The Odyssey: Networked Authenticity

This week, we're finally talking about the long-awaited The Odyssey. And there's a lot to unpack.

Let's start with the fact that the composer is Ludwig Göransson, someone we already know very well. But... I'm going to say something here at the risk of getting completely roasted…though we've always been honest on this channel: I genuinely wasn't that impressed by the musical approach. That said, I do think it's worth understanding where its strengths lie, and why it works the way it does.

I came across countless posts and videos on social media explaining why there was so much anticipation surrounding Göransson's score: that "Nolan told him to...", that "there would be no orchestra...", that "everything would be played with period instruments...", and so on and so forth.

But, honestly, had he relied on a large symphony orchestra, the puzzle simply wouldn't have come together. So I don't find that particular "requirement" especially remarkable.

Now, this is a film we've been talking about for quite some time, and I actually think this is the only episode in which, to talk about the music, we first have to stop talking about the music. We need to talk about the conditions that made that music possible, and with it, the networked ecosystem from which its power emerges.

The enormous amount of anticipation surrounding this film does more than position it as a "work of art." To me, it reveals structures of power within the industry. This aura of expectation was generated through the director's visibility and reputation, and was reinforced by the participation of highly celebrated figures across the industry, Göransson among them. I think The Odyssey operates as a point of convergence and of translation. But when we're dealing with a literary work whose historical accuracy remains uncertain, what exactly are we translating? And to what extent?

Drawing on Bruno Latour's concept of translation, translation is not simply the act of moving from one language to another. It involves the participation of multiple actors, each transforming intentions in order to produce something new. Translation does not merely transfer; it produces.

We possess fragments of an ancient world for which historical records exist, however incomplete they may be. Yet once someone is granted the extraordinary capacity to generate the kind of collective expectation that Christopher Nolan commands, virtually any story (or any point in history) along with all of its constituent elements, becomes susceptible to translation and to what I call retrat. I deliberately keep the Spanish term because it condenses an idea for which I find no satisfying equivalent in English. Derived from the verb retratar, I use it to describe the act of recovering, interpreting, and reworking something into a new form. In other words, the very operation that translation performs.

A network of elements makes possible the power behind this film and everything it proposes, from its source material to the professional prestige of those involved in bringing it to life. Everything, absolutely everything here operates within and through the network.

So no, the extraordinary excitement surrounding this film has never been (and never will be) the result of an isolated work alone.

Let's begin with the source material. The twenty-four books of The Odyssey (what Spanish calls cantos, a word that also means songs or chants.) have been the subject of discussion for centuries. Much has been debated about which parts might be historical and where the line between the extraordinary and the impossible truly lies. Viewed through that lens, what is perhaps most remarkable is not the certainty of their origins, but their endurance through time. I would argue that this endurance stems from the continued force of their symbolic capital.

The musical components, in turn, tell us something beyond the immediate fascination of hearing instruments from antiquity. They speak of perception, of constructed coherence, and of position. In other words, they participate in the creation of an "authenticity" surrounding a narrative, a history, and the moral structures upon which it rests. Those are the abstractions to be translated, produced, and circulated.

Across nearly two hours of music, Göransson builds his score around the aulos, the lyre, and thirty-five bronze gongs of different sizes. There is a clear emphasis on percussion and, despite Nolan's requests, a notable use of synthesizers that, in one way or another, mediate and make translation possible. They seem to say: this social structure and struggles comes from another time, yet it remains intelligible here and now. It is as though the synthesizer functions as the very artifact that transports us across time into the present, where the proposition continues to resonate, or, at the very least, becomes the mechanism that sets the work into motion. A clear example can be heard in Laestrygonians, where the synthesizer is unmistakably present before the cue ultimately resolves into voices.

Ultimately, although historical instruments occupy center stage, the sonic architecture remains profoundly contemporary. Its symbolic capital is still active. Paradoxically, then, The Odyssey achieves authenticity not by eliminating the contemporary, but by weaving it together with the ancient. It constructs resemblance; it builds a living bridge to Ancient Greece. Musical and sonic authenticity become the filter through which The Odyssey renders that world believable, not by transporting us into a past translated in its entirety, but by interweaving temporalities.

Now let's consider the lyre. It is the instrument most closely associated with the hero, and this creates a fascinating symbolic coherence when we think about his defining tool: the bow, whose very existence depends upon a tensioned string. Here we find another point of coherence. The lyre becomes connected to the protagonist and to everything that surrounds him: his decisions, his sacrifices, and the processes that define his journey.

The aulos, by contrast, performs a very different function. It places the background before the figure, that is, the character within his context, among his contemporaries and their conceptual world. The aulos becomes part of this network of authenticity because it evokes collectivity and the worldview of its historical moment. We can hear this clearly in Odysseus, where the aulos dominates the opening before percussion and voices gradually enter, constructing the work's epic and historical weight.

Source: YouTube

The thirty-five bronze gongs contribute the network's remaining element of coherence: embodiment. This is particularly evident in The Trial of the Bow/Vengeance, which, for me, became one of the film's defining moments (and the cue that stayed with me most after leaving the cinema). Why? Because their resonance is experienced not only through hearing but through the body itself. And it is through the body that we are able to be (and to inhabit) the world before us.

Within this authenticity, then, we can identify a sense of lightness, humanity, and embodiment. These become the emotional consequences of the story's decisions, carried through the resonance of the gongs.

There is, however, another essential actor in this network of authenticity and coherence: sound design. As I've argued throughout this episode, meaning is never produced in isolation. Meaning is a network.

For that reason, the music created under Göransson's department would not possess the same expressive force without the work of another department, led by Craig Henighan. And while I mention him because he heads the department, let's remember that everything here operates through the network. Alongside him is an entire team responsible for deciding that a battle should be framed by the resonance of a particular gong, or that a painful decision should be accompanied by the tension of a high string. A blow is never simply a blow without these people. Ancient Greece does not sound like Ancient Greece without its distinctive woodwinds and breath.

Once we recognize that connection, we begin to perceive ourselves as participants within this network, allowing us to recalibrate our sense of wonder at the way its meanings continue to resonate within our own practices.

Authenticity does not emerge from the score alone, nor from the sound design alone. It emerges from the relationship between them. This network of sonic coherence allows meaning to filter into our own structures of understanding, carrying us from astonishment to integration.

Ultimately, the network woven through visibility, cultivated expectation, the authenticity of the musical architecture, and the sensations produced by sound transports the body to a place where we begin to question what we appropriate and articulate in order to make sense of our own existence, and, ultimately, of this film's proposition.

And there is one final thought that I cannot let go of…

The Odyssey is traditionally divided into twenty-four books what Spanish calls cantos. Not chapters. Not scenes. Cantos.

Perhaps that is no coincidence. A story whose very structure is rooted in cantos continues to find, through music, one of its most powerful ways of coming back into existence, and, in doing so, of translating, validating, and restructuring itself.