Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  Charybdis—the whirlpool formed by seawater rushing through the Straits of Messina between Sicily and the Italian peninsula—is very well done by the special effects unit. Again, this scene is too short, but what’s here is extraordinary. As the men grunt at their oars, trying to get past rapacious Scylla, the ship topples over the edge of the maelstrom and, sailors flying, falls a dizzying distance. The column of thundering water blooms like a carnivorous flower and turns into huge, living claws closing over the ship, which vanishes in a churning swirl of white water. Bravissimo! In Homer, of course, the ship is lost not in the whirlpool but in a divine storm sent to avenge the Greeks’ killing of the cattle of the sun god.

  As Odysseus undergoes these travails, we keep cutting back to Ithaca, where Penelope is trying to stall the suitors. Greta Scacchi has a regal bearing and a melancholy, Mona Lisa quality that suits the role, and she looks particularly beautiful in her public address, where she steps forth in a deep-blue robe with her face half covered. The design of the shroud she weaves—Odysseus’ ship, its red sail adorned with Athena’s apotropaic Gorgon face—is no great shakes. Eurycleia is in a constant snit, rocketing around the house and doing a lot of spitting at suitors, which Geraldine Chaplin is too ladylike to really carry off. Also, Chaplin looks way too young and frail for the role of Odysseus’ nurse, who needs a bossy robustness like that of Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar-winning Mammy in Gone with the Wind.

  Now comes one of the production’s most successful episodes, Odysseus’ long sojourn with Calypso, beautifully played by singer Vanessa Williams, who had lobbied for the part of Circe and, because of her acclaimed Broadway performance as the lead in Kiss of the Spider Woman, deserved to get it. Ironically, Assante has much more chemistry with Williams than he does with Scacchi (or Peters!), proved by the fact that NBC’s official publicity photos present him and the latter two ladies in separate, solitary poses: the sole joint photo, which was widely reproduced (and interracial to boot), is of sensuous, strong-willed Calypso tenderly shielding an exhausted Odysseus. This episode shows the hero weeping for his lost men—a rare example of a screenplay admirably capturing the charming Mediterranean tearfulness of Homer’s warriors.

  Calypso is attended by a troop of sexy ladies in black, who do lots of Calvin Klein–like lounging amid pretty green pools on salt cliffs hung with Persian rugs. (It would be oh, so wrong of us to be reminded of Vanessa Williams surrendering her Miss America crown in 1984 because of old lesbian photos resurfacing in Penthouse.) The scene where the castaway Odysseus is spotted by these giggling girls with their stand-tall mistress is a direct copy of the scene in The Ten Commandments where the exile Moses comes to the aid of the shepherdess daughters of the sheik of Midian. There is a superb moment when effeminate Hermes arrives to nag Calypso about letting Odysseus return home; the two spar and quibble, and then Hermes sternly darts off, disappearing again over the blue sea. If only the entire production had been executed at this level of excellence!—though there are several awkward shots where Hermes appears to be sporting a Cupid-like diaper and where Odysseus, who has gone native, is soulfully beating a drum. Williams is so good as Calypso that she has become my leading candidate to play the unplayable—Shakespeare’s fierce, “tawny,” mercurial Cleopatra, whom no actress has yet been able to do. The shore scene where a desolate Calypso watches Odysseus grittily building his raft with makeshift tools is truly affecting.

  Telemachus, meanwhile, is having tantrums—trying to string his father’s bow and throwing things around when he can’t—and finally calls an assembly of Ithacans. Here wise venerable Mentor, whom Odysseus left in charge of his household and whose name has entered our language, is shockingly shown as a fat buffoon resembling a gouty W. C. Fields. Traveling to Sparta to find news of his father, Telemachus passes a startlingly out-of-place camel and arrives at the surely too brightly painted palace of dark-haired Menelaus (whose Homeric epithet is “red-haired” but whose long kinky locks are well cut here in a kouros-like triangle). Some nifty, bronze-wheeled chariots go by that are right off Geometric vases of the period. Bizarrely, Telemachus is not honorably received and lavishly entertained by Menelaus, as in Homer. Instead, after a brief chat, Telemachus is sent off without even a bite for the road. I especially missed Helen’s presence—not only her drugging everyone’s wine for forgetfulness but her “Silly me!” account of how she caused the whole war by running off with Paris.

