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Exploring ethical questions from Superhero movies and TV shows, sci-fi, and everything else geeks love!
*This transcript is produced using transcription software and reviewed for quality. Despite our best efforts, some passages may be incomplete or contain errors due to audio quality or software limitations.*
Matthew
And welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Friends, today we are diving deep into the past. We are talking about the Odyssey, both on film and on page. And not only are we diving into the past in terms of topic, but also in terms of guest. One of the first people who I got to have fun talking about ethical issues and crazy things we were watching was Mr. Adam Kemezis. Adam was a friend of mine in high school, someone I've not seen in probably 30 years, but is now a classics professor, a specialist in all things Greek and Roman, and someone I've been talking to about the Odyssey, the original and all that. So I wanted to bring him on and have this conversation, because there's been a lot of public conversation about this. We want to chat about what the ethical questions are involved in adapting something from such a different time, and what are the ethical questions raised by both our Mr. Homer, whoever that might have been, and our Mr. Christopher Nolan in the more modern day. So Adam, hello and welcome.
Adam
Hello, Matt. It's wonderful to see you again. Thank you for inviting me on. This is going to be fun. This is my pleasure.
Matthew
So first, just give us a quick version of your background, both in terms of what you've studied and also in relation to Homer's epic itself, or one of Homer's two epics, I should say.
Adam
Sure. I'm a professor at the University of Alberta. I mostly work as a Roman historian, on Roman history and the literature of the Roman Empire, but I have a background in classics broadly. I read all of that material and teach it at the undergraduate level. I actually teach the Iliad almost every year in class. I haven't taught the Odyssey in detail in quite a number of years, but I teach the mythology involved in it.
I've known Odysseus, in some form, since I was a little kid. Someone read this poem to me, or I read it myself, so long ago that I can't remember a time when I didn't know who Odysseus was. It's a poem I've reread many times over my life, in English and in parts in Greek, and every time you come back to it, you find something new in it, meanings you missed before. That's one of the things that sets certain works of literature apart, and the Odyssey is one of those.
Matthew
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I don't think I read the original until, I don't remember if this was one of the classes we took together, but in freshman English class I remember we read parts of the Iliad, and that inspired me to read the original, the Odyssey.
Adam
It must have been separate, because I remember reading the Odyssey with Miss Diatola. I don't know who you had.
Matthew
Okay, yeah, I think I just took Mr. Johnson. But anyway, I remember reading both of them, and I was someone who had read a lot of Greek myths as a child.
Adam
And you already knew all that stuff, huh? Yeah.
Matthew
But what I had also read was the very sanitized version you get in the children's versions of those things, and I think that's an interesting part of these discussions. And then, much more recently, I've been reintroduced to the story through the Percy Jackson books, which I've really loved.
Adam
Yeah, yeah, again giving a fairly sanitized version.
Matthew
That would be a whole other topic I should discuss at some point. And then, of course, we've seen the movie, and I've been working my way through the Emily Wilson translation as well. So let me just ask, what did you think of the movie?
Adam
It's a Christopher Nolan movie that uses the plot and characters of the Odyssey. I wasn't familiar with his other movies before, it's not hugely my kind of thing, but bits of it were a lot of fun. There were scenes I really liked, the way they did Circe and the pigs, that body-horror aspect of it. For whatever reason, that one jumped out at me. But it's a movie that I think all Christopher Nolan fans will love. People who come to it as a film adaptation of the Odyssey are going to have more mixed feelings, and that includes me.
Matthew
And that's going to be a big part of what we're discussing today, how faithful or unfaithful an adaptation it is, why that is, and whether you can really be faithful to something from such a different time.
I wanted to start by naming one of, I think, the sillier controversies out there. To be clear, you're not worried that a woman born out of an egg is supposed to not look like Lupita Nyong'o. Am I correct in that?
Adam
Of course. That's not an issue about Homer, that's not an issue about ancient Greece. That's an issue about the insecurities of some modern white people and their inability to deal with narratives in which they aren't completely central. It's a subject that's of professional interest to me, because right-wing appropriation of the ancient world in general is a growing and worrying thing. So the controversy around this is an outgrowth of something much bigger and really quite nasty. I've read and followed some of it, but in terms of my assessment of the film, it's completely not an issue.
