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Since I wrote my totally-completely-absolutely-justified-I-would-not-take-back-a-single-world denunciation of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer three years ago, a number of people have told me I was wrong and tried to argue with me about it. I, though, have been waiting for an apology.
Is Christopher Nolan's Odyssey a personal apology to me for having made Oppenheimer? Did the British-American filmmaker whose movies have made over $6 billion over the past three decades read my blog review of Oppenheimer, feel its profound truth, and attempt to personally make up for it to me by making a Classics-derived?
I doubt it! Nonetheless, this is what I've been asking myself ironically ever since I first heard of the project however many years ago that was. Meanwhile, a friend paid for my ticket so I could see it in theaters and report back on my thoughts.
Well, after seeing all three hours of Nolan's take on Homer's take on the story of a man trying to get home, though I can't praise the movie that much, I can mostly accept the apology.
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is not a great adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey, or a great Hollywood epic, or even a great film; it is, however, a film that captures our times, and in the process tells one very important truth.
Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is Not Homer's Odyssey
What is Homer's Odyssey? It is the world's very first disappointing sequel.
Homer's Iliad is one of the two or three greatest works of human literature ever produced. It does for the genre of epic poem more or less what the Gospels did for the genre of religious narrative: fundamentally transform it forever.
Like the Gospels, too, the Iliad is so remarkable precisely because it works on so many levels simultaneously. The Iliad is among other things and fundamentally a profound examination, critique, and in some ways even deconstruction of the entire genre of epic poetry, the concept and cult of the hero, and the basic theological and political concepts and structures underlying Greek culture. It manages to do all this, though, while also not skimping on any of the epic-poem goods its readers are there for.
As an epic poem about heroes, it features more heroes, pound for pound, and makes them more memorable than any comparable work. It spends an entire book listing every single hero and hometown represented at the Trojan War, or in other words more or less every single hero to ever appear in any epic tradition anywhere in the Greek world--the closest thing to fanservice they had in the 9th century. As an epic poem about war, the Iliad features more war, more action, more battle, more spears flying through the air, more brains spilling on the ground, more death-mist filling eyes, than any other. As an epic poem about gods, it gives us an unprecedentedly up-close and personal look at the personalities, attributes, powers, epithets, psychologies, relationships, favorites, family quarrels, and bitter rivalries of the entire Olympian pantheon. There was a reason that later generations of Greeks, including Herodotus, occasionally suspected that Homer had made up that whole Pantheon himself.
Whatever the category, then, the Iliad delivers the goods: epic mano e manos between all the most famous Greek heroes, a sex scene between Zeus and Hera, and a battle scene where most of the gods show up and brawl. It tries damn hard.
The Odyssey does more or less none of this; which is probably why it's been so much more widely read. Infinite generations of bored schoolchildren have read Odysseus encounter the Cyclops--simple folkloric account of clever hero and wicked monster. Asking them to ponder Achilles' paranoid existential depression doesn't tend to go over so well.
As one of the first sequels in human history, the Odyssey sets the tone for much of what would follow. Thankfully, it does not choose to bring Achilles back from the dead, like The Search for Spock; it does, though, pick a relatively minor character from the first outing to promote to lead. Like most such promotions, Odysseus is a bit of a disappointment.
In the Iliad, Odysseus' whole deal was that he was clever and eloquent--or in other words, a good character to use for exposition and resolution and drama in the various internal political conflicts of the Greek army. In the Odyssey, though, he is thrust into center stage, which necessitates finding some kind of conflict for him to participate in, some great theme to match the famous rage of Achilles. Where Achilles' conflict is fundamentally internal and defined by choice, Odysseus' is external and defined by circumstance. Similarly, while Achilles' rage is above all focused and single-minded, Odysseus' tale is defined above all else by multiplicity--of different sorts.
Where the Iliad opens by asking the muse to sing of Achilles' rage, then, the Odyssey opens by asking them to sing of ἄνδρα [...] πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη--"a manifold man who wandered through very many places." Unlike the fairly straightforward μῆνις ("rage") that defines Achilles' journey, the key word that defines Odysseus, πολύτροπος, is fundamentally ambiguous. Literally "much-turned," the word could mean "complex," "tricky," or even merely "widely travelled." Odysseus is all these things, of course--which is perhaps the entire point. Whatever else he is, Odysseus is not simple, morally unambiguous, or singleminded.
What is true of his character is equally true of his starring work. While the Iliad is fundamentally a single work of art in the Aristotelean sense, unified by a single man's choice between life and death, normalcy and heroism, the city at peace or the city at war, neither the Odyssey nor Odysseus are unified by any one goal.
Of course, as everyone knows, Odysseus is trying to get home to his wife and child; he does not, however, seem to be in any great hurry to do so. He is at least as interested in other goals--including honor, prizes, revenge, women, telling stories, conducting funeral games, seeing and hearing remarkable things, and doing and saying clever things--as he is in making it back to Ithaca. He is defined, in fact, precisely by this manifoldness, this multiplicity, which is not merely a cleverness in means but a pervasive confusion in ends.
Where Achilles lives in a universe defined by a clear dichotomy and a fundamental choice, then, Odysseus belongs to a world of indefinite multiplicity, where there is always one more island to visit, one more monster to fight, one more woman to seduce, one more god to offend and propitiate. In the most basic sense, we can say that Odysseus made Achilles' choice long ago, the decision to be a hero of immortal glory sung about in epic poems, and now is simply starring in his own interminable series of pulp novels like Mike Hammer. The two, in fact, have a great deal in common.
Put in other terms, Odysseus is simply a hero--a being, as I have argued in the past, defined by an orientation to death and an inability to relate to other human beings via any save the cultic relations of sex and violence.
It is for this reason, above all else, that Odysseus' much-vaunted cleverness is generally far more adept at getting his men killed than at rescuing them; at provoking unbeatable enemies than at beating them; at keeping himself away from his wife than at returning to her. It is Odysseus' heroism, manifested in the wavering, confusion, cleverness, and multiplicity intrinsic to such a being, that led him away from his wife and son to Troy to seek glory through manifold sex and violence, and that even on the alleged return journey again and again leads every one he encounters down to the underworld.
