Make Heroes Complicated Again
“Uh oh.” I reflexively slap my hand over my mouth, shoving the horrified critic voice from out my face into my head where it can only disturb this audience of one, alerting: “They’ve uncomplicated him!” We’re 15 minutes into The Odyssey.
I flash to a sequence of conversations I’ve had over the past few months beginning when a friend - one of the few people who asks anymore - says, “What are you reading these days?”
“Well” my enthusiasm unsuppressed, “I just picked up Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, which I’m going to read when I go to Greece.”
“The one where she translates it: ‘a complicated man?’”
“Yeah.”
<sputtering> “I couldn’t make it past that.”
A few weeks later, in Greece, I’m about halfway through the poem traveling with theater students, practitioners and scholars. I had just told one of these scholars that my travel-companion on this trip was Wilson’s translation.
As if from a script, “Is that the one where she translates it: ‘a complicated man?”
“Yeah.”
“Eh.”
“But!” I continue, “it’s immensely readable. Without radical alterations it reads like a real adventure novel. Like you just want to see what happens in the next book. Plus, she also translates Seneca!”
“The thing is,” and I am glad that he has a more developed script, “the original,” (because he reads and speaks Ancient Greek) “is polytropos, which is kind of like: ever turning, multi-faceted…” he pauses. He sees something in the knotty roots of etymology. “Actually… ‘complicated’ might be the best word for it…”
I get why this adjective is dismissible. It’s become one of those all-purpose words with a lazy, evasive application. You’re at loggerheads in a political argument. To keep the peace you throw up your hands and relent, “It’s… complicated.” A stranger, someone you hardly know, and who you definitely don’t have time for, asks your opinion about something that will take more than five minutes to parse: “I dunno… it’s… complicated?” It’s a word for the mealy-mouthed, not a fitting epithet of an ur-hero.
After I finished reading the poem, I read Wilson’s introduction to it. She doesn’t specifically address the decision to use “complicated”1 but at her introduction’s conclusion, writes: “Odysseus is a migrant, but he is also a political and military leader, a strategist, a poet, a loving husband and father, an adulterer, a homeless person, an athlete, a disabled cripple, a soldier with a traumatic past, a pirate, thief and liar, a fugitive, a colonial invader, a home owner, a sailor, a construction worker, a mass murderer, and a war hero.”2 Right. Complicated.
I have long ago retired from the role of One Who Reads the Book in Order to be Disappointed by the Film. The inevitable disappointment seems to arise from unreasonable expectations of a medium. I love going to the movie theater and advocate experiencing film in its natural habitat. I made sure to get tickets to a 70mm screening. I have managed to block out nearly all reviews, think-pieces, interviews, opinions and comments about the film3. The only information that had managed to seep in was about casting choices that, apparently, made some conservatives lose their minds. One of my favorite things are casting choices that make people lose their minds. In short: I was looking forward to a summer blockbuster experience and had set my expectations, I thought, appropriately.
But then there was that lotus flower.
The film starts and, as in the poem, we meet our hero on the island of Calypso. But in this version he’s eating lotus-flowers which, as in the myth, have memory-erasing properties. But in the blockbuster we come to learn that not only has Odysseus maintained a constant state of forgetfulness by consuming lotus flower - Calypso is feeding him lotus flower. Because the only way that Odysseus could possibly remain with a demi-goddess who adores him on an island free of war and worry would be for Matt Damon to suffer from an amnesia that Charlize Theron is drugging him into. If you haven’t read the Odyssey, or haven’t recently read it or don’t remember this detail: Odysseus does not have amnesia. This doesn’t mean he doesn’t have PTSD. But there is not a moment when his past life shatters through. Because. It’s the Odyssey. Not the Bourne Franchise. We love Matt Damon coming home and remembering himself. It’s a shame that they don’t trust the devastation of the more complicated, less convenient scenario passed down through the poem. What if, instead of Damon wandering the island, a sex-slave in a Lotus-induced-ruffie-haze the creators decided to hew closer to the original? In this version, Odysseus has never forgotten about his wife, Penelope and now-almost-fully-grown-son, Telemachus. And with this knowledge he remains on Calypso’s island. He sleeps with Calypso. He enjoys it for a time! Which - I mean - she is a Demi-goddess. And - simultaneously - he is so full of woe and discontent that he is described as weeping regularly. 🤯 The commitment to leave comes with a full awareness that he is choosing a mortal rather than immortal life. He is choosing to be with a wife who isn’t as “beautiful” as Calypso4. And with this knowledge and agency to make this decision, he pursues a perilous journey back to Ithaca. He chooses to be human. Complications and all. And this is just our introduction to Odysseus and his mortal complications. Many more were scrubbed from the film and I spend the remaining 2 hours and 45 minutes in the theater flashing between what I see on screen and the meetings I imagine happening to justify the choices that smoothed over a character that has survived with complications since the 8th century BCE only to arrive in the 21st century ADE when it is seemingly determined that the “audience” shouldn’t be subjected to them. As if the only way we could bear witness to this human will be for him to unknowingly commit adultery. My disappointment shifts from Hollywood at large and Chris Nolan in particular to all filmmakers, theater makers, poets of all media, who have surrendered the call to complicate perspective.