Matthew
This idea of taking ancient Greece, and certainly its mythology, not as a historical document, but trying to impose our modern idea of whiteness on it. My understanding is Greece was a trading culture, there was contact with Ethiopian people and all these kinds of things at that point in time.
Adam
Yes, and Ethiopian people are mentioned in the Homeric poems. The Greeks were certainly capable of what we'd call racial prejudice, but it didn't focus much around skin color. That's an issue people are exploring, there's important current scholarship. The field of studying Greek perceptions of blackness and skin color has really only started to be studied in the last five years or so.
Some important work has come out, from a much more nuanced perspective. But the idea that Greece is some white space you can go back to, to get away from modern diversity, whatever, is clearly nonsense, historically speaking.
Matthew
Okay, so putting that aside, what are some of the things you felt didn't translate? Let me state the one I've heard the most, and I'm curious how you'd talk about it. This is coming partly from Emily Wilson, the translator, who had a lot to say about it, but I've heard it from others too. In Homer, at the time the Homeric poems were written, and we don't know if Homer was a real person, the attitude toward warfare, toward glory, and toward the right of warriors to pillage and take what they wanted, in terms of loot and women, is just incredibly incongruous with our understanding of these things today, and that Nolan's take on those questions is very much a modern one. Is that a fair statement?
Adam
I've heard that argument. I don't entirely, I have issues with the way they've done the character of Odysseus. I wouldn't go as far as a blanket statement and say nobody in Greece had the kind of issues that Nolan's version of Odysseus has. It's clear people did have issues from having fought in wars in antiquity.
They had issues over trauma. Experiencing huge amounts of horrific violence does things to people, and that's true of ancient Greece as much as it is now. There are works of ancient Greek literature, I'm thinking of Euripides's Heracles, maybe Sophocles's Ajax, both tragedies from a later period, that really do seem to portray characters with something akin to what's now often called PTSD.
Matthew
They might not have had the term back then, but the brain chemistry of how human brains react to trauma and violence isn't fundamentally different.
Adam
That's something, yeah, and it's going to be processed through a different cultural lens. The things people would experience guilt over, or find hard to process, could differ because their culture has different ideas about war, but there's no culture that can war-proof you. That's often, among other things, a fantasy some people on the right have.
Having said all that, one of my former professors from grad school posted about this on Facebook, a whole long argument with lots of comments. I don't see that in Odysseus's character in Homer. There are characters in antiquity who look a lot more like Christopher Nolan's version of Odysseus than Homer's version does, if that makes sense. That's an issue people have discussed, and it's related to, I should say, among my professional colleagues in classics, there's a huge range of opinion about this. Some people are totally into it, some people think it's totally awful. But it's way more skewed toward the positive than, say, 300, or probably Troy. It scores better than those.
But the issue a lot of people have brought up, and that I agree with, is that Nolan, for understandable reasons, has made Odysseus a much simpler, frankly one-dimensional character than he is in Homer. In Homer, Odysseus has moments of depression, moments of joy, he gets hungry, he gets horny, he gets cocky and yells at the Cyclops and tells him his name, he gets weepy and emotional with Penelope and with his father at the end. When you add it all up, it doesn't add up to a terribly nice person, but it adds up to a hugely fully developed character. Nolan's version is really good at brooding, at reflecting on the violence he's done, and conveying a particular message that Nolan wants to convey, but he doesn't do a lot else.
Matthew
Yeah, there's the reflection on the cost of war, and I don't want to get into how that felt different from the Homeric idea, but you're right, I think also the trickery. Part of why I really latched onto Odysseus, and I think a lot of kids who got into Greek myths did too, I'm sure there are incredibly athletic jock kids who also love Greek myths, but a lot of us who read those were pretty nerdy. He was often portrayed, especially in the watered-down kids' versions, as someone who, yes, might have had the big muscles of an Achilles or someone like that, but he had intellect. He outsmarted his opponents, not just out-benched them.
