Tag: The Odyssey

Confluences: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

“This is the west. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

John Wayne as Tom Doniphon and Jimmy Stewart as Ransom Stoddard in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

I finally saw John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I saw it in a theater, with a fairly full house. I saw it two days after watching Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, and I was surprised by the similarities in the two movies. Either Ford was making a modern myth, or Nolan was making a mythological Western. I think I’m leaning toward the latter.

Both films center on the personal conflicts of their protagonists: Tom Doniphon and Odysseus. The heroes burn down their homes (literally and figuratively). After what they have done, they can’t go back home. What did they do?

Tom Doniphon lives Shinbone, and life in this frontier outpost is definitely not romantic. Cattle barons hire men to terrorize the townspeople. Tom describes one of these hired guns, Liberty Valance, as “the toughest man south of the Picketwire—next to me.” Except, tough as Tom might be, he does not act to stop Liberty Valance. Only when Ransom Stoddard appears and insists on law (an idea he brings in a satchel full of law books from the somewhere back east), does Tom take action. He kills Valance and lets Ransom take credit, which marks the end of a West governed by rough justice of gunfights, and the beginning of a time of law.

This doesn’t mean that the characters will not pine for that time. The movie begins with Ransom and his wife, Hallie, returning to Shinbone to attend Doniphon’s funeral. Has passed without notice; his body is in a plain pine box and he is remembered by only a handful of the town’s populace. Ransom’s return is news because he has gone onto serve as the unnamed state’s governor and senator, as well as the United States ambassador to Great Britain. When Hallie praises her husband, “It was a wilderness. Now it’s a garden. Aren’t you proud?” She means it. This is an achievement. But she also shows a heavy nostalgia—for Tom and the time that was. I suspect that we feel the same way.

Doniphon’s sacrifice—killing Liberty and giving Ransom the credit—erases him from the movie. He leaves Shinbone, the incipient state, and Hallie (the woman he loves) to Ransom because he knows that Ransom can provide something worth reading and writing about. Except, in the end, what we want to read and write about is heroes like him. His presence looms over all the characters who remember him.Their lives have been diminished by his erasure, even if their lives are better. Tom Doniphon understood the trade.

Matt Damon as Odysseus in The Odyssey

In Nolan’s The Odyssey, a law already exists. Zeus’s law—xenia, the rule of hospitality—declares that “suppliants are sacred” (as Nausicaa reminds her father in the poem). This is an extension of the Homer provides in the poem. “Strangers” and “suppliants” are sacred; Penelope and Telemachus endure the suitors because they are bound by a dictum that all guests be fed. In the poem there are limits. Athena advises Telemachus that if Odysseus returned, “a blood wedding, a quick death would take the lot!” Guests have obligations as well.

Other than Zeus’s law, the gods are mostly absent from the film. Athena appears, but not as the wily trickster-warrior of the poem. Nolan’s film is particularly human-focused, in spite of the presence of the Cyclops, Circe, Charybdis, the sirens, and the armor-clad giant Laestrygonians. These are obstacles mortals must overcome by fight, flight, or sacrifice. Gods do not intercede. Hermes does not provide Odysseus with an herb that protects him from Circe’s potions. Leucothea does not tie her magic scarf around Odysseus’s waist. Athena does not send the salvo of the suitors spears wide of the mark during the slaughter in the hall.

Odysseus and his men are human. They may follow Zeus’s law and they may be aware that Poseidon will punish them for blinding Polyphemus, but they live and suffer in human terms—drowning as they wait inside the horse and needing to forage for food on the way home. On Ithaca rumors of “people from the sea”—not rumors of displeased gods—threaten the peace. And when Tiresias counsels that only the “gods say only you make it home,” Odysseus answers, “Then I defy the gods.”

By limiting the role of the gods, Nolan focuses on human experience. Odysseus bears the costs of war. He questions Agamemnon’s motivation for going to war on Troy, suggesting that is as much for trade as to reclaim the wife (Helen) and honor of Menelaus (Agamemnon’s brother). Calypso drugs Odysseus, first to help heal him, then as a way of keeping him, but also as a kindness. Odysseus’s memories of the sacking of Troy are more of a wound than the physical ones he suffered on the sea.

Anne Hathaway as Penelope and Tom Holland as Telemachus in The Odyssey

He is much like Tom Doniphon, but unlike Doniphon, he is not preparing the world for a garden. In Nolan’s film Odysseus leaves Ithaca because he feels that he has broken Zeus’s law and not because Telemachus is a better, wiser king. In the poem Odysseus is also charged with an exile/exodus, but this is not a journey toward the west, but inland, to a people who mistake his well-planed oar for a fan to aid in the harvest. Odysseus must make this pilgrimage not to make amends for tricking the Trojans in a way that transgressed Zeus’s law, but because he has failed, repeatedly, to bring the men under his charge back home to Ithaca.

Maybe Telemachus will feel an irrevocable nostalgia for the days when his father could kill the suitors, the same way Hallie, Ransom, and a few others feel nostalgia for Doniphon and the erstwhile wilderness. However, Doniphon and Nolan’s Odysseus both recognize what they have done, and willingly pay the price that their actions demand. Let me note that unlike Ford’s Doniphon, Nolan’s Odysseus is accompanied by Penelope when he leaves his home. Nolan can’t quite make his hero suffer alone.

