relatable

Judging by the amount of ambivalent feelings toward Odysseus in all the blog posts about the slaughter (mine included), it’s pretty clear that in the 2000 years that have elapsed since it was first published, we are all hopeful our moral ideals have advanced somewhat. And it’s true, they have: like Telemachus, we've all experienced the soul-crushing despair of someone stealing all of your food, but it is no longer a societally acceptable response to murder them in retaliation. And yet there are still parts of the Odyssey that are strangely familiar to all of us, even in a world so alien to what Homer experienced. One obvious example of this is the heartwarming reunion of Homer with his beloved Argos, who still recognizes his master after 20 years of his absence: Odysseus sheds a single tear, and the faithful dog can finally die in peace at last. There’s other elements, too, that make it a satisfying and familiar read for our modern times: the theme of homecoming and reuniting as a family, and Telemachus’s abbreviated coming-of-age story as he tries to measure up to his father’s example.

In O Brother, Where Art Thou as an adaptation of The Odyssey, these same ideas come into play as Ulysses tries to get back to his family and Tommy (even though he’s not really a Telemachus parallel as I’m implying) tries to make it for himself in the world. But one of the most striking things about O Brother is how it goes beyond these broad themes to still mean something to us today. Just like The Odyssey is a representation of Ancient Greek heroic mythology and a cultural cross-section of the times, O Brother does the same thing, albeit humorously, for the American viewer.

The world of The Odyssey didn’t spring from Homer’s imagination fully formed (get it?) just for the purpose of this one epic poem; Odysseus instead finds himself in the same Greek mythological universe we’re all familiar with, facing the same belligerent gods and deadly monsters as every other classic Greek hero. At first glance, it might seem like this elaborate, complex universe is the antithesis of American entertainment: this country has only been around for a fraction of the time of the Greeks and an uncomfortably large amount of that time was spent squashing other people’s cultural traditions instead of creating our own. But in O Brother, we do see many examples of American semi-mythological motifs that, although we don’t realize it, might play a similar role in the American collective unconscious as Scylla and Charybdis did for the Greeks.

One of the most obvious examples of this is George “Babyface” Nelson, who was actually based on a real figure, but whose character in O Brother goes beyond that. It’s kind of a weird dynamic, but it come up in a lot of other movies and books: the bank robber who is simultaneously the unambiguous default criminal, and inflated into a larger-than-life semi-hero. Every wild west movie and a lot of current hero movies as well feature one of these figures, and although the hero is usually the one defeating them, there’s also an enviable air of mystery and power around this villain themselves too. Think of The Dark Knight. It obviously features Batman as the classic hero, but the Joker’s ingenious plan to rob a high-security bank is also set up as an impressive and admirable feat. In less recent movie examples, there’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), with two outlaws as the actual main characters, and Jesse James (1939) about another bandit. In both films, the outlaws are dangerous criminals, based on real people but inflated to heroic proportions.

There’s also the music in O Brother, much of which comes from adaptations of real american folk songs passed down for generations. Traditional American folk music serves many of the same functions as bards in The Odyssey and ancient Greece: entertainment, bonding, and passing traditional stories -- and, by extension, traditional ideals -- down to the next generation. Like The Odyssey and other Greek myths reinforce the value of hospitality and following the gods, the folk songs in O Brother refer back to American traditional ideals, whether that’s being a hardworking “Man of sorrow” who longs to return to his homeland, or a respectable (respectability dynamic!!), pious person “going down to the river to pray, studying about that good old way.”

O Brother is, at times, a clear adaptation of The Odyssey to fit into the world of the depression-era American South. But it's also an adaptation of the hero's journey itself for an American audience, and it's interesting because it brings out some of the ways that even now, 2000 years later, we’re not so different from Homer and the ancient Greeks. We have our own mythology with figures that we inflate, idolize, and let shape our ideals and visions of the world. Like the Greeks had their Achilles and Odysseus, we have heroic bank robbers, downtrodden convicts who overcome all the odds, and musicians who sell their soul to the devil. And as the Greeks’ ideas of justice were steeped in bard’s tales of hospitality and obedience to the gods’ will, so are ours shaped, maybe, by the echoes of American traditional culture that, even if we don't realize it, still mold our visions of heroes and morality today.

fate and free will

One of the most prominent motifs in the scenes of Odysseus’s homecoming is the idea of testing people to prove their loyalty. When he arrives back to Ithaca, Odysseus doesn’t tell anyone who he really is until he tells a long, elaborate lie about his identity and tries to suss out their allegiance to him first. He and Athena collaborate in testing the suitors, and Odysseus goes to meet them, disguised as a beggar, to see who will offer him some of their food. But passing the test doesn’t promise safety: Athena makes it clear that even the suitors who give Odysseus food will still be slaughtered in the end. The scene is confusing, but it brings out one of the most interesting aspects of The Odyssey: the complex relationship between individual free will, fate, and the gods’ influence.

Personal morality clearly plays an important role in the Odyssey. The importance of being kind to strangers, for example, is a driving force in the main plot: the suitors are the bad guys because they are abusing Telemachus’s hospitality, and in Odysseus’s travels, we hear the saying “every stranger comes from Zeus” more than once. Individual choices are also significant: the sailors met their fate because “the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all.” It’s clear throughout the epic that Homer doesn’t feel any sympathy toward them, and the reader shouldn’t either: not only did they deserve what they got, they did it to themselves, too. Odysseus’ identity as a hero stems not just from his exploits in the Trojan war but also from his bright ideas, determination, and loyalty to his beloved wife Penelope: heroic traits because they are moral, and require great personal willpower to achieve.

But the impact of free will is complicated because “doing the right thing” doesn’t always depend on doing what’s compassionate or logical, but instead on following the will of the gods. And the will of the gods is often fickle. While marooned on the island of Helios, Odysseus’ men are starving, and only eat one of the sacred cattle as a last resort. They promise Helios a great temple with heaps of sacrifices once they return home: but he kills them all at sea anyway. When Poseidon returns from Ethiopia to see Odysseus safely returned home, he has no qualms about transferring his wrath to the innocent Phaeacians instead, and after a quick and lighthearted brainstorming session with Zeus, he not only turns their best sailors to stone but surrounds each port with mountains that will destroy the Phaeacians’ entire livelihood as well.

There’s also the question of fate, which at times seems to be driven by the gods and at times beyond even them. From the beginning of the Telemachiad we see Athena carefully molding Telemachus into the hero that best completes her story, and she does the same thing to Odysseus, helping him to succeed outright and twisting events to make the story more exciting behind the scenes. The reader might wonder how much of either person’s heroism is their own and how much is Athena’s creation. But then there’s also the numerous prophecies that come true regardless of how much people try to thwart them, and that not even the gods can change. In the case of the unfortunate Phaeacians, Zeus and Poseidon smiting them fulfilled a prophecy they had known for years, and the gods weren’t even aware of it.

All of these elements make Odysseus’s hero’s journey more complex: It’s hard to tell how much of his success is due to his own actions, and how much is Athena, or fate, or those same influences acting on his unfortunate adversaries. It all lines up to make Odysseus the hero, but at the same time, it’s a little harder to root for him when it seems like so much of his success isn't really his own doing.