Adam
No, that's his absolute defining characteristic.
Matthew
So when he never says to the Cyclops that he is nobody, to have that moment taken away, and to have a lot of his trickery, I want to talk about how his trickery is portrayed almost as negative when it happens, but to have it taken away entirely felt, for me and for a lot of people, like, wait, that's our favorite part of the character. Where did that go?
Adam
Yeah, no, absolutely, I totally agree with you. The things that sometimes make you root for him, the things that make Athena really like him, his defining characteristic, even in the Iliad, certainly in all of subsequent Greek literature, is that he's the smartest guy in the world. He always wants to find out more, and that's a major motivation for everything he does throughout the poem.
In the Odyssey, in Homer, that's what creates the tension in his character, between wanting to go home and wanting to explore and experience more. That's missing in Nolan.
Matthew
And that's also what makes him so beloved by Athena, right? Because she's the goddess of wisdom and a goddess of warfare, so someone who uses wisdom, not just brute strength, when it comes to warfare, is particularly appealing to her.
Adam
No, and there's a magnificent scene that's not in the movie. When Odysseus gets back to Ithaca, he meets Athena, who's in disguise, and they start talking. Odysseus starts spinning her this whole line, that he's from Crete, he's a merchant, he tells her a whole phony life story, and at some point she just starts laughing and says, this is why I love you, Odysseus, you make up all this crazy stuff, and you're one of the very few human beings who can be on my mental level.
Matthew
Well, and that gets to what I think is one of the most interesting changes Nolan makes. It feels like a central thesis of the movie that the Trojan horse was a violation of the rules of war, and that among other things, Athena herself is angry at him for it. I think this isn't so much a cause as a personification of it. At one point he sees that Athena's temple in Troy is desecrated and pillaged, and he sees, in one of the priestesses of that temple, the face of Athena herself. You could say, was that actually Athena, because of the rule of treating a stranger well since they might be the god in disguise, or is he now seeing the goddess in the persona of that priestess who was killed. Either way, it seems like the idea is that this was dishonorable warfare, and therefore not okay, and a lot of what Odysseus is going through is because of that and his need to make amends for it. That's completely an invention of Nolan's, right? My understanding is that it feels very against the spirit of what Homer was writing.
Adam
Certainly, in Homer, this is one of the things that changes about Odysseus's character in Greek literature over antiquity. Homer basically thinks of the horse as a really smart idea Odysseus invented. There doesn't seem to be any particular moral issue with it.
There is a relationship between Athena and Odysseus in the Odyssey, something happens between them that probably does have to do with the violation of her temple in Troy, but it doesn't particularly have to do with the horse, and I don't think it's particularly even directed at Odysseus personally. She doesn't appear to Odysseus in person throughout his voyages, only when he gets back to Ithaca.
Matthew
But doesn't she intervene on his behalf with Poseidon?
Adam
Yeah, in the scenes with the gods, she's still basically rooting for him. But this is one of those details, one of the specialist aspects that people chase down, that I'm not as familiar with. Basically, Nolan didn't pull the idea of an estrangement with Athena entirely out of thin air, but the idea that the Trojan horse is a violation, and in Nolan's version he tries really hard to link it to a violation of hospitality, the law of Zeus that they keep talking about, which doesn't make any sense.
The Greeks aren't guests in Troy, they're attacking Troy. But be that as it may, what happens later is that in later literature, especially in Greek tragedy and to some extent in Virgil, Odysseus's deceit, what Homer treats as cunning trickster stuff you root for, becomes an amoral, deceptive character when you get to Sophocles or Virgil a few centuries later. That's a very standard way characters in Greek myth work. It's an example I use in my course every year, of how different works of literature can do different things with the same mythological character while always preserving certain aspects. So Odysseus always has to be smart. There's no version of the Odysseus myth in which Odysseus is stupid, unless it's a parody or something. He has to be smart, but he can be good-smart or bad-smart. That's something you can play with as an author.
