Hi friends!

Thanks to signing up to my newsletter Columns (credit to Lena for the name!), a bit of a one-stop shop for my writing on art, life, culture and history. This is my first one — I’ll be figuring out the format as I go, so please feel free to let me know what you enjoy or would like more (or less) of.

This week I’ve been adjusting to life back home after spending most of January in the Snowy Mountains shooting the first block of Cooee, the feature film I co-wrote with Toby Morris & Sam Burnett. I’m unspeakably proud of the film we’re making and what our extraordinary cast and crew were able to pull off on a microbudget. Everyone took what we had on the page and made it better — funnier, braver, more joyful and more harrowing. I’m already counting down the days until we head back to Jindy to finish the job.

Meanwhile it’s still the quiet summer season in commercial land, so that’s left me with time to obsess over new projects, hit the cinemas, and catch up on my not-so-light summer reading…

War and Grace in The Iliad

A passage from Emily Wilson’s superb new translation of Homer’s ancient epic The Iliad has haunted me ever since I set the book down last week. 

Greek warrior Achilles has cut a bloody swathe across the battlefield outside the besieged city of Troy. His beloved companion, kind and gentle Patroclus, was killed by the Trojan Prince Hector, and Achilles’ grief has transformed him into a one-man roaring rampage of revenge. He drives hundreds of Trojans into a river, murdering them as they try to shed their weapons and armour and escape.

Yet, in the midst of the bloodshed, Achilles pauses. He’s startled to see a long-forgotten face.

Amongst the helpless Trojans is Lycaon, a boy who Achilles took prisoner earlier in the war and sold as a slave. In the intervening years Lycaon won his freedom, and overcame incredible odds to make it home. But then, mere days after returning to his family, Lycaon is back on the battlefield — and back in Achilles’ power. The boy throws himself at Achilles feet, begging for mercy, trying to use his unlucky tale to squeeze a drop of sympathy from the blood-drenched demi-god.

It’s hopeless. Achilles replies:

He slits the boy’s throat and throws his body into the depths of the river.

We meet hundreds of soldiers like Lycaon throughout The Iliad. New readers can often be turned off by the huge glut of names; and admittedly the early chapters make you worry that the poem is going to be an unending series of “Y, son of X, slew Z” episodes, without a sympathetic character or fun mythic monster to hang onto. But all these names have a purpose. 

In his speech to Lycaon, Achilles articulates the shared fate of all soldiers in this war with a startling clarity. Patroclus’ kindness did not save him from death; nor will Hector’s nobility, nor Achilles’ own prowess in battle. Achilles perceives this truth, but in his grief he lacks the generosity of spirit to see beyond fatalism. He has become, in the words of pacifist philosopher Simone Weil, an instrument of force. He has transformed himself into a thing, and in doing so transforms his enemies into things too, unworthy of mercy. Many more will die at his hands before the poem can end.

But Homer (whether a “he”, “she”, or, most likely, a group of performing poets codifying an older oral tradition) refuses to allow men like Lycaon to become things, nameless victims mowed down by “heroes” like Achilles. Each soldier is given his own memorial: a name, his hometown, and a fragment of the life he’s left behind – a weeping father, a proud widow. The names stand tall on the page like so many tombstones. 

Homer recognises that combatants on both sides of the war have the capacity to be murderer and victim, hero and slave. All that separates them is time and… well, you could call it luck, fate, or the whim of a capricious god. What I find genuinely shocking about this 2,800 year old poem is its evenhandedness. Everyone, whether a Greek or a Trojan, displays heroism. Everyone — even Achilles — has their moment of cowardice. And everyone has the capacity for cruelty. 

In some ways the scale of The Iliad is small. The story only covers a few weeks towards the end of the decade-long Trojan War: the brief interlude where Achilles feuds with his commander Agamemnon, loses his Patroclus, and seeks revenge against Trojan Prince Hector. But its scope is also cosmic, encompassing the stories of hundreds of men and women caught up in this seemingly intractable conflict, from slave women to the gods on Olympus. Emily Wilson’s new translation, like her superb Odyssey from 2017, is told in rhythmic iambic pentameter and swift, accessible english verse. Her skill as a translator is to collapse the distance between us and the ancients without sanding off their rough edges, preserving the details of brutality, slavery and subjugation that make us uncomfortable. 

