COMMENTARY: It is not quite true that we live in a post-heroic age but certainly true that our cynical modern era has real issues with heroism, whether sacred or profane.
It was the Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler who crooned in 1984, “Where have all the good men gone, and where are all the gods? Where’s the streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds?” Holding Out for a Hero was a bombastic, catchy tune perfectly in sync with the go-go 1980s (and part of the soundtrack to the hit movie Footloose) but we’re still looking for heroes.
Director Christopher Nolan’s new version of Homer’s The Odyssey has become an event film, both praised and reviled, engendering a thousand hot takes equal to those thousand ships that Helen of Troy’s capture caused. Conservatives have both praised it and criticized it. Vanity Fair magazine gloated that the film “was going to drive the right wing completely insane” because it was a liberal/left riff on the ancient tale. Matt Damon’s Odysseus — tormented by his role in the Trojan War, morose and filled with regret — doesn’t seem very heroic or clever. Professor Emily Wilson, whose recent translation of Homer was used by
