by Eli Rarey
I was one of those who bought tickets to see Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm weeks before it opened in theaters—and I was also one of those disappointed by my experience of the movie. I had been listening to an audiobook of Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation of Homer’s epic in preparation. With repeated stock phrases and unusual syntax, Mendelsohn preserves the profound strangeness of the original rather than trying to render it in language that sounds natural to a modern ear. (I highly recommend this translation and the audiobook, which Mendelsohn narrates.) Nolan’s approach, I knew, would be the opposite; but I hoped that at least he would be inspired by the source material to make something like a great road movie. The road movie is one of my favorite film genres—the mechanical propulsion of the car somehow fuses in my imagination with the mechanics of the film reel unspooling (even if I’m watching it digitally over wifi) to create a perfect marriage of form and content. Walter Salles in his “Notes for a Theory of the Road Movie” says, “In terms of storytelling, The Odyssey seemed to me the basis of it all.” Nolan’s film, perhaps because of the fractured chronology, felt less like a road movie than a war film, concerned less with the sensory experience of moving through a landscape than the psychological effects of encounters with extreme violence.
It may have been naive of me to expect The Odyssey to easily adapt into a road movie, despite so many hailing it as the ur-text for the entire action-adventure genre. It seems to me that our road movie quests, and our adventure quests in general, follow the mythic model of the medieval chivalric romances more than they do Homer’s epic. There is no longing for home—the opposite in fact. The hero goes out into the world, seeking his fortune in foreign lands. The motion is outward, into the unknown; this is better suited to our modern ambitions and anxieties.
Easy Rider is the classic example of this, and perhaps the originator of the phrase. “Road movie” is really a marketing term, and Easy Rider was the unexpected box office hit that made it marketable. What Easy Rider popularized was not just the road movie genre but a whole counterculture ethos, once a mass rebellion but now part of the fabric of our mainstream culture. Like the road movie genre, there is something deeply American about this kind of revolutionary spirit—and the road movie is well-suited to it. For these heroes, home is not a treasure to be protected but a prison that must be escaped. Going out on the road is a chance to move beyond social norms by moving into new geography—the foundational American myth. This drive toward adventure persists in more recent films like Magic Mike XXL, where Mike and his buddies drive cross-country to Myrtle Beach in order to compete at a male burlesque convention. The episodic nature of their adventures, including crashing their vehicle and meeting a goddess-like hostess played by Andie MacDowell, suggests the structure of Homer’s epic—but the sense of nostos, the return home after long absence, is missing.
In another 21st-century road movie, Crossroads, starring Britney Spears and written by Shonda Rhimes, the idea of a “return home” is antithetical to everything the teenage American heroes need and want out of life. The longing to get away from home is a necessary step in their journey to adulthood. Their futures are in the distance. Penelope’s loyalty is transmogrified into the suffocating love of a doting parent, and the young women bond with each other as they leave what is familiar and familial behind. Homer’s Odyssey completely lacks this key feature of the road movie: the developing relationships over the course of the journey. Odysseus’ journey doesn’t bind him to anyone—instead it strips him bare of friends and companions. This total removal of any ties that bind him to others is the epic’s thematic core, around which the movement of the story is structured. He arrives literally naked on the island of the Phaeacians (an episode replaced in the Nolan adaptation by a bout of amnesia, a psychological stripping away) and must find a way to get home with nothing to help him but the favor of the gods. He will later return home to his son, then his wife, then his father—slowly reassembling the connections to other people that constitute a social context and identity. At sea, he is Nobody and has no one. Our road movies are structured around the bonds formed on the journey. The real holy grail is the friends we meet along the way.
