which means go into your shadow, go into the darkest place in your psyche, the darkest place in the culture and get the advice that will allow you to keep moving home again. So when he's down there, he gets some advice from Therese is. But here helps.
Jennifer Barone:Was going to say,
Phil Cousineau:like, I just finish that one point, which is important? He encounters Achilles himself in the underworld. And this is this has been one of the turning points of Western literature. He's about to compliment Achilles. He's saying, You know, we're still talking about you.
Phil Cousineau:I'm sorry, you're dead. I'm sorry, you didn't survive the Trojan War. I really feel bad about that. But is this some consolation? Paul, Paul Scott, I'm still talking about you, Paul.
Phil Cousineau:It was worth all the sacrifice you've made to reopen Julius' castle. We were talking about you for a thousand years. It feels like it's taking that long. Right? And now here, then we can turn over.
Phil Cousineau:Achilles looked at him, and you can practically hear him say, You idiot. Which, by the way, idiot is Greek for people who don't vote. How about that? All right. Is you moron, which is Greek for fool?
Phil Cousineau:He says, I would give all those stories, all of that fame, all that glory for one more day of sunshine. You feel that this is the first time someone has deeply questioned the martyrdom of war? And now Odysseus knows he's got to let go of that warrior complex and he can finally steer his way home again.
Jennifer Barone:Like really devastating news is when the head of, I do believe, Athena is desecrated after the battle of Troy. You have that really intense moment where we almost are experiencing man's loss of control after violence. And then we have a scene with Percy where men are turned into pigs. And it kind of Turns into like, this is our true nature actually that I'm really willing, you know. But in a lot of ways you talk about this is also being in parallel with, let's say, wars and people coming back with PTSD, people, warriors coming home, but home is not the same.
Jennifer Barone:Home is not welcoming. I think you're getting on to this point, like one of the first, like anti war cases and trying to warn us like into the future. Maybe that's one of the reasons why it's so important right now, this book and powerful right now, this book to be like, this is what, what the government doesn't advertise, which is the effects of war on our men, on our sons.
Phil Cousineau:Well, so the Iliad has been used in war colleges, war universities for centuries, from England to India, South South Africa. It's been read and used at West Point for since '18 the 1860s. So it is the archetypal template for books about the horror of war and the chasing of honor. Some words, of course, are necessary. Necessity herself is a goddess, a non king.
Phil Cousineau:All these forces that we're talking about, when they are starting to overwhelm you, they become personified in the God or Goddess, every one of them. So we have to be when you feel those huge urges coming up or you see a political speech in which you begin to feel manipulated. There's a God. What's the old phrase? A tremendous amount of emotion comes through the door.
Phil Cousineau:A God or Goddess has just entered. So it helps you to think about which one, which one. The Odyssey is a kind of release from that. It's offering in a number of places an option to this unthinking, instinctual id reflection about violence itself. So I love your examples here.
Phil Cousineau:Seriously, in most of the earlier male translations, I'm saying from Alexander Pope, Chapman, up to Fagles. I even think he uses the word witch, which has terrible connotations, of course. People like Betna Hughes from England, a great historian, and now Emily Wilson in her really majestic translation. They use sorceress, healer to describe there's something very, very different going on here. They're still dealing with the forces that you brought up.
Phil Cousineau:So thank you with that. Someone like Emily Wilson or Betony Hughes and some others are saying, this is a book not just about savagery, but about healing. Odysseus is an open wound. You know, when Odysseus becomes Ulysses in Italian culture, we're in an Italian bookstore here. I didn't even I've been looking for the reason why for years, and I just I found again after I turned in the manuscript when Virgil is writing the Aeneid and he's borrowing from the Odyssey, he keeps hearing with his Italian ear.
Phil Cousineau:Maybe you can explain this to me later. He's hearing Odysseus becomes Ulysses. Ulysses becomes Ulysses. In Latin, Ulysses means healed scar. The Odyssey, this long journey that takes ten years to come home from the battlefield, it is not a buzz, a beeline straight back to Ithaca.
Phil Cousineau:It is zigzagging like a terrible New Yorker cartoon. He's all over the Mediterranean and the Aegean. Because that's what happens to your soul when you are trying to heal from trauma. Trauma is a Greek word for wound. And then a big issue in therapy, psychotherapy.
