The myth of Odysseus in cinema: Political and semantic allusions (Based on the Coen brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou?)

Abstract

The paper presents an analysis of the poetics of the Coen brothers’ movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) in relation to motifs of Homer’s poem The Odyssey. The film opens with an epigraph quoting the opening lines of The Odyssey. This is a direct reminiscence, but the film’s authors employ a wide range of other artistic means, especially multiple allusions to the content and motifs of Homer’s’ poem. One should note that the principles of intertextual arrangement in the film pertain more to literary reception than to the cinematographic one, where the connection to the source plot and imagery is evident. At the same time, inasmuch as the meaning of the Coens’ movie is, in general, clear, without the direct reference to Homer’s text at the start of the film multiple allusions and references to the poem might have been hidden too deeply. Thus, the direct quote from The Odyssey on the one hand, and the indirect allusions and references to it in the body of the film on the other hand, help the authors to foreground social and political trends in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. In other words, allusions to Homer add more depth to the film, whose intertext embeds it in the text of world literature. Also, analogies and parallels both to the classical text and to cinematographic texts of the Coens’ predecessors exist in the film as a travesty, and that brings the poetics of their movie even closer to the poetics of literary reception.