  Odysseus is cast ashore on his last stop, Phaeacia, by the wrath of Poseidon, whose big, blue, cartoonlike face and speaking mouth appear in a giant wave of Hawaii Five-O dimensions—not incredible considering the tsunami after the cataclysmic eruption of Thera that may have destroyed the Cretan ports and even reached Egypt (influencing, some speculate, the account of God’s vengeance against Pharaoh in Exodus). The clever re-creation of Poseidon, with his deep, rumbling voice (like God’s on Mount Sinai in The Ten Commandments), makes one lament all the more the failure to exploit cutting-edge morphing technology for Athena’s transsexual disguises, an au courant theme of psychic androgyny which the production for some reason completely ignores: Isabella Rossellini is the same boring, orchid-heavy flirt from start to finish. Discovered unconscious by the Phaeacian princess, Nausikaä, who is very authentically beating laundry on the rocks with her maids, Odysseus is certainly not as battered or “salt-begrimed” (in Homer’s phrase) as one might expect after punishing near-death at sea. Nausikaä, one of my favorite characters from ancient literature, is left undeveloped. She’s a mere girl here; Odysseus makes no fine speech-in-the-nude to prove his rank, and no premarital sparks fly between them. At court, her father the king wears a surprising amount of makeup, and her ripe, fleshy mother looks like Rahotep’s wife Nofret, in a splendid dual tomb sculpture from Old Kingdom Egypt.

  Carried back to Ithaca on a Phaeacian ship, Odysseus now undertakes his complex homecoming, which Homer draws out into so many fascinating stages. Naturally, this production is too obtuse to catch the ritual symmetries of it all. The swineherd Eumaeus immediately recognizes his long-gone master, so there’s no suspense there, and we’re left to wonder why Eumaeus is living in what looks like a see-through, faux-palm Daytona Beach Coke-and-fries stand. At the first encounter of father and son, far from Telemachus courteously giving the stranger the best seat, the young man hammily draws his menacing sword instead. As for Argus, the old, neglected hound who has waited faithfully for his master for twenty years—well, no Argus, doggone it!

  When Telemachus returns to the palace, the suitors twit him about his wispy, newly sprouted whiskers (“Does he have a hormone imbalance?” I asked myself. “The guy’s twenty!”). In a very badly photographed scene, Eurycleia washing the beggar’s feet recognizes Odysseus’ identifying scar more by sight than by shadowy touch; worse, the scar is shown as a simple, shiny shin scrape, contradicting Williams/Calypso’s earlier flirtatious palpation of the boar wound correctly placed above Odysseus’ knee. Alas, there’s no resounding clang—that wonderful Homeric detail—as the joyful Eurycleia drops Odysseus’ foot into the basin, nor does he grip her by the throat to silence her (there’s real tribalism for you). As we see and clearly hear when it is being swept, the floor of the banquet hall where the suitors will meet their deaths is paved with stone—a flagrant error, since Homer specifically describes how the primitive dirt floor must be scraped afterward to remove the buckets of blood.

  There’s an exquisite shot (like an Alma-Tadema painting) of Telemachus brooding near a window in his airy bedroom, with weapons hung behind him on the wall, attractively painted in Minoan hues—orange-red and green with bands of blue. Odysseus’ great bow has been sharing a storeroom with wonderful, giant terra-cotta amphoras, which are glimpsed far too briefly and could have given a better sense of ancient household operations. The stringing of the bow scene—surely one of the most thrilling episodes in the history of literature—is poorly directed. When the beggar Odysseus picks up the bow, the suitors should
n’t stop dead in their tracks and gawk; they should be laughing, careless, inattentive, dismissive. When the beggar not only easily strings the bow but sends the arrow through the ax-heads, then the suitors should pause, puzzled but still uncomprehending. When Odysseus throws off his rags and leaps onto the threshold, their bafflement must turn to horror. This production jumbles the brutal, escalating, unstoppable rhythm of Homer’s scene, reducing its power. Interestingly added, however, is the slamming of the doors (already secretly locked in Homer) as Odysseus strings the bow, followed by the magical transformation into a red robe after he lets the first arrow fly. But things get incredible as Odysseus lackadaisically seats himself on his throne and jaws at the curiously slow-moving and witless suitors, who are felled far too easily.