Understood in those terms, the reason why Odysseus cannot return home to Ithaca is straightforward, almost definitional. So long as Odysseus is a hero, a dead man dealing death for glory, he categorically cannot exist within the world of the city at peace, the world defined by marriage and procreation and politics and agriculture and the giving of life. So long as he is a hero, Odysseus cannot be a husband and a father and a king.
But then, Odysseus must return home--not because he wants to so much as because his wife and son are threatened and need his help, but most fundamentally simply because the gods, or at least some of them, want him to. If there is a question that defines the Odyssey, then, as Achilles' choice defines the Iliad, it is simply whether there is, in fact, any way, any path or journey or crisis or grace or rite, by which a hero can be transformed back into a man.
If there is a basic reason why the Odyssey is, in my judgment, on an entirely lesser plane than the Iliad, it is because I do not think that the Odyssey ever answers its own central question, or indeed even tries very hard to. Odysseus is a hero for more or less nine-tenths of the story, during which he never visibly seems to learn any lesson from the things he has done and suffered. The Odyssey is in no sense a Christian story, defined by the experience of conversion and repentance and renewal of the inner self. Nor is it a Platonic tale, defined by an inner enlightenment through an encounter with a higher transcendent reality. Nor, indeed, is it even a Greek tragedy, defined by a process of learning, of the replacement of ignorance with knowledge through suffering. Odysseus never repents, is never enlightened, and never learns.
Ultimately, Odysseus' transformation takes place entirely in what we might call the social, ritual, or most precisely narrative domain--the fundamental domain of pagan religion the world over. Fixed like a dead man in an indefinite, cyclical mode of behavior, Odysseus wanders from place to place being a hero until all his men are dead, his ships are destroyed, and he himself has spent seven years living on a remote island having sex every night with an immortal nymph. Then the gods intervene--which we might define in fundamental pagan terms as the external, social, ritual, and narrative determiners and drivers of events. Odysseus, importantly, does absolutely nothing, internal or external, to bring about his rescue--it is Athena who petitions Zeus who sends Hermes to negotiate with Calypso.
Rescued by the narrative, Odysseus finds himself naked and cast ashore on the island of the Phaecians, where he is rescued by a beautiful young princess--who, importantly, Odysseus does not sleep with. After all, this woman is the daughter of a powerful king of a city at peace. She is thus someone he can only relate to through the human social and political relationships that define that city. The king offers Odysseus his daughter's hand in marriage--and thus brings into play for the first time in a very long time the fact that Odysseus is married already. As a hero, an anonymous dead man wandering the earth, this hardly mattered, and did not pose an obstacle to his sleeping with an indefinite succession of mortal and immortal women. In the city at peace, though, it does matter.
This transformation, though, importantly, is not an internal change of character, but rather an external change of place. In fundamental terms, Odysseus has not changed. He is still a man from nowhere, a ragged stranger with no ties of family or kinship; he participates in funeral games, play-acting versions of warfare for the city at peace, and easily dominates all comers. Still, as a stranger he has been welcomed, fed, and clothed, and so by the law of Zeus, cannot steal from or seduce or kill his hosts. He has no choice but to behave himself.
It is precisely by these essentially external and social means, though, that Odysseus' more fundamental transformation from hero to man has begun. In Phaecia, Odysseus hears songs of the Trojan War, and is overcome by grief and pity--the emotions of a living man. As with Achilles looking on Priam, it is pity that bridges all divides in the Homeric universe--though here it is not so much Odysseus' divide from his hosts as his divide from himself. He says his name, tells his story, and returns home without more ado.
Still, even after reaching Ithaca, Odysseus has not fundamentally changed; which is, again, a problem that the Odyssey does not know how to overcome otherwise than through sheer divine and narrative contrivance. The gods, or Homer, have contrived one last challenge for Odysseus--a challenge that can only be overcome by the strength, violence, and multiplicity of a true hero.
When Odysseus returns to his house, he brings death; an overwhelming, pitiless orgy of violence worthy of Achilles at his worst. Understood in fundamental terms, this violence is not the result of the suitors' presence, a moralistic revenge for their wrongs--it is, rather, the inevitable result of the hero's presence in the world of the living. Everywhere else he has gone, Odysseus has brought death; why should his home be any different? Everywhere Odysseus has wandered, people have died, as often his own people as his enemies. If the suitors were not there, I would suggest, that violence would have been wrought on others--his wife and child among them.
The suitors are thus crucial to the plot of the Odyssey in a way that is not often understood or recognized. On the one hand, by their boorishness and violations of hospitality, they have provoked the anger of the gods, the determiners of events and facts on heaven and earth. More fundamentally, their mere presence has provided a helpful, socially and ritually acceptable outlet for the boundless violence of the hero. On the most fundamental level, though, they have served as suitable sacrificial victims for the ritual that will bring Odysseus to life again.
If there is one thing that makes the Odyssey fundamentally a pagan work, it is this ultimate faith in the mysterious power of bloodshed to achieve what no force divine or human otherwise could. Odysseus undergoes no internal transformation, no repentance, no enlightenment, no process of education; he does, however, kill an awful lot of people, including not only the suitors but his own slaves and attendants. By this social and religious and narrative ritual, he has transformed himself as if by magic once again into the king of the Ithacans, the father of his son, and the husband of his wife.
In all this, there is a sense in which the Odyssey belongs to a fundamentally different genre than the Iliad. It belongs, not to the world of epic, but the world of pagan myth and folklore the world over, with its clever, morally ambiguous heroes, its wandering plotlines defined by spectacle and sex and violence, and its fundamental, cosmos-defining belief in the power of blood sacrifice.
Achilles is faced with the fundamental choice of a human person, between life and death, and makes the wrong choice. Odysseus mostly just wanders around, fights monsters, gets laid, gets all his men killed, and ultimately murders a bunch of people in his own house. Then the gods shove a lightning bolt in his face and tell him to stop fighting or they will kill him.