Phil Cousineau:I get all kinds of therapists who actually come on my tours in the footsteps of Homer, in the footsteps of Odysseus and Penelope, because they're dealing with so many patients who are open wounded, still stuck in some old and old wound and abuse somewhere. And I feel terrible about that. You can't do any spiritual one up one upmanship with this. What did Herb Kane call it? You can't be Berkley than thou.
Phil Cousineau:He actually said that. So with with hearts, what we're emphasizing, we're celebrating a book of healing. For me, this is a map of the soul. He is not a lost sailor. Odysseus is a lost soul, and he's trying to retrieve his soul.
Phil Cousineau:He cannot get back to Ithaca. And if you want to use some of the original language in the original imagery, he cannot get. I mean, this with all due respect and a sense of beauty behind it. Penelope will not allow him back into her bed, their bed, the famous olive trunk bed on Ithaca, unless he's healed. And if you don't believe the power of this metaphor, talk to women whose husbands are warriors who have never talked about what happened at war.
Phil Cousineau:This we have to emphasize is this is a story that was already 500 years old when the poet known as Homer is wandering around the Mediterranean, hired as a professional storyteller with a butt. Some say he actually played the liar. Others say he walked. He traveled with a young man who played the liar or sometimes a flute. And my my sense of this, my visualization of this is he tried different versions of the story for years, his entire youth writing the Iliad and then later into adulthood, tries to if this character works.
Phil Cousineau:If that character, if people don't laugh there or if they don't gasp, he's out the next time he goes to Mycenae. And now he's going to tell the story in Sparta. And now he's going to tell the story on Ithaca itself. This what we have now and what I'm trying to comment on in my book, The Wisdom of the Odyssey, is the version that worked. It's the version that sang to people's hearts and souls and reflected them.
Phil Cousineau:What would have been on their minds? You know, the life expectancy in this period around the time of Homer would have been 30 to 35. And most of your adult life was spent either at war or suffering some kind of plague or disease. Death was rampant all around you. And the stories that come here, they are a little tough.
Phil Cousineau:They're a little bittersweet. Or as the Greeks actually said, Sapphos is sweet, bitter. It's interesting that we've got that backwards, but these are the stories that would have reflected what was going on in their own lives and did more than that. So it's not just journalism and it's not just history. Homer through this spectacular combination of some history, some myth and fairy tale.
Phil Cousineau:All the stories in the center of the book, the sirens, which you are so familiar with by her book, The Poetry About the Sirens, by the way, the Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, The Floating Island of the Winds. These are all fairy tales that were probably plastered on top of the myth itself. Why? Because it's the function of fairy tales. It's been the function of fairy tales throughout history to show magical transformation.
Phil Cousineau:He is healed, not in real time. Odysseus is healed when he encounters these phenomenal powers in these worlds that are beyond journalism, beyond history. A joke. Campbell, we filmed him once doing a one hour version of the of the Odyssey, which was like that guy doing the FedEx commercial years ago, talking million miles an hour. But in there, he said, And now Odysseus goes off into a dreamland.
Phil Cousineau:The poet known as Homer is saying something about that. We can be, not always, we can be healed in our dreams. We can be healed if we go into a world that's luminous and magical.
Jennifer Barone:Intense debate about the role of women in The Odyssey. I want to say a lot of people go immediately to, if you're a woman and you're reading The Odyssey, we have to identify with Penelope. But personally, I identify you know, there's you bring up quite a bit in your book and I so appreciate this account and the female perspective is. And I think and you can tell me what you think about this. I don't necessarily think that just because you're a woman, have to identify with a female.
Phil Cousineau:Thank you. Thank you for that.
Jennifer Barone:But in your book, suggest that even men, like you say, need access to a more feminine way of knowing. And
Phil Cousineau:Well, thank you. I'm married to a feminist. What do expect? What
Jennifer Barone:do you see as the role of female wizard still and how that is represented, like deeper than just surface level story.
Phil Cousineau:Beautifully framed. Thank you. And this is also a chance then for us to make the segue then into the movie because it becomes so important the way that this is actually portrayed cinematically, because this will be the version young kids grow up with. It'll be the one you maybe reappraise what you read when you were a kid because it's so over the top. It's spectacle.
Phil Cousineau:And remember, I'm the word guy. I love writing books on the whole on the origin of words. Spectacle means appearance. It's the superficial front. And if you are trying to go, this movie costs $500,000,000 It's the marketing with the film cost itself, which means in Hollywood mathematics, if you will, he has to get $1,500,000,000 back just to break even.
