Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is still in movie theaters, and has just passed $700 million in box office receipts. It’s estimated that it will top a billion dollars worldwide in the coming months. Though it has now fallen to third place among the summer’s movies, just behind such cultural treasures as the new Spiderman flick and Toy Story 5, it has embarked on a second wave of influence as the school year commences. Teachers of literature everywhere have seized on the movie, thrilled by the prospect of discussing an icon of Western high culture with their students. By the grace of Hollywood, millions of their students now share a common fascination with Homer’s world and enough of a knowledge-base to talk about the Odyssey intelligently.
One reason for the movie’s wide popularity among teachers is that it’s possible to interpret it from a variety of political perspectives. Progressive teachers see the film as an obvious endorsement of their preferred worldview and can’t imagine reading it in any other way. So when I happen to discuss the flick with classicists of a leftist persuasion—that is, most of them—I’m getting a fair amount of trolling, most of it good-natured. As a a certified Defender of the Western tradition, lefty friends who know my opinions expect me to hate on the film. They expect to watch my knee jerking automatically to deliver a few kicks against the soft backside of Hollywood wokery.
The movie does exude more than a whiff of modern anti-Western prejudice. It seems to condemn the ancient Greeks, founders of Western civilization, for their violent imperialism and colonialism. The message isn’t subtle: the Greeks are dressed in black armor as opposed to the Trojans in white. Another way that Nolan blackens the Greeks is by casting Helen of Troy, wife of King Menelaus and a legendary Greek beauty, as a black African woman. (Progressives, naturally, take this as Nolan’s sly allusion to the Atlantic slave trade.) When she appears in the film at a banquet after the fall of Troy, her face has an ugly welt, and it is no great inference that she has been knocked about by her angry husband in punishment for humiliating him. Menelaus asks his guest Telemachus, in words foreshadowing Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus— delivered on stage 2500 years later—whether Helen’s scarred face could really have launched a thousand ships—‘maybe five hundred?’ he chuckles.
It’s Helen herself who dismisses as propaganda the story that the Greeks went to war because of her abduction by Paris. To Odysseus’ naïve son Telemachus she snarls that the war was really started by Agamemnon, her husband’s brother, to get control of Aegean trade routes. For added subtlety in conveying his anti-Greek perspective, Nolan has Agamemnon dressed as a Bronze-Age Darth Vader throughout the movie. Even the lumpen moviegoer by now can read between the lines.
By contrast, Odysseus, in Nolan’s telling, is less a heroic man of many wiles than a disoriented veteran suffering from PTSD. He is unable to process his own role in being the witting instrument of so many atrocities—above all the sack of Troy. The sack is made possible by Odysseus’ Trojan Horse stratagem, presented in the film not in the usual way, as a legitimate, brilliant ruse de guerre, but as a violation of Zeus’ laws of hospitality, a shameless trick. It’s an act of fraud that allows the Greeks to sack Troy, a crime against civilization. The Horse is disguised as an offering to Athena, but its abuse as a terrorist trick brings down on Odysseus the wrath of the goddess, who in punishment imposes on him and his warrior band a seemingly interminable ten-year journey home. SuperGrok informs me that the journey in an ancient sailing vessel, depending on winds and weather, might take anywhere from six days to three weeks. For a seasoned sailor like Odysseus, the wrath of the gods must have been like having your GPS system controlled by a gang of your worst enemies.
On the journey back to Ithaca, Odysseus tries repeatedly to do the right thing when encountering non-Greeks, but it always turns out badly. His followers gradually are killed off or abandon him as a leader under a divine curse. His battered psyche is finally healed of trauma by spending seven years (!) with nature goddess Calypso in a drugged but happy stupor. (Calypso is played by Charlize Theron.) Calypso raises his consciousness, and he realizes that what he has done in the war and the journey home is morally depraved, an offense against the gods—above all, against Athena and Poseidon, formerly champions of the Greeks. He is loved by no gods and must rely on himself, on past memories that gradually reawaken in his soul as he is gradually freed from his addiction to the lotus flower. Unlike the traveler of Cavafy’s poem Ithaka—or indeed unlike the Odysseus of the Homeric epic itself—his experiences have not made him rich and wise but left him a moral cripple. He can only satisfy his troubled conscience by returning home. On the other hand, he resembles the traveler in Cavafy’s poem because he now knows what Ithaca really means. It now stands, among other things, for the kingly responsibilities he has shirked in order to go to war.
