The Desolation of Nolan
Yes, I’m going to opine about the Odyssey—the actual Odyssey (the epic poem) and the movie that steals its names in a pretense of making something worthwhile. And it is a Desolation—a sterile creation stripped of myth where no one who watches the movie would walk away with any meaningful understanding of the poem’s themes, plots, its characters and the world in which it was set.
It’s no accident that the gods and goddesses are stripped from the movie except for Odysseus’s PTSD fever dream featuring a scowling Athena (appearing as a trauma hallucination, not as a goddess).
What would Middle Earth be without magic? Pretty much our world. How boring. If I wanted that, I would not be reading fantasy. The gods are active players in the actual Odyssey. Poseidon functions as an Antagonist (Punisher) for Odysseus blinding his Cyclops son, Polyphemus, turning the sea against Odysseus, forcing a much harder journey to return home. This is an important virtue of the poem—that our actions have outcomes and the gods will arbitrate the morality (or immorality) of our actions and deliver consequences. And that to gain our heart’s desire, we must overtime trials and tribulations.
But Nolan cannot accept that the Divine influences our course of life, and so he stripped them from the poem. Athena is a guide and protector, an ally throughout the poem to support his quest to return home to Ithica. Zeus plays the role of mediator. There is a scene (in the poem) where Odysseus, stranded on Calypso’s island, prays to Zeus for deliverance so that he may return home (an act of humility), which Zeus grants (showing his concern/love for mortals). When Odysseus’ crew ignores the gods’ warnings not to harm Helios’ cattle, Zeus destroys his ship and crew with a thunderbolt. Ignoring Divine authority has consequences in life as well as in the judgment at death. Calypso is a goddess and a most interesting character. I view her as a kind of Eve, where she tempts Odysseus with the pleasures of the flesh, using emotional and psychological manipulation to exert power and control over him (common female strategies), including an offer of immortality. But Odysseus resists the temptation (unlike Adam) because he is driven by his desire to return home and reunite with his family. Circe, another goddess (too bad these female roles were wiped or reduced from Nolan’s script!), invokes a different take on gender dynamics where Circe is able to turn Odysseus’ men into pigs (women exerting raw power and control over men) while Odysseus resists her power and her charm (part ordeal / part temptation). In the poem, Circe is described as being quite beautiful but in the movie Nolan went with an old medieval wench playing a witch rather than a goddess. Also, the whole Circe tirade of men are pigs is such a tired feminist man-hating trope that it comes across as 21st century elitist preaching.
Nolan axes the goddesses, so in turn expands Penelope’s role and her agency but it doesn’t work because sometimes Nolan tries to follow the poem’s story beats and when he does there is conflict with his many insertions. On the one hand, Nolan’s Penelope has no agency “only a man can sit on the throne” she says in a whine but then at a critical time Antinous, a suitor who wants to be king, acts against his own interest to prevent the suitors from killing Telemachus as a favor to Penelope (treating her as if she has real agency, when in reality, Antinous would have been king had the suitors killed Telemachus). Penelope would not have had the power to refuse Antinous and so Nolan’s version forces Antinous to act in a way that’s not believable (but is perhaps believable by a modern audience used to soft modern dynamics).
The dialogue was far too modern and off-putting. “What do you know about my dad” says Telemachus to Antinous and the latter’s response “You’re pining for a daddy you don’t even know” followed up by “you can’t blame me for looking” in reference to Penelope sounds so YA as to be jarring. I’m leaving it at that (for now) because there are too many examples to cover in this post.
Odysseus is on a hero’s journey. He faces ordeals (kind of like Hercules) and temptations (Jesus), which he overcomes because of his overriding desire to return home. The gods and goddesses are active players throughout the poem, and to remove them is akin to having no rings of power in Middle Earth, wizards or Balrogs. These ordeals and temptations are still relevant to the human condition, and they also show how gender dynamics are the same yet also different. Interesting stuff. But you won’t find any of it in Nolan’s movie.
