[COLUMN] The Odyssey is an Epic for the Modern World | by Darren Mooney

NOTE: This piece contains spoilers for the best movie of the year so far.

Naturally, Christopher Nolan’s take on The Odyssey is a non-linear narrative, a film told through stories and memories. However, no matter how one chooses to look at it, The Odyssey begins with the death of a child.

In the context of the story itself, The Odyssey is a narrative set in the aftermath of The Iliad, the epic poem mythologizing the war waged by a coalition of Greek city states against the city of Troy. That coalition was led by the King Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) to reclaim Helen (Lupito Nyong’o), the wife of his brother Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) who was seemingly abducted by Paris, the brother of Trojan King Hector.

In order to appease the gods and to secure the winds necessary to launch a fleet across the Mediterranean Sea, Agamemnon sacrifices Iphigenia, the daughter that he shares with Helen’s sister, Clytemnestra (also Nyong’o). This murder is recounted in passing by Agamemnon’s loyal general Odysseus (Matt Damon) to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway), explaining that he has been conscripted into this epic war.

The death of Iphigenia is in many ways the original sin of The Odyssey, at least in Nolan’s telling of the story. Throughout the film, Odysseus is haunted by visions of the goddess Athena (Zendaya), who is implicitly the ghost of Iphigenia. She is a young mixed race woman in her late twenties, about the age that Iphigenia would have been. Athena is the voice of Odysseus’ conscience. Tellingly, she is played by Zendaya, an actor married to Tom Holland, who plays Odysseus’ son, Telemachus.

However, Iphigenia is not the only child whose death haunts Nolan’s telling of The Odyssey. The film itself begins with the death of Odysseus’ loyal lieutenant Sinon (Elliot Page), who has been left alone on the beaches of Troy, guarding the ornate wooden horse that the Greeks left behind, an offering to the goddess Athena. The Trojan raiding party kills Sinon quickly, impaling him on arrows, and taking the horse as a gift – bringing it into the city to honor the Greeks’ fidelity to their gods.

Sinon is in some ways a surrogate son to Odysseus. He is the son of a goatherd on the island of Ithaca, Odysseus’ small kingdom. Sinon was conscripted, taking the place assigned to Antinous (Robert Pattinson), the son of his father’s master. Sinon is a poor child sent off to war in the place of a kid rich enough to buy their way out. Odysseus clearly feels some guilt over this, and has taken Sinon under his wing. Which makes the decision to open the movie with his death even more tragic.

Much as he did in casting Page as Ariadne in Inception, Nolan positions Page as the film’s conscience. Sinon is a true believer. He volunteers to guard the horse, knowing it is likely a death sentence. It is, crucially, a death sentence based on a lie. The horse is, of course, filled with Greek soldiers using it to infiltrate the City of Troy. Sinon does not know this, because it is his job to sell the Trojans on the idea that the horse is an offering abandoned. Sinon dies for a lie, like so many children sent off to war.

This is in many ways an escalation of one of Nolan’s central themes and ideas. Nolan is a director fascinated by the relationship between parents and children. The Prestige and Inception are stories about characters trying to get home to their children. Interstellar imagines a future where humanity’s children might redeem their fallen ancestors, while TENET suggests the alternative, that our children might ultimately condemn us.

The Odyssey is fascinated by abandoned children. Odysseus is trying to get home to his son Telemachus. The first truly supernatural creature that Odysseus encounters is the cyclops Polyphemus (Bill Irwin), who cries like a baby for his father Poseidon when injured. Wandering through the land of the giants, the first figure that Odysseus and his men encounter is what initially appears to be a grown man, but is instead a child crying for its parents.

Much like Disclosure Day felt like Steven Spielberg making the kind of movie that he could only make after directing The Fabelmans, The Odyssey feels like the second half of a conversation that Nolan began with Oppenheimer. This is always the way. While Nolan has suggested that he does not engage with criticism of his work, many of his films exist in dialogue with each other. Like any filmmaker at that level, Nolan is an artist continually pushing himself.

After many of his early films were dismissed as cold, Nolan made Interstellar, a space epic that earnestly argues that love is a universal constant akin to gravity. After many of his early movies were praised for their ability to deliver mountains of exposition in an easily digestible manner, Nolan made Dunkirk, a film which eschews many of the conventions of the war movie including map scenes and exposition dumps.

