Odysseus in America

Christopher Nolan's $250 million adaptation of The Odyssey has become one of the largest cinematic retellings of Homer's epic ever attempted. Unfortunately, his adaptation appears to miss the very reason Homer's story has endured for nearly three thousand years.

Predictably, much of the controversy has centered on casting choices and Hollywood’s familiar habit of retelling ancient stories through the moral assumptions of the present rather than those of the civilizations that produced them. Much of this generation of filmmakers seems convinced that it possesses a superior moral vision to those who came before and therefore feels compelled to rewrite the stories of the past with their modern values.

It is a tiresome exercise.

It also points to a much deeper problem.

When we insist on filtering ancient stories through modern moral assumptions, we often lose the very truths that allowed those stories to endure for thousands of years.

The public conversation revolves around the casting, the spectacle, the voyage, the Cyclops, the Sirens, and the adventure.

They’re talking about the journey.

Homer was writing about the homecoming.

The monsters, even voyage was never the point, except to show us what Odysseus was willing to endure, and how fiercely he longed to return to his homeland.

They give meaning to the homecoming.

But they are not the climax of the story.

The climax is what he finds when he finally reaches home.

More precisely, the betrayal the homecoming revealed

They’re talking about the journey.

Homer was writing about the homecoming.

One of Nolan’s most revealing departures from Homer comes in Hades.

Homer confronts Odysseus with Achilles, the greatest warrior of his age, a man who achieved the immortal glory promised to the greatest of heroes, only to discover among the dead that glory was no substitute for life. And having dismissed the value of his own glory, Achilles immediately asks Odysseus for news of his father and his son. When Odysseus tells him of his son’s courage and accomplishments, Achilles departs filled with pride.

The sequence matters. The greatest warrior in the Greek imagination has achieved everything a warrior could ask of glory, yet from beyond the grave his thoughts turn back to the living and to his family.

Nolan replaces that encounter with Sinon and, in doing so, changes the question the story asks.

This is not an incidental encounter. It is one of the keys to understanding the entire story.

Achilles received everything the heroic warrior was supposed to desire. He achieved immortal glory, but he never came home.

Odysseus already has glory.

What he wants is home.

Not merely Ithaca as a place, but home in the fullest sense of the word.

His homeland. His household. His father. His son. Penelope.

His family. His people. His culture.

Everything that gives a man a reason to leave and fight, and everything that gives him a reason to survive and return.

Nolan removes Achilles from this encounter and replaces him with Sinon, a dead soldier from Odysseus’s war, whom the film presents as the greatest warrior Odysseus ever knew. Much has already been said about the decision to cast Elliot Page, a 5-foot-1 transgender man, in a role meant to embody such a traditional masculine ideal of the warrior, physical strength and stature, masculinity, and the archetype of the ancient warrior. The choice is so conspicuous that it has understandably dominated much of the criticism of the film.

But I think the more consequential change has received far less attention.

Nolan has changed the question the story asks.

Homer confronts Odysseus with Achilles, the greatest warrior of his age, only to have that warrior tell him that all his glory was not worth the price of never coming home. Nolan instead turns the encounter toward the burden the surviving warrior carries for the dead.

The first change challenges our traditional image of the warrior.

The second changes the meaning of the story.

There are burdens that soldiers carry home from war, but we should be careful about imposing modern assumptions upon them. My experience has not been that soldiers are haunted by guilt for vanquishing their enemies. Nor does the death of a beloved comrade necessarily produce guilt. It produces grief, sometimes terrible grief, but grief and guilt are not the same thing.

Men can bear extraordinary loss when they understand what the sacrifice was for. If a man believes that he and his comrades fought in defense of their homes, their families, and their people, the death of a friend can be heartbreaking without being morally incoherent.

The deeper wound comes when that connection is broken.

When the warrior begins to wonder whether the sacrifice had meaning.

Whether those who sent him valued it.

Whether the home for which he believed he fought has forgotten what was sacrificed in its defense.

That is why Homer’s original choice of Achilles matters so much. The Odyssey is not fundamentally a story about a warrior learning to feel guilty for having been a warrior. Odysseus does not return home to renounce his capacity for violence. When he discovers his household occupied and his family threatened, he becomes a warrior again.

The lesson is not that war and glory have no value.

It is that they are not the highest values.

Achilles chose glory and never came home.

Odysseus already has glory.

What he wants now is Ithaca.

Home.

His father.

His son.

Penelope.

His family.

Perhaps this is a lesson that becomes clearest only after a man has spent enough of his life wandering. I spent much of mine as a soldier and adventurer, traveling to distant places, fighting wars, seeking challenges, and living among extraordinary men. I would not trade those experiences away. They made me who I am.

But one of the great lessons of that life has been learning the value of the thing I so often left behind.

Home.

Family.

The people for whom all the wandering, fighting, and sacrifice were ultimately supposed to matter.

Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam transformed the way many psychologists think about the hidden wounds of war. Drawing upon Homer’s Iliad, Shay argued that some of the deepest injuries a warrior can suffer are not physical, but moral.

Moral injury occurs when reality destroys beliefs that once gave a person’s life meaning, order, and purpose. The world no longer operates according to the moral framework by which he understood it. What he believed to be true collides with what he has experienced, and something fundamental breaks.