While reading the Odyssey I had reflected on how moving the portrayal of the poets in the myth are. Like Homer - or “homers” - canonizing their own. “Let the record show that we exist.” These poets speaking this poem were narrating myths surrounding events that occurred about three hundred years before the poem is thought to have been finally written down. In so doing the brains that retain their memories, bodies that activate their voices, are conveying the tale of a hero and with that hero’s tale maybe some residual philosophy, history, community, humanity is also imparted to the listener. But - importantly - they are not conveying morality. Which Plato found objectionable. But at least Plato wanted to see that this tale that lacked a moral message was censored from the young. By smoothing out the contradictions that make Odysseus a complicated hero for a film that earns an R rating, the film industrial complex seems to be as confident in our skills of moral discernment as they are of the target audience for the Paw Patrol film. I’m clearly not a film exec, but I’d like to believe that audience members around the world would be willing to go on a more knotty (and naughty) moral journey with this hero. That being alive has prepared us for that. So why this patronizing censorship? Was the “woke Odyssey” trying to avoid getting Odysseus cancelled?
At some point I found something like relief in my disappointment. I was, in fact, judging a medium unfairly. As a theater director I am drawn to stories of deeply complicated characters and have spent years digging into the craggy nooks and jagged facets of complicated, morally ambiguous, baffling characters such as Molière’s Dom Juan and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Allowing a character to form at the intersection of dialogue where the words of other characters sculpt the interpretation of a protagonist demands that an audience practice discernment, form their own opinion and fill in the gap that actions without explicit justification can make opaque. The audience for these works must lean in, truly be awake. And while film and television and other cold media can certainly ask the same attitude from their audience, with theater we’re talking about a medium comprised of the material of dialogue and actions in time and space. A dialogue can be an attempt to close distance between opposing perspectives to approach a truth - an infinitely diminishing point to which one can never arrive. But the attempt is one that can be imitated by an audience. Perhaps it is more reasonable to expect the audience at a work of theater to engage with moral ambiguities played out by a flesh-and-blood human on the stage rather than separated by the screen. A commitment to truly complicate characters is a commitment to a society that isn’t afraid of disagreement, different perspectives, the ability for opinions to be shaped and changed or the reality that prosperity and morality are not connected.
At some point I take a huge swig of Cherry Coke, sit back and appreciate the cinematography of the ocean. Particularly beautiful in 70mm. The straining effort to make Odysseus into a character who walks through Troy (a ptoliporthos who doesn’t kill?) stunned by what his cleverness - his polymetis - has wrought turns pathetic. The gnarly spine of Agamemnon’s armor is a coy tease of what could have been had the intention behind the production been to complicate rather than satisfy what a “hero” can look like. Afterwards, a friend texts to ask my opinion: “It’s just spineless.”
Fortunately, there’s a parallel narrative that runs throughout the Odyssey: that of Orestes and his family. And for that there are takes from ancient theater-makers Aeschylus and Euripides that wonderfully complicate Orestes, Electra, Clytemnestra, Agamemnon and the citizens who surround them. I spend time working on these texts in the next few months with a determination to, at the very least, make these characters… complicated.
For that “On Complicated…” is on Wilson’s Substack which I found only after writing this.
pg. 79. Homer, Author. The Odyssey. trans by Wilson, Emily R., Editor [New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018]
Just before hitting publish on this post I read Wilson’s review “An Uncomplicated Man” published in the August 13th 2026 edition of the London Review of Books.
Says Calypso: “…I know my body is better / than hers is. I am taller too. / Mortals can never rival the immortals / in beauty.” pg. 87. Homer, Author. The Odyssey. trans by Wilson, Emily R., Editor [New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018]