Over my trip back to the East Coast, I went to see Christopher Nolan's Odyssey with my friend, Lionel Spiegel. For a film about Greek mythology, it is remarkably biblical. This should not surprise readers of classical literature as there is a long-running tradition of reading Greek mythology in Christian terms. This is important for understanding C. S. Lewis' project, made quite explicit in Till We Have Faces. Lewis was a Christianized pagan, who saw mythology as an essential part of the Christian story. Whether Nolan is a Christian or a post-Christian, telling a Christian story that he no longer personally believes in, is difficult to determine and irrelevant for our purposes. We can ask similar questions about J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter or Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. In both cases, regardless of the authors' personal beliefs, these are deeply Christian stories.
Like The Passion of the Christ, The Odyssey is an incredibly violent film, beyond conventional R-rated action movies. This is violence meant to make viewers uncomfortable, but this does not mean that the violence is gratuitous; on the contrary, it is meant to horrify the viewer and make them feel as if they are the ones committing the violence. In the case of The Passion, we are meant to be aghast at the death of Jesus but also at the sin that made his death necessary. We are meant to feel that we are the Roman soldiers beating Jesus and putting nails into his hands.
The Odyssey can be read as a retelling of the Fall of Man in Genesis. Odysseus is an Augustinian villain. For Augustine, Adam and Eve seem like innocent children who ignored a seemingly pointless command. In truth, they consciously chose to rebel against God, despite God giving them everything, and tainted the entire world, including their descendants, with sin. Similarly, we like Odysseus as a person; he is a good husband, father, and king to his people. Because of this, we are inclined to minimize the nature of his sin. He was forced to go to war, but he figured out a way to eventually bring it to an end. In reality, he chose to ally himself with Agamemnon, a man who murdered his own daughter and put her spine on his helmet. In service to this satanic being, Odysseus spends ten years raiding the Eastern Mediterranean around Troy before putting the entire city to the sword. This destroyed the entire network of trade that his Bronze Age civilization relied upon.
On top of the physical crime is the spiritual crime. Odysseus violated the "Law of Zeus" to treat strangers as if they might be gods. The Trojan Horse is an act of religious sacrilege. Odysseus relied on the fact that the Trojans would not reject something that had been sanctified as a gift for Athena and not examine it too closely. Here is where the subplot with Sinon becomes important. Sinon, the innocent kid who should never have been sent to war in the first place, revered the gods and trusted in Odysseus' decency. Odysseus used that innocence to manipulate him and ultimately fool the Trojans. In Nolan's telling, Sinon is not a trickster. He honestly believes that the horse is an offering to the gods. The Trojans believe him, because he is so clearly genuine.
The publicity of this trick through bards telling the story, as we see in the beginning of the film, is now destroying belief in the gods in a Nietzschean "God is dead" sense. Just as modernity robs people of the ability to truly believe, even as they still go through the motions of religion, the Trojan Horse story is making it impossible to truly revere the gods as beings that one could never contemplate blaspheming. Note that Nolan, unlike Homer, never gives the gods the opportunity to punish the Greeks and reaffirm their power. For Nolan, bad things happen to the Greeks; what else can you expect from a world in which people have not only lost their material prosperity, but also the reverence for the gods that made their lives meaningful?
Our willingness to identify with Odysseus comes to work against us as the true extent of his crimes is slowly revealed and the excuses that we have been making for him are stripped away. By the end of the film, we have become complicit in Odysseus' bloody deeds and his actions become ours. We are good people who would never hack apart an unarmed woman. The fact that our world seems to be falling apart cannot be our fault. What if we are wrong; what if we are the barbarians who have irrevocably torn down the material and spiritual foundations of our civilization?
Odysseus can be thought of as Cain. There are two sides to Cain's character. He is a murderer who kills his own brother out of simple jealousy. On the other hand, perhaps because of the extraordinary nature of his crime, Cain is the first person to repent, declaring: "my sin is too great to bear." (Genesis 4:13) By contrast, we never hear Adam or Eve repent, but only their excuses. Despite this repentance, Cain is never allowed to find redemption, but is forced to wander the world until he is killed by his own descendant.
In the traditional version of the story, Odysseus is forced to wander the ocean and is kept from returning home for ten years because he blinded the son of Poseidon, the cyclops Polyphemus. In Nolan's retelling, Odysseus is someone overwhelmed by the enormity of the crime that he knows he is guilty of. As with Dr. Ernst Janning in Judgment at Nuremberg, it is a fair question whether his awareness serves to justify forgiving him or if it makes his actions worse. One can argue that Odysseus, as the Greek leader who was not a moral monster, had a special responsibility for not stopping the Trojan War and bears ultimate guilt for the destruction of Troy.
Overwhelmed by guilt, Odysseus is fed the lotus by Calypso to cause him to forget what he had done. As such, leaving Calypso, instead of being about the gods deciding to release Odysseus, becomes about Odysseus being willing to face his actions. For such a crime, there can be no atonement. Odysseus returning home does not rectify his actions. On the contrary, he allows himself to sink even further into blood by murdering the suitors. Here Odysseus becomes a scapegoat. He performs the sin, knowing that his soul is already damned beyond salvation so that his son, Telemachus, can rule untainted. In the end, like Cain, Odysseus goes into exile, though, in his case, he does get to take Penelope with him.
Odysseus attempting to protect Telemachus is an interesting play on Machiavelli's essential dilemma. Every dynasty was founded on a crime at some point in the past. The advantage of established kingdoms is that they can pretend to be innocent even though their rule is ultimately just as tainted as the person who seizes power and personally has people killed. In the case of Telemachus, it is hardly clear that the families of the dead suitors really hold him blameless. Regardless of whether or not he personally fought, Telemachus' reign is still founded upon the violence of Odysseus and bears the stain of his sins.
Nolan leaves us with an irredeemable world where individual heroism is incapable of holding up a civilization once the pillars have been brought down. Without a shared reverence for the gods to guarantee hospitality to strangers, there can be no trade. This is a culture that must now be allowed to collapse into a dark age, even to the point of losing writing, in the hope that a better one might one day arise.
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