{"id":311654,"date":"2026-08-01T20:15:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-01T20:15:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/311654\/"},"modified":"2026-08-01T20:15:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-01T20:15:20","slug":"christopher-nolans-artfully-woven-odyssey-daniel-mendelsohn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/311654\/","title":{"rendered":"Christopher Nolan\u2019s Artfully Woven Odyssey | Daniel Mendelsohn"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aristotle, for one, wasn\u2019t all that impressed by Odysseus\u2019s adventures. In the seventeenth chapter of his Poetics he observes, apropos of the relationship of a story\u2019s \u201cessential\u201d meaning to its constituent episodes, that<\/p>\n

the storyline of the Odyssey is not long. A man has been away from his homeland for many years, and Poseidon is always on the watch for him, and he is all alone. Meanwhile, the situation at home is such that his wealth is being consumed by the Suitors, who are plotting against his son. But after a storm-tossed journey he returns, and after revealing himself and attacking them is saved and destroys his enemies. That is the essential; everything else is episodes. <\/p>\n

This summary will strike many as odd. Where, you wonder, are the famous adventures that most people think of as the meat of the great epic\u2014the numerous escapades that showcase the ingenuity, wiliness, and derring-do of Homer\u2019s hero during his decade-long return from the Trojan War? The Lotos-Eaters, who eat of a flower that erases memory? The seductive nymph Calypso, who holds him prisoner for seven years, offering to make him immortal if only he would stay with her\u2014an offer he movingly refuses in favor of returning to his aging, mortal wife? His yearlong dalliance with the witchy Circe, who turns his men into swine? Or his lengthy sojourn among the effete Phaeacians, with their opulent wealth and glittering palaces, their taste for dancing and music\u2014one of the many cultures that the epic presents as a tempting alternative to Ithaca\u2014whose royal family the hero, deploying his famed rhetorical skills, wheedles into bringing him home?<\/p>\n

Nor is there any mention here of the voyage to the Underworld, where, in one of the epic\u2019s most moving moments, Odysseus attempts\u2014and fails\u2014to embrace the wispy ghost of his mother, of whose death, during his long absence, he had been unaware. And no mention either of the lengthiest of the adventures, the encounter with the one-eyed giant Cyclops, whom clever Odysseus\u2014repeatedly celebrated by Homer as polym\u00eatis (\u201cgreatly cunning\u201d), polyphr\u00f4n (\u201chaving many kinds of intelligence\u201d), polym\u00eakhanos (\u201cable to contrive many solutions\u201d), and poikilom\u00eatis (\u201cof multifaceted wiles\u201d)\u2014vanquishes by means of an artful pun on the word \u201cnobody,\u201d the false name he gives the Cyclops when they first meet.<\/p>\n

All this, in Aristotle\u2019s summary, is reduced to \u201ca storm-tossed journey.\u201d<\/p>\n

In part this is because he rightly emphasizes the importance of that other, far vaster part of the Odyssey, what he calls \u201cthe situation at home\u201d\u2014the crisis that the hero\u2019s long absence has created for his city, whose political institutions are collapsing; for his wife, Penelope, who is besieged by the Suitors; and for his young son, Telemachus, who strives to live up to the grand reputation of the father he never knew. These constitute what screenwriting courses refer to as the \u201cstakes\u201d\u2014the crisis that must be resolved by the hero\u2019s eventual return; otherwise the homecoming has no point. Only four of the epic\u2019s twenty-four books are devoted to the adventures, which are narrated by the notoriously smooth-talking hero himself before the mesmerized Phaeacian court: his greatest feat of verbal artistry.<\/p>\n

But the main reason Aristotle gives short shrift to the adventures has to do with the epic\u2019s structure. In the section of the Poetics devoted to the Odyssey, he\u2019s primarily interested in the workings of plot. The Odyssey\u2019s plot is one that he admires as being \u201ccomplex\u201d (the many ups and downs of its characters, the multiple scenes of recognition with which the poem concludes) and commends because of its \u201cdouble thread\u201d: the ascending arc of its hero\u2019s rehabilitation and eventual triumph, twined around the descending arc of his enemies\u2019 downfall.<\/p>\n

