An Ode to Complicated Men

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opened last week, and the fight over it started long before that: the casting, the helmets, the modern dialogue, whether a director this famous owes anything to a poem this old. I try to stay out of these fights. There is a discourse of the week, every week, that distracts us from the work of this moment, and most of it exists to be clicked on and forgotten. Chasing it is a good way to stop doing public history and start doing engagement farming.

But this one lands in my lane, because it is about the work stories do, the way they shape how we see the world around us and, above all, our political culture.

And Nolan’s films always do real work. That is the reason to pay attention to them, and it is precisely the thing his critics seem uninterested in exploring.

But we can start by separating the two arguments currently running under the same headline. The first is the purist fight, which began with the helmets and has since expanded to the armor, the ship, and Tom Holland saying “my dad is coming home.” Who cares? It is a movie about a poem about a guy who blinds a giant and annoys a sea god. The loudest of it gathered around Lupita Nyong’o’s casting as Helen, on the grounds that Homer calls her the most beautiful woman in the world, which he never does. Not in the Iliad or in the Odyssey. Even “the face that launched a thousand ships” line is from Marlowe. The men most furious about her face might have noticed, had they watched the movie, that Nolan casts an Oscar winner as Helen and then gives her almost nothing to do, which tells you how much room the great man’s story leaves for anyone else.

Ignore the rest of it. Homer’s epic has been rewritten, retranslated, and repurposed for three thousand years; it is a record of performances, not a text betrayed by them. Every bard who sang it changed it, reinterpretation is the tradition, and there is no authentic Odyssey sitting in a vault for Nolan to violate. The people policing helmet typology are not defending Homer. They are defending their claim of ownership over Homer.

The second argument is more interesting to me, and more valuable to our work, and it comes from the scholars themselves. Their complaint is not that Nolan changed things but what he changed them into: a poem of genuinely sophisticated morality watered down in favor of spectacle, and a hero remade, as the translator Daniel Mendelsohn put it, in Nolan’s own image. Nolan’s protagonists are reliably tortured men wrestling with angst and old wounds, and this Odysseus spends the film mourning the death he dealt at Troy, with the poem’s violent homecoming traded away for something more tragic. That is not a complaint about fidelity but rather about substitution, which is worth slowing down to consider.