Matthew
Well, that makes a lot of sense, because again, you're the expert here, correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that Rome had more of a tradition of martial honor, the fair fight type of thing. So deception in warfare being more looked down upon in that culture makes some sense to me.
Adam
Well, certainly that's what the Romans thought of themselves.
Matthew
Okay, that's what I was talking about.
Adam
And in the Aeneid, the Trojan horse is thought of as a stereotypical Greek act of deception. That's where the line "I fear Greeks bearing gifts," or "beware Greeks bearing gifts," actually comes from. It's from that part of the Aeneid, and refers specifically to the Trojan horse.
Matthew
And it's important that Aeneas is himself a descendant of Troy, in that regard. Which obviously colors that as a very good thing. And I think that statement is also really interesting for the whole project of what we talk about here, because one of the things I love to talk about is that when we're doing modern versions of superhero characters, you look at someone like Batman. Batman has been written and rewritten over literally close to a hundred years by now, maybe a little less. Superman, like ninety or so.
In that time, different people have written them in very different ways. Even just on TV, we have this image of Batman as often being very against the cops, chasing down corrupt cops. But the Adam West Batman that was on TV when you and I were kids, in reruns, to be clear, we're not that old, that one talked to the commissioner all the time and wasn't very critical of the cops. The point being that even in just the eighty years of those characters, you can go back to the original texts and find wildly different versions of the story. So it feels to me like it makes sense that with something like Odysseus, it's the exact same thing. Instead of eight or nine decades, we're talking about eight or nine centuries, if not many more.
Adam
Yeah, so a whole universe builds up in lots of different ways. It's an example I use for my students when I'm talking about myth. I sort of use the example of Star Wars, but superheroes work the same way, you have a certain number of very important canonical works in different media, and things building on that, and you have fan fiction, and artistic depictions in different media, and whatever.
Matthew
And that's actually a good segue to the next thing I want to ask about. I don't know if you remember this at all, we didn't have you in these conversations, but my mother used to love to talk about the Star Trek of the sixties as being one of the best illustrations of the hopefulness of that era, and how later versions of Star Trek were told in times that don't have that sense that everything is possible, that have somewhat different mindsets. Part of my understanding of what happens between Homer and Virgil and everyone else, all the way up to Nolan, is, we talked about whether PTSD existed and the like, but in Nolan there's this whole idea of the warriors from the sea coming to pillage, and how terrible that is, that it's a defense of civilization, and Odysseus realizing it's his own men who are causing it, that Troy had apparently led to it, and things like that. My understanding, and part of this comes from Wilson, so maybe we'll have to talk about her translation, is that the behavior of proud, heroic Greek warriors traveling from place to place and pillaging towns for the supplies they needed, that's how you got glory and honor, and it wasn't looked down on as some massive attack on civilization. Is that fair to say?
Adam
Yes, it is. There's a tension in these works between the mentality you've more or less described, which is clearly what Odysseus does. The first thing he does after leaving Troy is to find, and this is briefly shown in the movie, this other people, sometimes called the Cicones, and plunder them, take everything that isn't nailed down, kill people, enslave them, the whole nine yards.
He doesn't seem to have an issue with that. But there are characters, notably Achilles in the Iliad, who often brings up the idea that the Trojans haven't really done anything to him, so why should he be attacking them. In the ethic of the Homeric world, revenge is a very powerful justification for violence. Nobody questions that Agamemnon, and Menelaus particularly, has a motivation given by the Trojans, and that he's entitled to take revenge on them however he can. The idea that the whole of Greece shows up, and a lot of people who have nothing particular to do with this, is never outright condemned in Homer, but it is more complicated. In Odysseus's case, he doesn't have a personal reason to be mad at the Trojans.
Homer doesn't mention this, I don't think, but in other versions of the myth, Odysseus didn't want to go to Troy. He had to be tricked into going, he pretended to be mad. So there's, again, Homer is aware, and people in antiquity are aware, that starting a war and taking other people's stuff for no particular reason is ethically questionable, to say the least, although some people still do it. It's funny, Thucydides has this one observation where he says that back in the old days, people didn't think piracy was such a problem, and you can tell that from Homer, among other things, and he quotes various bits of Homer. So that's kind of how it is. But Odysseus is more, I'd say, on the pirate end of that spectrum.