The ending of the Iliad is a perfect, rounded pericope: "then they buried Hector, breaker of horses." We end in the middle of events, suspended between life and death. Achilles has made his choice; Troy is doomed to fall; but pity, divine and human, remains, and a father buries his son.
The ending of the Odyssey, though, is yet another question mark in a story full of them. Odysseus has murdered the suitors and transformed himself back into a living man--but questions, to say the least, remain. His own wife and father remain doubtful; they do not recognize him as the man they knew. Has the transformation really happened? Is Odysseus really a living man, a man of peace, the man they knew before the war? Is he really Odysseus?
As it turns out, sacrifice was not enough; Odysseus must talk his way back into his father's and wife's hearts. Odysseus, though, as Homer reminds us in very the act of persuasion, is πολύτροπος--or, in other words, a liar. He points out to his father a scar made by a wild boar in childhood--but is it really the same scar, and would this old man be able to tell the difference if it was not? He recounts the number and type of trees his father gave him as a child--but how do we know this is not just made up on the spot like so many other cons, and would his father remember one way or the other? He passes his wife's test by remembering that their marriage bed is carved from a living olive tree--but couldn't anyone have found that out merely by asking around?
Most fundamental of all, the very tales of Odysseus' heroic wandering--the Cyclops, the Sirens, the giants that destroyed his ships--are the Odyssey only tales told to the Phaecians by a ragged man who washed up naked on their beach. How can we know that these tales are true?
And anyway, whatever the alleged power of sacrifice, the author of the Odyssey knows well that bloodshed is in the final balance the maker of heroes, the bringer of war, and not their end. Odysseus became king by killing the suitors--but he also just as inevitably began another war. The families of the suitors gather together, denounce the heroic monster who has brought death to their shores, and march on the palace, and the hero goes forth to meet them, and prepares to kill again. Ritual and narrative homecoming, ritual and narrative transformation, the ritual of sacrifice itself, have become just another event in the indefinite cultic heroic chain of sex and violence.
Still, as generations of itinerant poets knew well, a story has to end somewhere; so, as often in Greek myth and tragedy, the gods intervene, and abruptly and unsatisfyingly end ritual and story alike. Deus ex machina, it should be pointed out, the god lowered down at the end of the story to declare the play over and tell the audience to go home, is in the final balance not a contrivance of ancient Greek plots so much as a dogma of ancient Greek religion.
In the Odyssey, there is no reason the story should ever end; no reason why the hero should ever stop being the hero, short of his final, inevitable death, descent into the underworld, and eternal cultic worship at his tomb. At the end of the Odyssey, Odysseus is as much the hero as ever, unable to restrain himself from violence and openly rejoicing in the prospect of a new war where glory can be won and martial power displayed. Then the battle is joined, blood is shed, a single man is pierced with a spear--and the gods declare the war over.
In the end, in the pagan world of mythology, it is the gods who are the final determiners of events, the arbitrary masters not so much of the reality of the cosmos as of social and ritual appearance and narrative arc. Odysseus has not changed; bloodshed has not ended conflict; but the gods have accepted the sacrifice, and so the war must end. When Odysseus, overcome with heroic bloodlust, tries to go on fighting, he is stopped in his tracks by a lightning bolt.
It is only now, faced with Zeus' overwhelming violence, that Odysseus "was persuaded, and rejoiced in his spirit"; the others, meanwhile, "turned themselves towards the city, longing for life." The passage from the army at war to the city at peace, the transformation from hero to man, is in the end achieved in an instant through the fear of the gods.
Then religious and civic ritual of blood sacrifice is capped, as it so often was, with the public and political and act of oath-taking, as Athena compels all present to swear to fight no more. By this act, above all else, the city is refounded, and Odysseus made king. Like his departure from Calypso, though, it has been achieved in no sense by Odysseus himself, but only by the gods.
If this appears unsatisfying and tenuous to us, there is a real sense in which it appears equally so to the author of the Odyssey. If there is a basic irony to the ancient Greek worldview, in which the social and ritual and narrative is always and everywhere prized over the moral and metaphysical and true, it is precisely this constant awareness of its own limits. What has been achieved by the threat of divine violence has not been achieved by social or political consensus; what Odysseus has been forced to do at gunpoint is not what he would do of himself and of his own character; and the Odyssey knows this as much as we do.
If in the Odyssey a hero achieves a transformation back into a man, then, it is in narrative and ritual rather than in truth. Odysseus has not changed at all; what has changed are only his circumstances.
But is that enough? Will the transformation last? Will the surrounding circumstances of home and family and city, the recurring rituals of blood sacrifice, the overwhelming fear of the gods, really keep Odysseus from killing again?
The Odyssey ends, then, not so much with an answer as with the same question with which it began.
Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is Hopefully Robert Pattinson's Oscar
Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is not about any of the things I just talked about; nor did I expect it to be.
I have never seen a movie based on the ancient world that in any way captures anything at all about the ancient world. I honestly don't know what I would do if I ever came across one, but I think it might include screaming and running for the hills.
I am a simple man. I also have a PhD in Classics. When I sit down to watch a Hollywood film allegedly about the ancient world, I hope for only a few things: 1) Battle scenes involving swords, 2) People pronouncing Greek and/or Latin words and/or names in various incongruous modern accents, 3) Over-the-top performances from famous Hollywood actors. I got all three with Christopher Nolan's Odyssey.
One of the funniest things in the world is reading modern Internet complaints about the "historical inaccuracy" of modern Hollywood productions, in which the standard for historical accuracy is always and everywhere past Hollywood productions. If these discourses are to be believed, the ancient Greeks all spoke using the artificial accent developed in the 1930s by British radio hosts in order to be more easily understood by Americans. Also they all had blonde hair and blue eyes and preferred to wear sandals and extremely aesthetically skimpy drapery at all times.
Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is not historically accurate. It is, however, by my entirely made up system at least ten times more historically accurate than anything to appear in 300. Helen of Troy, a fictitious character whose name means "Greek woman," was probably not imagined by itinerant Greek bards as looking like Lupita Nyong'o. She was also probably not imagined as looking much like Diane Kruger in Troy. Oh well.