Phil Cousineau:And you don't do that by just making a movie for the arthouse. Okay, a few of us are going to go to the Castro and see this, and isn't that sweet, right? No, you've got to go as wide as possible so people all around the world can identify with. That's the mystery. Can people identify with your stories, not just admire, but identify with them?
Phil Cousineau:So what's surprising to me is because I read this every year, like Borges, a great Argentinian writer, read Don Quixote every year with his life. I've read The Odyssey in different versions all my life. It's getting a template for me. I read it as a kid. It still talks to me now.
Phil Cousineau:But what's different as I grow older is you realize Odysseus is not motivated. He's not driven by sheer testosterone. He is not one more Marvel comic book hero. Instead, Odysseus gets home because of five women, five female powers. If you start to think about it, it's kind of staggering because Homer arguably then is not just the world's first sports writer, the first nature writer, the first recipe.
Phil Cousineau:He tells us where where is it? Shish kebab comes from. Achilles sticking his sword in the side of a piece of cattle. There's your first shish kebab, the first yogurt, the first cheese. It's fun when you start to go down this road.
Phil Cousineau:He's also the world's first feminist because he is saying that if a man sticks to only the male point of view, pure instinct, pure id, he will face catastrophe. He will be lost. This comes up again and again and again, which is why the Polytropos epithet is so beautiful. He's able to turn his mind around. So he's directed home again and again because of Athena.
Phil Cousineau:And Athena, I'm still trying to figure this one out, appears half the time in the book as herself. A beautiful god goddess of what? Wisdom. She's the goddess of war, but she's also the gods of wisdom. She is constantly reminding him, grow up.
Phil Cousineau:You're grieving too much. You're making another predictable male mistake. I'm paraphrasing, but this essentially is what she's saying. But the other half of the time when she's in the book, she appears as mentor, which is very mysterious to me. It's in and out, in and out.
Phil Cousineau:What I'm reading into this, and this is the everything else. Everything is something else besides. You have to look at these great epics and now great movies for their hidden meanings. What's invisible there? What's poetry there?
Phil Cousineau:And in this case, mentor, which means mindmaker. He is a character. He's been left behind by Odysseus to look after his son while he's gone because he's not sure he will ever come home again. You know Anthony Burgess and Anthony Burgess fans out there. He wrote a travel book in the about the mid nineteenth century Up until the mid, I would say the eighteen fifties, half half of the travelers, diplomats, traders, merchants, traveling philosophers looking to have a conversation a thousand miles away never reached home again.
Phil Cousineau:That's how dangerous travel has been since the mid nineteenth century. It was risky to leave home, so you needed something more than strength, something more than just strategy or tactics. You needed inner wisdom. Why did I leave home? What am I really looking for?
Phil Cousineau:So Athena is his patron, constantly appearing in a moment of crisis when he's lost faith in himself. Who are the others? I'll go through this quickly, and then we can open it up for questions. Calypso. Promised him immortal love, but Hermes is sent down to say, Let him go.
Phil Cousineau:Seven years is enough. Why seven? That seems arbitrary. No, seven is a mythical number for transformation. Seven days of the week, the seven chakras on and on and on.
Phil Cousineau:Seven signifies something that's about to turn around inside out. Jung called it Anatiotromia. What's been going in that direction now spins in the other direction. Circe shows him how to get home, sends him to the underworld, right? A Nausicaa, who isn't even in the movie, and it's that's something I miss.
Phil Cousineau:She's the princess of these magical people and Facia, which is probably modern Corfu, which this episode makes Homer the first science fiction writer. I bet you didn't see that coming because when he arrives on the island, the beautiful Nausicaa and Larry, this is the first example of people playing ball in all of written history. Odysseus wakes up under an olive tree and he sees this beautiful princess and her maidens throwing a ball around. That just makes me laugh every time I see it. Oh my God, I thought I invented baseball.
Phil Cousineau:No, no. So then he goes to the palace. He's greeted by two automaton steel dogs that have been invented by Hephaestus, the god of the forge, goes inside the palace. There are 50 automaton female servants helping everybody eat, bringing them their wine. So what does this signify?
Phil Cousineau:What it signifies is that he will be healed in a magical dreamland, and he has to pay attention to the women keep popping up in dreamland. Finally, when he gets home to Ithaca, it's not he is safe because Athena appears again and then brings him home to whom? To Penelope. And this is part of our segue then into the movie. There's a beautiful opening sequence with Anne Hathaway, who surprises me with this with the strength of her performance.
