Like many Nolan films, the story isn’t told in a straightforward manner. The Odyssey’s play with time is less pronounced than that of Memento, Dunkirk, Inception, or Tenet, but is still crucial to the gradual revelation of Odysseus’s state of mind. Much of The Odyssey crosscuts between Ithaca, where Odysseus’s wife Penelope and son Telemachus must deal with an infestation of unruly rival suitors intending to marry Penelope and take Odysseus’s place, and the island Ogygia, where Odysseus has spent the past seven years with the nymph Calypso, eating lotus flowers that have blotted out his memories of the past. Similar to the organization of Homer’s Odyssey, most of Odysseus’s journey from Troy back to Ithaca is narrated as a series of flashbacks, and in this version, those flashbacks are coaxed out of Odysseus by Calypso as she restricts his diet of lotus flowers and helps him regain his memories.
Traditionally, Odysseus’s long and winding journey is often presented as a product of bad luck, prophesized fate, and Odysseus having incurred the wrath of some of the gods, most notably Poseidon, whose son, the cyclops Polyphemus, is blinded by Odysseus early in his journey home. Certainly, Nolan’s Odysseus is waylaid by these problems as well, but Nolan also adds something new: throughout the film there are hints that a part of him doesn’t actually want to return home, and that his wandering is not simply imposed upon him, but is also a product of his guilty conscience. You might say Nolan’s Odysseus suffers from PTSD. Odysseus is often predominantly characterized as witty, cunning, and mercurial, but Nolan’s Odysseus is a more rounded character, whose experiences affect and change him. In other words, Nolan adds a weight to Odysseus’s moral psychology, which makes him seem much more like a human being than an epic figure.
Odysseus’s guilt is only hinted at throughout most of the film, particularly through its depiction of the sacking of Troy, which the film returns to repeatedly, each time fleshing out the attack on the city a little more, until we finally come to understand how its fall, and the role Odysseus played in it, affected him. Only near the end of the film, when we flashback once more as Odysseus describes it to Penelope, do we learn that Odysseus was sickened by the slaughter he helped to unleash, watching in horror as the Greeks flooded through Troy’s gates and unloaded ten years of built-up anger and resentment onto any Trojan they happened to come across, murdering soldier and civilian alike. Most pointedly, Odysseus witnesses the desecration of a statue of Athena and the beheading of an Athenian priestess, which retroactively makes sense of Athena’s sporadic appearances and brief conversations with Odysseus throughout his journey: she has assumed this priestess’s likeness as a way of punishing Odysseus by reminding him of his guilty conscience (either that, or she’s Odysseus’s own hallucinatory manifestation of his PTSD).
For Nolan’s Odysseus, his responsibility for this slaughter has led part of him to feel he doesn’t deserve to return home (thus his contentment to lose himself to lotus-eating obliteration with Calypso). Odysseus views the sacking of Troy as a violation of basic human decency, one that has stained him just as much as any other Greek who participated (and even, as we come to learn, Greeks who hear tales of it). It’s here where the film weaves in its larger theme about the sanctity of home and what the characters repeatedly refer to as “Zeus’s law,” or the mutual respect guests and hosts should show one another. By tricking the Trojans with a fake “gift” of a horse statue, Odysseus retrospectively considers himself to have abused the rules by which armies should conduct war, having won only through lies and subterfuge, which is not dissimilar from a guest abusing the hospitality of a host.* Of course, opponents in war are different from hosts and guests, but the difference is really only one of circumstance and scale; both are (or should be) governed by shared rules of conduct.
* We see Odysseus’s ideas about fair conduct surface elsewhere in the film as well, particularly in his hunting methods, where he always strums his bow loudly before shooting at his prey, in order to alert the prey to his presence and give them a sporting chance. Notably, he does the same in the film’s climax, when is prey is not game, but men. The Trojan horse, by contrast, left the Trojans with no such warning.
Odysseus prides himself in his cleverness, but in Nolan’s version of The Odyssey, the consequences of that cleverness betray him: the savage sacking of Troy surpasses his expectations of what would happen when the Greeks finally entered the gates, and it leaves him devastated. Of course, Odysseus is hardly a naïve idealist; even before he leaves Ithaca to join the war, he tells Penelope that the ostensible reason for the war – reclaiming Helen from the Trojans – is nothing more than a thinly-veiled excuse for Agamemnon to wrest control of trade routes away from the Trojans. However, he has trouble reconciling the hell he unleashes on Troy with his own values. It’s as if his ten-year journey home is a mourning period for his conception of Greek civilization and human decency, and it’s only once he comes to terms with what he’s wrought that he’s able to return home and start making amends for his misdeeds.
