Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has clearly become a flashpoint in the broader culture war, and this war took a strange turn after the release of the film found many conservative pundits applauding the film while expressing condescension and confusion about why some other conservatives may be extremely critical of it. Ben Shapiro, for example, suggests that criticism of the film is often “not in good faith,” and is an example of how conservatives get too caught up in “outrage culture,” or some such.
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It is worth noting, however, that the criticisms of Nolan’s creative choices in this movie aren’t limited to the political right. One very unexpected and stinging rebuke of Nolan’s film came from Emily Wilson, whose translation of The Odyssey is admittedly predicated upon the classical poem being seen through a modern feminist lens, and hers is a translation that Nolan himself has suggested was hugely influential in the making of his film.
Wilson clearly doesn’t feel like Nolan captured the Odysseus of Homer’s story. “The film presents an Odysseus,” she says, “who feels very bad about things that he’s done in war, and is struggling to process them in a very modern, psychiatrized [sic] way.”
“I kept looking in vain for a sense that this was a film about glory. This is a film that has an interest in shame, but I don’t think it has any interest in glory,” she says, but “it is very much in tune with things that Nolan has been obsessed with his whole career, so if you’re a Nolan fan, I think you’ll like this movie [emphasis added].”
There is an irony in all of this. Emily Wilson is suggesting, very openly, that Nolan chose to tell a different story, framed around different themes that are the “obsession” of his filmmaking, rather than telling the actual story of The Odyssey which has existed for thousands of years.
The Greeks called this sort of thing hubris, and incidentally, it was in my reading of The Odyssey as a child where I first encountered this storytelling concept, because it was a central feature of the character of Odysseus. Not only does Nolan completely ignore this central theme in the story, but he supplants this concept with themes that are familiar to all other Nolan movies — guilt, trauma, psychological burden, and so on.
In The Odyssey, which Emily Wilson is kind enough to remind people is not “this movie,” Odysseus and his men encounter a massive giant cyclops named Polyphemus. After eating some of his men, Odysseus, being the trickster that he is, engages the giant in dialogue. Hiding his identity, he tells the giant that his name is “Nobody.”
This allows, in Homer’s story, for a bit of fun with the audience. When Odysseus blinds the giant, he begs help from other cyclopes, suggesting that “Nobody has blinded me!” The other cyclopes naturally found that to be nonsense, and did not attend his injury.
Sailing away, as Polyphemus blindly hurls boulders at his ship, Odysseus cannot remain anonymous, desiring glory as he does, so he screams, “say that Odysseus, sacker of cities, blinded you, the son of Laertes, whose home is in Ithaca.”
This is a central theme of the poem, and one that completely vindicates Emily Wilson’s criticism of Nolan’s film — far from being shameful about his role in the war, he is so proud of it that he simply cannot allow this episode of his ingenuity to take place without reminding a random, blind giant that he is the one who blinded him, and he is the one who sacked Troy.
In the story, Polyphemus prays to his father, Poseidon, who curses Odysseus. After which, his long odyssey ensues.
In short, this brief event is fundamental to the character and to the story as a whole. It is symbolic of his pride in believing that he was too great a man to be held accountable for his actions. Nolan ignores this entirely, opting instead for a more silent, albeit terrific-looking sequence.
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Nolan suggests that his reasoning for having little dialogue in this scene is that the pun doesn’t work in modern English. I do remember my days in college in which we discussed how puns from Greek comedies don’t really translate to modern English, particularly in some works like Aristophanes’s Lysistrata. But this is not that, certainly. The Greek word “outis” clearly translates to “not anyone.”
Who knows? Maybe Nolan simply thought it’d be silly to have a giant cyclops talk to a human, or that it would lessen the story immersion for audiences to some greater degree than a small-woman-pretending-to-be-a-Greek-soldier, or sub-Saharan-African twin sisters being married to the two most prominent kings among the Greek kingdoms, or that Odysseus’s first mate managed to get to Greece from India in order to boss around an oarsman from Korea or something.
How did any of that happen? That’s just Hollywood magic, I guess. But dialogue with a cyclops would be a bit too much for audiences to believe.
The omission of Odysseus’s hubris as the reason for his Odyssey is important, and interestingly something upon which Emily Wilson and I agree. Pretending that Odysseus was some PTSD-addled veteran who was numbing himself with drugs until such time that he got home is an outright bastardization of The Odyssey.
So, without Homer’s reason for the journey as expressed in the poem, how can the resolution be any more in consonance with the poem? The answer is that it can’t.
If there were one central theme of The Odyssey that could be defined, it is the concept of nostos. This is the Greek term for “homecoming,” and particularly in this poem, this means the restoration of the appropriate order of things. Odysseus returning home meant that he would again be a husband to his wife, a father to his son, and a just king for his subjects.
He has the responsibility to do this, and it is a good thing. Many people are familiar with the phrase, “with great power comes great responsibility,” as it has been made famous by modern Spider-Man movies, but this is quite literally the very pinpoint of that idea’s cultural origin in the Western world.
Nolan does something different. He has his traumatized hero, who strangely endures shame but never sought glory (as is attested by Emily Wilson), get back home to Greece. He then kills the suitors who had been tormenting his wife and son, and who had been helping themselves to his own property in his absence, as he does in the poem. But after that, he and his wife go into exile, cowardly ridding themselves of their worldly responsibilities.
There is so much more to say, but I imagine that all the currently loud chatter about this film will be quiet after a week or so until next year’s award season. This film will almost certainly sweep those award shows, and it’s already a box-office hit. But it won’t be because this movie has anything to do with the central thematic concepts of The Odyssey, or what has made it endure for thousands of years.
Aside from the stupid choices around dialogue, storytelling, ultra-woke DEI casting, costume, and sound issues, the greater problem is that this movie has plucked the thematic heart out of the source material in order to make it an ancient-world character study in modern ideas about war-trauma that were far more meaningfully explored in films like The Deer Hunter.
But perhaps the greatest tragedy is that very few are trying to preserve the integrity of great Western stories like The Odyssey, and would rather fangirl about how Christopher Nolan is the last auteur du jour in America, and how his completely disrespectful treatment of the Homer’s source material is beyond any “good faith” criticism.
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