*Spoiler alert for The Odyssey and Project Hail Mary*
Back in the old days there was a quaint little practice known as reading. This archaic mode of information sharing required a reader with enough resources to acquire printed material as well as a fundamental knowledge of how to translate the mysterious scrawling into something that wasn’t complete and incomprehensible gibberish. For example, you may use this so called reading skill to read a restaurant menu and order the fish that you like instead of a spinach omelette you do not like. Or you read the instruction manual instead of just trying to assemble your kid’s Christmas bicycle unaided. Because you’ve got your pride. You don’t need no damn instructions. And if you really want to show off your reading skill, you can read gematria decodes because you can tell these are reliable. The narrators tell you so. Quite frequently. Annoyingly and insanely frequently. Almost like they need to say it instead of just being an actual reliable source needs to be, projected, instead of relying on actually being reliable.
Because this tedious reading thing doesn’t just require an education to read and some form of payment in a late stage capitalist nightmare. There needs to be a writer. And that’s a mixed bag. Some writers are better than others, whether it be for entertainment to distract others from how they are struggling to pay the rent bill, or they’re targeting people who wouldn’t recognize propaganda if it bit them on the ass. The marketing for sports/conspiracy gematria has always played to it being a somewhat fun method of acquiring secret and forbidden knowledge that just happens to coincide with bigotry and undreamt of wealth. Every single one of these narrators is unreliable. The profit motive is there. The willingness to contradict just for the spur of the moment influencer economy points is there. The sociopathic lack of giving a shit about others is there. The doubling down on the craziness is there. The constant drive and search for new cult members, braggadocio, confluence with other bad ideas, etc…. It just never ended.
Sometimes effective entertainment writing will deliberately use an unreliable narrator as a driving plot point. And sometimes this can become an effective method of injecting societal concerns into the entertainment. And as these get adapted into films the burden of slogging your way through hundreds of pages is removed. You just might be forced to put up with an angle you don’t agree with when 100% objectivity is virtually impossible.
The narrators of Fight Club, American Psycho, and Shutter Island are unreliable since they’re crazy. Golden Caufirld in Catcher in the Rye is heavily biased. Children are naive and innocent. The unreliable narrator is officially a trope, a trope that exists because in real life the unreliable narrator exists in its many different forms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator
(Throwing that in because a red flag for spotting an unreliable narrator is insistence that they are the ultimate source of all knowledge without providing references.)
My two favorite movies this year are Project Hail Mary and The Odyssey. And both have unreliable narrators. In PHM the protagonist suffers from a (deliberate) drug induced amnesia who slowly requires his lost memories over the course of the story. The part about man made climate change is more clear in the book. The clock is ticking to save the Earth. And fortunately man made climate change bought us some extra time. The alien microbe is absorbing the Sun’s energy and a super long trip to another star system holds the cure. The creative choice allows our hero to work hard as tension builds instead of not having much of a movie and magically knowing the answer within 10 minutes of film time. Throw in an alien that sociopaths and xenophobes can’t appreciate that makes grown adults with real feelings cry.
But I find even more interesting is The Odyssey. Not more entertaining, but thought provoking. The mere fact that this is the topic Nolan chose, I find fascinating. The same way the Vietnam War sparked movies of war veterans trying to re-assimilate back into society (Rambo). The source material has been part of philosophical discussion for THOUSANDS of years. And not only is Odysseus an unreliable narrator, the question of his reliability is part of that philosophical discussion. Translation and interpretation are an integral part of the lore. Not just the plot but the subsequent arguments. Here’s some other content I’ve absorbed from YouTube:
https://youtu.be/u0Y8tFcpWnI?is=9jerJZiBRU2IfjQZ
(Phil0bot philosophy channel)
https://youtu.be/u0Y8tFcpWnI?is=9jerJZiBRU2IfjQZ
(MadMorph Movie Club channel)
These are smart people with worthy opinions. Reliable narrators.
Previously, my experience with The Odyssey was
1). High school English - the finale with Odysseus returning home and killing Penelope’s suitors.
2) Bits and pieces of chapters stolen and thrown into other works. Usually the Sirens.
3. Xena Warrior Princess did the whirlpool story and devoted an entire separate episode in the second season titled, Ulysses. And now we know Homer was full of shit and Ulysses fell in love with Xena.
These things, while fun like PHM and didn’t prepare me for the unreliable narrator. So wrapping up Part 1 of the blogging. My three takeaways in my highly personalized and opinionated recap of the Odyssey.
1) The in movie referencing to the Sea Peoples was frequent. I can’t help but relate that to current day big issues like the war with Iran and resource depletion.
2) It’s complicated. Odysseus is a complicated man. It’s not black and white. It does appear that like a conspiracy theorist all the good and cool stuff he accomplished because he’s study and cool. All the bad stuff, the Gods are out to get him. The convenient scapegoat.
3) With intent I do not waste my time on Twixter anymore. But I have heard that there’s pointless argument about culture war topics instead of substantial issues. Like the casting of Page and a black woman for Helen of Troy. These are the talking points of the grifter. The talking points of someone unwilling to focus on meaningful content. The talking points of an unreliable narrator that will not talk about unreliable narrators because it hits too close to home and can’t express a complicated issue without resorting to a two or three digit number in a gematria decode.
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