Nolan’s Odysseus starts out saying “he doesn’t really want to go home,” because of his Vietnam war trauma. We have a character in need of therapy, who uses drugs to help him navigate his trauma. Sound familiar? It’s too familiar. Nolan’s Odysseus is tragic not heroic, and that line by itself, a direct contradiction to the emotional heart of Homer’s poem says is absolute clarity that whatever Nolan’s film is, it’s not the Odyssey. And because it is such a direct contradiction, none of the beats in the movie works when you put them together and especially in the rare times when Nolan decided to adapt bits of the poem.
What you will find is a Vietnam PTSD Odysseus munching on lotus flowers to wipe away the pain of his trauma (in the poem, he resists the temptation to eat the flowers) and who is riddled with so much guilt that he cannot bear to go home where Penelope would act as a mirror to his war crimes (he is weak—not only did he commit “crimes” but he resists doing what is right, going home, because of his shame). There are movies out there that tell that story. It’s a worthwhile story, but (again) it’s not the Odyssey.
There’s even a bit where Antinous avoids going to war because of Odysseus’ intervention (draft dodging). The movie is stuck in lessons that Nolan learned as a child, and that would be okay, except 1) it’s a familiar story told better elsewhere 2) he’s claiming that he is doing an adaption, he has extoled its authenticity, which is nothing more than deliberate reframing which gets into gaslighting whenever anyone challenges him on that point.
The Trojan Horse is used as a twisted metaphor for Original Sin. It doesn’t work on many levels. There is an ancient Greek moral code in Homer's Odyssey: Xenia. Like many cultures across the world, the Greeks had a moral code around how to treat guests/strangers, and it was held to be sacred. Xenia required hosts to warmly welcome, feed, and shelter strangers before asking any questions, while guests were expected to be respectful, gracious, and not abuse that generosity. In the Odyssey, Xenia was central to the plot as it constrained Penelope and her son, Telemachus from expelling the suitors (the sons of the men who had gone off to war) from their home. Nolan expanded the concept of Xenia to include all actions, including those in war, and that in effect Odysseus’ use of the Trojan Horse was “unfair”, shattering the code of Xenia to such an extent that it caused civilization collapse. That’s not how Homer portrays it— the Trojan Horse was portrayed a clever tactic to end a protracted siege, and all’s fair in love and war. There is no moral doubt around its use—and to impose Nolan’s modern sensibilities on the ancient Greeks is arrogant and self-limiting. In the poem, to the extent the gods had any issue with the attack on Troy (keeping in mind that the siege lasted a VERY long time, I think around a decade) they had ample time to intervene, it came from Divine anger that resulted from the desecration of temples and statues dedicated to the gods and goddesses in the sacking of Troy (the attack itself was not immoral but there should be limits). Within Nolan’s concept of Xenia (expanded to be the Golden Rule, also, not original), Xenia would have already been broken by those that triggered the war (most notably, Paris and Helen). Further, if the Trojan Horse was grounds for civilization collapse, then it would have already collapsed (the world was harsh).
It doesn’t work. Nolan is trying to insert Original Sin into a story where it doesn’t belong and at the same time, he is shoving his moral presentism around war that didn’t exist back then. A quote attributed to Tolkien is, Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made, and alas, that is the state of Hollywood. Nolan pillaged the epic poem, lifting names and places for his use but disregarding the themes, the ancient virtues and lessons, to remanifest it as a modern tale subservient to his sensibilities. Because in the context of the movie, Nolan is god, albeit a small one, and because he is god, whatever he does is right and just and the meaning of a tale told by Homer (which was itself a retelling of older versions) and translated by thousands of writers across the millennia (which nonetheless told the same basic story) meant nothing. Instead, Nolan twisted the epic poem into his image. He did not adapt—he plundered. Nolan did not earn the use of Odyssey, its title or the names within.
Also, having Telemachus read off Zeus law (Xenia expanded into the Golden Rule) to someone who would know it well is boring and there’s a lot of that in the movie. A lot of info dumps between characters because otherwise how would the audience understand what’s going on since in reality it is such a mess.
