STUDY GUIDE FOR A DISCUSSION OF "WATERWORLD" AND THE "ODYSSEY"

Comparing & contrasting the heroes:

The main character of "Waterworld", played by Kevin Costner, is in some ways a modern-day reincarnation of Odysseus. He has no name, and is known only as "the Mariner." ("Mariner" means "sailor.") Both Odysseus and the Mariner are archetypes of at least two kinds of heroes, the Survivor and the Eternal Wanderer. One student in the Monday class asked whether they are also archetypes of the Seeker. This is a good question. But neither is consciously seeking some form of knowledge he wants. They differ from Gilgamesh and Tripitika or Monkey in that sense. So the archetype of the Seeker may not fit quite as well.

There are some obvious features the two men have in common.

1. Both are clever, especially in terms of their insight into the minds and motives of others. Just as Odysseus shows himself able to trick giants and witches, even though they should have more powerful minds than he has, the Mariner shows himself able to outsmart entire communities of people who are hostile to him. (This happens both at the Atoll, a mini-city on a coral reef, and on the abandoned oil tanker, which is the floating city occupied by the bad guys, who are called Smokers.)
2. Both are skilled liars, and depend on lying to survive. Both know when others are lying and how to get the truth out of them.
3. Both are ruthless in their pursuit of practical goals. Just as Odysseus was willing to kill the infant son of Hektor to prevent a future war, the Mariner is initially willing to throw the little girl Enola off his boat so that there will be enough food and water for the two remaining survivors. Later he's also at first willing to "rent" the older Atoll refugee, Helen, to a drifter in exchange for some old maps from a National Geographic.
4. The two heroes both suffer because of the stupidity of their respective "crews". Odysseus suffered because his crewmen were naïve in their confrontation with Circe and undisciplined in the episode with the cattle of the Sun God. In the same way the Mariner suffered because Helen used his harpoon without understanding how it worked and because she insisted on meeting and trading with the insane sailor who wound up trying to rent her for sex.
5. The two heroes both also suffer because of their unreasonable mistrust of their shipmates. Odysseus refused to tell his crew what was in the bag of winds Aeolus gave him, and as a result, they refused to trust him and opened it on their own. Helen didn't know which harpoon to use as a weapon because the Mariner had refused to show her how anything on the boat worked. And the Mariner lost Enola because he insisted on leaving her alone on his boat at a time when he knew the Smokers were looking for her. He did this so that he could take Helen down to the bottom to see the ruins of the cities for herself, since he assumed she wouldn't believe him if he just told her what was there.
6. The "bad guys" have similar character problems in both stories. The Smokers of "Waterworld" were practically clones of the Suitors in the Odyssey, if you think about it. Moreover, the survivors of the Atoll who opposed the Mariner were similar to Odysseus's opponents, including those who challenged him at the court of Alcinous and the faithless servants.
7. Odysseus's main character flaw is pride, shown by his imprudent arrogance in bragging to Polyphemos about his identity. There's a somewhat similar scene between the Mariner and the blond, red-faced Smoker spy who first tried to engage him in conversation at the store on the Atoll. While it was not a mistake for the Mariner to avoid the Smoker spy, he showed no appropriate caution, and in fact made an open display before Helen of his contempt for any stranger who would dare to talk to him. He was also overtly hostile to Gregor, the old man in the balloon who eventually saved his life.
8. The main goal of Odysseus's journey was to return to his family--or so we're told, at any rate. In paying his debt to Helen for freeing him from certain death at the Atoll, the Mariner became a member of a family for the first time in his life. Although the plot lines are a little different, both stories deal with the taming of a lone warrior who must connect or reconnect with a family. Nor is this a minor theme, even in a modern macho film like Waterworld. One of the most memorable scenes in the film is the scene of the Mariner teaching Enola to swim. And she later became the only person who understood the Mariner enough to offer him fitting praise, in the lines that begin with, "He doesn't have a name, so death can't find him…"

However, you shouldn't conclude that Odysseus and the Mariner are exactly alike, or that their stories address all the same issues and concerns. The similarities are interesting. And I'm willing to bet that Kevin Costner is quite familiar with Homer's Odyssey. However, I'm also willing to bet that he's equally familiar with famous water stories from other traditions. For example, "Waterworld" also invites comparison to the primordial flood story from Gilgamesh, which you've read. And it invites comparison to the biblical story of Noah and the flood (see chapters 6-9 of Genesis, pages 682-6 of your textbook). It also invites comparison to the Greco-Roman myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha (told in your text on pages 651-4, in Ovid's Metamorphosis). Costner may have had not only the Odyssey, but all these other stories in mind. Yet each of these stories is different from the others in significant ways.

