Nolan’s Odyssey Unintentionally Compels Us to Return to the Classics on Their Own Terms
Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Odyssey hit theaters this summer. Many students and teachers may have encountered Homer already and want to go see the adaptation, and many more may watch the movie hoping to encounter Homer for the first time. If Nolan’s Odyssey is supposed to be some positive sign of a cultural return ad fontes, then I would seek to dislodge that impression. Nolan’s Odyssey is weak and unimpressive at best, and subversive and treacherous at worst.
Much attention has been given in conservative circles to the obviously woke elements of the film, which admittedly beggar belief. Literally, the opening scene of the film is a black bard chanting the poem in Odysseus’ hall at Ithaka, and then it switches to a portrayal of the death of the Sinon character, played by transgender actor Ellen (calls herself Elliot) Page. Nolan had to cast an incredibly black Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, despite the frequent Homeric epithets of Helen “shining among women” (Iliad II.171) with “white arms” (Iliad II.121) and “fair cheeks” (Odyssey XV.123).[1] This was hardly an accident or a neutral decision, which Nolan drives home by having Menelaus declare on screen that hers is the “face that launched a thousand ships.” Similarly, the “Greeks” in the film are a multiracial cast including Asians, Indians, Africans, and other more European hues. The intentional race-swap casting is so on the nose one could almost believe it is satire, except that I don’t believe Nolan is actually that subtle here.
While Nolan’s film flops for these surficial reasons alone, there is much more to critique. In my analysis, I want to go beyond the surficial woke elements to get at some of the manifold ways Nolan’s adaptation significantly changes the story, characters, and themes in ways that do injury to Homer. The length of the film and the depth of Homer could provide ample material to discuss without limit, so my treatment will necessarily be selective. Nevertheless, I still hope to show that Nolan ultimately fails to recreate the Homeric world, values, and characters.
Different Stories
Nolan’s film contains numerous breaks from the Homeric story, most notably skipping the entire chapter of Princess Nausicaa and the Phaeacians who generously host and assist Odysseus.
The Greek gods are almost entirely absent in the film, and the few appearances of Zendaya’s Athena are something less than divine. This is a major departure from Homer’s story in which the gods are present in pivotal ways throughout the story, especially Zeus, Poseidon, Athena, and Hermes. In Homer, the gods drive the action from start to finish, from Athena inciting Telemachus to search for his father in the opening to Athena making peace between Odysseus and the offended Ithakans at the end. Even though the film manages to explain that Odysseus has incurred the wrath of Poseidon by blinding the Cyclops, the film completely eliminates the scene of Odysseus’ famed dialogue with the Cyclops which serves to exhibit both his cunning and his hubris.
In the film, the witch Circe is presented as a pitiable old woman who fears Odysseus and his men will rob and harm her; Circe’s entrapment is an understandable response to their aggression. In Homer’s epic, however, Circe is a beautiful enchantress who arguably preys upon Odysseus’ unsuspecting men, offering them hospitality but then turning them into swine. Odysseus is only able to overcome her magic because the god Hermes shows him the nature (physis) of a specific plant. This knowledge permits him to resist her enchantment and overpower her, symbolizing the power of reason over superstition.
In the film, at the nymph Calypso’s isle, Odysseus is presented as stupefied and forgetful, with Calypso acting as a kind of therapist helping him to remember. In the actual epic, Odysseus remembers his homeland and is described as a “grieving, unhappy man” (Odyssey I.55). He is confined there against his will by Calypso who “ever with soft and flattering words she works to charm him to forget Ithaka” (I.56) and remain her lover forever with her in timeless bliss. Odysseus cannot leave Calypso’s island until the gods send Hermes to bid her release him.
One of the most egregious flaws of the film is the alternate plotline in which Sinon, the Greek responsible for telling the Trojans about the horse, is actually a young Ithakan lad who was tricked by Antinous into going on the expedition to Troy. Odysseus feels guilt over the death of Sinon because he allowed Sinon to be killed as part of his plot to get the Trojan horse into Troy and take the city. Not only did Nolan make up this plotline, but he has Sinon acted by Ellen Page, a transgender actor pretending to be male.