Though the term “road movie” was invented to describe Easy Rider and its cinematic progeny, the first ever road movie is probably It Happened One Night, a 1934 screwball comedy directed by Frank Capra. The term “road movie” wasn’t in common usage until the 60s and 70s, but in 1934 audiences were hungry for stories in which traditional social norms were challenged. This is the basis for the screwball comedy genre, in which both gender norms and class expectations are turned upside down. The hero of the film, heiress Ellie Andrews, flees her overbearing father in order to get back to her husband, with whom she has eloped but not yet consummated the marriage. Newspaperman Peter Warne, played by Clark Gable at his most devastatingly handsome, happens upon her when they share the same cross-country bus. (Can we have more movies about people on cross-country bus trips please?) The two travel together and—spoiler alert—fall in love. This would be like if at the end of Homer’s epic Odysseus decided he didn’t actually love Penelope and sailed off into the sunset with Calypso. Again, our modern American sensibility wants a hero who doesn’t return home at all. Our heroes go somewhere new.
In Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, the longing for home feels much more akin to the nostos of The Odyssey, though the hero of Van Sant’s film feels more like Odysseus’ son Telemachus, searching out a parent he never knew. Mike Waters, played by River Phoenix in one of the great performances in film history, lives on the streets in Portland, Oregon, turning tricks to survive. With his friend Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves, looking like a classical kouros), Mike embarks on a journey to try to reunite with his mother, whom he has not seen or heard from in years. The actual road trip portion of the movie is relatively small in comparison to the overall running time, but this is also true in Homer’s epic. Odysseus reaches Ithaca halfway through the narrative and spends the rest of the story figuring out how to cope with his long-awaited homecoming. Mike Waters, on the other hand, never finds the home he left behind. His mother has abandoned him. Scott Favor’s storyline in the film is explicitly based on Shakespeare’s Henry IV, even including Elizabethan dialogue directly from the play spliced into the 1990s setting—and Van Sant’s sympathies are firmly with the Dionysiac impulses of the Falstaff character and his cohort. The core values of My Own Private Idaho share more with the world of Easy Rider and Magic Mike XXL than with The Odyssey, despite the longing for home at its emotional core.
Which isn’t to say that Odysseus has an unambivalent relationship with coming home. Nolan attempts to dramatize this in his adaptation when Calypso gives Odysseus a kind of period-dress psychotherapy for his PTSD. But in Homer’s version the drama lies in the action: Odysseus is literally unable to return home as himself. He tests each of his relationships, one by one. A similar drama, minus the war-hero backstory, plays out in the film Five Easy Pieces, one of many collaborations between Jack Nicholson and director Bob Rafelson—including Easy Rider, on which Rafelson was an uncredited producer. In Jason Wood’s book-length study of the genre, 100 Road Movies, he describes the film as a “character study of a man embroiled in a crisis of the self.” Bobby Dupea is no Odysseus—he has an obligation but no desire to return home—yet his journey home includes aspects of The Odyssey missing from Nolan’s version, particularly Bobby Dupea’s seemingly irresistible sex appeal. Like Odysseus, he goes to bed with almost every woman who crosses his path. The emotional climax of the film isn’t romantic in nature, however. The crucial scene when Bobby attempts resolution with his elderly mute father has a direct parallel in Homer’s text. Trying to explain himself, Bobby says, “I move around a lot, not because I’m looking for anything really, but because I’m getting away from things that get bad if I stay.” This is our modern-day Odysseus. Bobby could certainly be described as “a man of many twists and turns.”
Despite its inclusion in Wood’s book, it is a bit of a stretch to call Five Easy Pieces a road movie. The road trip portion of the narrative is about ten minutes long. But if we follow this willingness to open up the genre, we could also include The Secret Agent by Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho. The film begins with a memorable episode that feels like a kind of standalone short film—in fact, much of the film, like Homer’s Odyssey, feels episodic in structure—and this short film would definitely qualify as a road movie. The rest of the film focuses on the hero Marcelo’s return home and his longing to be reunited with his family—in this case his young son. And like The Odyssey, it ends with a bloodbath, though the resolution takes a very different turn for Marcelo—or should I say Armando? In some ways this film, by abandoning the explicit narrative of The Odyssey, feels more true to the epic than Nolan’s adaptation. Marcelo’s problems are not psychological. He cannot claim his name and his son because he is in mortal danger from his enemies. Perhaps this is why Wagner Moura’s performance feels like a more convincing Odysseus than Matt Damon’s psychologically tortured action hero. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation seems fundamentally uneasy with the source material, working hard to bring his audience’s sympathies in line with Odysseus as a hero—but this requires changing the essence of who Odysseus is and what he does.