Moreover, Costner's film introduces some uniquely modern ideas that would have been alien both to the biblical writers and to Homer. I'm referring not only to the ecological theme, but to other ideas as well. For example, no one in the ancient world would have understood the intense anxiety the people of Waterworld feel when faced with strangers. Nor would they have understood how a community could offer most of its members roughly the same social status, as opposed to dividing itself into heirarchies and classes. These ideas would have been particularly alien to the Homeric tradition. They're identifiably modern as well.

Therefore, any essay question I'd give you about these two works would probably require you to contrast them as well as compare them. For example, I might ask questions like these:

1. Both Odysseus and the Mariner have a lot to learn from women. But Odysseus learns his lessons by encountering women along the way, in the forms of witches and ghosts and monsters, and by defeating them or escaping their clutches in battles of cunning. In contrast, the Mariner must accept a woman and a young girl on board as his first and only crew. This means he must assimilate their virtues while also transforming them into something more like himself. How does this difference change the lessons the two men learn?
2. Both Odysseus and the Mariner must accept responsibility for a child in order to be saved from oblivion. But Odysseus must reclaim and recognize his own child, and validate that child's claim to kingship. The Mariner, in contrast, must rescue a strange child from a world he doesn't even believe in. How does this difference change the nature of their two different accomplishments at the ends of the stories?
3. Odysseus is lost in a small sea surrounded on all sides by land, land he knows and has seen many times, now held tantalizingly just out of his reach by the gods. The Mariner is also surrounded by sea. But he has to find a tiny speck of land no one except Enola has ever seen before, land most men no longer believe exists. How is each of these differing tasks helpful in developing the character of the hero for whom it's intended?
4. Compare and contrast Odysseus's trip to the Underworld in Book 11 of the Odyssey to the Mariner's trip to the ruins of the underwater city in Waterworld. Consider questions like the following. Why must Odysseus go alone, whereas the Mariner must take Helen to see what he's seen? Why does Odysseus meet lost people, whereas the Mariner goes beach-combing for lost things? Why does the Mariner take Helen there to prove something, whereas Odysseus goes to find something out? (See notes on symbolism and allegory, further on.)
5. Compare/contrast Polyphemos from the Odyssey to the Deacon (the one-eyed leader of the Smokers) from Waterworld. If you had to encounter a terrible villain, which one of these would you rather deal with, and why? (See notes on symbolism and allegory, below.)

Up to this point, we've discussed mainly the characters and the situations in the two stories. But the characters and the situations suggest ideas as well. That brings us to our next subject, symbolism and allegory. Both stories have symbolic elements that suggest allegorical content. These include symbolic names of characters and places.

For a discussion of symbolism in the Odyssey, see the study guide to the Odyssey on the web page. Symbolism and allegory are most evident, of course, during the tales of the voyage in books 9-12.

The Mariner is a symbolic title, making it significant that he has no name. (Just before the final battle scene at the oil tanker, the little girl Enola actually explains to one of the Smokers why he has no name. These are significant lines.) The epithet "Smokers" is also symbolic; the bad habit of smoking illustrates every negative trait of their character. Helen may or may not be named after Helen of Troy, the infamous lady who started the Trojan War. But Enola's name can't possibly be coincidence. First of all, as a student pointed out yesterday, "Enola" is "Alone" spelled backwards. But more significantly, the World War II bomber that dropped the Atom Bomb on Hiroshima was named the "Enola Gay." The Smokers live on an oil tanker, but it isn't just any old oil tanker. It's the Exxon Valdez, the most infamous oil tanker in history. The name can just barely be seen on the stern when the ship finally sinks. Also, they worship a man named Joe Hazelwood, whose name and picture are in the ship office. They call him "Saint Joe." Joe Hazelwood was in fact the captain of the Exxon Valdez. For those of you who don't remember, the Exxon Valdez ran aground at a wildlife refuge in Alaska in 1988 or 1989, partly because Captain Joe Hazelwood was sleeping off a bout of drinking and was not at the wheel. The resulting oil spill was the biggest one in history and resulted in the greatest loss of land and wildlife in history (well, so far, anyway).

That's enough background for now.

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