Comparing these works, Ford’s seems more honest and prescient. We (Americans) still harbor a romanticism about the Wild West, and a predilection for savage displays of strength. He acknowledges the trade Doniphon makes in allowing Ransom to don the mantle of the hero while he leaves the story. In Nolan’s film, Odysseus trades the slaughter of the suitors to give his son a fresh start. However, Telemachus is not ushering in a new law to Ithaca. He is neither visionary nor heroic. Nolan shows him to be a middling fighter at best—well beneath his father’s ability. How will he distinguish himself as king? What has Odysseus’s sacrifice and exile left behind?

Maybe the comparison is unfair, after all these are different films separated by almost 65 years. But they are both movies about legends, law, and sacrifice. Ford shows that after the sacrifices, we can build something new and recognizably better, even if we ache for what was. We have to learn to live with the ache. Nolan’s film shows that there is only loss, that memory is undefeatable. Odysseus and Penelope sail away much as Frodo did at the end of Peter Jackson’s Return of the King, the world saved, but not for him. But what has Odysseus saved in Nolan’s epic? Is there anything worth saving?

Calling the Muse

Sing in me muse, and through me tell the story…

So began the first translation, by Robert Fitzgerald, of The Odyssey that I read. Later, I taught another translation, by Robert Fagles, that began:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns…

More recently, Emily Wilson offered this:

Tell me about a complicated man,/ Muse…

No matter the translation or framing of the tale and Odysseus, the poet turns to the muse to provide the story and the song. It seems like a quaint notion. These days we mine our lives for the sources of stories.

Even Gabriel Garcia Marquez, perhaps somewhat disingenuously, claimed that all the impossible elements of One Hundred Years of Solitude were true. His memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, reads like a revelation, and it makes all that seemed strange in his novel strangely normal—at least for that time and place. Of course, Marquez famously recounts the genesis of that novel—he was headed away on vacation with his family when he realized that the voice of the book was the voice of his grandmother telling incredible stories in the most matter-of-fact voice. He turned the car around and started the work that would define him as a writer. His grandmother was, in a way, his muse.

Why do writers have muses—things, people, animals—outside of themselves to give their work a nearly mystical, almost divine impetus? The writer faces inward and outward tidal forces. A writer works the tension between the inner voice—the thing that writes—and the outer world—what she or he writes about. Writers attempt to portray the outer world, even if it is a fantastic and impossible world, truthfully, crafting a vivid continuous dream in words, crafting it with the inner voice.

Of course, what a writer makes is not the world: it is an approximation, a copy, a simulacrum, an aspiring reality that with a combination of skill and luck convinces the reader. Or hoodwinks. I can never tell. Perhaps enchants. The writer makes a world, or something like a world, and populates it with minds and bodies, cities and mountains, oceans and sea monsters. Even if all these elements resemble something found in the real world—the world of the reader—each part comes from within the writer.

This act of creation is nearly divine. The writer is the maker of worlds. Even when Dickens charts London’s streets—we can locate Scrooge’s counting house and guess, fairly accurately, where his lonely lodgings were—they are shoved two inches to the left of the world we know. This London is not London. By creating a new world, the writer seeks to emulate the world that is, but also to replace it. For the time the reader enters the dream, it is a world that could be, not a world that is, and the dream reveals something particular, something full of twists and turns and complications.

While the writer uncovers the words that capture this world, she or he enters the world, and if the writer believes the words—and she must! he must!—then the inner world threatens to obliterate the outer one. After all, there is something about that outer world that the writer seeks to correct. The ghosts visit and Scrooge reforms—is literally made into someone new. This is the world that should be—where a miserly and selfish investor can become “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”

The writer sees what could be, like Cassandra, the unheeded prophet of myth. Some writers simply disgorge the terrible truth of what is, like an oracle who disdains both irony and hope. There is no redemption, just inexorable weight—think of the novels of Stephen Crane, or Gustave Flaubert. Their worlds may be imagined, but the imagined reality is cautionary: there is no escaping this gravity. Let me pause to say that dystopian fiction while cautionary, by making the possible reality so obviously awful, opens a kind of door to redemption: all this could be avoided. The realist, on the other hand, sees no way around the unbearable truth.

Either writer—redemptive or admonishing—seeks some anchor outside the work. By locating the inner voice in some external force, a muse, whether divine or closer at hand, the writer can dissociate from that other world. It isn’t in me! It comes from Erato, or my lover, or my cat, or the messages on the television. The muse is a hedge against being swallowed by that inner world. Madness is a double edged sword, and there is divine madness in writing. “Much madness is divinest Sense,” Emily Dickinson begins her poem. The muse keeps the madness at a distance.

I am not suggesting that writers are mad—that trope has little interest or value to me. Writers bear the weight of vision, and seek ways to allay that weight. Some retreat from the world—the noisiness of life interrupts the vision that animates their existence. Some bound into the world—seeking febrile connections to the world, and allowing all those connections to illuminate their visions. Some stop writing, and I believe that even then they suffer. I know so. Vision is persistent and obstinate.

Sing, sing, or tell. We seek a trick, a magic act, inspiration to crack through the hard shell, and once again, create and fly. A muse, or otherwise, a simple spell of words to open the way.