Phil Cousineau:She occupies occupies Penelope. And my wife, Joe, here tells me that she saw an interview that said Anne Hathaway discovered an interview with Maria Callas. Jo, what was it? An interview?
Jennifer Barone:Channeling Maria
Phil Cousineau:Callas, who played in one movie, Madea. She played Madeava. That's her only appearance in a movie. And if you ever see a film clip of this, you can see this on YouTube. It's staggering to realize the steel bar that's through her spine there.
Phil Cousineau:This is what Anne Hathaway is trying to access. It's very, very impressive. But there's no eroticism. There's no sensuality with Penelope. There's none with Calypso or Circe.
Phil Cousineau:And so I'm tremendously respect Nolan. I have to because I'm going to be an NPR on Monday following Christopher Nolan. And it's a film critic and NPR is going to ask me, So what do you we just had Chris on? What do you think about the movie? So I'm exploring here what metaphors work and what do want, what don't.
Phil Cousineau:So a movie without humor, honestly, humor, without nature. Well, nature's there. But without humor, without joy. There's a tremendous amount of joy in the Odyssey. It's not here.
Phil Cousineau:So Nolan has made a choice. You know, that's it's a it's a famous line in Hollywood where I've been working since 1981. Someone they won't say, hey, hey, love your movie, man. Wow, they'll say like your choices come up to an actor like your choices, dude. It's really it's kind of inside baseball talk.
Phil Cousineau:It's really wonderful. So you know every one of these. Crossroads with different characters scenes. Do I conflate this? Do I just jettison that?
Phil Cousineau:No one's making a choice to tell a brisk story that would otherwise take nine hours. You've to do it in three. The question I ask you when you go to see the movie, does it move you? Not are you impressed? We know it's impressive because it's a spectacle.
Phil Cousineau:My question always with art, with poetry, with music, with my beloved baseballs, does it move me? That's a very different question.
Jennifer Barone:I have one more question. Have to ask it.
Phil Cousineau:Sure. Sure.
Jennifer Barone:Maybe not everybody might know we are in the time, but certain most of the Odyssey actually takes. So then it is Greece, Greece occupied. My hometown of Pompoli, we have the air names of sirens and all this stuff. However, going back to a point earlier about female characters, the sirens and what each one of is mythic ones. The sirens have a wisdom song.
Jennifer Barone:But when people do think about metaphors with them or the meaning, they tend to go toward the temptress, the person that's gonna eat man either. But they have a wisdom song. Like, what is it to be learned from the the sirens? And arguably, in the movie and most books, the siren scene is always very memorable, like one of the most memorable, like, mythic scenes. But what does it mean to learn from the sirens?
Phil Cousineau:Well, that's a very large question. But it's fun because for a lot of us who grew up with the You version of the comic book version or Kirk Douglas with the sirens in 1956 that I saw at the Wyoming Drive in in Detroit, Michigan. You remember the sirens because they're voluptuous, In the beautiful sense, it's also a Greek word, right? The question again is, what do they mean? And that's what I'm trying to explore again and again.
Phil Cousineau:What is the world called it? So in cribs, what does it mean? What does it mean that it takes seventeen years to go home? What does it mean that a hero is contemplating suicide? It's not just plot.
Phil Cousineau:What does it even mean that the Greeks want to go to Troy? Remember, Elwood Camus, one of my heroes in literature, says, We fight for plunder. We fight for greed and goods. The Greeks fought for beauty, which is a very romantic way of thinking about the romantic way of talking about the Trojan War. In this case, the sirens mean anything.
Phil Cousineau:Homer doesn't even describe them physically. This was a later tack on. It's almost as if the description of them roaring down from the mountains and seizing a few of the soldiers and ripping them apart to shreds. Right, right. They constantly change through history.
Phil Cousineau:But why? Why does Odysseus put beeswax in their ears? One of the things Homer is telling us again and again is that men specifically in this kind of mythology are very prey to seduction. The seduction of sex, the seduction of power, but also the seduction of knowledge. So again and again in antiquity, Odysseus, he's not described as warrior.
Phil Cousineau:He's described as curious. One of the lines is he traveled. His fame was far flung, which I love that phrase far flung fame. And he would go out of his way to see and meet different kinds of people and respected them and asked them their stories and their songs. So he was he wanted to know their songs.
