Joyce Carol Oates and Stuart Heritage Argue Past Each Other's Definitions

Joyce Carol Oates insists the 1990s Hallmark Channel adaptation of The Odyssey is the best version ever made for screen. Stuart Heritage at the Guardian disagrees, pointing to Christopher Nolan's film as visually and narratively superior. But this entire dispute is built on a premise neither writer bothers to defend: that "best adaptation" means the same thing to both of them. It doesn't. They're measuring different objects with the same scale and acting confused when they get different numbers.

The unstated rule here is that a superior adaptation stays closest to Homer's text while looking expensive. Heritage assumes you measure fidelity—how faithfully does the film render the source material's narrative structure, emotional arcs, and thematic weight? By that measure, Nolan's three-hour film, engineered with Hollywood's technical resources, beats a children's fantasy show cobbled together on a cable network budget in 1992. The argument appears self-evident. It isn't.

Oates is not measuring fidelity. If she were, she'd never prefer a show where Odysseus gets reimagined as a time-traveling teenager stranded in alternate realities. She's measuring something else entirely: accessibility, invention, the willingness to treat the source material as a skeleton rather than a scripture. She's asking what an adaptation can do when it stops trying to be faithful and starts trying to breathe. A Hallmark production doesn't have the luxury of fidelity. It has only ingenuity.

This is the fragility in every cultural argument that masquerades as taste dispute. Two people use identical language—"best," "adaptation," "version"—while operating from incompatible definitions, then act wounded when disagreement persists. The framework collapses not because one critic is wrong but because both are speaking past a chasm they never named. Heritage never explains why visual fidelity matters more than emotional reach. Oates never explains why departure from the source strengthens rather than weakens the work. Without those conversations, the disagreement isn't settled by evidence or argument. It's settled by whoever has more institutional credibility to make their unstated assumption feel like common sense. That's how criticism becomes fashion rather than thought. The person who stakes their position on an undefended premise needs nothing but time and authority to win.