Umar Nizar
The near-hysterical reception that accompanies the release of a Christopher Nolan film has no exceptions. `Odyssey’, his latest flick to hit the screens, has succeeded in a way that would be envious to many, to say the least. The movie has found a huge audience, and also has become a talking point or a conversation starter as Nolan movies are wont to. The unqualified praise that is heaped on this `cinematic phenomenon’ in India deserves a closer look.
Is it the mythical parallel between India and Ancient Greece that makes the movie so palatable to an Indian audience? But Nolan has leached the movie of any of its Greek antecedents. The presence of an Indian actor as Odysseus’ second-in-command strangely jars since this rather serves only to push one out of immersion in the mythical cosmos of Homer. The horrific massacre at Troy and the nonchalance of heroes including Odysseus and Agamemnon to that violence, as depicted in the movie, hardly take away the awe that they inspire. This is more in line with Hollywood `war masala’ where the violence inflicted upon a native populace serves as the source of the trauma which in turn becomes the narrative furnace that propels the movie and the arc of its main character forward. The atrocities inflicted upon the innocents are elided, as they are literally fodder to the violence. So whither cinematic ethics, and what are its ramifications for contemporary Indian society where the release of a movie exalting toxic masculinity is uncannily followed by horrific violence inflicted upon the bodies of women?
The mythical parallels that inspire our adulation of the Nolan epic throw up a challenge, which has been around since the 18th-century debate about the ancients vs the moderns. The ancient cosmos had a coherent ethical code (like the Bronze Age ‘law of Zeus’ regarding the treatment of guests often gratuitously referred to in the movie), or it could have been a problematic space in which warfare and violence towards the vulnerable had been normalised. The modern Semitic world of Abrahamic faiths then dubiously takes the credit for having sanitised the ancient world of its `violence’. Instead of framing this as a binary, the mythical dimension of Semitic faiths has to be traced out.
The Edenic myth and the primogeniture of monotheism
If the Edenic myth in the Abrahamic religions is to be taken seriously, then the ancients had an inkling of that linearly separable dualistic world of God and man. The polytheistic deities of classical Greece then are preceded by the God of Moses, David, and Abraham, of course. Once the source of ancient violence has been located, it would be less inconvenient to point fingers.
Gaza and the primordial nature of violence
The blame for the soul-searing violence that is inflicted upon the populace of Gaza almost daily cannot be conveniently laid at the door of Abrahamic faiths. Islam and Judaism have more in common than one would imagine, like for instance, the kosher meal of a Jewish person would also be halal for a practising Muslim. That this requires no theological transubstantiation comes as a surprise, given the diametrically opposite points to which these two faiths have been located in the contemporary milieu.
The inherent belief in the primordiality of the one god, which is the basis of monotheism, finds its strongest adherents in these two religions.
So if the violence of Hiroshima can be blamed on the moderns and that of Troy on the ancients, where would the actual blame lie? The Ancient Greeks were a slave-keeping people, and the idea of universal `humanism’ can be a bit of a puzzle there. The Allies and the Axis powers during WWII had the totalitarian urge for destruction amply aided by technological prowess.
The organic violence of the ancients and technological annihilation perpetrated by the moderns can be imagined otherwise.
The technique implied in the motif of the Trojan horse belies the Odysseus myth. Odysseus himself is a hero but more in the mould of a master strategist or even trickster than that of a heroic gallant like Achilles. Strategy is aided by technical prowess in the Odyssey. The violence in Oppenheimer was baffling in one location-Japan. The majesty of Oppenheimer’s singular achievement that found so many takers worldwide was not surprisingly met with utter bafflement and astonishment in the space where that violence was inflicted. The banality of evil cannot be redeemed by the exaltation of the human genius behind it. The organic nature of that bafflement is what should protect modern society-which is neither entirely Abrahamic nor entirely Homeric in its ethos-from moral annihilation. The organic Homeric myth vs the disenchanted Abrahamic modern would be the worst binary of all hitherto existing binaries, including that of gender. There is no Homeric monopoly over myth, just as there is no Abrahamic monopoly over moral uprightness and ethical behaviour.
There is no ethical monopoly of the present over the past, and this need not always be a simple binary. The idea of the caveman has been the most baffling, since from Lascaux and Altamira to Bhimbetka, Edakkal Wayanad, and the Nasca lines and the Pyramids of Giza, the ancient cave paintings and etchings and productions of a cryptically artistic nature for the present-day mind could have been made by women just as well as they could have been made by men or through combined communal effort.
The caveman as the lowest common denominator of human morality needs to be examined. If gender were to be considered as a construct, can this framing of gender be drawn back in time to be applied to ancient societies as well? This is a point raised by the Slovenian thinker Zizek, who is fond of quoting `the mysteries of ancient Egyptians were mysteries to the ancient Egyptians themselves’.
But the genocidal violence that is haunting the disenchanted present perhaps finds its organic soul in myth. This mythical synthesis of the present and past can very well be a path towards ahimsa.
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Umar Nizar teaches at Kerala University. He holds an MSc in Computing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a PhD in Bhakti Studies from the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. His poems and critical essays have appeared in Roundtableindia, The Hindu, The New Indian Express, The Bombay Review, Madras Courier, Vayavya, Muse India, Culture Café (British Library), FemAsia, Sabrang India, and the Ibex Press Year’s Best Selection, among other publications.