While satisfying to Aristotle, the very complexity of the Odyssey\u2019s narrative, constantly moving as it does between past and present, reminiscence and action, Ithaca and those far-flung voyages, is no doubt what has made it so difficult to bring successfully to the cinematic screen\u2014this despite the fact that the adventures in particular seem to cry out for big-screen, special-effects treatment. The problem isn\u2019t merely the vast amount of incident that needs to be covered. Homer also has a distinctive way of embedding his elaborate narratives within other narratives. Stories nest within stories; lengthy conversations are reported within other lengthy conversations. The most famous instance of this technique occurs in book 19, when an elderly housemaid who is bathing the feet of the disguised Odysseus recognizes a telltale scar that the hero had incurred during a boar hunt in his youth. At the moment she realizes that the \u201cbeggar\u201d before her is her long-lost master, the narrative grinds to a halt in order to loop back through not one but two embedded flashbacks, first to the boar hunt and then to the day of the hero\u2019s birth, before circling back to the present.<\/p>\n

How to represent any of this\u2014the structure and the technique as well as the vast tale itself\u2014in the course of two or three hours?<\/p>\n

One answer is that you can\u2019t. It is no accident that the most scrupulously faithful dramatic adaptation of the Odyssey has been not a film but a miniseries: the meticulously detailed eight-part L\u2019Odissea (1968), a French-Italian coproduction directed by Franco Rossi. The miniseries, a form that is itself episodic, solves the problem of how to weave many episodes into a larger pattern that is never extraneous to the \u201cessential\u201d theme of the story\u2014Odysseus\u2019s homecoming, its nature, origins, and ramifications\u2014as Aristotle recommends. The great length permitted by the genre allowed the writers of the series to evoke even the most minor characters and incidents.1<\/a><\/p>\n

But a movie\u2014even a very long movie\u2014inevitably has a much harder time twining the threads, organizing the episodes in a way that does not (and this is the trick) feel \u201cepisodic.\u201d It says something that of the very few movie adaptations of the Odyssey that have appeared, two\u2014Ulysses (1954), an antic and amusing Italian production starring a swashbuckling Kirk Douglas and Silvana Mangano as the royal couple and Anthony Quinn as Antino\u00fcs, the loathsome leader of the Suitors, and, more recently, The Return (2024), with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche\u2014make deep cuts. The former eliminates most of the adventures (presented as flashbacks while Odysseus gazes out to sea during his stay with the Phaeacians) while compressing the situation at home to a bare minimum.<\/p>\n

The Return, on the other hand, cuts out the entire first half of the epic and starts with the hero\u2019s return home. This naturally eliminates not only the supernatural elements\u2014the gods, the nymphs, the monsters, the divine dalliances, and the spooky encounters\u2014but everything in Homer that establishes the stakes. Informed, perhaps, by recent approaches to the Homeric poems as proto\u2013case studies in PTSD,2<\/a> the film recasts what Aristotle saw as the hero\u2019s triumphant arc as the grim tale of a traumatized veteran. (At one point Odysseus himself openly sneers at the idea of \u201cheroes\u201d when someone asks about the war.) The Ithaca to which this Odysseus, played by a wiry, scowling Fiennes, comes home reflects his depressed state: a scattering of dun-colored huts inhabited by meanly clothed peasants, its palace a dreary pile of stones. You wondered why he was so eager to get back.<\/p>\n

To do all of the Odyssey justice\u2014justice, that is, to its structure as well as its content\u2014it would seem that you need a director who is not only capable of producing a visually engrossing spectacle but also adept at handling complexly embedded narratives. Which is why, soon after the release of The Return, some people, myself included, were elated when it was announced that the British American director Christopher Nolan was working on a movie adaptation of the epic.<\/p>\n