  An unlikely piece of casting that does work is Eric Roberts (Julia’s alienated brother) as Eurymachus, the vilest of the suitors. Roberts, who worked with Konchalovsky more than a decade ago on Runaway Train, is surprisingly effective, not only looking like a Greek warrior but projecting exactly the right degree of decadent insolence. A single arrow ingeniously pierces both Eurymachus and his lover, the treacherous maid, Melanthe, when she tries to save him by opening the door (in the poem, she’s hanged later with her sister quislings). Penelope, meanwhile, has un-Homerically fainted at all the slaughter. There is no final testing scene between Odysseus and his wife, but the marriage bed carved out of the living olive tree is indeed gratifyingly shown. However, the teleplay, unhelped by sluggish editing, misgauges the timing of the finale, which is too drawn out. Odysseus and Penelope mind-meld to awful, synthesized Little House on the Prairie music. As William Blake said, “Enough! or Too much.”

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  With the video of the NBC miniseries released to stores in August 1997, classical studies will be stuck, for better or worse, with this version of The Odyssey for the foreseeable future. Whatever its deficiencies, it will prove a useful pedagogical tool for courses on both the high school and college levels. I have had good luck with comparative projects: students enjoy and find profitable term papers that analyze a literary text and its adaptations by opera and film. Despite the fact that I have taught The Odyssey many times (using E. V. Rieu’s Penguin prose translation), the miniseries gave me renewed appreciation of Homer’s masterful shaping and structuring of plot. Nine out of ten times, the teleplay went wrong when it tried to improve on Homer, who after nearly three millennia has never lost his relevance and broad appeal.

  My view of the miniseries is probably biased by my long devotion to the Italian-made movie version of Homer’s poem, Ulysses (1954), starring Kirk Douglas, which I first saw on late-night television in the early 1970s. It is available on Warner Home Video but difficult to find. The miniseries will probably spark the video’s re-release and wider distribution, but a new copy ought to be made from a fresh or restored print of the film, since the colors have dulled. Ulysses was a risky venture produced by the then-unknown Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti. The director was Mario Camerini, and seven people, including Ben Hecht and Irwin Shaw, worked on the screenplay. The dialogue often sounds stilted to contemporary ears, since everyone in the international cast spoke the lines in his or her own language, with dubbing done afterward for each country where the film was shown.

  The imaginative quality of Ulysses is shown even in the credits, which contain a story in themselves, sweepingly scored: a tranquil sea gradually darkens until a storm batters and overwhelms a Greek sailing ship; then the sea quiets, and the sun returns. (The credits claim the production’s “exteriors” were shot on “the Mediterranean coasts and islands described in Homer’s Odyssey.”) Perhaps the film’s most daring innovation is to have Penelope and Circe played by the same actress, Silvana Mangano, De Laurentiis’ wife. Ulysses as Everyman therefore encounters the two faces of Eve, the ambiguous duality of woman that Western culture polarizes as Madonna and whore.

  The story begins as it should with Ulysses’ house invaded by suitors, over whom his wife struggles to maintain authority. Mangano makes a very grand and statuesque Penelope, whose inner suffering we feel. The nurse Eurycleia, I am happy to say, is as old as she should be, but the suitors are too fat, middle-aged, and epicene. We quickly get a performance by the Ithacan bard, Phemius, playing his lyre with a gorgeously ornamented mother-of-pearl pick, seen in close-up; his tale is the fall of Troy, which takes us into flashback.

  Bearded Kirk Douglas as Ulysses is crouching inside the belly of the wooden horse. When the Greeks emerge to take the city, the chaos in the streets is done far more completely than in the NBC miniseries. Fire, massacre, and rape are shown, as well as the insult to Neptune’s shrine by a gloating, wild-eyed Ulysses, who topples the god’s statue and gets a curse laid on him by the ranting princess, Cassandra. Even though the gods are never actually seen in this film, Italian Catholic culture, with its residual pagan superstition, seems to have given the makers of Ulysses an instinct for the crucial religious elements of Homer’s story.

  Now we jump back to Ithaca in the present: Penelope boldly chides the suitors, who are carousing with the slutty maids. We clearly catch the Homeric dirt floor of the great hall, with its central open pit where meat turns on spits. The dark stone walls, however, with their flat, squared blocks, look too medieval. As Penelope mourns her absent husband, there is a spectacular dissolve from her pensive face to the open sea; the camera pans down to find Ulysses lying face down in the sand, his body entwined with seaweed; a broken mast and shredded sail bob further out on the rocks.