Anyway, believe it or not, Bronze Age Greece was not predominantly inhabited by either aging British thespians or oiled-up male models from Montana. As I said, I have a PhD.
What I was really worried about when I heard that Christopher Nolan was making a movie of the Odyssey was not any of these things; indeed, it was nearly the opposite. I do not expect historical accuracy from a Hollywood film for the same reason I do not expect Caviar at a QT; because if it was there, it would probably be either fake or poisoned or a sign of complete civilizational collapse.
No, what I was worried about when I heard Christopher Nolan was making a film version of the Odyssey is that I wouldn't get what I wanted; and what I wanted was entirely fake and totally inaccurate Hollywood spectacle. And monsters. I definitely wanted monsters.
When I was a child, we had on VHS two of the Steve Reeves 1950s Hercules films, in which Reeves and a posse of second-tier models fight and romance each other with plastic swords and faux-leather outfits, respectively, while tearing apart any amount of cardboard scenery painted to look like stone. Somewhere deep down inside me, this is still one of my basic ideas of fun.
Hi, guys, it's me, a guy with a PhD. Did you know that ancient Greeks did not actually dress in frilly striped loincloths with sandals?
Christopher Nolan, though, did not strike me as very a promising candidate to give me what I wanted. Indeed, it would be hard to think of a worse candidate to make a fun epic about wandering around the Mediterranean fighting monsters than Nolan.
I think everyone in my generation both loves and hates Nolan; I don't think there's really any way around it. His impact on popular filmmaking can not really be overstated, even if much of that impact bad and large parts of it are probably unintentional.
In retrospect, his Batman trilogy was probably more important in establishing the era of Superhero Dominance (now thankfully over) than any Marvel movief with the possible exception of the first Avengers. Put simply, it nearly singlehandedly gave the entire genre for the first time true cultural cachet with critics, intellectuals, cinephiles, and other self-regarding people with no taste. In so doing, it overcame the critic-audience divide on superhero films and helped ensure that the next ten years of increasingly shitty and nonsensical Marvel movies would all somehow get 90%+ on Rotten Tomatoes regardless.
Similarly, the runaway success of Inception helped set the stage for a nearly ten-year long (though now over) era of sci-fi prominence; and Oppenheimer, for its part, not only spurred the Barbenheimer phenomenon and the last 3-4 years of bad pseudo-intellectual films, but also probably got Trump elected and started the Iran War (this may be exaggerated; as already stated, I am still mad).
Nolan is a weird filmmaker, though; and it wasn't until watching Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey that I think I finally understood him.
Put simply, Christopher Nolan is an intellectual: which is to say, he is belongs to a recognizable personality type of someone who is emotionally avoidant, deeply sentimental, terrified of visceral experience, obsessive, constantly tempted to turn everything into an intellectual puzzle to simplistically solve, and very, very stupid. I say this, of course, as an intellectual myself.
Still, for many years prior to watching Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey I have been more or less puzzled with the gap between what people say about Nolan's films, and what is actually true of them. Many people say that Nolan is a technically proficient director--he is not. He is not all that good at the basic preoccupations of directing as an art, which is to say the creation of stunning, arresting, atmospheric, 2.5-dimensional images. The typical Nolan film consists of distractingly moving camera shots of extremely high-contrast people standing or sitting in dark rooms of uncertain dimensions filled with colorless, shiny, oddly CG-looking metallic objects. In so doing, he appears to have (mostly by accident) created a visual style that works fairly badly on the big screen of a theater, but quite well on a laptop or phone screen, and in so doing invented the style that will probably continue dominating America and the world until we all die in Oppenheimer-inspired nuclear fire. The best thing I can say about this is that he is, in fact, technically proficient at his own style--and 90% of his imitators are not.
Similarly, people have been telling me ever since Inception came out that Nolan was an unorthodox filmmaker who broke plot and story rules and whose films were intellectually brilliant but confusing and went right over the heads of ordinary audience goers. This also isn't true that I can see. Inception has a completely linear heist plot taking place across a total of four locations. The central heist of Inception is simpler and more straightforward, with fewer characters and fewer moving parts and less narrative deception, than that in Ocean's 11, which no one I know has ever called a film for intellectuals.
He is also often accused of practicing "non-linear storytelling," which he has not done in any film of his that I have seen--though admittedly I have not seen them all. At some point I should really get around to watching Tenet. Featuring a brief out-of-context tag as a teaser is something that has been done regularly on general-audience television for decades. Making your story a flashback and/or narration was done several times by the original Star Trek in the 1960s; hell, the original Star Trek even did a show in which we cut repeatedly back and forth between a government trial and the events under discussion. The actual storytelling of Nolan's films, though, is thoroughly linear: get to the place, get to the other place, do the thing, get the MacGuffin, return home.
In fact, one could argue, though I've never seen anyone do it, that Christopher Nolan's concepts of plot and character owe a great deal to '80s and '90s general-audience sci-fi television: the technical problem solved elaborately and in detail by professionals that illuminates and ultimately resolves a simplistic character arc centered on male insecurity, guilt, loneliness, belonging, professional success, and/or family, with a few non-standard narrative techniques and stylistic excesses thrown in to keep the audience interested.
I am far from despising this formula; I have written an absurd amount about Star Trek over the years, and intend to write more. '80s and '90s general-audience science-fiction television had its flaws, but it provided a durable and more importantly flexible formula that could efficiently cover a large conceptual and emotional territory and encompass many different genres and atmospheres while carrying a mass audience with it.
What strikes me about Nolan, though, even relative to this formula, is the degree to which his filmmaking style is defined by mutedness and avoidance. Put another way, Nolan constantly pulls his punches--even on his own stories and concepts and the emotions they could and ought to engender.
Inception is a heist and con film; or, in other words, a film in which a large array of characters conspire to screw over one character. And yet...perhaps the oddest thing about the film is the way in which the film manages to entirely defuse and muddle and avoid its own central conceit. Ocean's 11 made its heist/con sympathetic by the simple and time-tested method of making the guy conned really, really unlikeable. Other, darker films have done the opposite, making the guy conned sympathetic and using the opportunity to explore the darkness of the alleged protagonists.