Matthew
And I think that's also an important point, because it illustrates the length of time we're discussing. When people try to make the simple point of, oh, folks in ancient Greece believed such-and-such, well, even at that time, works like this were debated and discussed. The time period you're discussing is like a thousand years, from the ancient, ancient times of Homer to what is to us still antiquity, but is much more, to someone like Sophocles, would have seen themselves as much more modern.
Adam
Well, from Homer to Sophocles is probably close to three hundred years, and people keep asking these questions clear down into the Christian Middle Ages.
Matthew
And until today. I guess my point is, and this isn't meant as a defense of Nolan, but just as a further discussion of it, it feels like, to really try to present Odysseus the way Homer presents him, in our world today, which has such different ideas of what's acceptable in warfare and what's acceptable for warrior people to do, it'd be hard to do that without him coming across as the villain of the story.
Adam
Well, or certainly without him coming across as kind of a dick. There are a lot of other people in the story who are worse. Part of this, clearly, is that there are only certain characters you can ask Matt Damon to play. The way he does Odysseus, you keep hearing the words relatable, redeemable, something like that.
One thing that kind of unsettles me about the way this goes: on the one hand, Nolan wants to make Odysseus relatable, redeemable, whatever it is. So, okay, Odysseus still does all this violence, he's still an enslaver, a colonizer, whatever, but he feels really bad about it.
Okay, so that makes him a redeemable character, whatever. But they take the sex out entirely. Odysseus doesn't have sex with Circe, doesn't have sex with Calypso, doesn't commit adultery as we'd define it. Does that mean adultery makes you non-redeemable, non-relatable, but committing mass murder is redeemable and relatable?
Matthew
I think to some extent it is, particularly here, and I think this is a place where our culture has changed significantly, and not necessarily in a bad way, because the fundamental drama of the story, at the end, is his battle to win back Penelope. In our culture, someone who has violated their marital vows and is then portrayed as unrepentant about that, but still trying to win back the love of the person he's married to, becomes very complicated. Whereas at the time this was written, and probably for most of the time it's been interpreted, what happens on Circe's island stays on Circe's island, what happens on Calypso's island stays on Calypso's island.
There's never any incongruence between the idea that he slept with all these other people while off at war, but now that he's back, he wants to win back Penelope, his wife, and his home. I don't want to paint too disparaging a picture of Homeric ideas, but I think I'm on solid ground saying that the relative importance of female agency, and of women as characters rather than as possessions to be fought over and won, is at least significantly better now than it was at that point.
Adam
I guess I'd be more willing to accept that argument if the movie's women characters were better developed as characters. That's another criticism.
Matthew
I should say, as a corollary, I'm talking about modern audiences. I do think Nolan could have far better developed those characters, in any case, totally agree with you. I'm just saying, I think he realized, and I think you're right, that if he showed Odysseus having sex with either Calypso or Circe, let alone both, audiences would have had a harder time buying him as being truly besotted with Penelope and wanting to win her back, in the way the movie needs him to be.
Adam
No, I think that's right, I'd agree. I imagine Nolan simply couldn't think of how he'd write that scene with Penelope. The only way it could have worked for a modern, current, blockbuster film audience would presumably have been to have Penelope, in some way, forgive him.
And Nolan would have had to write that convincingly, and I wouldn't want that job. It's still, I don't know, it still feels like an odd set of priorities. What can I say?
Matthew
Well, I'm just going to ask it this way, and I don't know how much of an expert on ancient Greek matrimonial practices you are, I'm guessing it's not high on your list.
My understanding is that to the listeners of Homer, to the readers of Homer, there wouldn't be a presumption that Penelope was expecting him to remain sexually monogamous while he was off on this twenty-year adventure. Am I wrong about that?