The Dark Knight Rises is a clear repudiation of the reactionary readings of The Dark Knight, nearly three hours of a director yelling down the camera about how silly it is to read ambiguity as endorsement. Inception feels like Nolan grappling with criticisms of how he writes women, as Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) acknowledges that he cannot conceive of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) in her true complexity. “You're the best that I could do,” he admits. “But you’re just not good enough.”

One of the stock criticisms of Oppenheimer was that, in its intensely subjective focus on the man who built the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), it neglected to take into account the victims of the bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nolan addressed that criticism on the press tour, and it’s a defensible choice. After all, the film is told from Oppenheimer’s perspective, and a defining aspect of his character is his refusal to look at the consequences of his handiwork.

Oppenheimer is a story about the man himself, and depicting the atomic bombing of Japan in that context, in a story built around this one American, risks reducing those lives to empty spectacle. It would be incredibly cynical and callous to cut away from a movie about Oppenheimer’s relationship to the bomb to depict the death of thousands of anonymous Japanese people. Regardless of what James Cameron might think, it was a smart and considered decision.

However, The Odyssey is a film about grappling with the weight of that. At the climax of the film, via flashback, Nolan opts to show what he declined to feature in Oppenheimer: what it looks like when a dominant western power burns an eastern city to ashes, murdering civilians and causing the foundations of the world to crumble. Because the atrocity in The Odyssey is couched in myth, Nolan enjoys a greater degree of freedom in depicting it, without wandering into exploitation.

Nolan’s movies tend to daisy-chain into one another. TENET is about a Cold War being waged between the past and the future, with the inventor of time travel described as “the Oppenheimer of her time” and the climax finding the heroes fighting over “the Algorithm”, which is essentially a doomsday weapon like the hydrogen bomb, but for time. This is not the only specter of atomic devastation in Nolan’s work. The reactor in The Dark Knight Rises serves the same purpose.

This led neatly into Oppenheimer, but it is also interesting how neatly Oppenheimer leads into The Odyssey. Central to Oppenheimer is the idea that the discovery of quantum physics threw mankind’s understanding of the world off-balance, representing a rejection of the Newtonian logic of cause and effect or action and reaction in favor of a “world of probabilities.” What was certain is no longer certain. What was once known is now unknowable. Something has been broken and unraveled. After all, Oppenheimer is an adaptation of American Prometheus, alluding to classic Greek mythology.

Throughout The Odyssey, the characters repeatedly reference “Zeus’ Law.” It is the law of hospitality, the set of rules upon which a host and a guest can establish a relationship. It demands that a host treat even a lowly beggar with respect and curtesy. It recognizes the implicit divinity in every human being, arguing that any guest could be a god in disguise and should be treated as such. It is no understatement to suggest that this is an ordering principle of civilization.

After all, The Odyssey was a myth of independent city states coming together and forging alliances, engaging in expeditions across the Mediterranean Sea. For such a civilization to prosper, develop and grow, there needed to be an understanding of the terms of social gatherings. Envoys and traders needed to that they could eat with strangers without being poisoned or sleep under a foreign roof without being murdered, and that they could welcome guests without fearing invasion. The concept is known as “Xenia.”

Odysseus broke that sacred rule with the Trojan Horse. He presented the Trojans with an offering and let them take it into their home. Then, when inside their city, Odysseus murdered them as they slept and cast open the gates to an invading army. This was a grotesque violation, and the third act of The Odyssey reveals that Odysseus carries incredible guilt and shame with him for that. He does not just carry the blood of Sinon on his hands, nor the ashes of Troy, but the death of an entire civilization.

When it is presented on screen, the sacking of Troy is a horrific and nightmarish sequence. The film reveals that the visions of Athena that haunt Odysseus are not – or are perhaps not just – the phantom of Iphigenia, but the specter of a young innocent woman brutally slaughtered in Troy. As with the best of Nolan’s films, there is ambiguity there. Is Athena a specter of Odysseus’ conscience? Or was Athena really there in Troy, as “Zeus’ Law” suggests is possible? Does it matter?