Nolan, after all, made his name by twisting narrative threads in ways you wouldn\u2019t be wrong in describing as polym\u00eatis. His first feature, Following (1998), tracks an aimless young Londoner who likes to follow random people around\u2014harmlessly at first\u2014until one of them turns out to be a sly cat burglar who ensnares his stalker in a dense and finally deadly web of lies and illusions. Memento (2000), which won him widespread acclaim, highlighted what was to become another entrenched theme of the filmmaker\u2019s work: the relationship between memory and guilt. An amnesiac (Guy Pearce) bent on finding and killing his wife\u2019s murderer must rely on an elaborate system of photographs and notes, some tattooed on his own body, as a means of retaining consciousness of who people are, where he has been, and what he has accomplished in his quest for clues. Here, too, it turns out that the protagonist has been the victim of an ingeniously plotted scam.<\/p>\n

What was so intriguing about Memento was the technique Nolan employed to suggest Leonard\u2019s fragmented mental reality and to recreate it in the audience. The film has two narrative threads: a black-and-white sequence that follows events in chronological order and a color sequence that moves backward in time. As each proceeds, the audience comes ever closer to being able to put the pieces together in a way that Leonard can\u2019t. Such toying with chronology has become a hallmark of Nolan\u2019s work, not least in a marvelous venture into sci-fi, Interstellar (2014), an astronauts-saving-the-inhabitants-of-a-dying-Earth extravaganza in which time, literally bent out of shape (there\u2019s a black hole), moves at different rates for various of its characters, with sometimes very moving results. I doubt that I was the only one in the theater getting teary-eyed during the scene at the end between the still-young protagonist (Matthew McConaughey) and his now elderly daughter.<\/p>\n

Guilty characters with dark pasts resurfaced in other Nolan films, most notably the Dark Knight trilogy, the opening chapter of which, Batman Begins (2005), depicts Bruce Wayne\/Batman (Christian Bale) as a man who, because of his failure, as a boy, to prevent the murder of his father and mother, feels no less \u201cguilty\u201d in some ways than are the outlandish villains he constantly battles. Nolan\u2019s psychologically somber Batman films were ecstatically received as a shrewdly contemporary reimagining of the old franchise and had huge international success, but to my mind they lacked\u2014perhaps of necessity, given their pop nature\u2014the stimulating structural ingenuity of some of his other films. In The Prestige (2006), an obsessive and ultimately murderous rivalry between two turn-of-the-century London magicians\u2014one of whom has caused the death of the other\u2019s wife\u2014results in deliciously inventive plots-within-plots that allow the director to play at length with favorite themes of guilt and innocence, illusion and reality, human action and its sometimes unforeseen consequences.<\/p>\n

And in the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer (2023), another guilt-ridden hero (Cillian Murphy, playing the morally tormented leader of the Manhattan Project) is caught in knotty webs of both his own and others\u2019 making. Here Nolan topped Aristotle by having not two but three discrete plot threads twining around one another: one follows Oppenheimer\u2019s participation in the development of the atom bomb; the second looks forward to the Star Chamber\u2013like 1954 government investigation of Oppenheimer, whose security clearance has been threatened by his early ties to the Communist Party; and the third, set in 1959, focuses on Senate hearings on Lewis Strauss\u2019s nomination as commerce secretary and his involvement in revoking Oppenheimer\u2019s clearance back in 1954.<\/p>\n

Nolan\u2019s penchant for convolution can lead him astray. I\u2019ve never quite been able to figure out precisely what\u2019s going on in Inception (2010), a stylish fantasy in which futuristic criminal \u201cextractors\u201d wreak high-tech havoc on their marks by stealing their inmost thoughts from\u2014or implanting new thoughts in\u2014their subconscious, a feat they manage to achieve by entering their victims\u2019 dreams. (Or something.) Still, the rendering of the dreams was so visually arresting that I\u2019m not sure I cared. And the director\u2019s virtually nonverbal World War II epic Dunkirk (2017) left you understanding nothing about that historical disaster, but it was gratifyingly eye- (and ear-) popping.<\/p>\n