Phil Cousineau:One of the interpretations by Robert Graves, if anybody of you know Robert Graves, the White Guys and so on, his theory is the song that they sang, which is a huge riddle in mythic literature, the history of literature. What was the song that threatened all these men? What was it? Was it just sex? Because there's so much beautiful, but dangerous, which sets you up.
Phil Cousineau:It's almost film noir at this point. The femme fatale, right? Or is it something else? The reading that Graves gives that I favor here in my book, the wisdom behind this is that the very thing that makes Odysseus unique that he's hungry for knowledge like no other hero in antiquity. He will go anywhere for it to learn one more new thing, to find one more new group of people.
Phil Cousineau:But that could also get you in trouble. You can become over intellectualized if you read too much. You have to sacrifice something for all that reading time, all those knowledges to learn everything about law or sports or the history of justice. What's the history of justice? So he he is he knows that every time his crew is has the opportunity to be seduced by women characters, they are vulnerable and they die.
Phil Cousineau:They perish because of seduction. So he wants to hear the siren songs and break the spell. That's part of the beauty to me. And I think it's one why the whole this Kurt Douglas tied to the mast in the 1956 movie with all those muscles rippling, Is he going to break the ropes just with his sheer strength? He wants to hear the siren song, but learn how to say no.
Phil Cousineau:So in a nutshell, just one little cycle here to think about. It's mastery, self control in a way that we don't see and we most male authors just forgot about for the next two thousand years. That has become part of the stereotype. But here, he knows he can't get home again unless he begins to break the enchantment. So in a nutshell, three act structure, just like Aristotle.
Phil Cousineau:I think Homer was one of the most enormous influences on Aristotle. What we think of is three act structure in our movies today and a lot of our stories. The whole thing begins with disenchantment. Everything is a spell. War is a spell.
Phil Cousineau:Love is a spell. Disenchantment in the center. He has to learn how to break seduction, the spells of monsters, the spell of being bound by very called fame and glory that and then when he gets home again, he has to learn how to re enchant his world. When I wrote my book on the art of pilgrimage, which some people know here, I had an occasion to spend a few minutes with Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Buddhist, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk. And I asked him, What do you think in your tradition?
Phil Cousineau:Paiden, sir, what's the deepest value of pilgrimage? And he said, It's not just going to that sacred place halfway around the world and thinking you're hip because you have walked an Inca Trail and nobody else you know has. And so there's a lot of one upmanship with pilgrimages. He says the real the real value is being able to come home and recognize your own backyard as sacred ground. And I think that's at the heart of the Odyssey.
Phil Cousineau:Odysseus comes back, and he has to learn how to love his wife and his son and his father again. That's where the book ends in beautiful poetry. He's in bed with Penelope and all major translations. After all these tests, they haven't seen each other for twenty years. And she says something that is one of most beautiful lines in literature.
Phil Cousineau:Come tell me of thine ordeal for my heart can take it. I know you've gone through hell, but you know what? I'm strong too. I can take it. And then the story gets better because Odysseus is kind of full of himself and he wants to talk about his twenty years and all the adventures he's had, right?
Phil Cousineau:But then it kind of catches the breath and Homer says, and then Odysseus turns to his wife Penelope and says, And what have you endured here while I've been gone? What was it like for you to raise our son alone? What was it like for you to be besieged by these 108 suitors? And you know what? That guy actually listens.
Phil Cousineau:Men forgot how to do this for the next couple of thousand years. So the book ends in love. This is what drew what pulled him home. But it's not a sentimental kind of love. This is equal.
Phil Cousineau:The husband and wife are equals in Homer's vision. Now, in the movie, it's problematic for some of us, because first off, it ends not like a great comic comic tragedy. I think that's the term for it. Some humor, but also some human tragedy. Instead, it ends like a King Arthur legend that's married onto an American Western.
Phil Cousineau:And there are reasons for this. I'm still mystified. We're going to go see the movie again tomorrow to try to deconstruct this, guess. But the issue is deeply haunting the modern Greeks. They hate the ending of this movie because he doesn't stay around.
Phil Cousineau:Instead, he and Penelope leave. There's no love. There's no eros there. Yeah. Spoiler alert.
Phil Cousineau:Spoiler alert. Spoiler
Jennifer Barone:Spoiler Spoiler Spoiler alert.
Phil Cousineau:I'm trying to be very fair as a filmmaker, not just a writer or a commentator on the mist. And it's this: when you are going wide like this and you are trying to resolve a story, this is what's important for third act structure. It's why most stories have price. Most stories, travel stories or huge movies have three act problems. How do you bring it home again?
