Nolan's Odyssey as Rorschach test
I woke up this morning with that realization, after having slept on it, to the sound of the cosmos...
...which, actually, was 'just' Ludwig Göransson's inchorprandible soundtrack to Christopher Nolan's adaptation of Homer's epic, as I walked home alone and along Bay Street to home, at almost midnight last night, after having taken in the 8 PM showing at AMC Metreon. And yes, I just made up that word to describe the soundtrack [and by the way who the heck is this Göransson composer and why hadn't I heard any of his music before and if I did why didn't I integrate him then?] because characterizing the music/al•sounds accompanying the film's images is totally beside the point {as one has to be merely immersed in it to know how singularly joined it was to the flow of visual action}...
...and why am I talking first about the soundtrack and not the movie itself? Because maybe I want to deflect from the fact that — as I sat there immobile after the last scene of Odysseus and Penelope boarding that ship sailing towards the sunset, his words suddenly vibrating for me in a way that was benthically familiar «and phrasing it that way beggars language itself» so familiar that tears flowed unbidden down my year-strewn cheeks, and watching the credits roll — I was gripped by emotions that told me everything i needed to know about the movie and, ultimately, about myself and my own brittle, anonymous, odyssey through this ineffably and infinitesimally nanoscopic particle and portion of the universe itself.
Well, wow. I didn't expect that to emerge. ::chuckle::
Perhaps I was weeping while the silverblue tokens on the screen were rolling and I wasn't really reading them [hardly anyone does unless they were part of the army of artisans involved in crafting the flick] because that genius Nolan ended the story not as I recall Homer did, with Odysseus and Penelope reuniting and restoring peace to Ithaca (well, after the incredible slaughter of most of the 108 suitors) but sailing away into... exile. And if that's not a compressed reading I can make of my own itinerant, nomadic, exilic journey, well... a movie could be made about it in an alternate universe where I am the grizzled protagonist sailing the 13 oceans of Stürm and Drang, felled by this, exalted by that, and at first encumbered, then released, by the other. ;p
As for that riveting, extended scene of Odysseus dispatching the suitors; when Matt Damon stood there surrounded by the 108 pretenders-to-the-throne [and by the by, I think Tom Holland was perfectly cast as Telemachus as Damon was as the eponymous hero, as Anne Hathaway was as Penelope] the cheeky part of my prehensile chimpanzee brain half-expected a mashup of Uma Thurman gutting all those suit-clad samurai-ninja-assassins in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill and the epic slaughter of the Starks in Game of Throne's Red Wedding episode. ::chuckle::
What took place instead on Nolan's screen was less campy-cinematic than Tarantino and less drama-infused than GRRM, and thoroughly, legendarily, quintessentially, Christopher. There was hardly any blood and gore to the scenes of Odysseus desperately but manfully and expertly slaying one suitor after another {i mean, how could he not be so skilled after vanquishing the Cyclops, Circe, the Laestrygonians, and Hades itself?} but the effect was visceral and vertiginous nevertheless.
As I walked home through this northern precinct of the peninsula whose monosyllabic nouns marking place are mythic in both essence and granularity — Bay, Beach, Fort, Square, Cove, Green, Field, Point, Trail, Pier, etc. — I stopped dead in the middle of an intersection, visually interdicted as I was by these two autonomous and unbeknownst-to-themselves witnesses:
Stopped twice: once at midnight and once again now {as i write this some 13 hours later, finishing up at precisely 1:31 PM} because, integrating this tableau now in the shade of noonday, there are things semiotic and chromatic to be found in its latent space of probability: the chiaroscuro, wayang-kulit and Plato's caveness of light & dark; the colors red, white, blue, black, green, yellow, purple, etc.; numerals seriatim and not-π a linear gash on a billboard's gnomic surface; the word TRAVEL lodged within the space of a turquoise & sea-blue rectangle; the geometry of lines, angles, arcs, gradients, nodes...
...that is to say, the odyssey of existence itself. But that's just my own foolish-frenzied Rorschach reading of the movie and of the metacognitive moments afterwards ::chuckle::.
What do you see?