Whatever its flaws, Nolan\u2019s work indicated that he might indeed be the right person to take on Odysseus, another multifaceted hero characterized at once by admirable cleverness and dark behaviors, and the Odyssey, a text characterized by temporal disjuncts and narrative playfulness. The result, a $250 million, three-hour-long behemoth, the first movie to be shot entirely in the IMAX format, is, like Batman Begins, a darkly psychologizing updating of a classic; like Memento, it toys with themes of memory and forgetting while, like Oppenheimer, it twists a profusion of narrative and temporal arcs. And like the sack of unruly winds that Aeolus, the divine custodian of the winds, entrusts to Odysseus in book 10\u2014only to have it opened by the hero\u2019s suspicious crewmen, with disastrous results\u2014it is in the end a mixed bag: at once a vehicle for the director\u2019s virtues and, as with The Return, a case study of the weaknesses inherent in attempting to modernize a work many of whose values remain, for all its timelessness, stubbornly archaic.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that Nolan isn\u2019t aware of the values of the original. In an interview that appeared in The New York Times a month before the movie\u2019s release, he spoke about his early, formative love for the Odyssey, which he first encountered as a stage production he saw as a young schoolboy in London. What marked him particularly, he recalled, were the image of the Trojan Horse\u2014the clever invention of Odysseus that allowed the Greeks to infiltrate Troy, which is mentioned several times in Homer\u2019s text and is the subject of a song sung by the Phaeacians\u2019 court bard\u2014and the episode of the Sirens and their song.3<\/a><\/p>\n

Small wonder, then, that the film, in all its IMAX glory, is often visually impressive and, even more interestingly, that from its opening to its closing scene it finds ways to remind us that epic was considered to be a form of \u201csong\u201d and hence was something its original audience experienced aurally rather than visually. It\u2019s a nice touch that Nolan\u2019s film begins with Phemius, the court bard in Odysseus\u2019s palace, rapping rhythmically on the floor with his stick as he intones words with well-known connections to the tales of Troy\u2014\u201ca face [i.e., Helen\u2019s], a man, a song\u201d\u2014and, even more, that Phemius is played by the rapper Travis Scott: the director\u2019s sly nod to the oral, improvisational origins of Archaic epic.<\/p>\n

As you\u2019d expect, Nolan\u2019s own \u201csong\u201d effectively replicates the imbricated textures of the original. Because of the nature of epic narration, with its vast arcs, many famous \u201creveals\u201d necessarily stand cheek by jowl with the backstories that set them up. When, in book 17, Odysseus approaches the gate of his palace for the first time in twenty years and spots his faithful old hunting dog, Argos, now flea-bitten and lying atop the town dung heap\u2014a powerful analogue for the haggard warrior himself\u2014the poet pauses to give you the story of how Odysseus acquired and trained Argos as a puppy, what good a tracker he was, and so forth. Similarly, there\u2019s a climactic moment at the end of book 21 when Odysseus finally reveals his true identity by wielding a magnificent bow that he alone is strong enough to string\u2014he plucks its twanging string, Homer tells us meaningfully, just the way a professional bard does with his lyre\u2014and by shooting an arrow through twelve ax heads that have been lined up: a trick, the poet has recently told us, that he used to perform in the bygone days.<\/p>\n

Nolan inserts space between the backstories and the reveals in a way that\u2019s appropriate to a dramatization and finds ways to give the tension between past and present interesting visual textures. Early on, an image of the now decrepit Argos, abused by the arrogant Suitors (led by Robert Pattinson\u2019s sneering Antino\u00fcs, in a faded-pretty-boy turn), melts into a flashback of the young hero meeting his frisky puppy; a bit later we\u2019re watching a younger Odysseus (a heavily bearded Matt Damon) performing his arrows-through-the-axes trick as Penelope, smiling indulgently, looks on. And Nolan has found ways to slip the twanging of the bowstring early enough into his movie that when the returned hero plucks the bowstring at the end\u2014the prelude to the climactic slaughter of the Suitors\u2014the moment has just the right shivery power. Since Nolan started dropping trailers, the Internet has been aflame with discussions of the \u201caccuracy\u201d of the costumes, ships, armor, and diction of the movie, but the most authentic thing about this Odyssey may well be its densely braided narrative textures, which succeed in replicating Homer\u2019s artful weaving.<\/p>\n