Phil Cousineau:It's actually one of the phrases. How do you bring it home? How do you bring your characters home again? In this case, they leave. And there's no arrows there.
Phil Cousineau:Instead, what happens is predicted. But the story about them or Odysseus leaving within days or weeks of coming home again is a much later edition, two to three, maybe even four hundred years after the Homeric edition that we've been reading for so long. But there is a tradition that's just much, much later, like us redoing a movie from the 1930s or 40s. We do this all the time, right? It's not talking to us today, so let's redo it.
Phil Cousineau:Nolan, I think, is having this. Sometimes it happens to screenwriters and directors. You go from the archetype to the stereotype. The archetype means stay home. There was something deep in the human spirit that says I have made it back, and now it's my job to restore the castle, the home, the family and so on.
Phil Cousineau:But there's another urge which is which is deeply heroic. It's the Western American myth. You come home, but you're not going to stay. You're going to get on your horse and leave again. So I invite you just to do something playful.
Phil Cousineau:If you go back to see the movie or you see it for the second or third time. Ending of the IMAX Odyssey. Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is shot almost frame for frame along the lines of John Ford and John Wayne's The Searchers, which is which is regarded again and again and again as the greatest American Western, and it's based on Homer's Odyssey. Searchers, the story of this uncle who has found out that his daughter, played by Natalie Wood, if you forget her first movie appearance, he is outraged with a sense of hatred and vengeance for the other, the Comanches. And it's a story of vengeance, going to find her and, if necessary, killing all the Indians that captured his niece, brings her home.
Phil Cousineau:And then there's this great scene. It's very Homeric Here, you brought her home. My god, everybody's crying. You brought back our you brought Natalie home. Now she's going to have a great movie career.
Phil Cousineau:Thank you. And then there's this challenge. It's right at the heart of the American myth of individualism. And somehow it made its way into this movie. John Wayne stands there, arms akimbo, arms right there on his hips, and he looks at it and said, Don't want to stay.
Phil Cousineau:I gotta go. I gotta go. He turns around. If you remember, the last shot is through a doorway, very similar to the way that Nolan shoots the ending of The Odyssey. And John Wayne turns around, walks through the doorway.
Phil Cousineau:The music comes up. The sun starts in the background. He walks to his horse, jumps on the horse, and John Ford holds the shot for several minutes as our hero. Not just John Wayne. He's the American man, the American male who can't stay home.
Phil Cousineau:He says, I've got I've got something more important to do, honey. I'm going out here out here. It's American myth of individualism. And if you think I'm exaggerating with this, back five minutes before. And again, spoiler alert, if you haven't seen the movie, when the great Odysseus comes home, played by Matt Damon, a marvelous actor who I deeply admire, when he takes on the infamous 108 suitors in the poem, he does it with five other characters and Athena.
Phil Cousineau:The goddess is there and she deflects arrows. If someone if an arrow comes too close, she gets in the middle because she wants him. She's his patron. She helps him survive. In the movie, he fights it all alone.
Phil Cousineau:This is a very American version. It's I don't need nobody. I don't need nobody. So he's a whirling, dervish cowboy with King Arthur's Excalibur sword inside. It's kaleidoscopic.
Phil Cousineau:It's impressive. But what I'm challenging you to do and what I'm trying to do with my entire book, every time you come to one of these these images, they're called mythologems. It's a wonderful word from the myths. It means an image like an Excalibur. The Achilles' shield, it's so powerful you do not need interpretation.
Phil Cousineau:When Margaret Hamilton, dressed in black as the witch on the bicycle, is flying by Dorothy's window in The Wizard of Oz. As the houses worry its way to the magical land of Oz, you don't need a subtitle that says, this is a witch. That's practically the definition of an archetype. You know it on appearance. It's right there.
Phil Cousineau:In this case, what I what I'm asking you is deep readers, but also a group like us. We all read a lot of books and movies, right? And music. So if you are deeply stirred, ask why. And read my book or read it before before.
Phil Cousineau:If you are deeply stirred, ask why so you're not manipulated. And I think that's part of the wisdom here. Ask yourself why. And this is I like to think it deepens your pleasure.
Jennifer Barone:Absolutely. It was such a pleasure to see you with this guy. So I do recommend we do
Phil Cousineau:help. Bless you. Thank
Jennifer Barone:you so much.
Phil Cousineau:Thank you.