Nolan’s Odyssey: A Shaky Middle Ground 

Too woke. Too conservative. Everyone has a take on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and everyone is eager to share it. 

I won’t offer you a take. For one, I don’t think Nolan’s filmmaking can be easily filtered through any given political lens. But even if one could convincingly give an account of how Nolan infuses contemporary anxieties into an ancient story, I don’t think that’s the most interesting aspect of this new adaptation. 

Instead, I want to draw your attention to how Nolan handles the opposite process: not imposing the present onto the past but deciding which version of the past to catapult into our present culture. Whether consciously or not, Nolan promised us Homer’s Odyssey, but he delivered instead Virgil’s Aeneid. And that reveals a lot about the direction in which our culture is headed. 

Nolan can’t help that some of the crucial themes in The Odyssey are ripe for contentious discourse in our political climate. It would be difficult, for example, for any director to make a film based on a story that heavily features sea travel through foreign lands without all kinds of commentary on immigration policy. However, what a filmmaker can—and a good filmmaker should—do is think carefully about how he or she depicts the past.  

When it comes to the story of Odysseus, the possibilities are plentiful. Homer’s eighth-century BC text was already a reworking of an older, orally transmitted story about the Bronze Age, four centuries earlier. In the fourth century BC, four hundred years after the texts of The Iliad and The Odyssey were composed, Greek dramatists like Aeschylus and Euripides reinterpreted the stories of the characters involved in the Trojan war, from Agamemnon to Helen. In the Middle Ages, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri— who could not read Greek, and whose knowledge of these stories came from Roman literature instead—included the character of Odysseus, using the Latin version of his name, Ulysses, among those condemned in hell. Rereadings of Homeric myth aren’t new. They’re part of what the literary critic Harold Bloom called in his seminal work The Anxiety of Influence “strong misreadings” of previous texts. As Peter Leithart pointed out in a recent response to the Odyssey discourse, “that’s what ‘the classics’ do: plunder, rewrite, subvert, and twist earlier classics … Western literature is more like a transcript of the struggle to exorcise the ghost of Homeric influence.” 

Nolan doesn’t tell any of these stories, though he borrows from many of them, and he has, of course, gone on record saying that he is familiar with at least one translation of Homer’s Odyssey, Emily Wilson’s. No, I believe the story Nolan is trying to tell is, at its core, that of another rereading of Homer: Virgil’s Aeneid. And I think that tells us two things about our cultural moment: first, that our ethical assumptions are still much closer to the Christian tradition than we realize; second, that we have a deep-seated desire to reconcile those ethical assumptions with stories from our cultural past. 

What do I mean when I say that Nolan’s Odyssey is really Virgil’s Aeneid? First of all, there is the obvious point that some plot elements are borrowed from it. The character of Sinon, for instance, is not present in either The Iliad or The Odyssey but is instead borrowed from Virgil’s epic. The assumption that the deception of the Trojan horse, which allows the Greeks to enter the city of Troy and raze it to the ground, is morally unacceptable is also entirely absent from Homer, but is at the core of The Aeneid.  

In Homer, Odysseus’s role in devising the deception receives nothing but praise and is a source of pride for him. In Virgil, it is seen as a trickery that has no place in a just war. Virgil was, of course, trying to legitimize the rule of his own leader, Emperor Augustus, by tracing his ancestry all the way back to Aeneas, a Trojan who escaped the sack of Troy. It’s not surprising that he would have depicted the Greeks as fraudsters and the Trojans as victims, but it is surprising that Nolan should follow in this tradition. You would expect him to have “sided” with Odysseus, given that it is his story he is telling, after all, but he does not. Instead, Nolan picks out the Trojan horse as a source of war trauma and deep regret for Odysseus, even implying—again, unlike Homer but like Virgil and, later, Dante—that his misadventures in coming home are partly a punishment for his trickery.  

This brings us to the greatest difference between Odysseus and Aeneas as heroes, and to my point that Nolan’s Odysseus is really an Aeneas in disguise: the difference between “hubris” and “pietas.” In The Aeneid, the epithet that Aeneas gets called most often is “pius,” from which of course we get the word “pious”: he is dutiful and follows his destiny of traveling until he founds the future city of Rome even against his own heart—for example, even when he falls in love with the Carthaginian Queen Dido. By contrast, Odysseus is called “polymetis” in Homer’s epic (meaning “of many crafts,” i.e., clever, resourceful), which is generally positive. But “fandi fictor” in Virgil, meaning “the maker of lies,” characterizes him not as merely astute, but rather as full of hubris, the Greek word describing excessive pride.  

Nolan does something fascinating with this contrasting characterization: he accepts Virgil’s view of Odysseus as a prideful trickster, but then forces his Odysseus to change and become more like Aeneas, humbler and more dutiful. Such a change, of course, is hard to depict even in a three-hour-long film, and so Nolan has to start with an Odysseus who is already only reluctantly deceitful. Many of the less palatable aspects of his character are either reduced or eliminated altogether. For instance, Matt Damon’s Odysseus is not shown spending an entire year committing adultery with the goddess Circe while his wife is waiting for him back home. His defiance of the gods is not overt but only indirect, and only prompted by grief over the loss of his men: in Homer’s poem he tells the cyclops Polyphemus, whom he has attacked and blinded, to remember that it was Odysseus who defeated him—which directly causes Polyphemus’s father, the sea god Poseidon, to delay his journey home through shipwreck and to slowly kill all of Odysseus’ men. But in Nolan’s film, Odysseus merely shoots an arrow at the cyclops in a moment of anger, making him seem less culpable.  

