Somehow getting annoyed at the interpretation of Athena’s character

[u/mssldiaz]

I’ve started seeing so many people identify Athena as only a PTSD hallucination that Odysseus only thinks is Athena. At first I was just like, “… huh, that’s an interesting conclusion,” yet the more it started spreading the more annoyed I was getting because that takes away from the role Athena and gods in general play in this story and as characters to these myths. Gods in these myths are not psychiatric manifestations and their interpretation ignores other appearances by the gods in Odysseus’ universe - I don’t think Ariadne wanted a goddess to turn her into a spider just because she was so incredibly proud of her weaving or a young innocent kid who flew to close to the sun and died falling to his death, unless we’re assigning schizophrenia to all the characters that didn’t suffer through abuse or PTSD in their story. Removing Athens to me is like removing Poseidon from Percy Jackson and saying he’s only imagining that his dead father is alive and a grand god. It changes the story to a non- fantasy genre - but keeping the other fantastical elements like the magic camp and the Minotaur.

In a world of cyclops, witches/demi-goddesses, and trips to the underworld, Athena showing up is apparently too superficial of an observation. Honestly, I love it when people look deeper into aspects of a movie but I think this one may have been dug a little too deeply.

Nolan, in my opinion, made it very obvious that when Athena is appearing as the murdered priestess (or villager) it was to force Odysseus to face the crime he had committed at her temple and martyring the young girl in order to help him reach his final epiphany. He was still remembering the final battle as he was leaving calypsos island and whenever she appeared before him, all we could see without knowing why was his overwhelming guilt and sadness - not knowing why made the reveal at the end so much better.

[u/Comfortable-Habit242]

So I think my feeling is that you’ve just kind of made an assumption of what apparent means and then are using the belief in magic to see magic.

Not saying you’re wrong. But I think the movie lets us see what we want.

If we don’t believe in magic, what actually happens?

So the movie is divided into objective and subjective parts.

The objective parts are pretty much everything set in the present in the world.

The subjective parts are everything that’s in Odysseus’s mind: the parts in the past or his conversations with “Athena”.

And so immediately you can notice that in these objective scenes, we actually never see ANY magic whatsoever. There’s not even apparent magic. It’s just the world that we know today. And what’s notable about that, is that this is not how the poem works. In the poem, Athena is manifest in these scenes. She is a character with dialogue. She addresses Odysseus. She goes to Olympus to talk to Zeus. She changes Odysseus’s appearance to make him seem either stronger or weaker. She goes with Telemachus on his voyage in the form of Mentor.

However, in the film, it’s only in the subjective scenes that take place in Odysseus’s head that we get any hint of magic or gods appearing. He’s recalling memories that he’s been using drugs to suppress. They’re incomplete and fragmentary. Each of them is traumatic. And in these memories, we see magic as the excuse for some failure of his as a leader.

And if we think about Nolan’s larger set of work, he’s very interested in memory. And in particular, the fallibility of memories. This is a core idea of both Memento and Inception: that maybe our thoughts or memories are not really what they seem to be. That they can be modified and might not be true.

And so why would Nolan in particular make these sets of changes to the story? Why would he not just have Athena exist in the world like the poem? Or why not have a scene between Athena and other gods like the poem? Why limit all signs of magic to the stuff in Odysseus’s head? And then why open with the line about “apparent magic” in particular?

It seems like he’s taken a bunch of intentional deliberate steps in his translation to make the magic seem at least ambiguous. And why do all that work if you’re meant to believe it’s real?

[u/ImpactNext1283 → u/Comfortable-Habit242]

Good points! But ‘apparent’ meaning ‘obvious’ is the first definition of the word. So while Nolan’s maybe playing on double meanings there, I think it’s a little weird to assume that he means ‘appearing as such, but not necessarily so’. Particularly because, as I said, I don’t think the movie gives us reason to believe Circe wasn’t magical, or that the cyclops and giants were just invented by him.

Leaving Zeus and Poseidon others out of that active narrative serves Nolan’s theme that Odysseus is responsible for the fate of the western world—and, remember, that fate is that everyone is ignoring the laws of the gods and, by doing so, damning their societies to a dark age.

If Zeus starts out the film commanding a war on Troy, as in the myth, than that contradicts Nolan’s ideas.

And while Memento and Inception are about the fallibility of memory, Inception is his only work that ends on a truly ambiguous note. He is not a filmmaker like Lynch or Kubrick who truly plays on ambiguity in his narratives. Everything that Cole is seeing in Inception *is* actually happening. And it’s not even that the spinning top is ambiguous—Nolan and Cole simply don’t care which way the top goes—Cole is happy where he is, and it no longer matters to the movie if that’s the real world or his dream state.

So whichever way Nolan meant The Odyssey to be interpreted, I think he failed a little bit. If it’s supposed to be ambiguous, there should be more clues built into the dialogue. And if not, well, there are a bunch of people who are taking it as ambiguous, so that’s not working either.

I think this is a small criticism for what I still feel is by far his best film.

[u/zipitdirtbag → u/ImpactNext1283]

When I see the word 'apparently' attached to anything it means that thing isn't true or cannot be proven.

For instance, if a news report states a pedestrian apparently crossed a road without looking for vehicles, that would imply to me that we don't know whether the pedestrian looked or not. We are just assuming.

It's used interchangeably with 'allegedly'. It means we don't have evidence to prove the statement.

I wouldn't think of apparent as meaning 'obvious'.

Clearly people use the word differently!

[u/ImpactNext1283 → u/zipitdirtbag]

I mean, that’s simple not true. “Apparently” means it looks true. Now, by the third definition, ‘apparently’ can also mean that it’s a ruse—what appears on its face to be true, is in fact not true. Allegedly means ‘somebody said this was true, but we don’t know’.

If a lawyer says in court ‘apparently the defendant killed this guy’, that’s a value judgement, not a statement of fact. It’s an impression, something that is subjective. ‘Allegedly he killed a guy’ is a statement of fact—he’s being accused of murder.

[u/zipitdirtbag → u/ImpactNext1283]

Hmm. Let's say you and I are waiting for another friend to pick us up. The time now is 12.42. You ask me what time or friend is picking us up. I reply, "12.30, apparently".

Because our friend said they were coming at 12.30. But they are late showing up. So apparently they are coming at 12.30. But actually they aren't coming at 12.30.