Returning home at long last after more losses of ships and men, he cannot defend his long absence to Penelope. His dialogue with her, behind a screen, reminiscent of a confessional, turns into a narrative of his many sins as a warrior and leader, and an acknowledgement of his failures as a husband, father and king of Ithaca. Confession, however, does not lead to an entirely amended way of life. Making full use of his wiles, Odysseus succeeds in freeing Penelope from the repulsive company of her suitors after a long, cathartic scene of exemplary violence.
A serious question, however, remains hanging in the air. Is Odysseus really any better than the suitors are? Is he better than any of the beings he has fought on the journey home, even the Cyclops? He is surely better at scheming and killing, but is he a man of superior virtue?
The suggestion of moral equivalency between Odysseus and the suitors, and the film’s whole framing as a progressive morality tale, should have made me, as a Defender of the West, squirm with disgust during the whole three-hour experience. Instead—and this is the embarrassing part—I loved the film. I can’t wait till it’s available on a streaming platform, so I can study it more closely. I loved the brilliant cinematography, the carefully managed pacing, the clever re-imagining of familiar episodes, the way the various encounters never become episodic but feel like the gradual unfolding of a hidden fate. It’s a bit of a stretch to believe that Nolan or his consultants studied Aristotle’s Poetics, but the main plot device fits the philosopher’s description of anagnorisis, or retrospective recontextualization—a movement from ignorance to knowledge. The classic example is Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In the present case it’s Odysseus’ self-knowledge that changes. The film showed a profound understanding of how memories can slowly change their moral polarities and lead to a yearning for reform and redemption.
As a historian I admired the sudden, almost Virgilian opening-up of longer historical perspectives. The boldest such opening-up was re-imagining the Trojan War as a collapse of civilization—Trojan civilization—brought on by Greek barbarians. The student of early Greek history gradually comes to realize—in an almost comic “are we the baddies?” moment—that Nolan is identifying with the Greeks themselves the mysterious “Sea Peoples” who terrorized Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean during the Greek Dark Age. In the course of the film Odysseus begins to suspect this, but the explicit identification of the Greeks with the ‘peoples of the sea’ is left to Penelope, in an almost casual remark after Odysseus’ confessional. The early Greeks, far from being the inventors of civilization, were barbarous, sea-borne raiders who threatened the ancient civilizations of Egypt and the Levant after destroying Troy, the last light of Bronze Age civilization.
In short, in Nolan’s Odyssey, the Greeks of Homeric times are not the founders of a civilization, but its enemies. Their assault on Troy was the proximate cause of the historical Dark Age lasting several centuries before the beginnings of Western civilization in eighth-century-BC Greece. This Archaic Age was when the Homeric legends were written down, just before the flowering of Classical Greece (sixth to fourth centuries BC). This is the first Golden Age of the West that we cherish today for having laid the foundation of our traditions of democracy, philosophy, literature, science, reason, and all the arts.
To a progressive educator eager to leave traditional Western values behind, Nolan’s portrayal of Homer’s Greeks as barbarous raiders who defy the laws of gods and men to destroy civilization looks like a gift. At first sight it seems as though it could be deployed to call into question the achievements of classical Greece. Read critically, through the lens of progressive moral prejudice, Homer’s epics, the most canonical texts of Western literature, can be turned into yet another stick to flog Western civilization itself. On this reading, Westerners live under the delusion that they are the civilized ones, but their culture was from the beginning seeded with an unacknowledged barbarism, an arrogant sense of superiority, and a contempt for law and humane values.
This oikophobic interpretation, however, is neither the only nor the best way to read Nolan’s Odyssey. I will argue in Parts II and III of this essay that Nolan is well within the long Western tradition of reinterpreting canonical texts and redirecting civilizational turnings that have led down dark roads leading into moral deserts. What looks like a gift to progressive educators, when seen as part of the Western tradition becomes a Trojan horse. My advice to progressive educators: Timeatis Danaos et dona ferentes (with apologies to Vergil for the false quantity).
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