This Odyssey Press Photoshoot Still Haunts Me in My Sleep

Welcome back to Saturday Night Social.

It’s been over a month since the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which means if you haven’t seen it yet, you may have been living under a rock (or perhaps caught between Scylla and Charybdis). The film’s A-list cast, including Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o, and more, warranted one of the largest press tours of the year, dominating most of the pop culture news cycle in June and July. Now, as the summer comes to a close, the noise is dying down, and the IMAX theater near you might finally have tickets available that aren’t front-row, but I am still here, trying and failing to recover. I lay awake at night. Restless. Nightmares. The horror. God, make it stop.

The images I saw seared a permanent white-hot scar into my brain—not the terrifying cyclops Polyphemus or Cersei’s half-human/half-pig beasts. Something worse…The blindingly white teeth of Odysseus, on the cover of People Magazine’s “Matt Damon Hotter Than Ever!“ cover story.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by People Magazine (@people)

As each sleepless night passes, my list of questions grows longer:

• Why are they hugging like that?
• Why do they look like the family that got into a fight on the way to the mall to get their Christmas card photos taken in coordinating outfits?
• Why do they look like the people in the pharmaceutical commercial after they take the pill?
• Is Tom Holland a 30-year-old man? Or a child who just graduated from junior high?
• Why is Odysseus, the man of many devices, modeling for Abercrombie and Fitch?

After all this time, and 2 hours and 52 minutes’ worth of 70mm IMAX film, I still have no answers.

Obviously, this is a high-quality photoshoot for a legacy publication, but the staging, styling, and editing are all converging to create something almost uncanny in its vanilla-ness. I mean, tell me this isn’t the face of someone who’s been condemned to eternal suffering.

  

The noncommitment to a premise and the overall lack of personality have progressed to such an extreme that they have reached a sinister, haunting level. And why are Damon’s teeth so white? It’s too much for my mere mortal eyes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Gavin Bond (@gavinbondphotography)

Hotter than ever…Hotter than ever, I mutter to myself as the years pass, withering away into a lonelier and lonelier spinster. Hotter than ever? Lord, what does it mean?