Inception, though, does neither; or rather both. It makes the main protagonists sympathetic by the simple expedient of focusing on other things and avoiding portraying clearly what they're actually doing; and it makes the guy conned sympathetic by making him a naive kid who spends most of the movie helping the con men con him. This is in a sense a clever conceit, but emotionally and viscerally a way for the audience to avoid having to think about what our plucky protagonists are actually doing to this person. One could imagine, in fact, a film with a similar conceit that reveled in and highlighted the dark irony of the situation; Nolan, though, not only does not do so, but actively avoids doing so.
One could make similar points about nearly every other Nolan film--though I won't do so here. The Joker in The Dark Knight is a brilliant psychological villain precisely because he has no background, no ideology, and no cause. In real life, of course, such a villain does not, and indeed cannot exist; which is another way of saying that The Dark Knight's vision of the Joker is entirely defined by psychological avoidance once again. That the Joker was in the context of 2008 supposed to be in some way a stand-in for Islamic terrorists--possessed of a quite clear and explicit ideology and a history indelibly tied to that of European colonialism and American Empire--makes that point even more clearly. And, strangely enough, the film itself makes that point in the famous scene in which ex-colonial officer Alfred Pennyworth tells Batman a story about native resistance to the British Empire, and then opines somewhat strangely that this anti-colonial violence was, like the Joker, ultimately causeless and based on a love of destruction for its own sake.
Anyway, the above summary probably sounds harsh, but is not intended as negative at all. Nolan is simply a certain kind of person, a sentimental male intellectual prone to an obsessive fixation on puzzles. This personality type is responsible for most of what's good about his films--above all his occasional achievement of a unique, intense inward unreal pressure and atmosphere, as in Inception, which remains in my memory not as a heist film or a film about dreams so much as a film about the experience of being a hyper-fixated inward professional intellectual sentimental man trying to, say, catch a plane or attend a conference or accomplish any other task in the real world.
Still, it should be clearly said, once and for all, against all the critics who have derided Inception's lack of imaginativeness and creativity and joy in portraying a world of pure imagination: Inception is in fact what Christopher Nolan's dreams are like. Don't tell anyone, but so are mine.
Anyway, all this is to say that when I first heard that Christopher Nolan was making an adaptation of The Odyssey, I was not particularly happy. And upon seeing Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, I do have to record for posterity that I was mostly right. The parts of the film that have to do with "adventure" or "spectacle" in the traditional Hollywood-epic sense--the parts that Steve Reeves might have enjoyed--are all without exception very bad. The monster Scylla, usually portrayed in Greek art as a beautiful woman naked to the waist with dogs in place of legs, is a terrible indistinct grabby rock monster. Charybdis, the terrifying whirlpool that is also a sea-gulping fish monster, is, and I can't emphasize this enough, simply very very small and not particularly threatening. The Laestrygonians are generic giants wearing generic armor who kill Odysseus' men and destroy his ships with all the drama of a posse of bored highschoolers. The Cyclops, admittedly, looks good, but doesn't speak, isn't tricked by Odysseus into thinking his name is "No One," and is consequently no fun at all. The underworld is portrayed as a large empty field. The man-enslaving nymph Calypso is neither terrifying nor desirable, but acts mostly like a very bored and blissed-out therapist who does a lot of yoga. Even the sirens aren't sexy at all--and chronicling the changes in American culture since Troy in 2003 that would make the portrayal of non-sexy sirens in a Hollywood blockbuster even thinkable would, I am confident, once again lead to the conclusion that we have passed through a total change in epoch. Et cetera.
This is all, again, quite negative; still, I should say that my initial misgivings were not entirely confirmed; and that there were in fact glimmers of light in the film corresponding however distantly to the Hollywood epics of yore.
First, it is clear that Nolan was in fact trying to stretch himself filmically in The Odyssey. The film does not merely correspond to his usual style; for one thing, it features way more color, way more landscapes, way more nature, and much larger and more clearly-defined spaces, than anything else I've seen by him. Too much of the film, admittedly, takes place in vast dark flat planes; but not most of it. Lots of people do stride around wearing very badly designed and impractical armor brandishing fake swords, in the best Hollywood tradition; other people wear tunics and speak with Irish accents. Ithaca gets a great hall vaguely worthy of its name; and we get to visit an implausibly large, whitish, vaguely Egyptian temple nearby that genuinely thrilled me. Overall, what we get is a Nolanization of the Hollywood epic palette, but still something recognizably like it.
Secondly, whatever directions Nolan gave to Matt Damon (more gruffness! more mutedness!), he clearly didn't give the same directions to the whole supporting cast--or maybe they ignored him. The film contains some performances that are legitimately fun in the way that famous actors were once expected to be fun in a Hollywood epic about the ancient world.
Above all, I genuinely hope that someone gives Robert Pattinson an Oscar for sneering his way so lustily through this film. The actor who played Circe also did a great job coming off as entirely uninterested in belonging to the rest of the movie; as did any number of other famous A-list actors in minor parts. This exercise--what drug-addled Brooklynite with a penchant for wild parties will they get to play this Aechean stablehand?--was once half the fun of watching a historical epic.
Still, when all was said and done, I walked away from Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey not only having been once again confirmed in my belief that Christopher Nolan is the very last person you should ever hand a giant budget to to make a fun Hollywood epic about the ancient world, but also, I confess, genuinely moved, genuinely intrigued, and grudgingly conceding that this was perhaps the best possible "Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey" that I or anyone else could have reasonably hoped for.
Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is in Important Ways a Contrast to Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer
That, though, has little to do with either Homer's Odyssey or Robert Pattinson's smirk; it has, rather, to do with the very fundamental question of what story Christopher Nolan actually wanted to tell. This story has more or less nothing to do with Homer's Odyssey, but a great deal to do with Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, a great deal with historical Christianity, and a great deal to do with the times in which we live.
Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is many things; including a thoroughly stupid film, a remarkably uninformative biography, and a thesis on the ultimate significance of destructive power. Put simply, as I argued at length elsewhere, the film Oppenheimer believes that Robert J. Oppenheimer is the most fucking important person to have ever lived for the sole reason that he helped build a weapon with the power to destroy the world. Solely because he will have built a device that can lay waste to the surface of the earth, Oppenheimer is sexy, tragic, Promethean, and, in short, and ultimately without much content besides the purely aesthetic, really really cool.
I found the experience of watching Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer so thoroughly revolting and infuriating that I am still, to this day, mad about it. To say I did not trust Christopher Nolan to make a good Odyssey film because of his lack of viscerality and joy as a filmmaker is, in the end, a severe understatement. I did not trust Christopher Nolan to make a good Odyssey film because I was afraid that he would make yet another evil film instead.
He didn't do that, though; which is why I am in fact writing this piece, and why I provisionally accepted his apology above. Not only is Christopher Nolan's Odyssey a film celebrating the ultimate meaning of destructive power, it comes close at times to being a rather incisive and eloquent refutation of that celebration and everything associated with it in the real world over the past four years.
If I had to do Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey over again, I think I would edit out most of the actual Odyssey stuff, then retitle it The Trojan Horse. Put simply, in Nolan's vision, Odysseus is a man who desperately wants to go home to his wife and children, but cannot--not because he is lost, opposed by gods or monsters, or trapped by witches, but because he is internally obsessed with his feelings of guilt over the Trojan Horse.
The Trojan Horse is probably the one thing that everyone remembers from Homer, despite the fact that it's never actually portrayed in Homer's Iliad or Odyssey. It is, however, portrayed in Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, at great length and repeatedly, as the thing that Odysseus is in fact thinking about and brooding over during his long journey home.
As Odysseus expresses it in a late scene, by building a horse as an offering to Athena, inviting the Trojans to accept it into their temple, and filling that horse with armed warriors, he and his fellow Greeks had betrayed the most fundamental bonds between human beings, the trust and decency and hospitality and respect for religion and women and children even in wartime on which human civilization depends.
Throughout the film, numerous characters identify these bonds of trust with "Zeus' law": a reference in part to the genuine ancient Homeric concept of xenia, or hospitality, a principle present in many ancient cultures including Biblical Jewish belief, by which strangers and travelers must be housed and fed rather than menaced and harmed under pain of divine wrath. In Nolan's world, though, "Zeus' law" extends far beyond hospitality as such, and is frequently expressed rather in the words of what we now know as the "Golden Rule": do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
The Trojan Horse, it should be clearly said, is a genuinely dirty trick; it is not, however, something that Odysseus or anyone else in Homer ever expresses any particular guilt or shame over. In this fundamental divide lies the difference between many things; including the ancient and the Medieval and the pagan and the Christian.
Odysseus is a hero; which in the Homeric world of antiquity means among other things that he is both licensed and expected to do things that would otherwise be considered monstrously immoral in the pursuit of gaining honor, war prizes, and immortal glory in song. Homeric xenia even in its most extreme forms does not really amount to a generalized principle of loving one's neighbor as one's self: still, Odysseus and his men are not really expected to abide by the principles of hospitality while in arms either.
So long as they are at war with Troy, the Acheans can and do lie, cheat, steal, plunder, and kill anyone they come across, including civilians, noncombatants, and total strangers; so long as he is on the high seas with an army, Odysseus does the same thing. Admittedly, as I have tried to suggest above and elsewhere, the status of the hero at war is not in the final balance an ethical or even a stable one. It is not so much that Odysseus is ethically exempt from xenia as that he is expected by everyone, even the gods, to violate it for plunder and glory; it is not so much that the gods or anyone else morally approve of heroes so much as that even the gods enjoy epics about heroes.
By building the Trojan Horse, Odysseus not only won the war, not only gained a great deal of plunder, but most importantly gained an immortal name and immortal glory for himself and his family. He is certainly not sorry about that. Still, by this same heroic deed he has also killed a lot of innocent people, destroyed a lot of temples, and in the process made a great many enemies for himself up to and including the immortal gods. Properly understood, these are simply two sides of the same heroic coin: in gaining glory, the hero inevitably deals death and inevitably dies.
Nolan's Odysseus, though, is nothing like this; he is, indeed, not even really a hero at all in the Greek sense. He has no interest in his own reputation, in his war prizes, or in the songs sung about him. He fought for the Greeks, not out of a desire for personal glory, but out of care for others, to do his duty and to protect his people from Agamemnon's wrath. Nolan's Odysseus, we might say, is a thoroughly ethical and familial being, defined above all by his adherence to the laws of society and his attachment to women and children. In other words, in the terms of Homer, he is not a hero, but a man of the city, a man of peace. He is the choice Achilles does not make.
Yet this kind of person, as Homer knew well, simply cannot exist in the world of the heroic army at war; much less can this kind of person ever achieve the immortal glory granted through Greek epic. Odysseus, in this sense, is a walking contradiction; and it is therefore quite logical that he spends most of the story in a state of profound discomfort, depression, and isolation, barely tolerating and barely tolerated by those under his command.
In a sense, then, Nolan's Odyssey is a kind of mirror image of Homer's Odyssey. Homer tells the tale of a hero wandering around being a hero and ultimately managing through ritual to become a man again. Nolan tells the tale of a man who does one heroic deed only, and in so doing spreads heroism and destroys the world.
Here is the most interesting, and indeed most brilliant aspect of Nolan's Odyssey: an element that is not so much from Homer's Odyssey as in intelligent dialogue with it. Homer, as most scholars posit, is heir to a tradition of itinerant epic poetry from the Iron Age, the age of triumphant, wandering Greek piracy on the high seas. The world he depicts is in many respects, ethically and otherwise, recognizably this era of anarchy and this society of warrior pirates; in other respects, though, it is a self-conscious attempt to portray the Bronze Age, a very different period when powerful centralized agricultural states hoarded grain and built palaces and storerooms and organized armies and trade routes throughout the Mediterranean. What results is a bizarre mélange of anachronism and archaism; warriors riding chariots but dismounting them for battle, vast organized armies composed of individualistic glory-seeking heroes, petty pirates inhabiting Bronze Age palaces.