Weaving, as it happens, is crucial in the Odyssey. Even people who have never read the epic are likely to have heard the story, recalled by an irritated Suitor in book 2, of how \u201csharp-witted\u201d Penelope, every inch as ingenious as her husband, had held off the Suitors for three years by promising that she\u2019d marry one of them when she finished weaving a funeral shroud for her father-in-law, La\u00ebrtes\u2014and then, by night, unweaving what she\u2019d woven by day. Nolan places this scene in the \u201cnow\u201d of the homecoming story: Penelope (Anne Hathaway, in a portrayal that wavers nicely between sharp authority and anguish) explains her weaving process to Telemachus and then, gesturing to the palace and the city beyond, as if her civilization itself were a giant artwork, makes an observation about the relationship between form and content of which Aristotle himself, you suspect, would approve: \u201cThe structure is nothing without the people\u2019s respect for its meaning.\u201d Like the sly self-reflexive depictions of bardic artistry in the Odyssey, the queen\u2019s remark seems like a comment on the way Nolan\u2019s elaborately textured structures are meant to serve his long-standing themes.<\/p>\n

While Aristotle gives the adventures short shrift, Nolan certainly doesn\u2019t; the movie has great visual panache. In the Underworld scene, the hands of the dead, whom Odysseus has been instructed to summon by means of a creepily bloody ritual, wriggle upward, unnervingly, from beneath the black sand of the shore. The storms at sea\u2014scenes to which Homer devotes some of his most memorably descriptive poetry\u2014are impressively scary. And Nolan\u2019s rendering of the Cyclops episode is unlikely to be topped, the huge IMAX screen powerfully conveying the inky immensity of the giant\u2019s lair as the Greek warriors, puny in comparison with their tormentor, anxiously wander through it. (All this is helped by some very effective sound design: the entire theater shakes when Polyphemus makes his entrance.) In this version, it\u2019s not just the Cyclops\u2019s (Bill Irwin\u2019s) vision that\u2019s wonky: some of his features have been violently twisted ninety degrees, so the famous \u201cone sole eye\u201d sits vertically in his forehead, blinking side to side.<\/p>\n

Polyphemus isn\u2019t the only character who gets a makeover. In Homer, Circe decorously taps Odysseus\u2019s men with a magic wand to transform them into swine; Nolan gives the scene a repellent physicality, as the witch (a decidedly unglamorous middle-aged Wiccan type, played with earthy relish by Samantha Morton) violently uses her hands to massage their faces into snouts after they pig out on the stew she\u2019s served them. In one of a few feminism-inflected moments, Circe bitterly suggests that the transformation reveals rather than conceals who these men really are: \u201cThey raped and pillaged across the world for you! Filthy soldiers with empty bellies and hot blood. Look at them and know your own men!\u201d<\/p>\n

It has to be said that whatever Nolan\u2019s taste for optical extravagance, the production design here is disappointingly unimaginative: the drearily sepia-toned sets and costumes, sooty in the flickering torchlight, look like they\u2019ve been rented from the Game of Thrones warehouse. In Homer, the palace of Odysseus\u2019s old comrade Menelaos is so opulent that Telemachus, who\u2019s come to interview the indulgent, rather sentimental Spartan king about his father\u2019s whereabouts, openly gawks: \u201cLook at the bronze that flashes throughout the echoing palace,\/At the gleam of gold and amber\u2014Look! Silver and ivory, too!\u201d Here Menelaos is a thuggish warlord who, it would seem, has enjoyed beating his wife, Helen\u2014the Kenyan Mexican actress Lupita Nyong\u2019o, in a bit of casting that launched a thousand tweets\u2014half of whose legendarily beautiful face is covered with deep scars. This Menelaos (Jon Bernthal, sounding vaguely Tony Soprano\u2013ish) guffaws that perhaps that famous face would now launch only five hundred ships.<\/p>\n

