Unconscious in the Cosmic Ocean of Consciousness
Y’know, reading all this hubbub about historical accuracy in “The Odyssey” film, well, it is nonsense. The haters and naysayers come across as ridiculous purists unaware they’re as dirty as the glass they throw stones through. I do not care if Helen is black as night. In historical reality Black people traveled far and wide from Sub-Saharan Africa. They intermarried into other cultures and vice versa. How else did Humans ever get out of Africa, LOL? The Ancient hunter-gatherer tribes of the British Isles and coastal Iberia were black skinned people with blue eyes and curly hair anyway. This discovery upended a conventional, Eurocentric narrative of early European settlers being mostly White folks. The current fuss over Christopher Nolan’s epic film is the same type of tempests in old teapots. Deriding such as “woke” betrays the persistent ignorance of Humans whose minds seem as clogged up with debris as a storm drain after a hurricane.
Furthermore, the movie is a movie, a fictional adaptation of a book. As such many liberties were taken as movies usually do with books. This especially true if the book is dense literature in the form of an epic poem. And Homer’s books are themselves fiction, a mix of mythology written in Ancient Greek as a long poem. Why are purists of all kinds so upset? Cinema critics are raving about the movie as a movie. As a movie, it is a real as a movie, so the adventures of Odysseus occurred as real within the context of a movie as a work of fiction. People get so wigged out when their interpretation of reality clashes with another’s creative manifestation into reality of their vision.
The interesting thing is as researchers and psychologists have noted, the human brain experiences the events of a movie as real, and its events are stored in human memory in real time. They elicit the same emotional responses as if they themselves experienced the events of the film they’re watching. Cognition makes a distinction between virtual and real, but both are versions of reality. Memory, however, especially the emotional feelings stored across time, does not make such distinctions. Dr. Diana W. Pasulka dives deep into this issue in her 2019 book, American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology. Is the reason so many moviegoers are upset is because “The Odyssey” as they visually experienced it is at odds with their memory of epic prose as read and analyzed back in their college and university classes? That we all have a grotesquely incorrect and actually flat-out wrong Modern ideas of ethics, race, culture, gender, and ethnicity from Prehistoric and Ancient Times?
A few friends have asked me to join them to watch the writer and director Christopher Nolan’s cinematic interpretation of Homer’s long ago epic poem. Each time I declined. I’ve developed the bad habit of waiting to watch movies at home on a big screen TV. Being profoundly Hard of Hearing in an age of gigantic booming soundtracks drowning out clear speech, I need closed captions with subtitles. Plus the costs of watching films on the Big Screen have escalated to outrageous levels. I’ll just wait to watch them for free on the big screen of my home Smart TV. Of course, by the time one buys all the audio-video smart equipment and subscriptions to multiple streaming services, one can wait to watch it otherwise for free. So, yes, you oligarchic tyrants, finances is a huge reason. And…yes, bathroom breaks, really. Bathroom breaks are necessary for well-hydrated people during a time of two and three plus hour long features with another half hour of trailers and commercials and silly rules.
Haven’t even seen the movie yet. Sooner or later I will at home – with closed captions and subtitles – between bathroom breaks. I’ve read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey decades ago, twice each, in high school and again in college. Enjoyed those poems, enjoy reading current research into the Late Bronze Age Collapse of which the Trojan War was a part of, and will most likely enjoy watching Christopher Nolan’s movie as a movie. I do not care what the skin color of any of the actors and actresses. What matters is are they able to pull off convincing portrayals of their characters within the context not of Homer’s epic poem but of Nolan’s film?
Puristy people hating on “The Odyssey” have so long ago missed the point they can’t even see the sea twas lost in. Homer’s ghost isn’t even gonna waste time trying to haunt such a ship of fools.
William Dudley Bass
Friday 31 July 2026
Revised Sunday 2 August 2026
Shoreline/Seattle, WA
USA
Earth
Sol
Copyright © 2026 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.