In the classical canon (it’s actually told in Book II of Vergil’s Aeneid), Sinon is a cunning character – almost as cunning as Odysseus himself – who spins an elaborate yarn to the Trojans and tricks them into accepting the horse as a gift from the Greeks to Athena. His cunning is cut from the same cloth as Odysseus’ plan to take the city by means of the feinted naval departure and the wooden horse stuffed with clandestine warriors. Not only could Nolan not follow the Homeric storyline, but he has to insert an entire storyline of his own which ultimately permits Odysseus to be the advocate of the transgender “boy” who was vulnerable, trusting, foolishly courageous, and tricked into sacrificing his life – for which Sinon berates Odysseus during his visit to Hades (also not in Homer). I don’t think this is accidental, nor is it an accident that Nolan has Odysseus’ character say Sinon “was the bravest man I ever knew” on screen. It’s as if Nolan is trying to bring the Homeric hero as low as possible by making him feel guilt over his cunning ruse to take Troy and by transforming him into a progressive, trans-affirming hero instead of a Bronze Age warrior-king.
I also don’t think it is accidental that Nolan has Odysseus take unique vengeance upon Antinous for tricking Sinon into his eventual death at war. This allows the transgender character to be, once again, the ultimate victim, and Odysseus to be the avenger. Not surprisingly, even though Nolan seemed to have no problem casting all kinds of diverse actors as Greeks – no matter how incongruous and farcical the effect – he made sure to cast the chief villain Antinous as a white male.
Some might say I am being too harsh, reading too much into every detail. I hardly think so. Nolan didn’t have to go out of his way to give prominent, pivotal roles in the movie to minority and transgender actors (even though those are completely unreasonable and incongruous with the original setting), but he did so anyway. If Nolan decides to be on the nose like that, clearly placing woke ideology over concern for literature, pardon me for following the train of his logic and extrapolating other implied anti-white, pro-LGBT messages from just below the surface. Recall also that Nolan publicly praised as an inspiration for his adaptation Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the Odyssey – acclaimed by critics as a “feminist translation”. It shouldn’t be surprising to find critical theory woven throughout the film.
Climax and Hero
Despite serving as the climax of the film, the slaying of the suitors leaves much to be desired. Aside from weak action, it simply misses the Homeric energy, likely because the director is uncomfortable with the Homeric morality. In the epic, Odysseus opens the conflict with a bold declaration:
“You dogs, you never thought that I would any more come back from the land of Troy, and because of that you despoiled my household, and forcibly took my serving women to sleep beside you, and sought to win my wife while I was alive, fearing neither the immortal gods who hold the wide heaven, nor any resentment sprung from men to be yours in the future. Now upon all of you the terms of destruction are fastened.” (Odyssey XXII.35-41).
In the film, Odysseus seems almost reluctant for the fight, and he basically shields Telemachus from taking any part in it. What a stark contrast this is to the epic in which Odysseus and Telemachus scheme together on how to slay the suitors and Telemachus wins his spurs fighting bravely alongside his father to cleanse the household of its enemies. Homer also makes it clear the goddess Athena is assisting Odysseus and Telemachus in their quest for retribution, showing it to be rational and just.
Overall, the film portrays Odysseus as a kind of character with PTSD, feeling regret over the sacking of Troy and the loss of his men. Never mind the fact that Homer calls Odysseus the “sacker of cities” (e.g. Iliad II.278) as a heroic epithet of honor. Ironically, the Homeric Odysseus has no regret over the sacking of Troy, and his chief characteristic is the ever-present cunning and wit that caused him to devise the Trojan horse as the means of sacking Troy. In the epic, Odysseus certainly is grieved by the loss of his men, but Homer also makes it clear that many of the men perished through unforeseeable tragedies from the gods or by their own folly, such as those who ate the cows of the sun god Helios.