If the film has a single unifying visual motif, it is, unsurprisingly, the Trojan Horse, which made such an impression on the young Nolan. When we first see it, in an opening flashback to the end of the war, the huge black contraption is sticking out of the sand by the seashore, left there to be discovered by a group of gullible Trojan warriors. Odysseus has also left a young Greek soldier named Sinon (Elliot Page) to ensnare the enemy by claiming that it is a gift from the (allegedly) retreating Greeks. The Trojans seize the Horse and kill the naive youth, whom Odysseus had kept in the dark about the Greeks\u2019 master plan. In Nolan\u2019s Odyssey, the only significant encounter the hero has in the Underworld is with the ghost of Sinon, who reproaches his commander for his duplicity\u2014the negative side of his great cunning. The final image of the film reiterates the point: the Horse\u2019s unseeing eye, recalling that of the Cyclops, staring out from the smoking rubble of Troy\u2014the deadly aftermath of yet another of Odysseus\u2019s clever schemes.<\/p>\n

But then, the only side of Odysseus\u2014and indeed of the Odyssey\u2014that you get in Nolan\u2019s film is the negative one. \u201cI wanted the film to be accessible,\u201d he has said.<\/p>\n

I wanted the world of The Odyssey to feel like a world that a modern audience could relate to. We didn\u2019t want it to look or sound like previous movies set during antiquity, as many of them take their cues from certain periods of art and music, like Neoclassical painting from 18th and 19th century Europe or Romantic Era orchestral compositions. We wanted an earthy, modern, relatable tone to ground the story. <\/p>\n

As with The Return, \u201cearthy, modern, relatable\u201d here translates to a focus on psychological angst and a grim \u201crealism\u201d that shrewdly channels a contemporary impatience with notions such as \u201cgreat men\u201d and \u201cheroism.\u201d In this Odyssey, there is no cleverness, no humor, no wily charm. In this Odyssey, the hero doesn\u2019t trick the Cyclops with his brilliant \u201cnobody\u201d pun; he and his men just poke the giant\u2019s eye out and make a gridiron-inspired run for it. (\u201cRun low through the entrance and then split wide!\u201d) This Odysseus has no sparkling repartee with his divine patroness, Athena\u2014a delightful leitmotif of Homer\u2019s text\u2014because the crucial part in the epic played by that awesome goddess, with her creepy \u201cowl-eyes,\u201d has been whittled down to a couple of scenes in which Athena (Zendaya, swathed in what looks like Jil Sander) bucks him up during his moments of religious doubt. \u201cLook! Who\u2019s moving those clouds? Who\u2019s moving that water?!\u201d The dialogue, alas, is pedestrian throughout.<\/p>\n

Nor can this Odysseus charm the Phaeacians with his seductive talk and beguiling storytelling, because Nolan has eliminated the Phaeacian episode altogether\u2014a real loss, given that long episode\u2019s enchanting portrayal of the feisty teenage princess Nausicaa, who discovers the shipwrecked hero and saves him, and of her adoring parents. This Odysseus does not break down in tears at the apparition of his mother in Hades, because that tender moment, too, has been excised, along with the most crucial encounter he has in the Underworld. The ghost of Achilles, who had given up long life in return for eternal glory, tells his old comrade that he would rather be alive, the lowest servant of a poor man, than king of all the dead: a ringing endorsement of the Odyssey\u2019s hero, who stops at nothing to survive.<\/p>\n

