Christopher Nolan’s Brilliant Imitation

The movie director Christopher Nolan has created an original work of art that uses an existing work of art as its point of departure. His movie “The Odyssey” appropriates what it can use from Homer’s Odyssey and goes merrily on its way. The result is a visually gorgeous eruption of cinematc energy. Movie making and movie watching, it is safe to say, will never be quite the same. Nolan has not translated the Odyssey; instead, he has created what is known in literature as an imitation — a composition that claims only to embody the spirit, the Weltanschauung of its original. An imitation uses  the greatest freedom in choice of subject matter and detail that is compatible with faithfulness to the inner spirit of its original. The outstanding example in English literature is probably Samuel Johnson’s great poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes”, which Johnson wrote in imitation of the Roman poet Juvenal’s tenth satire.  Johnson’s subject matter is “mankind, from China to Peru”, while Juvenal’s satire is limited to Romans in the early empire. But both satires deride the pretensions of human nature to mastery and control against the backdrop of the treacheries of life. Nolan follows the plot of the Odyssey and reproduces its most famous incidents —