In Nolan’s film, Odysseus has the strange self-revelation that he is, in a way, the cause of the chaos he encounters across his wanderings and especially in his house at Ithaka. Because he unleashed chaos within Troy, he is somehow partly to blame for the general breakdown of men abiding by “Zeus’ law”. He cannot even clear his house of the suitors with an entirely clear conscience, which is one reason I think Nolan inserts the alternate storyline where Antinous is uniquely guilty of tricking and betraying Sinon. The Sinon plotline allows Odysseus to have a specific and unique cause to take revenge on Antinous, the chief of suitors. This justification for the slaughter seems to move into the film’s foreground, while pushing to the background the theme of justifiable vengeance upon those who have spoiled his goods, threatened his son, wooed his wife, and dishonored him. Avenging this transgender character Sinon perhaps is somehow a more palatable justification to contemporary sensibilities than the Greek theme of Odysseus vindicating his honor and retaking his home. Especially given that Nolan said the film is about “respect for strangers”, he may be uncomfortable with the conclusions Homer would suggest for our problems in our time about the decline of the West and its invasion by the Third World.
The idea that Nolan’s Odysseus can’t even punish with a good conscience because he, too, is somehow the cause of the chaos is suited to the environment of civilizational decay and the postcolonial world we currently inhabit. We cannot impose aesthetic standards, enforce our laws, secure our borders, or punish criminals with a good conscience because somehow “environmental factors” or our own past civilizational wrongdoings (e.g., slavery, colonization, white supremacy, etc.) make us complicit. We are not permitted to believe that our civilization is superior and to act on that belief. Nolan’s Odysseus is thus fitted to our time, but in a mode that reinforces the malaise, not in a helpful or revolutionary way to call us back to greatness.
Perhaps this comes out most clearly in the end of the film in which Odysseus does not even remain as king in Ithaka but instead gives the throne to Telemachus and sails away with Penelope. Instead of a settled homecoming and the restoration of peace and stability through the rule of the good king, Nolan gives us Odysseus the permanent wanderer who remains in a kind of self-imposed exile (or never-ending quest). The film at least implies that Odysseus feels unfit to resume the throne because of his own actions in the past, yet this is not the Homeric Odysseus, and it also aborts the central theme of homecoming in Homer’s epic. Homer’s epic ends with three generations of royal fathers and sons (Laertes, Odysseus, and Telemachus) together in the restored kingdom, and that is something Nolan chooses not to give us. Notably, Nolan also omits the famed marriage bed of Odysseus and Penelope, which is literally rooted to the ground because it is built attached to a live olive tree. The roots to family, kin, and homeland are diminished for Nolan, which again matches our deracinated world, but is not inspiring or restorative.[2]
In sum, the film’s portrayal of Odysseus as written by Nolan and acted by Matt Damon is entirely lacking. He seems like a weary, troubled man struggling with remorse and nagged by the various women throughout the film, rather than the cunning, charismatic, romantic, and even egotistical hero of Homer’s epic. The opening line of Homer’s epic prays the Muse to tell us of the “man of many ways” (I.1), as Odysseus is called, but the film makes little attempt to show us Odysseus’ famed cunning, resourcefulness, prudence, and loquacity. Athena favors Odysseus because he has a nature excelling in wisdom and knowledge, which is Athena’s domain. If Nolan’s goal is to make Odysseus more “relatable” by reducing his superlative qualities, that seems to alter the character and purpose of such an epic, heroic tale.
Taking the Classics on Their Own Terms
Perhaps a predictable response to such a film is to hope that, even if the film is not an accurate portrayal of Homer, more people may yet be incentivized to go read Homer for themselves because of the energy and interest produced by the film. Given the literacy of the general public, I have my doubts about that. However, the film does unintentionally produce one good effect: it makes evident the need to return to the classics on their own terms. Studying the classics is not an exercise in self-meditation or introspection, but rather an immersion in a world of human things from a different civilization. Nolan’s Odyssey flops because he wants to tell a story set in the Homeric world, but he imposes all his own 21st century moral and aesthetic values on the story. It’s not a Homeric masterpiece because he does not immerse the viewer in the moral values and imagination of Homer.
