Homer’s Odyssey is about Odysseus’s ten-year journey home to Ithaca. Odysseus and his crew were blown far off course to exotic unknown lands. Odysseus resultantly had many adventures, including the famous encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus, and an audience with the seer Teiresias in Hades. On the island of Thrinacia, Odysseus’s men ate the cattle sacred to the sun-god Helios. For this sacrilege Odysseus’s ships were destroyed, and all his men perished.
“Odysseus had not eaten the cattle, and was allowed to live; he washed ashore on the island of Ogygia, and lived there with the nymph Calypso. After seven years, the gods decided to send Odysseus home; on a small raft, he sailed to Scheria, the home of the Phaeacians, who gave him passage to Ithaca.
Frustrated, spiritually spent Odysseus (Matt Damon) to self: “First the decade-long siege of Troy, and then another ten years to get home! Good Lord!
“If only the young and impetuous Paris hadn’t fallen head-over-heels in love with Lupita Nyong’o‘s middle-aged Helen! On top of which she’s…what? Roughly 15 if not 20 years older than the 20something Paris? What could he have possibly seen in her? An obviously beautiful woman, yes, but hardly the most beautiful in the entire ancient Greek-Aegean world. At best Paris saw her as an exotic MILF, but was this mad passion worth the deaths of so many hundreds if not thousands of Greek and Trojan soldiers?”
Overview: Who needs ten years to return home? A year or two, maybe, but not a full decade.
Odysseus’s wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway in Chris Nolan’s film) had logical suppositions that would lead any reasonable woman to believe that her husband is dead. Who wouldn’t presume this after a couple of years?
What kind of wife shrugs her shoulders and says, “Ah, well…my husband has obviously been delayed on his way home, but I trust that he’ll eventually return so I will wait and keep myself chaste until the glorious day of arrival.” Commendable but not when you’ve been waiting ten fucking years. That’s ridiculous.
What if Odysseus couldn’t find his way back until 12 years had passed? Or 15 or 20? How many years of absence are tolerable or understandable? I say no more than two. Okay, three max.
If I were Penelope I would say after four or five years, “All right, screw it…Odysseus has obviously drowned or been killed or has settled down with another woman somewhere. I guess it’s time to start thinking about finding a replacement husband. What am I supposed to do? Wait until I’m 50 or 55 years old?
“And someone younger this time. My husband had begun to slow down or, you know, lose rigidity before he left. God knows what he’ll be like in the sack when he returns. If I’m going to remarry I want a man with a phallus like a piece of petrified wood.”
And so, naturally, the word gets out and several suitors start hanging around Penelope…all of them looking to “make it happen”. But then Odysseus finally returns, and in a big thundering climax he and his son Telemachus murder all the guys who were hoping for a little Penelope action.
Dying would-be suitor, arrow in his chest, bleeding on the floor: “What the fuck, dude? You’ve been gone for ten years and you expected your wife to…what, just wait and wait and wait? If you had been among us and some other king of Ithaca had been absent for ten years, you know you’d be looking to win Penelope’s favor and maybe discreetly do her on the side when no one’s looking…you’d be acting no differently. So why have you and Telemachus killed so many of us? What have we done that is so awful? Nothing.”