Adam
Certainly, well, probably as a practical expectation, you're correct. This is a world in which it was known that men had more sexual opportunities, and would take advantage of them. That doesn't mean emotionally that Penelope would have accepted it or been fine with it. Odysseus never mentions it to her. I forget, at the end of the Odyssey we're told Odysseus gives her a brief recap of his adventures, and I'm not sure if he mentions Circe or Calypso at all.
But he's perfectly happy to tell those stories to the Phaeacians, the people in the Odyssey to whom he tells his story, just not to Calypso. It's still an emotionally fraught issue, but it's one where the culture gives women a lot less ethical support, let's put it that way.
Matthew
Yeah, and in some ways, I guess if part of Nolan's goal is to tell this story through our modern ethical lens, it's disappointing that he avoids that issue entirely, because I think that would have been much more interesting. Though I agree it also could have gone very badly.
It would have taken a lot better writing of all the characters involved. Let's switch to a part of the discourse a lot of people are focused on, which is that Nolan has said he based his movie on the translation done recently by the classicist Emily Wilson. I've read some of it, not all of it, but my understanding is that some of the more modern language comes from there.
Adam
Yes, like calling Odysseus's father "dad," for example. I think that does in fact happen somewhere in Wilson's translation.
Matthew
I'm not sure, but that's the spirit of it. And she has since come out and been very critical of the movie. I'm curious about your understanding of her perspective. First, what's your sense of how her translation was regarded in the classics world?
Adam
I'm not a hundred percent sure of the dad thing, but I think, yeah. It has been a hit, with classicists as well as everybody else. It's a very modernizing translation, people speak in language that's much more recognizable than most other translations you'd get. I think that's found its way into the dialogue of the movie. What Wilson doesn't do, and what she's calling out Nolan for doing, is simplifying the story along with the language.
She wrote a very long, negative review in the London Review of Books, and a lot of it was basically, you've left out the best bits. I can't disagree with her.
I don't know how you'd get all the best bits into a three-hour Hollywood movie. I think you could probably do better, I can imagine somebody doing a better job than Nolan has, but to do it completely right would be impossible. It takes about fifteen hours to read the whole Odyssey.
Matthew
When this first came out, I remember thinking, how is this going to be a movie? This should be a ten-episode show, with an episode on the Cyclops and an episode on dealing with Scylla and Charybdis.
If you had the money, exactly. So that brings us to the main question, the final question, of how this all wraps up, which is for you as a classicist, as someone whose work and study has been on these works of literature, what do you think is the responsibility of modern people creating art based on that? I'll start with, have you read the Percy Jackson books?
Adam
Not actually, I admit. My students frequently, I've now had ten years' worth of students whose first introduction to Greek myth was Percy Jackson, so I have a vague idea of what it was like.
Matthew
What's your main takeaway from them, in terms of how you feel about them?
Adam
I'm glad somebody's doing it, and I think this is true of most classicists. We may get finicky about details, the things Wilson has brought up, and everything, and by the way, I don't personally know Emily Wilson, I don't know her views on any of this, but mostly, we like it when somebody out there draws the public's attention to what it is we do and teach. And then, if we don't like the way the other person has done it, the movie or the novels or whatever, then we're like, okay, but it'll give us a chance to do it right, because we're going to rely on our students to say, okay, I've read Percy Jackson, I know there's more out there, I want to explore it.
Here's this professor who will teach it to me, and we're very happy about that. The exception is when there are portrayals of the ancient world used for agendas that are in some way problematic, antisocial, racist, homophobic, whatever it may be. There are gray areas. I wish 300 had never been made. I don't doubt it probably got a few people into my classes because they'd seen that, and I don't mean anything against those particular students, but in general, the greater cultural impact of it has clearly been negative, and that's something you can pretty well document.
Matthew
This is a very minor part compared to the inaccuracy leading to problems, but I was friends with someone, met through a group of guys talking about dating and things like that, who was himself of Greek ancestry, and he complained that the movie gave an impression about the hairiness of most Greek men's chests that was deeply inaccurate, as he put it. A small quibble compared to what you're talking about.
Adam
But yeah, part of the larger, pernicious kind of masculinity that gets promoted. The question then for classicists is what other movies fall in that category. I wouldn't put Nolan there. Maybe Emily Wilson would, I'm not sure, I don't want to speak for her.