Even if Christians believe that Christian revelation has fulfilled and completed the classical world since the classics were insufficient on their own, it behooves us to clearly examine the classical works on their own terms. We should want to understand them as they were written and understood by their world, rather than merely simplistically comparing them to a later Christian (or, like Nolan, a pseudo-Christian) standard. Only by taking them seriously on their own terms can we hope to glean from them.
There is an oft-repeated idea that we should read the classics to “see ourselves” in them. This is only partly true. Of course, Homer’s Odyssey is archetypal of the hero’s quest, and we can all find some resemblances to our own experiences in the wanderings of Odysseus. But the classics are not intended as a mirror in which we only see what we look for because we look for ourselves. In fact, Nolan’s obnoxious diverse casting is part of the broader phenomenon generally in education of forcibly recasting the tradition to look like our contemporary values, rather than receiving it on its own terms. America must have been built by Indians, blacks, and immigrants because to check the historical record and see it built by white settlers and mostly white men is offensive to the contemporary reigning values. And so on. Academics would rather decolonize history and the tradition than be colonized by it.
As scholar John Peterson has written on this topic, “Our tradition is ours, a gift of life from our forebears to our descendants. We must peer into its deep, living waters to see what is teeming there, to see what real life is. We must not, Narcissus-like, use it as merely a reflecting pool, glancing at it and vainly proclaiming either ‘I do’ or ‘do not see myself in it,’ as if our life and our present moment is the true measure of things.” Classical education is fundamentally about receiving, preserving, and being inspired by the Western tradition, and the tradition is not interested in catering to our preferences or sensibilities.
And given the Homeric worldview with its moral values, hero worship, and Greek theology is remarkably different than the egalitarian, liberal, feminist, bureaucratic-managerial world we inhabit in the 21st century, perhaps it is good that we be shocked by literature and art which show us a very different world. Classical education is not primarily meant to be comforting but transformative.
Subversive Art
What is Nolan’s purpose in taking a famous classical work but then recreating it in his own image so it doesn’t resemble the Homeric world and heroes? John Daniel Davidson wrote recently about this as “cultural destruction” in a review for The Federalist:
“Nearly every beloved myth or story from western culture has been ‘reimagined’ and foisted on us as a piece of liberal propaganda. What it amounts to is a sustained campaign of cultural destruction — a war not just on the past, but on everyone in the present who venerates our cultural patrimony … The revolutionaries of the left might start by censoring books or authors they dislike, but eventually they appropriate those stories and transform those authors’ works into something useful for their revolution.”
As Davidson notes, it is not sufficient for contemporary directors to make contemporary films portraying their egalitarian, radically subversive values. They want to take time-honored works of art and repurpose them in a parasitic way, which is all the more useful and powerful for their agenda. Rather than rejecting Christianity, it is far more effective to subvert Christianity into a humanitarian, left-wing social project which gives them allegedly divine authority to do the things they already want to do. Instead of banning Homer, it is far more effective to subvert Homer by making a “relatable” Odysseus with a diverse cast that simultaneously castrates the masculinity and heroism of the Homeric myths.
It is disappointing to see a brilliant director like Nolan stoop to this, given Nolan has directed some excellent films and even arguably “conservative-coded” films like The Dark Knight trilogy. However, resisting the leitmotifs of the regime requires conscious choice and conviction, and Nolan seemed only too happy to swim with the stream on this one. Nolan’s Odyssey may be a fruitless quest, but this should compel us all the more to make our own return ad fontes to the unqualified Homer and encounter the Greeks on their own terms.
Endnotes
[1] Quotations from translations of the Iliad and Odyssey by Richmond Lattimore.
[2] It’s worth noting that the corpus of Greek mythology is not monolithic or everywhere consistent. Many different authors tell versions of the same tales or at least featuring the same characters. There are other Greek writers who write alternate histories for Odysseus which include him leaving Ithaka after the events of the Odyssey. Perhaps Nolan was inspired by these. However, in the Odyssey, the prophet Tiresias in Hades tells Odysseus that he will die peacefully at home with his people (XI.134-137). I think I have also attempted to show why Nolan’s decision is inconsistent with Homer’s Odyssey and its themes.