Nolan constructs his film with supreme confidence in his ability to involve an audience in the story cinematically—and with good reason; the film has an undeniable impact, overwhelming in its scale and volume. However, with this subject matter I longed for a different kind of confidence: a filmmaker willing to make the audience uneasy. David Lynch, despite his global popularity, is in some ways a deeply American filmmaker, and his film Wild at Heart is a classic American road movie: two lovers on the run, escaping a troubled home and past. But even so, it uses The Wizard of Oz as its template, constantly referencing this other story about a young girl who longs to return home. In David Lynch’s portrayals of home, however, Kansas is already not Kansas anymore. Anxiety about home fuses with nostos, creating that uniquely Lynchian mix of sweetness and darkness. Another road movie, The Straight Story, may be famous among his films for being the least “Lynchian,” but like all his work, it carries at its emotional core a deep sense of both longing for and anxiety about home and family. At the outset of the film, Alvin Straight discovers that his brother Lyle has had a stroke—this is the same motivation for Bobby Dupea’s trip home to visit his father. Like Bobby and his father, Alvin and Lyle haven’t spoken in years. The only vehicle he has to make the journey is a riding lawnmower that can barely go over the speed of a brisk walk. The film is told, as the title implies, in a straightforward style. It is a road movie and an Odyssey, with a series of episodic events that befall Alvin during his journey. Like the Odysseus of Nolan’s adaptation, Alvin is haunted by memories of war; but the straightforward chronology allows us to appreciate the grandeur of the journey itself. Lynch’s dreamlike visual sense here lets the physical landscape of the Midwest take on mythic status, with the surreal central figure a lawnmower rolling down a highway. Though the sense of nostos is not literal, as the journey to see Lyle is a journey out and away, the reunion of the two brothers feels very much like a coming home, a recognition that where we come from is somehow where we belong. The Straight Story is a fusion of the sensibility of an American road movie and a Homeric return home.
In the end, it is unsurprising that the grand epic treatment of The Odyssey by Nolan would fall a bit flat for those who love Homer’s epic. This version of Odysseus is neither epic nor Greek, but rather a familiar American action-adventure trope: the expert assassin racked with guilt. The movie’s best scenes are episodes with fantastic creatures and magical spells, but the miraculous intervention of Athena in the original text has been rewritten as a psychological artifact of trauma rather than a powerful force of nature. Nolan loves the epic scale of the story, but feels compelled to circumscribe it with a modern psychological morality tale. Ironically, the director’s attempts to make the film feel universal and important make it instead feel self-important and provincial. The result is occasionally affecting but oddly hollow, a film that overwhelms the senses but whose narrative structure becomes incoherent. The best examples of road movies achieve epic effects by externalizing psychology onto the map. Characters travel through a kind of hallucinatory landscape, encountering embodied visions of their deepest fears and desires. In this way, despite their fundamental differences from Homer’s epic, these road movies function in a way much closer to the ancient epics than Nolan’s chronologically fractured psychodrama. The sensory experience of the journey itself is visionary and cathartic; outward and inward become one and the same. What makes a self, once you take someone away from those that know them? We go out on the road in order to discover who we truly are. This is why the myth of The Odyssey still feels so relevant and what draws artists and filmmakers back to reinterpret it again and again. But I would choose to rewatch Crossroads or Magic Mike XXL over Nolan’s version any day.
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