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.