There is a sense that, just like Oppenheimer broke the world with the atomic bomb, Odysseus’ ingenious plan caused something to come undone. Throughout The Odyssey, hospitality is weaponized and betrayed. Odysseus’s wife Penelope finds herself beset by suitors who exploit her hospitality night after night for years by trying to drain her wealth and force her to marry. Polyphemus traps the sailors in his cave and uses them as food. The witch Circe (Samantha Morton) preys on the men who visit her hovel.

However, The Odyssey is careful to avoid wandering into xenophobia. This is not a tale of monstrous and untrustworthy foreigners. Indeed, throughout The Odyssey, it is made very clear that Odysseus an his men are terrible guests themselves. They raid and pillage from islands in their way, taking what they want. Circe quite reasonably calls out Odysseus on sending his men with “empty stomachs and hot blood” to a lone woman’s household, wondering what he thought would happen.

There is a sense that the very structures of society have begun to collapse. Over the course of the film, Odysseus’ hold over his men breaks down. On Circe’s island, Eurylochus (Himesh Patel) informs Odysseus that the men have “decided” that Odysseus, their commanding officer, should remain with the boat. Later, directly contravening his orders, they slaughter cattle belonging to the sun god, dooming themselves. In this chaotic world, men can no longer be governed.

In the years since Odysseus’ departure, it is revealed that the Mediterranean has descended into anarchy. Penelope warns her son about the dangers posed by “the Sea People”, nomadic raiders attacking settlements in the region, taking advantage of the anarchy that has been loosed. Only at the end of the film does Penelope realize that Odysseus and his crew are “the Sea People.” They are the very raiders that she worried about. They have become the embodiment of lawlessness.

There is a none-too-subtle sense of political commentary in this. The Odyssey releases at a point where the international order is breaking down, where geopolitics has become increasingly unstable, and where the egos of nations lead to untold bloodshed. Much has been made of Nolan’s relatively diverse casting for The Odyssey, including Elliot Page, Lupita Nyong’o and Zendaya. However, there is something pointed in this. Nolan is illustrating who suffers in these turbulent times.

The first person killed on screen in The Odyssey is played by a trans man. The Trojan War is fought over ownership of a woman of color, who is returned to an abusive husband. A mixed race child is sacrificed to the gods, and another is beheaded in the sacking of her city. This is the undercurrent of the breakdown of the laws of hospitality that govern human interactions. This is what happens when outsiders are no longer welcome within a society.

Nolan’s Odyssey releases into a world where the system of alliances and trade that governed international interactions have been thrown into disarray. Perhaps not unrelated to that, there has emerged a greater fear of – and resentment towards – those perceived as “foreign” or “other.” Xenophobia has become more common. It has perhaps even been normalized. The Odyssey understands that these trends do not exist in isolation.

In some ways, The Odyssey feels like a belated companion piece to Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, which was a snapshot of Bush era America. It was a portrait of what Aimé Césaire described as “the imperial boomerang”, the idea that the tools that nation state employs against foreign enemies are inevitably turned on its own citizenry. In The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) tests his eavesdropping software in Hong Kong before deploying it in Gotham.

The Dark Knight trilogy was a study of the War on Terror, of an America swept up in fear and panic. Part of the horror of The Dark Knight Rises was in the image of armed men driving tanks with desert camouflage stolen from Batman through a major American city, positioning themselves “not as conquerors… but as liberators”, placing it “under a warlord, like some failed state.” That is the anxiety of that movie: what if somebody did to America what America had done to Iraq or Afghanistan?

It is interesting that the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars do not occupy a more central role in American culture. Allowing for the success of American Sniper or The Hurt Locker, most films about the conflict have been low-budget indies with no real impact: The Outpost, My Dead Friend Zoe, The Covenant, The Messenger. These wars have yet to produce works comparable to the films released within a decade of the end of the Vietnam War, like Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter or Coming Home.

However, in recent years, particularly with the formal end of these “forever wars”, it does feel like the anxieties are simmering through contemporary media. Dune held its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. The recent season of House of the Dragon finds members of “the Greens”, such as Ormund Hightower (James Norton) and Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel), responding to their enemies seizing the Iron Throne by waging guerilla warfare.

