Nolan’s “The Odyssey” and the Only Question Worth Asking

By Endri Xhafo

I usually sum up what I think about a film I like in two lines as I walk from Cineplexx Albania to the TEG parking lot. I post it straight to my Story; 24 hours later, it is gone… and we move on to the next one. The same was true of Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” except that I watched it at Cineplexx Kosovo in digital IMAX on Friday, July 17. I watched it, said and wrote what I thought, posted it, and that was that. But I am returning to it with something longer so that it does not disappear again after 24 hours, because lately I have seen all kinds of intellectuals, writers, scholars and translators, Albanian and foreign, complaining that Nolan has not delivered a faithful adaptation of the Odyssey. They talk a great deal about the story and the source material, but ignore the film’s human and psychological dimension.

First of all, engaging with Nolan these days, especially when it is not part of your job—when you are not being paid by “Variety,” “The Hollywood Reporter,” “Cahiers du Cinéma,” “Sight & Sound,” “Empire,” and so on—makes it look as though you are trying to redirect attention from his fame to yourself. This now inevitably applies to me as well, but it applies especially to those who attack him.

Fortunately, those attacking him are not the ones making films! And I doubt their interpretation of the story would resonate with more than one billion people, which appears to be the trajectory Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is following. But anyway.

Their main complaint is its lack of fidelity. Fidelity to what? What we know about the Odyssey does not come from Homer alone, but has been supplemented by successive contributions from the entire corpus of Greek and Roman mythology.

Only today, nearly three weeks after seeing the film, have I decided which Odysseus I prefer: Nolan’s Odysseus or the mythological one.

The mythological Odysseus cheated on his wife several times, slept with Circe and Calypso, and even had several children with both of them. He was arrogant when he told the Cyclops: “Tell the whole world that Ulysses blinded you.” He was also a trickster who delighted in humor and in the pranks he played on others. The dilemmas and crises of Homer’s Odysseus are those of a pleasure-seeker torn between adventure and returning home, between hedonism and the faint memory of marital fidelity.

Homer’s Odysseus embodies a deeply patriarchal world, the kind in which a man can run wild, forget the way home, return whenever he can, and still find his good and dutiful wife waiting for him, even ready to wash his feet through Eurycleia. When the mythological Odysseus finally returned to Ithaca, he killed not only the suitors but also, in an extremely bloody fashion, the servants who had sided with them. And in the end, he himself was killed by Telegonus, the son he had with Circe. Homer does not tell us this, however; it comes from Eugammon of Cyrene’s lost sixth-century BC epic poem “Telegony,” which, precisely because it has been lost, is known through summaries by later authors, especially thanks to Proclus, who summarized the “Epic Cycle.”

Under these circumstances, I personally prefer Nolan’s Odysseus. Nolan’s Odysseus experiences shame, fear and remorse. Nolan’s Odysseus has only one son, Telemachus. He suffers from the same internal struggle as Oppenheimer: the victor’s guilt over his own victory and its consequences. Nolan humanizes the hero, just as he did in the Batman trilogy, where the savior suffers from the insecurities of an ordinary man. The conversation with Penelope about the coming war before his departure for Troy; Odysseus’s fears and doubts about his own fate; Penelope’s pleas for him not to yield to Agamemnon’s political and strategic ambitions; his reply that Agamemnon—a father who sacrificed his daughter to demonstrate his commitment to the war—would take revenge on their son Telemachus if he deserted: this entire exchange, which resembles any “modern” conversation or bit of gossip between husband and wife in bed today, directly reveals the war’s true cause. From that moment, you understand that the war is political, not mystical in the slightest, and still less a matter of honor, and so on. That is why, in Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” it is completely irrelevant who plays Helen, because whether Helen is beautiful or ugly is of no importance whatsoever. It does not take Nolan making a film for anyone who reads the mythological Odyssey after turning 20 to understand that Helen was always a pretext. Reading it literally means acknowledging your own naivety! Even the great Kadare once ventured to interpret Homer’s Iliad through the Albanian code governing guest and host, under which the dishonor inflicted by Paris could not simply be laid to rest. But he later “surrendered” when he said that the Trojan War was the first world war in human history.

In that sense, in Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” it does not matter at all whether there are Black, white or Asian actors, whether the language is modern or classical, or whether Telemachus says “dad” instead of “father”… because these things are entirely irrelevant to the story!

Nolan’s interpretation takes you into deeper waters. The image of Athena is not Athena herself, but Odysseus’s fractured conscience, a projection of the Trojan girl whom his soldiers behead. The Cyclops Polyphemus is not a real monster, but an allegory for the monstrosities committed by Odysseus himself, the victor of Troy. He knows that his wooden-horse trick opened the gates to looting and murder, violating the law of Zeus—Xenia, the ancient Greek code of hospitality. The “Sea Peoples,” historically believed to have marked the end of the Bronze Age civilizations during which the events of Troy took place, are, according to Nolan, the very Greek hordes that razed Troy to the ground. Nolan’s Odysseus knows this, which is why he says on the journey home: “I have followed Agamemnon long enough; now I will follow a different path.” But Nolan’s Odysseus feels such overwhelming guilt that he appears not to want his soldiers—these “Sea Peoples” who bring nothing but destruction—to return home alive. When Circe turns them back from pigs into men, does she not say, “Return to the form that conceals what you truly are”—in other words, “pigs with human faces”? Nolan’s Odysseus is an accidental survivor of the ordeals of the journey home, who finds the strength to return only when he is psychologically ready.

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This story of Nolan’s Odysseus reminds me of Kadare’s Aeschylus. Kadare himself wrote, regarding the publication in France of his work “Aeschylus, the Great Loser,” that “the book was generally well received, but someone also came forward to criticize it and only toward the end revealed the real reason for his criticism: ‘We have gone bald over Aeschylus, studying him our entire lives, and then a writer from Albania comes along and receives all this praise.’”

The same applies to Nolan. That is why I say we should leave the intellectuals to their hermetic intellectualism while a genius like Nolan democratizes myth through art.

The only legitimate question worth asking, and one I have yet to settle for myself, is this: Which of the two films ranks higher, “The Odyssey” or “Interstellar”?

Glossary:

– The Odyssey—the epic poem by Homer recounting Odysseus’s return to Ithaca after the Trojan War.

– Odysseus—the Greek name of the hero, the king of Ithaca.

– Ulysses/Ulixes—the Latin, or Roman, name of the same hero.