Indeed, the film makes a motif out of violations of Zeus’s law (perhaps its most thuddingly obvious element, but one put to good effect). Most of Odysseus’s encounters on his journey home are variations of bad behavior between guests and hosts:
- Rather than welcome Odysseus and his men as guests, instead the enormous cyclops Polyphemus traps them in his cave and eats them.
- Odysseus and his men solicit an unprovoked attack by the giant Laestrygonians when setting foot in their land.
- Odysseus’s men enter the witch Circe’s house uninvited, and she in turn tricks them into eating a meal that lets her transform them into pigs. They are only saved by Odysseus’s cleverness.
- The episode with the sirens distills this motif down to its barest essence: the sirens’ song beckons sailors to come to them (i.e., to their home), at which point the sailors are swiftly killed.
- Starving, Odysseus’s remaining men slaughter and eat the sun god Helios’s cattle without permission, for which they are doomed to die at sea.
- Most emphatically, all of the suitors hounding Penelope on Ithaca overstay their welcome, threatening and disrespecting Odysseus’s few remaining loyal servants (and his dog), and plot to kill Telemachus.
Odysseus sees a lot of these violations of Zeus's law as reflection of his own shortsighted moral transgressions, and also considers himself either directly or indirectly responsible for some of them (particularly those involving other Greeks) because he traces the erosion of human decency back to the sacking of Troy. For Odysseus, Troy’s destruction, and the evil it unleashed in the hearts of the Greeks, is the first step in the decline of Greek civilization, infecting him, his men, and the rest of Greece as tales of Troy’s fall have spread.
We can see this cultural rot through various characters describing rumors of “sea people” invading Greek cities. Near the end of the film, Odysseus reveals that the sea people none other than the Greeks themselves, corrupted veterans of the Trojan War returning and infecting their homes with their experiences of the war (more PTSD, if you will). Thus the film’s climax, where Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca and vanquishes the suitors infesting his home, plays not only like a cathartic action sequence, but also like an attempt to atone for all of the wrongs Odysseus feels he has wrought upon the world, and which have come home to roost in his one small corner of civilization. Odysseus rids his castle of suitors like he’s cauterizing a wound or purging a virus from Greek culture. Indeed, after he reveals his identity and starts to slaughter the suitors, flashes of lightning punctuate the action, signaling that Zeus himself approves of Odysseus murdering those who have violated his law.
In the end, Odysseus and Penelope exile themselves from Ithaca, and it’s little wonder why. Much like a hero in western, he’s been so changed by his actions – both in Troy and in the time since – that he is now a part of the wilderness he’s spent the film journeying through, and is unable to truly partake in the civilization he’s tried to restore by slaughtering the suitors. Instead, he and Penelope leave Ithaca in the hands of their son, Telemachus, whom Odysseus and other characters have spent much of the film cautioning against attacking the suitors directly, lest Telemachus violate Zeus’s law and stain his own hands, much the way Odysseus has stained his.
Ultimately, with this version of The Odyssey, Nolan has humanized Odysseus, transforming him from an epic figure of myth into a character with verisimilar frailties, while at the same time seeming to comment on the centrality of basic human decency to the perpetuation of civilization. How should a host and their guests behave toward one another? Can one ever truly return home again? What are the codes we all agree to live by, and what happens when these things are violated? These are the questions at the heart of Nolan’s version of this epic tale, and his answers seem especially well-attuned to our contemporary world. It’s easy to read his version of The Odyssey as an allegorical warning about the dire consequences of normalizing violations of human decency, which, sadly, is a problem relevant not only to contemporary America, but to any part of the world where fascism once again threatens civilization.
Other thoughts:
- Another marker of Nolan’s authorship present in The Odyssey, aside from his manipulation of time and protagonists dealing with guilty consciences, is a protagonist attempting to reconcile with a family.
- While I’m at it, here are some other Nolan films where his protagonists suffer from guilty consciences: Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar, Oppenheimer, and perhaps The Dark Knight, the last of which asks the chicken-and-egg question about the degree to which Batman is responsible for the creation of his own villains. After all, in this film, Two-Face’s creation is the direct product of one of Batman’s choices, and the film suggests that the Joker only targets Gotham in the first place because Batman is there. Whether or not Batman feels guilty about this is less clear.
- The episode with the sirens is interesting in the context of Nolan’s additions to this story. To my understanding, traditionally, Odysseus’s desire to hear the sirens’ song is motivated by his mercurial and narcissistic dispositions: despite the danger they represent, he wants to hear them because he is curious, and because he wants to be able to survive an experience no other mortals have withstood. In Nolan’s film, though, there’s an argument to be made that Odysseus wants to hear the sirens as a way of punishing himself. He doesn’t know what they’ll sound like before he hears them, but perhaps he knows that being unable to act on what he hears will be a form of torture. Indeed, when he describes what he heard to his men, it’s clear that retrospectively, it was an unpleasant experience, full of yearning and heartache, where feelings of promise of hope are dashed against the disappointment of reality.