Nolan is clever (though not so much with the movie). Given Nolan threw out a reference to Emily Wilson’s feminist inspired translation, he clearly wanted people to think that he drew upon her work. Doing so created controversy and helped to rally the WOKE faithful. But Emily herself has criticized the movie because it is in no way faithful to her translation (or to any translation that has come before). And why should it? Nolan is god (and he used Emily to bait those who looked upon the film as political theatre). But I take Nolan to task for using Emily in this way—it’s so small-minded and anti-empathic (impact to others does not matter). The use of Elliot Page as a Greek warrior playing Sinon is another angle to this strategy. Sinon appears in the ancient ROMAN epic poem The Aeneid by Virgil around a thousand years later—a character invented by Romans, not Greeks! Sinon also replaces Achilles; Achilles has a limited but important role in the poem—a reminder that life is precious, and that Achilles would prefer to be a living farm laborer than king of the dead. Sinon serves no purpose in the film other to garner “woke” points—it’s forced and looks ridiculous (kind of like a fat woman playing Wonder Woman). Nolan clearly doesn’t care anything about the Greeks or their culture—not a single Greek in the movie and the use of black actors and actresses as Greek is jarring. I don’t believe it. I’m fine if non-Greeks are used but some effort should be made to make them look plausibly Greek or Greek-adjacent.
I’m not a fan of Matt Damon in this role. I like Matt. He’s nice—too nice. He does fit Nolan’s vision of Odysseus—a weak man traumatized by war, unable to face the consequences of his actions (lack of accountability)—but that’s not the Odysseus of Homer or even a semblance of that character. A somewhat younger (about 10 years) actor would have been better (assuming an actual adaption) and having much more charisma and gravitas (as in a man other men would follow). Do you really think men would have followed Nolan’s Odysseus through 10 years of war and a perilous journey home where Odysseus took a longer route because he was tired of following Agamemnon? The real Greeks would have killed Nolan’s traumatized Odysseus long before the Trojan Horse ever came to be. People back then didn’t have the luxury to indulge in their need for therapy. People who needed therapy had a way of getting culled from the herd.
The world was harsh.
Connecting the Sea Peoples to the Greeks of the Odyssey is misinformation (a fair comment given how Nolan trumpeted his “authenticity”)—the Sea Peoples raided the Eastern Mediterranean and were ultimately defeated during an attempted invasion of Egypt. Their origins are murky; they were not a unified force, but were a collection of refugees and bandits banding together because of famine and other environmental stresses, and their migrations and raids unraveled the Hittite Empire and other important cities. The trading networks collapsed, and the Bronze Age collapse followed (a combination of environment stresses, the migrations that followed and wars that were triggered). So Nolan once again borrowed loosely from history and inserted it into a poem where it does not belong (so he’s not even being creative—just more stealing as he merged unrelated histories). What’s next? Combining the Civil War with the French Revolution? As an aside, the trading network comment in the film reminded me of the Phantom Menace in a way that was again jarring.
Because few people read the Odyssey these days (unlike the good old days), most people who watch the movie will walk away believing a bunch of nonsense about history. If Nolan had created the fantastical, mythological Odyssey, well, perhaps such elements could be excused but he wanted grounded realism as if he was telling a real story. As presented, it’s a kind of misinformation.
There is so much egregiously wrong about the film that I may do a follow up blog next week.
The Odyssey is not just any story—it is a foundational piece of work in Western literature. To have someone disrespect it with such wanton, cynical abandon for the sake of his ego and glorification is a travesty for our culture and stain upon those who funded it. There is a mindset among many of hating upon western culture and much of this is done by people who project superiority while hating themselves and the culture that produced them as if they had no agency in the matter. Nolan turned a man on a hero’s journey into a sniveling, weak traumatized drug-addict in need of therapy. Projecting Nolan?
No accountability whatsoever. And the self-hatred thing…if you must feed such a shadow, keep it to yourself.
To be continued?