  Nausikaä (Rossana Podestà), who gets a satisfyingly full-scale treatment in this film, is playing ball with her maids. Unfortunately, the girls are decked out in glaringly anachronistic, off-the-shoulder, rainbow-pastel prom dresses with frilly bodice ruffs. Still, the scene captures Homer’s moving contrast between the bruised, traumatized castaway and the merry young people of peacetime affluence, who think they’ve stumbled on a corpse. The screenplay’s sustained plot device is for the shaky, near-drowned Ulysses not to remember who he is or where he’s from. Nausikaä is instantly smitten but comports herself with a princess’s proper dignity.

  At her father’s court, the jewelry-laden king and his men are peculiarly wearing glittery, decolleté dresses with puffed sleeves and have their hair styled in dangly, oiled, Louisa May Alcott ringlets. Ulysses naturally comes across as very masculine in this near-drag environment. At the poem’s festive Phaeacian games (omitted by the miniseries but included here), the baited Odysseus reluctantly proves his mettle by hurling a heavy discus and challenging the vain young bucks to a test in any sport. In Ulysses, Douglas, who was a wrestling champion in college, does a great job of Greco-Roman wrestling with Umberto Silvestri, a renowned Italian athlete. Regrettably, Homer’s intergenerational theme—the seasoned veteran vanquishing novices who are the suitors’ age—is overlooked.

  Meanwhile, back on Ithaca, Eurycleia, with true tribal vigor, is furiously whipping the servant maid who betrayed the secret of Penelope’s nightly undone shroud to the suitors. The latter are busy outside with competitive games; the Homeric prominence of athletics in this film again exposes the conceptual weakness of the NBC miniseries. Antinous, the obnoxious head suitor, is well played by a swaggering Anthony Quinn in elegant, Darth Vader black. The Ithacan marriage theme is paralleled on Phaeacia, where the wedding day of Ulysses and Nausikaä has dawned. The princess’s bridal dress is an exact copy of the full-skirted, cinch-waisted costume of Cretan snake-priestess statuettes—minus the bare breasts: a modest cloth panel censors that glorious pagan display for modern consumption. But where’s the groom? The troubled Ulysses has wandered off to brood on the beach: “My name, my deeds—who am I?”

  Now we again move gracefully into flashback, as Ulysses slowly begins to remember the disasters that led to his marooning on Phaeacia, most of all his boastful self-confidence and sacrilegious denial of the gods. The screenplay treats the Cyclops
episode with great respect. For example, when the trapped Ulysses begs for mercy by appealing to Zeus’ sacred “laws of hospitality,” Polyphemus scornfully laughs: “What have I to do with Zeus? I am Neptune’s son!”—at which Ulysses’ men groan in despair. As the leader who must sustain morale and find some stratagem for escape, Douglas is charismatically convincing. I’ve always loved the lusty way, on arrival in Cyclops’ cave, he is shown grabbing a fistful of soft cheese and cramming it greedily in his mouth. In his autobiography, Douglas reveals that filming this detail was no easy matter: “We did seven takes of a scene where I had to taste giant white cheeses. They used the real thing, strong Italian goat cheese. I was so nauseated, for the eighth take, I had them slip in little pieces of banana.”1

  Later, as the Greeks barely escape on their ship, Ulysses cannot resist tempting fate. “Who’s master now—Neptune or Ulysses?” he exults. Roughly shoving past his own men on deck, who try to restrain him, he shouts back at the Cyclops howling on his cliff: “When your father asks who took your eye, tell him it was Ulysses! Ulysses—destroyer of cities, sacker of Troy, son of Laertes, and king of Ithaca!” Douglas delivers these soaring, trumpet-like lines to perfection, grinning, laughing, and roaring like a rampaging lion. Nowhere in film have I ever seen a better depiction of the terrifying vitality and half-mad hubris of ancient warriors.

  With a powerful sense of dynamics, the film cuts momentarily back to Ulysses in the glum present, as he stands mute and uncertain on the Phaeacian shore; then we return to him on his ship, where he is relaxed, leaning on the rail and staring out at the twilit sea. Chuckling, he says wistfully to his companion: “There’s a part of me that loves the familiar, the end of the journey, the cooking fires at home. There’s always the other part—that part loves the voyage, the open sea, storms, strange shapes of uncharted islands, demons, giants. Yes, Eurylochus, there’s part of me that’s always homesick for the unknown.” As an example of deftly condensed screenwriting, this passage is as fine an adaptation of a major work as any scholar can ask for. And Douglas again shows his virtuosity: he is as eloquent with these quiet, rueful, poetic lines as he is in his paroxysmic, full-volume gibes at the Cyclops.