Nolan’s Odysseus — An Uncomplicated War Criminal

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey has been one of the most anticipated movie releases since the ‘Barbenheimer” phenomenon of two years prior. In just the opening weekend, the film made 124 million from eager audiences. The John Ford of our times, Nolan has become the specialist of epic blockbusters. 

Nolan’s adaptation of the three-thousand-year-old epic centres on ξενία, translated as “Zeus’s Law,” which refers to the norms surrounding hospitality. In a world where being outside of your home, argues Nolan, puts you at the ‘complete mercy of strangers,’ treating strangers as potential Gods that could impart wrath if you were not hospitable became the ‘backbone of civilization.’ The director recognised that this core concept would become a thread connecting the 3,000-year-old poem to the present day. Just as in the past, we live in a world where each time we step outside, we are vulnerable to those around us, and the Odyssey can become a lesson in the rewards of following Zeus's law, as well as the dire consequences of breaking it.

Where Nolan breaks from Homer is on the foundations of Zeus’s law; whereas for the latter, the law was grounded in the Gods, the former empties Mount Olympus. Take the actual impetus for Odysseus’s final journey to return home. In the film, Calypso has drugged Odysseus with lotus fruits to erase his memories of the past and lull him into remaining on the island. Odysseus’s unrelenting will to return home breaks him from Calypso’s spell. In the poem, we first encounter Odysseus crying on the shore, fully aware that he is not home but at the mercy of others’ wills. It is not Odysseus who breaks him free from Calypso’s captivity, but the sympathetic Athena who fights on his behalf to the Gods who have sentenced him there. 

Governing the Greek world was not Nolan’s naive golden rule that people should treat each other fairly, but rather the conflicts between contradictory divine wills. As Emily Wilson stresses in her scathing review, Calypso herself contests Athena’s efforts to free Odysseus by pointing out the hypocrisy of the Gods, with Zeus being able to kidnap and rape women at his choice but simultaneously forbidding others from doing so. In the film, Calypso is cast as, in Wilson's words, ‘an unpaid therapist,’ relegated to being sidelined in the male fantasy of a woman passively listening and soothing the hard-working man. While Nolan claims his adaptation revolves around hospitality, he refuses to remove Odysseus’s sovereignty. Calypso’s island forces the viewer to think critically about the gendering of οἶκος, the household, and its presupposition of patriarchal domination by situating the hero at the mercy of a woman. Yet for Nolan this is too audacious. It compromises the hero the viewer identifies with; yes, there must be a bland moral lesson about hospitality, but this cannot come at the expense of the ‘good guy’ prevailing through his own will. 

This element of Nolan’s film bears some similarities to Adorno and Horkheimer’s interpretation of the Odyssey. For the pair, the poem is about reason disenchanting the world, to borrow Weber’s expression. In a world full of Gods and mythic creatures, Odysseus’s cunning reason allows him to control the environment, asserting his sovereignty over the divine world. Adorno and Horkheimer use Odysseus’s encounter with Polyphemus as a key example of this. Odysseus wanders into a cave of a cyclops, stealing his wine and cheese. Odysseus enters into a game of wits with the cyclops. First, he tries to deceive Polyphemus by lying about where they came from, attempting to claim that Poseidon, the cyclops’s parent, sent them there. When the Cyclops disregards Odysseus’s lie, he proceeds to convince him to drink his wine, promising to exchange barrels of the elixir for an opportunity to return home. While the Cyclops thinks that he will trick Odysseus by simply drinking the wine and then killing him, Odysseus’s actual plan is to get him intoxicated. Once drunk, the hero identifies himself as “Noman” before slashing the Cyclops’s eye and escaping. For Adorno and Horkheimer, this story encapsulates how reason can conquer the world, though at the expense of emptying one’s identity. Through forsaking his homeland and his name, what makes him him, Odysseus can instrumentally attain victory, but at what cost?

Nolan takes up Odysseus’s sovereignty, but disenchants the world prior to the hero. For Adorno and Horkheimer, what worries them is Odysseus’s deployment of reason to defang the world. Odysseus’s plan to escape the cave reads less as the brilliant game of wits in the poem and more as a Navy SEAL Team operation. Only after they slash the Cyclops' eyes do we hear him speak. When a crew member asks, “Can we reason with it?” Odysseus responds, “I think we’re past that.” The poem avoids a neat binary between rational/irrational subjects; both Odysseus and the Cyclops attempt to deceive one another. However, in the movie, nature is passive to the will of the mighty hero. For Adorno and Horkheimer, reason is necessary to overcome the enchanted world. For Nolan, the world has no mysticism, no sovereignty, and all one requires is might. 

Yet, Odysseus does not truly overcome the world in the poem through his reason. His use of reason to dominate the world results in developing a pride that leads to him and his crew’s downfall. He shouts at Polyphemus his real name to make sure he knows who tricked him, which results in the Cyclops pleading his father to punish the traveler for blinding him. Nolan’s Odysseus, on the other hand, shoots Odysseus with an arrow to avenge his fallen comrades, not out of his own selfish pride. Again, Nolan refuses to have a complex protagonist that the audience can critically reflect on. Yet his flattening of the hero comes at the expense of revealing Odysseus’s finitude in the world. Core to the centrality of Zeus’s law is that Odysseus must overcome his own pride first and foremost, his own claim to sovereignty over the world, before submitting to the hospitality of the Gods and strangers. Nolan’s Odyssey, however, presupposes the world at the hero’s feet, expressing an inability to be truly vulnerable. 