His cunning is also downplayed. In Homer, he sends some of his men on a survey mission on the island of Circe, and those men end up being transformed into pigs. Nolan’s Odysseus does no such thing; his men go of their own accord, and he acts the perfect hero when he eventually suspects something’s wrong and rescues them. As Odyssey translator Emily Wilson pointed out in her review of the film, many of the “crafts” that make Odysseus “polymetis” are absent: “He does not build a marriage bed out of a tree growing in his house … The raft on which he escapes from Calypso is cobbled together from a few bits of driftwood” (in contrast to the elaborate woodchopping and shipbuilding in Homer).  

The film also ups the horror aspects of the story. The cyclops Polyphemus, who is a man-eater in Homer’s poem, sure, but who is also perfectly capable of holding a rational conversation with Odysseus, becomes a nearly nonverbal monster in the film. The more “comfortable” parts of Odysseus’s journey, such as when he lands on the island of the beautiful—and welcoming—princess Nausicaa, are completely absent. Circe, who in the poem is breathtakingly beautiful and has an incredibly easy time seducing Odysseus, becomes a sinister witch-like figure. Instead of a world of adventure, we are shown a world of bodily horror, because Nolan knows that adding this dimension is necessary to make us root for Odysseus’s homecoming.  

Why is it necessary? Because Homer’s Odysseus, while a very compelling character, is not a sympathetic one by our own moral standards. Though we live in what is often termed a post-Christian culture, we are still in many ways culturally Christian. Most audiences are still uncomfortable with adultery, slavery, abuse, and anything that can be perceived as a war crime. “Many of the film’s implicit values,” Wilson points out, “directly contradict those of Homer’s poem. Deception, warmongering, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abusing women and yearning for honour—all perfectly fine in the world of Homer—are, in this version, very bad.” And when Matt Damon’s Odysseus witnesses the sack of Troy, made possible by his own cunning, Wilson is right in saying that he “gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before.”  

There’s nothing inherently wrong, as I’ve argued, about retelling—“misreading,” in Bloom’s term—classic tales. It makes for interesting storytelling, but it should make us reflect on what new adaptations tell us about our changing cultural norms. My first impression after watching the film was that Nolan had taken a pagan hero and made him a Chrisitan hero who doesn’t feel worthy of coming home until he has repented. Damon’s Odysseus gives Anne Hathaway’s Penelope a long speech about how he regrets his actions in the Trojan war, in which he does all but use the word “repentance,” a Christian virtue that is related to, but still distinct from, the Greek concept of metanoia. Homer’s Odysseus does nothing of the sort. Other publications have picked up on this apparent Christianization of The Odyssey.  

And yet, I think this interpretation still misses something. I don’t think audiences are responding well because they wish for a return to the actual Christian faith, but rather because they are looking for a sense of purpose and for access to spirituality without the strictures of adhering to any actual religion. Once again, in this respect Nolan makes The Odyssey into The Aeneid. While the gods and goddesses in both of Homer’s epics are loudly present, steering the events of the war based on their whims, in Virgil’s epic they begin to take a backseat. They’re less wily, less unpredictable, less visible. Their will conforms to a more disembodied concept of fatum (fate). As the late theologian Ronald Knox argues in his Lectures on Virgil’s Aeneid (which was reviewed in Public Discourse), “Fate in Homer, if it has any moral determination at all, is uniformly cruel and unpleasant. Virgil, if he does not reach the idea of Providence, at least rises to that of destiny.” 

Knox sees Virgil’s Aeneid as a link between Homer’s culture and Christian culture. There is a sense that it is worth all the pain and struggles for Aeneas to submit to destiny for the greater good of founding the city of Rome at the end of his travels. Fate is not, ultimately, Aeneas’s enemy, in the way that the gods can be for Odysseus. But neither is it Providence. There are many instances in The Aeneid, most famously when Aeneas leaves Dido, when Aeneas struggles. You don’t get the sense that he is led by a loving God who, in his Providence, is guiding him to the right path. Fate is less callous than in Homer, but only to the extent that it gives Aeneas a specific purpose in life, not in the sense that it provides him with anything close to true consolation.  

Nolan’s Odysseus resembles Aeneas in that the gods are for him, also, less “real” people and more of an internal reminder to do his duty. Odysseus seems to take the advice of the goddess Athena seriously, for example, but it is also left ambiguous whether she’s actually there, or if she’s simply a psychological externalization of Odysseus’s war trauma, a figure who exists merely to remind him to do his duty and return home. 

We like a hero who is less brash, less prideful, more obedient to moral laws than Homer’s Odysseus. We like Aeneas, who, unlike Odysseus, doesn’t seduce every available woman (and feels guilty when he does), and only reluctantly kills his enemies. We like him because we feel, instinctively, that it is right that he should believe in and conform to something greater than himself, to unchanging laws about human nature that it is disastrous to defy. In Knox’s words, “we like him because he is in exile, not because he is a warrior,” because he’s the underdog. Very tellingly, Nolan’s Odyssey ends not with Odysseus’s triumphant return to rule Ithaca, but with his abdication to Telemachus and his decision to go on a self-imposed exile with Penelope to expiate his guilt about the war. 

Aeneas, just like Nolan’s version of Odysseus, doesn’t force us to actually believe in the Christian story. In a cultural moment marked by a renewed interest in Christian values, but not necessarily Christian doctrine, these characters provide a reassuring middle ground. They draw out and confirm our moral intuitions, but don’t demand that we commit to actual religious practice. Just as there is a long tradition of viewing Virgil’s Aeneid as a pre-Christian story, Nolan’s Odyssey is the post-Christian story par excellence. One question, however, remains: will this moral middle ground hold, or will we eventually return to a truly Homeric past?  

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.