The Odyssey is the story of an empire in decline. It is a theme that resonates across contemporary American popular culture, most obviously the Dune trilogy and House of the Dragon. This is a culture that has betrayed all of its core beliefs. It is a society that still mythologizes itself, but very deliberately chooses what it wants to forget. Like J. Robert Oppenheimer himself, these people cannot bring themselves to look at the consequences of their own actions.

The film opens with a bard (Travis Scott) beginning to tell the story of the horse, only for Penelope to cut him off because she does not wish to hear it. Helen begins to tell Telemachus the story of what happened to Agamemnon on his return home from Troy, only for his brother Menelaus to cut her off, because he would rather not hear the story. Throughout The Odyssey, Antinous manipulates and massages his own account of his history to flatter himself.

The framing device of The Odyssey finds Odysseus living on a remote island with the mysterious Calypso (Charlize Theron), feasting on the flower of the white lotus. Odysseus has spent years living in a haze. The film is structured as his memories returning, Calypso trying to coax them back to him. The truth is that Odysseus would much rather forget everything that he has done – everything that has happened to him. However, a culture that forgets its own history is doomed to collapse.

Nolan’s films are full of characters and societies that lie to and about themselves, but the world of The Odyssey is so fallen that nobody believes these pretenses any longer. In an early scene, Odysseus lays out the narrative of the Trojan War to Penelope: Helen was kidnapped by Paris and Agamemnon seeks to bring her home. The pair also discuss the truths that everybody knows beneath the myth: Helen consensually eloped with Paris and Agamemnon was just looking for an excuse to seize Trojan trading routes for himself.

Coupled with Villeneuve’s work on the Dune films, The Odyssey is part of the first wave of truly great pop cinema to reckon with the legacy of recent Middle East Wars: Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. Troy, after all, was supposedly in Turkey. Ithaca is haunted by veterans of the Trojan War, who have seemingly spent years disenfranchised and marginalized by the nation for which they fought. The poor are sent off to fight, while the wealthy remain at home in decadent luxury.

It is a war based on lies, from those told by Agamemnon to his subjects to those told by Odysseus to Sinon. It feels oddly appropriate that The Odyssey begins two decades after the Trojan War. It takes that long to fully process the enormity of what happened. Just like Oppenheimer suggests that its protagonist started a chain reaction that will eventually destroy the world in the sands of Los Alamos, The Odyssey implies that the sins committed on foreign shores eventually make it home.

As in the Dark Knight trilogy, there is a sense throughout The Odyssey that the violence these men inflict overseas inevitably comes home with them. Agamemnon returns home from conquering Troy to be murdered in his bed by his wife Clytemnestra. Menelaus was so enraged by Helen’s betrayal that he scarred her face. The climax of the film finds Odysseus waging war in the halls of his own home, massacring the suitors in his own banquet hall as weapons are thrown in from the armory.

Nolan positions The Odyssey as the myth of a civilization in decline. The fall of Troy led to not just the destruction of the Trojan Empire, but also set in motion the collapse of Ancient Greece. It is an epic, but an epic with a resonance far beyond its original context. The film ends like The Lord of the Rings, with Odysseus and Penelope setting sail towards the horizon - “chasing the disappearing sun” - disappearing into history in the hope that Telemachus might eventually redeem this fallen world.

The ending of The Odyssey is bittersweet in the way that the best Nolan movies are. Odysseus asks that his actions be remembered in song, because he knows that writing is about to disappear and that the world will be plunged into a dark age resulting directly from his own sins. Penelope asks whether civilization might rise again from the ashes, and Odysseus agrees that it might, but only after it has forgotten their mistakes - and so perhaps doomed to repeat them.

Every generation gets the classical epic that they deserve. The swords and sandals films of the 1950s spoke to an ascendant America emerging on to the world stage as the dominant superpower, an empire at the start of what would be called “the American Century.” Ridley Scott’s Gladiator spoke to that powerhouse contemplating the end of history and inevitability of decline from within after vanquishing its last enemy.

The start of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars coincided with a wave of these sort of mythological epics: Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, Oliver Stone’s Alexander, Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur and – easily the best of them – Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey feels like it is closing that particular loop, circling back around to end that argument. It speaks to the current moment, offering something of a definitive statement on these mythic sagas and what they say about societies.

Nolan has crafted an epic, about the lies that a civilization tells itself, and the chaos that follows when it stops even believing in those.