Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

This week we watched Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? in class and I enjoyed it.  I’m pretty sure that if it hadn’t said that it was based on The Odyssey by Homer, I never would have made the connection, but that was what I liked about it.  It wasn’t just copied scene for scene and that made it a great movie to watch in class and discuss in relation to The Odyssey.  

I found that the setting of the Depression Era South was a great choice for the movie.  Like we discussed in class, this setting and time period is almost like a different reality or a far away mythic land, which is similar to how we feel about Ancient Greek myths.  And then the folk music that went along with the movie (which was amazing and fit perfectly) is almost like the American version of epic poems: they were passed around by word of mouth and no one is really sure where it started or who the true author is.  The South is also sprawling fields with towns that are few and far between, which is not only reminiscent of Ancient Greece, but it serves to make the different scenes in the movie very episodic, which takes us straight back to the Wanderings of Odysseus.

Another part of having the movie take place in the South was having religion take the place of the Gods.  It’s pretty explicitly shown when Everett prays to God and a flood comes and saves him and the others while wiping out all the bad guys, but other instances of divine help are not as explicit as when Athena helps Odysseus.  One thing that came up a few times in class was the hair pomade. Everett would not be the same person without his Dapper Dan hair pomade and it can be seen as a comparison to Athena lavishing splendor onto him, while also adding humour to the situation.  Another time Everett receives divine help is when Pappy O’Daniel steps in and pardons them of their crimes without even knowing what they are. He saw how much the crowd loved them and decided to take advantage of it and use them as pawns in his campaign for governor, which brings us back to the idea of the Gods using humans as pawns in their game and for their own entertainment.

Odysseus

When I first heard we were reading The Odyssey for this class, I was excited.  I’ve always been a fan of Greek myths and The Odyssey has references to a number of them.  I also feel like it’s one of those books that’s a classic that you should read at some point during your life.  At the same time, I was worried because other books that I have read that are older, like Paradise Lost and Doctor Faustus and various Shakespeare novels, I found very hard to read and almost impossible to get through.  With that line of thinking, I expected that I would dread the nightly readings, but I was wrong. I’m glad that we are reading Emily Wilson’s translation because she did an amazing job of getting rid of all the flowery language and the excruciatingly detailed descriptions that I was not interested in.  She keeps it to the basic facts and it makes it easier to concentrate more on the story and characters and get more out of them.
In the Telemachiad, we were introduced to Telemachus and we followed his story for a while.  Like we discussed in class, he was a reactionary character for a lot of it. He spent twenty years moping around the castle until Athena pushed him into doing something.  She led him on a mini-hero’s journey to find out information about his father. We discussed why she felt the need to do this and I believe it was a way for him to gain confidence so he could be more similar to his father and impress him when Odysseus returns.  In the first four books of The Odyssey, we keep hearing about the amazing hero Odysseus and how awesome he was in battle and how he tricked the enemy with his mind and all these other details.  When we meet him in book five, all these things are true, but at the same time I’m not quite sure what to think of them. He is constantly described as talking with careful calculation and tact, which is smart because he wants to be careful with what information he tells strangers, but it still makes him seem sorta sneaky and not exactly someone to trust.  In books 11 and 12, he starts telling his story of what happened after he left Ogygia and how he slowly loses all his crew members. Many of them weren’t his fault and he couldn’t really do anything, but with Scylla, he knowingly sacrificed six men without telling them. I know it was his only option to get past and to finally get home, but it still rubs me the wrong way.  I’m curious what will happen next so I can get more of a feel for Odysseus.