Nolan’s Odyssey & sticky tennis balls: what heritage brands can learn from a 3,000-year-old story

Most of the time, my Classics degree sits in a dusty corner of my brain, unless someone wants to know what a statue says or if there’s a rogue Latin clue in a pub quiz. But when a film like The Odyssey comes out, the sleepy Classics geek in me is prodded awake, ready to sit in a dark cinema and have some Opinions for three hours.

A story that’s been alive for this long is a bit like a sticky tennis ball. It’s thrown around, and everyone who touches it across the centuries leaves a little of themselves stuck to the surface; their point of view, their politics, whatever’s buzzing in the zeitgeist. Great stories hold onto what’s essential, shed assumptions and continue to evolve.

It’s the same trick every heritage brand is trying to pull off. Something lands perfectly for one moment, one audience, one set of assumptions – but the ball itself can get so weighed down with everything that’s stuck to it over time that you lose sight of what made it sticky in the first place. (Have I broken this brand/ball metaphor yet?)

For a story told hundreds of years ago, it’s fascinating to see what people choose to add, retain and strip away – and why. Nolan gives Odysseus a sense of trauma and guilt-ridden heroism that isn’t really there in the original text (Matt Damon plays him quite earnestly in the film, literary Odysseus is a bit more of a prat imo). But what Nolan does do is answer the question ‘why are we retelling this story now’ by leaning into a cultural relevance that can’t help but be felt. A relevancy question that heritage brands also grapple with.

There’s a lot of chat about ‘Zeus’ Law’ in the film – xenia in Greek (from where we get xenophobia in modern English). It’s the ancient code of welcoming anyone arriving from somewhere else with hospitality & warmth (just in case they turn out to be Zeus in a wig). It’s not hard to discern the relevance to the times we’re living in today. Heritage brands have to make the same choice. Which part of your story matters because of the moment we’re living through?

Nolan has apparently based his adaptation on Emily Wilson’s 2016 translation, the first ever by a woman. What’s radical about Wilson’s translation isn’t necessarily what she added, but what she restored. Decades of male translators had glommed their own sensibilities, political squeamishness and discomfort onto the particular sticky tennis ball of this text, and passed it down the centuries as if it were Homer’s own point of view.

Take the maids of Odysseus’ household. Wilson corrects a centuries-old euphemism here: they were slaves, not maids. That single word restores an uncomfortable truth: these women had no real power to consent to the relationships they’re later punished for. Nolan, meanwhile, cuts the episode in which Odysseus & his son kill them on returning home. It creatively makes sense – that ruthlessness doesn’t sit well with Tom Holland’s sweet boy-next-door Spider-Man street cred. But it’s exactly the kind of cut that changes a story: one that softens Homer’s version rather than restores it. Homer wrote a “complicated man.” Hollywood, unsurprisingly, prefers a hot one.

That’s the challenge heritage brands face. At TVE, while we’re not repping any poets from the Bronze Age (currently – get in touch??) we have been thinking a lot about what makes something stay sticky over decades; not by staying the same, but by staying true.

Every heritage brand starts life as somebody’s sticky tennis ball; a set of associations, feelings, and stories that stick to it at the moment it first landed, when it was new and exactly right for its time. The problem is that the moment passes, and the brand can get stuck holding the version of itself that worked for a customer who, in a lot of cases, doesn’t exist anymore, or answers a set of needs that have fundamentally changed.

The brands that actually stay relevant are taking the two approaches we see in these translations of the Odyssey. Nolan’s contribution was knowing why this story, now: reading the room, and having a clear answer for why a piece of heritage still matters to people who weren’t around for the original. (Ed recently wrote about just how good Guinness is at doing this).

Wilson’s contribution goes back to the source and discerns what’s genuinely load-bearing and truthful versus what was just an imposed translation choice for a different era. For a brand, it’s not about asking “how do we look the way we did in 1987,” but “what did we mean to people in 1987, and what’s the current equivalent of that meaning, for people who’ve never known the brand any other way?” M&S is a brand that has increasingly looked more like Wilson’s approach: stripping back layers of accumulated assumptions to rediscover the qualities (quality, trust and value) that made people care in the first place

The throughline that makes Homer’s story survive translation after translation, culture after culture, isn’t the specific plot details (even if the Classics geek in my brain might beg to differ!) – it’s the human truth underneath them. Heritage brands work the same way. The job isn’t to preserve every detail of what made people love you in the past; it’s to understand the feeling underneath it, remove everything that’s become baggage, and find a way to make that feeling matter again.

Do that well, and you don’t need nostalgia to carry you. You just need to still be telling the truth about what your brand is all about.