- The crosscutting between Ithaca and Odysseus doesn’t begin until roughly 30 minutes into the film. The opening deals entirely with the state of affairs in Ithaca, which is a nice touch. Not only does delaying Odysseus’s introduction build up anticipation for his eventual appearance, but it also lets the situation in Ithaca breathe more, establishing Penelope and Telemachus’s yearning for his return. Moreover, when Odysseus does finally appear, he’s an amnesiac old man, seemingly in no position to help the characters in Ithaca, in turn making the Ithacan characters’ situation even more fraught.
- Odysseus’s guilt stems not only from Troy’s fate, but also the fates of his own men. One of his soldiers, Sinon, is left behind to present the horse statue to the Trojans, but Odysseus lies to Sinon about the nature of the statue to better ensure that the Trojans take the bait. Sinon dies for his efforts, and then later berates Odysseus for lying to him when Odysseus crosses into Hades during his journey home and encounters the souls of the dead. Odysseus’s guilt over Sinon’s fate is central to the emotional impact of his slaughter of the suitors, since the lead suitor, Antinous, swapped places with Sinon when Odysseus was recruiting men to fight the war. Upon killing Antinous, Odysseus shoves Sinon’s recruitment chit into Antinous’s mouth, telling Antinous to swallow his shame. It’s a nicely cathartic moment in the film, since it’s so unlike our contemporary culture, where it has become increasingly rare for the corrupt rich and powerful to suffer consequences for their actions.
- Sinon’s role in this film is another of Nolan’s additions. According to Flint Del Sol, Sinon appears in other epics and plays, but not in Homer’s Odyssey, and Nolan’s incorporation of his character – and his casting of Elliot Page – can be interpreted in terms of supporting trans rights. See this Instagram post by Flint Del Sol for an insightful analysis.
- Agamemnon’s homecoming, which he relates to Odysseus when Odysseus travels through Hades, provides another variation on the theme of violations to the sanctity of home and the corruption wrought by the war. Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra kills him upon his return in revenge for Agamemnon sacrificing their daughter, Iphigenia, to Artemis in order to secure favorable winds on the way to Troy. For Agamemnon, home is no sanctuary, since it was sullied by Agamemnon’s horrible act even before the war got underway, and his fate serves as a warning to Odysseus about the perils of Odysseus’s own homecoming.
- Speaking of Agamemnon, he is treated somewhat strangely in this film. Unlike nearly every other major character, we never get a clear view of his face, despite him being played by a fairly famous filmmaker, Benny Safdie (who also had a prominent role in Oppenheimer), and despite Agamemnon being a fairly significant tertiary figure in The Odyssey. Yet despite refusing to show his face, Nolan treats Agamemnon with such stylistic flare that it’s impossible not to notice him every time he appears. He is at least a head taller and a shoulder broader than every other human character in the film, and his pitch-black armor is accentuated with golden vertebrae trailing off the horsehair crest of his helmet and down the back of his neck. This treatment is likely a means of signifying the character’s stature amongst the Greeks while also de-emphasizing his role in the story, instead keeping the film squarely focused on Odysseus. Yet this stylization also has the effect of making Agamemnon into an imposing, intimidating, and perhaps even inhuman figure (quite unlike the somewhat impetuous and haughty leader he appears to be in other poems and plays), which lends itself to the themes with which Nolan is working. Only a monstrous creature could have led the bloodbath that ended the war. We are led not to pity him for his grim fate, but to (perhaps) see it as just desserts for a severe and merciless ruler.
- Another change Nolan makes: Calypso doesn’t keep Odysseus on her island against his will. Instead, she is more of a helper figure, lessening the pain of Odysseus’s guilt until he’s ready to accept it and make amends. She does try to convince him to stay, but when it becomes clear that he’s determined to leave, she assists him.
- My friend Rob rightly points out that Nolan seems to forget about Melantho, the serving woman (played by Mia Goth) who is seduced by Antinous and betrays Penelope’s confidence. Penelope punishes her by locking her in the banquet hall with the other suitors when Odysseus begins his slaughter, pointedly suggesting that she should be slaughtered along with the rest of them, but the last time we see her, she’s merely cowering under a table. I suppose you might say it’s characteristic of Nolan’s problems writing for women that Melantho simply disappears from the film, but I suspect further details about her fate were cut for time (plus, The Odyssey does have some interesting parts of women, most prominently Circe and Penelope).
- I was lucky enough to get to see the film in 70mm IMAX, which is absolutely stunning. Go see it that way if you can.
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