The question of the Bronze Age Collapse--what exactly happened that in short order seems to have destroyed every major city in the Mediterranean and fragmented these great states back into tiny ones--has been a debated topic for centuries of scholarship, and remains so. For some, the primary driver was climate change; for others, social revolution; for others still, Greeks.
If there is a fundamental irony built into Homer's Iliad and Odyssey alike, it is that the story he tells--of seafaring warriors with their individual warbands gathering to sack a large walled city--describes among other things a recurring scenario of the Bronze Age Collapse.
I think Homer knew that; just as he knew very well that he and his fellow Greeks were living in the ruins of a greater civilization, a time when people were larger and stronger (because better fed by agriculture), when people travelled farther and faster (because the seas were safer), when the gods were in some inchoate way closer. It was natural for him to associate this past epoch with heroes, cultic dead men worshiped and sung about across the Greek world from Spain to Sicily to Turkey. But Homer was also smart enough to realize that the hero's whole way of life stood as a glaring contradiction to the settled, agricultural, civic way of life that characterized that past era at its height--and therefore to realize, in some inchoate way, that it was the heroes themselves who had destroyed the great city and brought the age of glory to its end.
Of course, in the Odyssey, all this is quite jumbled--perhaps even self-contradictory. The Iliad, the better of the two works, is wise enough to pose the two ways of life as finally contradictory, a choice between two alternatives, which we might call heroism or humanity, the city at peace and the army at war, or simply life and death. The Odyssey, an infinitely lesser work, tries ultimately to have its cake and eat it too: to let the hero survive and return home after destroying the city.
Nolan, in a sense, tries to correct that mistake; and I for one agree with him.
In Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, the hero returns home; but ultimately confesses to his wife his realization that by being a hero, if only for a moment, he has destroyed both the city and his whole world.
This revelation is the only scene in Christopher Nolan's Odyssey that made me emotional; though the sadness was merely the recognition of truth. Throughout the film, we are told of people's fear of a new threat, sea peoples who ravage and plunder and destroy, and from which all great cities and palaces and temples must soon be ready to protect themselves. Ultimately, though, Odysseus tells Penelope that they are the Sea People--by which he means his men, wandering heroes who in an early scene raid and burn a village for food, all the other men returning from the great expedition to Troy, hardened by ten years of bloody conflict and the violent orgy of the taking of Troy, and ultimately simply the Greeks themselves, who have almost to a man have abandoned trust and begun to prey on each other, a phenomenon exemplified as much by the luxurious young suitors who cluster in his hall to drink and eat as by battle-hardened raiders from the sea.
As Odysseus puts it quite clearly, the greatness of the Greek civilization was ultimately based on moral principles, on bonds of trust between human beings, on the universal divine law that tells us to treat others as we would be treated. Once this bond has broken, civilization cannot survive. And the bond has been broken--first and most famously by Odysseus' deed of the Trojan Horse, trumpeted by bards and travelers across the world. Even those too young to have fought at Troy have learned from Odysseus.
Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a film about a really cool smart guy who feels vaguely bummed about the fact that he happens to have overseen a large-scale military project that happens to have discovered a bomb that happens to be able to destroy the human race. In the film's stark portrayal, all significance and all meaning in life ultimately flows from the technical achievement of the undirected power to destroy.
Understood properly, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey makes precisely the opposite point. Significance and meaning flows not from destruction, but from civilization, from the city, from family. What makes Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus significant is precisely their moral stature; Odysseus' men and the suitors, on the other hand, are weak, pathetic losers unable to restrain themselves from random acts of violence and self-indulgence. What destroys, in other words, is explicitly and clearly made out to be less significant and meaningful than what is destroyed; which is precisely the opposite point made in Oppenheimer, where Nolan steadfastly refuses to show us any consequences of the atom bomb other than on Oppenheimer's career. What holds civilization together is human trust and morality expressed in strength of character; what destroys civilization is human cruelty and predation expressed in weakness and cowardice and stupidity and lies. It is eminently clear which is better.
In Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer's vague and mostly implied recognition that he might in fact have done something pretty important but kind of sad in inventing the atom bomb does little except add a vague air of sexy tragic meaningfulness to this otherwise boring technician. In Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, however, Odysseus' recognition is both much more explicit, and much more fundamentally moral. He has sinned; he has done something wrong that he should not have done. And his sin has negative consequences.
Up to this point, we could see Christopher Nolan's Odyssey as in some sense a commentary on, or in dialogue with, the world of Homer's Odyssey. What sets the film entirely apart from Homer, though, is its fundamentally Christian view of sin, guilt, confession, and expiation.
The scene where Odysseus confesses to his wife is portrayed quite literally and deliberately as an echo of the Sacrament of Confession; his wife even speaks to him from behind a grille. This confession, too, is at one and the same time to a human being and a divine being, Athena; portrayed throughout the film as a young woman in a white veil, an image that has nothing to do with Greek iconography of Athena and everything to do with Christian iconography of the Virgin Mary. The same scene also features a kind of Christian vicariousness and identification in suffering, as Athena in burning Troy briefly takes the place of a young woman about to be murdered.
Even here, though, the film suffers from Christopher Nolan's nature as an intellectual. I like and agree with the fundamental thesis of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, almost as much as I hated and despised the fundamental thesis of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. Still, it remains a thesis; a clearly stated intellectual point. I understood the thesis, and was moved by it; I was not, however, as moved as I should have been, for several reasons.
First, the film would be far, far more effective if it allowed Odysseus to be more of a hero in the Greek sense; if it showed him and his men engaging in the kind of plunder and predation it diagnoses as the cause of the Bronze Age Collapse. Here, again, the unfortunate necessity of having to feature monsters and sirens causes problems for the film. I like monsters and sirens; Nolan does not, though, and his film fundamentally has nothing to do with them, and would be stronger without them.
Secondly, and most fundamentally, the film suffers from Nolan's aversion to viscerality in emotion as such. I was moved by the realization of Odysseus' internal, personal guilt; I was not, however, moved by the projected downfall of Greek civilization. The simple reason is that I was not allowed to feel the visceral, gut-punch realization of human violence and evil; because Nolan would not show it to me.