Her reviews speak for themselves. For most of us, things have to get pretty bad before we're willing to say, this publicity is bad publicity.
Matthew
So you'd put this closer to Percy Jackson than to 300.
Adam
I'm glad it's been made, I'm glad there's the interest it's generated. I think it will, on balance, get a lot, I know a number of people, including Liz, my partner, who have gone out and read the Odyssey because the film is out there and part of public discourse, and I'm here doing this with you, and in the greater scheme of things, this is good.
Matthew
Like I said, I think I first got into Greek myths because I saw a movie called Clash of the Titans.
Adam
Which I still show in one of my classes, by the way.
Matthew
Oh, also, that movie, as I understand it, is wildly inaccurate.
Adam
Well, of course it is. The Kraken is something from Norse mythology, the Titans being a specifically named group in Greek mythology who are not who it's talking about in the movie. And the Greeks didn't have little metal flying owls that made noises like R2-D2.
Matthew
How do you use it in your class?
Adam
Oh, when I'm teaching Jason, or excuse me, Perseus, it's basically telling the Perseus mythology, so I just show it to the students. It's the end of the semester, everybody's tired. My main purpose in doing this is to let students know what the world was like before CGI.
Matthew
Because, you know, what do they know? Good reminder. And everybody laughs their ass off. It's immense fun.
I'm glad, I'm glad. Adam, it's been a great conversation. Any last thing you want to say about the movie, or the work, or things like that?
Adam
I really hope this will get people to read more, and also to go on and read the Iliad. And one thing I'll plug, if anybody wants a chaser for the Odyssey, did you ever see the 1990s Armand Assante version of the Odyssey?
Matthew
I don't think I did, no.
Adam
It's free on YouTube, you can get it. It's hilarious, it takes itself far less seriously than Nolan's. But at the same time, I'll say the women in it have much better-written parts.
Better-written roles, and there's a lot more fun. Bernadette Peters is seriously, she's hilarious. It's about three hours long, it's a TV miniseries. I'm going to plug that as an alternative.
Matthew
Well, I will definitely put a link to that in the show notes. And just to round that out, if people are thinking, well, I really want to hear more about what this Professor Kemezis has to say about things, are there publications of yours that people can find?
Adam
I suppose people could probably find me on the internet, but if I can, there are a couple of books, not by me, but about the Odyssey, that I'd recommend for people looking for further reading. We were talking earlier about issues of race and appropriation of classics, and so forth.
There's an important new book on this called The White Pedestal, by Curtis Dozier, D-O-Z-I-E-R. I can send you a link to it. When I was talking about issues of right-wing appropriation of classics and so forth, it's a full survey of that.
There's that. And the second book, again for people, I mentioned there was a lot of new work on blackness and the perception of skin color in ancient Greece, is by Sarah Derbew. It's a pretty serious academic book, as is Dozier's, I'm not saying it isn't, but it's basically, for years and years we all just said people in antiquity didn't care about skin color, and this is an attempt to nuance that idea.
To say, well, yes, they did, not in the same way people do in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it was not nothing. So, yes, Sarah Derbew's Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity.
Matthew
Awesome, I'll look at those, and we'll keep talking about it. Well, Adam, thank you so much, really, hopefully.
Adam
Oh, it's been good. It's been great. Yeah.
Matthew
Yeah. And to our listeners, as always, let us know what you think. We'd love to have you write in. You can write to me at matthew@theethicalpanda.com, or find all the contact information in the show notes. We'd love to hear you talk about this on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or any other places you want to continue the conversation.
If you have a mechanical owl that can fly to us with your message, better than a carrier pigeon, no animals are being abused, do that too. Please check out all the other conversations happening on this podcast, and my fellow podcast, Star Wars Generations. I'm also wrapping up my time on the Marvel Movie Minute, where we've been discussing Captain America: The Winter Soldier. And yeah, thanks again for being a part of this. Thank you to Adam, on behalf of all of us, we have spoken.