For Shay, one of the most devastating sources of that injury was betrayal by legitimate authority in a high-stakes situation. Warriors can endure fear, hardship, deprivation, and even killing. What they often struggle to survive is the realization that those they trusted to lead them violated the very moral code they expected them to uphold.

In the decades since Achilles in Vietnam, our understanding of moral injury has continued to grow. We now recognize that the destruction of deeply held beliefs can arise from many sources. Many of the moral assumptions formed in peaceful societies simply cannot survive exposure to the realities of war. A warrior’s beliefs may be shattered by what he is forced to do, by what he witnesses, by what is done to him, or by the realization that the world does not conform to the moral order he once believed governed it.

I believe Homer understood a different wound long before modern psychology gave it a name.

Modern storytelling has become so accustomed to portraying the returning warrior as psychologically broken that it often reads Homer through that same lens. Yet Homer does not present Odysseus as a man psychologically destroyed by war. He returns weary, older, and deeply tested, but still capable of clear judgment, disciplined action, and decisive leadership. The deepest wound Homer explores is not what the war has done to Odysseus. It is what twenty years with its warriors away have done to Ithaca.

Not the psychological wounds of battle that modern storytellers so often project onto Odysseus.

The moral injury of returning to a home that no longer feels like home.

Homer understood that the greatest trial of the warrior often begins only after the fighting ends.

For years after September 11, one phrase united America.

Never Forget.

It appeared on bumper stickers, billboards, memorials, T-shirts, and stadium scoreboards. It was more than a slogan. It was a promise.

A promise that the dead would be remembered.

A promise that their sacrifice would mean something.

A promise that the nation would remain worthy of the young men and women who answered the call.

Tens of thousands believed it.

Many walked into recruiting offices within days of the attacks. They believed their generation had been given its purpose. They would defend their country. They would ensure that such an attack would never happen again.

The next twenty years became deployments, memorial ceremonies, folded flags, prosthetic limbs, marriages strained and broken by separation, children growing up in photographs, and friends who never came home.

Years later, before dawn in New York, one of them lies awake in his own bedroom and hears the Islamic call to prayer drifting over the city.

To many of his neighbors, it is simply another sound in a changing city.

To him, it is something else.

It is Fallujah.

It is Ramadi.

It is Kandahar.

It is every patrol that began before sunrise.

It is memorial services.

It is folded flags.

It is friends whose names are etched into stone.

For years, he had been told that men like him had to fight the enemy over there so America would never have to face him here. He believed it. His friends believed it. Some of them died believing it.

Now, lying awake in the darkness, he hears the same call that once echoed over the battlefields where they fought and died.

The deepest wound is not what happened on the battlefield. It is the realization that, while he was fighting, the country he believed he was defending was breaking faith with him.

The battlefield did not merely follow him home.

It was invited in.

Invited by people who never bore the cost of the war, who valued tolerance, political power, and profit more than the covenant they had made with the men and women they sent to fight.

He kept faith with his country.

His country did not keep faith with him.

And lying awake in the darkness, there is only one question left.

What exactly did they die for?

The question is older than September 11.

Older than America.

Older even than Rome.

Homer had already asked it.

In the Odyssey.

The Odyssey is not about fighting a war.

It is about coming home from one.

After twenty years away, Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca expecting to reclaim the home for which he had sacrificed the best years of his life.

Instead, he finds betrayal. His palace has been occupied. His wealth has been consumed. His authority has been mocked. Men who contributed nothing to his household feast at his table, consume the inheritance he left behind, and compete for the hand of his wife because they assume he will never return.

The tragedy is not merely that his property has been stolen. It is that the people who remained behind failed to preserve what he sacrificed to defend.

The covenant has been broken.

That is the moral injury of homecoming.

Modern psychology often asks what happened to the veteran.

Homer asks what happened to his home.

Perhaps those are not separate questions.

A nation asks extraordinary things of its warriors. It asks them to leave their families, risk their lives, fight and kill its enemies, watch friends die, and bear burdens that the overwhelming majority of citizens will never experience.

In return, the warrior asks very little.

Only that the nation remember.

Only that it remain faithful to the ideals for which those sacrifices were made.

Only that, when he finally comes home, he recognizes the home he fought to defend.

For many veterans of America’s post-9/11 wars, that is precisely where the deepest wound begins.

Not on the battlefield.

Not in the explosion.

Not in the firefight.

But in the slow realization that while they were fighting abroad, their society changed without them.

They begin to wonder whether the covenant embodied in the words Never Forget was itself forgotten.

Whether one agrees with that conclusion is almost beside the point.

The feeling itself is real.

It is as old as Homer.

Three thousand years ago, Odysseus stepped onto the shores of Ithaca and discovered that the hardest battle of his life was no longer against the enemy.

It was to determine whether the home he had sacrificed everything to preserve still existed.

Perhaps that is why The Odyssey remains one of the greatest stories ever told.

Every generation will have its own Odysseus.

Every generation will ask young men to leave home and bear burdens that others will not.

If they return to find that faith has been broken, they face the same choice Homer gave his hero.

They can surrender to bitterness.

Or they can accept one final duty.

Not merely to come home.

But to reclaim it.