Odysseus' men are more than once in the film said to embody the violent predatory nature of the Greek of the future; we never see them do anything particularly bad, though. Circe says that their true form is pig-like monsters of dangerous and violent appetites, accuses them of threatening her and wanting to rape her; they never show any particular signs of that, though, obediently throwing off their weapons and armor and sitting politely down at her table for soup. The closest the film comes to showing us this alleged brutality of desire is closeup shots of them eating. Admittedly, they seem pretty hungry; but they mostly just come off throughout the film as really stupid.
Likewise, the suitors are also said to embody the violent, dangerous, deceptive, predatory nature of the Greek of the future. This, admittedly, works much better, thanks almost entirely to Robert Pattinson's performance. Still, the backstory of his character, Antinuous, is needlessly convoluted and abstract and hardly visceral at all; and for all Pattinson's efforts neither his character nor the other suitors are allowed to do very much monstrous. They beat up a few people, including one older man; they kick a dog; they arrange an assassination; and, well, that's about it.
The scene, though, that drove home to me just how unwilling Nolan was to make me feel the evil that he was intellectually describing was the scene that in most respects is the best in the whole film; Odysseus' confession to his wife. The scene is intercut with the Trojan Horse, its transportation into the city, the heroes' escape by night, and finally the taking and burning of Troy. For the most part, this plays simply like an exciting action sequence. One of the best scenes in all literature is the description in Vergil's Aeneid of the Trojan parade bringing the Horse into the city, with laughing children and dancing young women and smiling old men throwing handfuls of flowers at the very men about to kill them. Nolan, though, mostly focuses on the discomfort of the men in the horse.
When the scene reaches its climax, though, and Odysseus is at last confessing his sins to his wife, the scene devolves into a melee of taking and burning; and, I confess, I was waiting for, looking for, emotionally primed for, things that would drive home the magnitude of Odysseus' sin and betrayal of human bonds, things that would hit me like a punch in the gut. I didn't get them, though.
Oddly, the city of Troy in its taking appears almost entirely devoid of civilians: there are a few young women cleanly murdered with swords, and otherwise just a lot of soldiers to kill. As Homer knew well, as he portrayed clearly both in the Iliad and the Odyssey, when cities fall, truly horrible, monstrous things are done: old men are cut down without pity, women of every age are raped and mocked and tortured and abused, children are killed for sport. Even later generations of Greeks remembered the Trojan Women, and wept. Nolan did not have to show us these things graphically; but it was certainly his duty to remind us of them. In fact, Odysseus' character as portrayed in Nolan's The Odyssey would have made this far more effective. A man of moral character, a Christian man, returning home at long last to protect his beloved wife and child from predation, confessing his worst sins to God and man, would surely remember the women and children he had himself seen preyed upon by his own fault, and confess, and weep.
Alas, Nolan is an intellectual; which means that for him, the sight of stately buildings crumbling in fire is far more important. Admittedly, there is something in this. In these crumbling buildings, we see the collapse of Greek civilization, perhaps for the only time in the film; we do not, however, see the collapse as it would have actually occurred, as Nolan's The Odyssey in fact says it occurred. We neither see nor feel the intimate betrayal of human beings by each other, the turning of man into wolf to a man. We are told about it; but all we see are crumbling walls.
Still, we do see the Virgin Mary weeping in the guise of a murdered woman; and that is something for a Hollywood blockbuster in 2026. I will take what I can get.
Apology accepted, Mr. Nolan.
Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is a Sign of the Times
The year is 2026, and as I write this Saudi Arabia has attacked Iraq and the President of the United States has declared that America will "beat the fucking shit" out of Iran. Earlier this year, America blockaded and stole huge amounts of oil from Cuba and Venezuela; and thereafter spent months manipulating oil markets up and down for private gain.
Anyway, when I walked out of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey I couldn't help feeling that the film really did capture the zeitgeist of 2026 better than anything I'd seen that year; a zeitgeist best described as a kind of numbed, resigned despair alternating with purposeless frenzies of destruction.
According to Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, which had to have been conceived of and written long before the Iran War, and mostly even before Trump's election, human civilization is over. We have broken God's law, the Christian law of love of neighbor, and all the fragile bonds of trust between human beings; and so, we are doomed to prey on and betray and destroy one another until all has been lost and we return to a centuries-long dark age. Still, as Odysseus tells us as he sails off into the sunset, eventually civilization will return.
I really do think that this is how a great many people today are thinking, if only subconsciously--people up to and including almost all the most powerful people on the planet. I do not, however, think it is true; and have been arguing and fighting against it, and the underlying sin of despair, practically my entire life.
When all is said and done, life is better than death; and human beings know that. We live in a time defined by an urge to destroy and die--this is only, though, a consequence, a diseased mistaken consequence, of the human urge to live and see God. It is mostly only a form of temporary insanity induced by the Internet, the Pandemic, Donald J. Trump, and our own sins.
Sooner or later, the orgy of destruction will stop; and we will be left where we were at the start, alive in the world and full of desire for God. In the meantime, our task is to arrest the processes of dissolution wherever and whenever possible; and to promote the processes of life and growth and salvation wherever and whenever possible. Really, this isn't too different from our task at any other time.
I largely agree with the thesis of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, which is in many ways a Christian thesis; namely, that what ultimately defines a civilization and makes it strong is its human bonds of trust, morality, virtue, generosity, living and giving life, and what destroys a civilization is the breaking of those bonds.
Where Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is not at all Christian, though, where it in fact coincides with the paganism of Homer most fundamentally, is in its ultimate commitment to fate. In the tragic worldview of the ancient Greeks and Christopher Nolan, people sin, suffer for their sins, and learn from them. In the Christian and Catholic Faith, though, sins are forgiven, and people and civilizations repent and are redeemed.
As Alfred the Great, who fought against the nomadic predators of his own day, said quite eloquently: pagans believe in fate, but all Christian men in providence. There is a great difference between the two.
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