After all, try as we might to dismiss the beliefs of Homeric societies as utterly archaic – with their interventionist gods, women reduced to trophies, and perverse masculine codes of honour — we’re far from outgrowing The Iliad. In 2024 is it still radical to treat combatants on both sides of a war as equally capable of bravery and atrocity, and equally deserving of grace. And it has become easier than ever for those of us far from the battlefield to treat our perceived enemies as things, and harden our hearts to their suffering. 

Homer’s poem does not conclude with an act of violence, nor with the end of the Trojan war. It ends with a surprising act of generosity between mortal enemies, and the singing of laments. Both sides are given time to grieve at last, and bury their loved ones. There are more battles to come — the fatal arrow, the wooden horse, the broken wall, the burning roof and tower and Agamemnon dead — but there is beauty to be found in a few days respite. And it kindles our hope that maybe next time we can transform a brief ceasefire into a lasting peace.

Highly recommend picking up Emily Wilson’s translation if you’ve got any interest in Greek mythology, war stories or just great literature. Simone Weil’s essay The Iliad, or the Poem of Force is a stunning accompaniment, grappling with the poem from a pacifist perspective. But please, please, I beg you, don’t watch Troy. It’s very bad.

Film of the Week: Hackers (1995)

Directed by Iain Softly. Screenplay by Rafael Moreu.
Cinematography by Andrzej Sekula. Production Design by John Beard.

A deeply silly movie about teen hackers in New York, featuring Angelia Jolie in one of her first roles. Jolie already screams movie star (and boy does the lascivious camera know it), but the film around her is a riotous mess. Despite betraying genuine respect for its anti-establishment heroes, the film saddles them with a plot — in which our high-school hackers are framed by a pair of dastardly executives who are stealing money from their own corporation — that doesn’t remotely threaten the status quo.

If the plot can’t be politically radical, director Iain Softly compensates by making everything else radical in the most 90s way possible. It’s hard to shake the feeling that every department was simply told to “go for broke” and given zero follow-up instructions. The dialogue interweaves cringeworthy slang and genuine excerpts from the Hacker Manifesto (“my crime is that of curiosity”); the costumes are a joyful kaleidoscope of colour and leather; and no one seems to have decided whether our lead character Dade (also known by hackers aliases “Crash Override” and “Zero Cool”) is staggeringly hip or a complete dweeb. Matthew Lillard is a choice slice of pure ham, whereas poor HBO stalwarts Lorraine Bracco and Fisher Stevens give villain performances that would get them laughed off the set of a Disney Channel original movie.

And even if no one to this day has figured out how to make "man types furiously on laptop” compelling on camera, Softly throws every trick he has at enlivening the many, many hacking montages. Sometimes the results are inventive — say, the gorgeous computer interiors, created via miniatures — and sometimes they’re perplexing. Why exactly are these roller-skating teens now hacking on top of the Empire State Building?

For all its faults, I found this delightfully dated vision of the internet and its anarchist guardians irresistible. Hackers imagines a web that’s far more mysterious, creative and inclusive than the one we’re stuck with almost three decades later. If only.

Watched 4K Restoration @ Obsessions: A Static Visions Festival, Randwick Ritz. Available to rent via AppleTV and Google.

Odds and Ends

• Huge film festival season coming up in Sydney (and Melbourne) over the next few weeks. We’ve got — deep breath — the Antenna Documentary Film Festival (9-19 February), the Europa! Europa Film Festival (15 February - 10 March), the Chinese Film Festival (15 - 18 February) AND the Queerscreen Mardi Gras Film Festival (15 - 29 February). So many wonderful films to check out! I’m particularly excited about the 4K restorations of The Conformist and Farewell My Concubine, and Goran Stolevski’s new film Housekeeping for Beginners.

• Conservators at the National Museum of Scotland have reconstructed an ancient Roman soldier’s brass arm guard from 100 fragments — one of only three in the world!

• Fascinating piece from the Guardian with queer writers sharing their (often complicated, nuanced) feelings about Andrew Haigh’s recent ghost story All of Us Strangers. Heavy on spoilers, so watch the film first!

• The Oscars are FINALLY adding an award for Casting! Stunt category next please.

• And in case you missed it, check out the legend Joni Mitchell performing “Both Sides Now” at the Grammys last weekend. Beautiful and heart-wrenching.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading. And if you’re interested in any more of my film hot takes, follow me on Letterboxd.