There is little hospitality in Nolan’s film. The one scene where we truly encounter it is in Telemachus’s, Odysseus’s son, journey to recruit help in rescuing his lost father. Nolan speeds through the son’s trip to Sparta, only leaving a brief zoomed-out drone shot to indicate the perilous sea standing in his way. Worse is the arrival in Sparta; Nolan offers only a brief minute with dozens of rapid-fire shots of the travellers arriving and them reaching Menelaus. Immediately after meeting them and asking them to sit down, he asks them where they are from. In the poem, Menelaus’s servant asks him what to do with strangers that are outside, and, without knowing their identity, he reproaches them: “You used to have some brains! Now you are talking like a silly child. We two were fed by many different hosts before returning home. As we may hope for Zeus to keep us safe in future times, untack their horses! Lead them in to dine!” Nolan’s film has a completely separate tone; when the travellers try to introduce themselves, the servant instantly interrupts them and rushes them through. Nolan does not have the patience to actually show the vulnerability in Telemachus setting out to sea and the hospitality, which supposedly his film revolves around, to meet him. Instead of actually filmically expressing these themes, Nolan relies on plot exposition in the dialogue. There is no time to show Telemachus being bathed and rubbed in olive oil simply for being a guest. Odysseus’s stay with Nausicaa and Alcinous, where they throw athletic games to impress their guest, is removed. These are boring, as Nolan needs time to show exciting action sequences of the characters defeating the evil, one-dimensional monsters. It is in these fine details that Nolan claims his story revolves, trying to show the modern viewer hospitality. Yet, he simultaneously needs to assuage the viewer from noticing that this hospitality is completely foreign to the modern world, that our treatment of strangers is not a bridge to connect us with the ancients but a threat to our holed-up, privatized conceptions.

One of the barriers to understanding ξενία (Zeus’s Law) in our present is the ease with which the modern human inhabits the world. Traveling from Troy to Ithaca now does not require traversing Scylla and Charybdis; it does not require being at the mercy of the elements. The prospect of a plane ride, lounging for an hour on an aircraft traveling several hundred miles per hour, is incredibly foreign to the world these mythologies came from. Once the plane lands, they can buy a hotel room online and slip in without any human contact. Therefore, it is difficult to grasp what exactly was at stake when it came to hospitality. It is also difficult to truly grasp the divine. Technological development and scientific discourse have disenchanted thunder and tsunamis from the outrage of the Gods. The people in Homer’s world were aware of their finitude, their submission to strangers and Olympus. 

The absence of finitude haunts the normative message of the film. Nolan’s Odyssey is similar to military-entertainment complex movies on traumatised war heroes like Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper. The fundamentally valiant hero was debased in the midst of war, and both films see the complex heroes reconcile with the past. Zeus’s law is not decided in the Courts of Olympus but in the guilt-ridden super-ego. Athena, who in the poem is the driving force for Odysseus’s return, is relegated to being a reflection of Odysseus’s guilty conscience speaking back to him, embodied by a priestess of an Athenian temple who was killed in the war. Our hero is a victim of his war crimes in Troy, slaughtering the innocent. 

Bret Devereaux, in the Foreign Press, interprets the film as commentary on how the moral failures of a civilisation end in its collapse, with the Trojan War being the transition from the Bronze to Iron Age. He argues that Nolan bridges Trump’s domestic inhospitality with his foreign war crimes to signal the end of an era and the need for the future to regain new foundations. Odysseus does not remain home; he instead bequeaths it to Telemachus for a new beginning.

Yet, what has Telemachus learned? What has the modern viewer learned? Did the traumatised, war-torn veterans of the Civil War, the World Wars, the Korean Wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. prevent future onslaughts? Has the original sin of colonialism, one Devereaux compares to Troy, been the death of Western Civilisation, and can we, in a Straussian manner, recover the great lessons from the classics to restore a new moral foundation? 

The issue with these sets of questions that Devereaux and Nolan raise is that they cannot think past the West’s inability to conceive their finitude. The guilt-ridden war criminal cannot rely on their superego to save them. Zeus’s law was not upheld by the morally righteous. It was upheld by the will of deeply flawed Gods, Gods who were at the forefront of the war crimes in Troy, demanding the submission of those under them. It was upheld by the recognition that the world has a certain power over humans, forcing humans to act in a certain manner.

Devereaux and Nolan’s navel-gazing lamentations for the moral corruption of the West, and its saviour coming from the great texts, come from its hegemonic dominance. The translation of ξενία to the guilty super-ego is due to the absence of sovereign authorities keeping Western powers in control. The genocide in Palestine did not happen because Americans were not reading the moral lessons of the Odyssey– it happened because no one could stop it. Hollywood does not make ‘anti-war’ movies about American war criminals actually receiving justice, about the creation of an international order that can keep people accountable. Framing international law as the guilty conscience is exactly what permits war crimes, and does not prevent them.

To end, Immanuel Kant raises an important question around the future of hospitality and peace. For Kant, history is a rational movement directed to perpetual peace, and one of the key features is a world where travellers will be able to visit any land they want with no barriers. However, Kant scoffs at the notion of an international sovereign law determining each nation’s actions, seeing it as absurd. Instead, he believes in the gradual development of republican governments where the people’s will, the same people that the elites typically instrumentalise in their greedy bloodlust, can prevent wars. However, the West has embraced a bourgeois democracy – these states after Kant have been far from governed by the people. Still, Kant reorients the discussion from focusing on the guilty lamentations of the war criminal to the emergence of a new sovereignty to be feared, a new God to submit wills toward, one Machiavelli recognised well– the people.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Metropolitan Museum of Art (Fletcher Fund, 1930)

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