Nolan deletes all this while retaining material that adds little to his story or its themes. A confusingly extended scene of a battle with a race of cannibalistic giants called the Laestrygonians, a relatively uninteresting episode in book 10, adds nothing, except perhaps an adrenaline rush for the eighteen-to-twenty-six crowd.<\/p>\n

Worse, this Odysseus does not make his moving rejection of Calypso\u2019s offer of immortality because Nolan, taking a leaf from the Kirk Douglas version, portrays Odysseus as being an amnesiac during the seven years he spends with her; he doesn\u2019t even know he has a wife to return to. In a conflation of two canonical adventures, Nolan has his Calypso (Charlize Theron)\u2014here apparently not a goddess but an ordinary mortal\u2014confess to her lover that for all those seven years she\u2019s been feeding him Lotos in order to ease his mental anguish. \u201cYou want to remember, but what if remembering destroys your happiness?\u201d she murmurs\u2014one of several Yoda-like utterances that Nolan attributes to a character who, in the original, is the mistress of an impressive rhetorical style. (Homer\u2019s Calypso, faced with Zeus\u2019s order to give up her captive, rages against the male double standard for female sexual behavior in a memorable speech that has lost none of its freshness\u2014or pertinence.) The whole point of the Calypso episode is that Odysseus remembers the wife, and the life, he has left behind: when we first meet him, in book 5, he is staring out to sea, \u201csitting there; nor did his tears\/Ever dry, since the sweetness of life was trickling away\/As he grieved for his homecoming.\u201d<\/p>\n

What this Odysseus does remember is the Horse and everything that Nolan wants it to represent. The climax of his adaptation is not the triumphant achievement of the long-deferred vengeance and restitution of the hero\u2019s identity but a moment the evening before, when Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, converses with Penelope. Losing hope, she insists that the husband she remembers would have found a way to come home if he were still alive. Rueful, Odysseus replies, \u201cIt\u2019s not always an easy thing, a homecoming. What if the Odysseus you knew lost his way? What if he saw things?\u2026 What if, when he opened the gates of Troy, he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night?\u201d This triggers an extended flashback to the atrocities committed by the Greeks during the fall of the city: the rapes, the beheadings, the desecrations of shrines. For these crimes, Nolan\u2019s Odysseus feels a crippling guilt:<\/p>\n

We left them a gift, an offering of peace that they took into their home. We violated all that is held sacred between people and turned a fight into a hunt. To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire\u2026. What if [Odysseus] knew, that very night, as he walked through fires of anarchy and pain and in the days of sweaty celebrations that followed\u2026what if he knew exactly what he\u2019d done? <\/p>\n

As this resounding speech echoed in my ears, it occurred to me that it sounds nothing like the heroes of Homer\u2014who, after all, gleefully vaunt over the mutilated bodies of their slaughtered enemies\u2014but a lot like the heroes of Christopher Nolan movies. This tormented, guilt-ridden Odysseus, stripped of humor and wit, seductiveness and cleverness, is a sibling of Memento\u2019s anguished amnesiac, of Batman, of Oppenheimer, men tormented by pasts they wrestle with in different ways. Speaking to the Times on the eve of his movie\u2019s release, Nolan acknowledged how, as he read various translations of the Odyssey, he realized that it was the \u201cur-text. It\u2019s in everything I\u2019ve done before.\u201d<\/p>\n

But whatever his lifelong fascination with the epic, Nolan has merely remade Homer\u2019s hero in his own image, just as he has imposed on Odysseus\u2019s adventures values utterly foreign to Homer. Is his new vehicle for Odysseus\u2019s tale impressive in its visual impact and distinctive in its structural ingenuity? Yes. But is its \u201cessential\u201d in any way Homeric? On that I\u2019ll let Penelope have the last word: \u201cThe structure is nothing without the people\u2019s respect for its meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aristotle, for one, wasn\u2019t all that impressed by Odysseus\u2019s adventures. In the seventeenth chapter of his Poetics he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311655,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,11,10],"class_list":["post-311654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311654\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}