Slaughter of the suitors of Penelope by Odysseus and Telemachus, assisted by Eumaeus and Philoetius. 2nd Century. Photograph Ixion Painte Wikimedia Commons

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by Phil Hall

I can’t help thinking the Coen brothers would have made a better, more honest job of filming the Odyssey and that Cormac McCarthy, or Brecht, had either of them been alive, would have made better scriptwriters, because Christopher Nolan, director and scriptwriter of the 2026 film, The Odyssey, flinches in his retelling of the epic.

To the extent that Nolan piques interest in Homer and the Iliad and ancient Greece, to the extent that he creates the gorgeous moving tableaux of the film, and to the extent that the actors are all so beautifully dolled up in period costume, we should be grateful for Nolan’s hard work. And for all the effort he put into invoking and evoking; into conjuring up this new version of Homer’s Odyssey.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is a story enacted by an excellent cast. The wonderful Matt Damon plays Odysseus masterfully. But for all the movie’s gorgeousness and verisimilitude, Christopher Nolan is using Homer to say something not precisely Homeric. Nolan would have us believe in a regretful Odysseus who feels sorry about what he is bound to do.

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This retelling of the story of Odysseus is screamingly political. As the film comes out, the USA is conducting a war of aggression against Iran, supporting Israel to the hilt and waging what it admits is a proxy war in the Ukraine – to the last Ukrainian. It is also angling for a conflict with China.

Meanwhile Hollywood, owned by the same US corporations that form part of the US military industrial complex, congratulates itself on its moral perspicacity. It hires directors like Christopher Nolan to do this and this time in full unabashed American accents, even though the director and half the cast are from the UK.

Nolan’s American accented Odysseus is a repentant combatant. This Odysseus is someone who can order the bombing of a wedding and then give a monologue about the heavy weight of command. The repentant Odysseus is the kind of man who can starve the population of Troy and then, express sorrow about the suffering for which he feels responsible. The repentant Odysseus is the one who can resign himself to waging wars that are not ‘of necessity’. Odysseus, at the beginning of the film, suggests the Trojan war is just such a war. It is a war about who controls the trade routes. The Strait of Hormuz?

The Odysseus of the Homeric epic has honour, but fewer scruples. He would be honest about his violence and cruelty and not cavil, as Nolan has him do. He would name what is happening. He would not dress it in humanitarian rhetoric or therapeutic guilt. He would say: I drew the bow. I killed them. This is what I did. Because they are Amalek! The enemies of our US interests in the region, Ithaca’s enemy. The Odysseus of the Homeric verses kills, rapes slave girls and starves civilians. But the Odysseus of the film feels terrible about it all, he really does.

In Homer’s verses Odysseus returns and does not wrestle with his conscience in a pseudo psychoanalytic mode. He draws the bow, and he kills every last suitor. The maids who slept with the suitors are hanged – like birds (an image the magpie Sebald took for his book, The Rings of Saturn). Melanthius is mutilated, nose, ears, genitals cut off, fed to the dogs. There is no mercy. There is no moral ambiguity. There is no repentance. He doesn’t die repenting for what he did in Troy.

Nolan does not let all Penelope’s suitors be slaughtered; he needs Odysseus to process his guilt and weep for his Trojan enemies; and for all the friends he led unnecessarily to death. In the film, Odysseus, after having fully, materially and actively supported the massacre of the people of Troy, wanders around Troy despairing at all the destruction. At the end of the Hollywood movie, Odysseus dies! Now, there’s a turn up for the books. He does not die in the epic.

δμῳὰς δ’ ἐξαγαγόντες ἐϋσταθέος μεγάροιο,
μεσσηγύς τε θόλου καὶ ἀμύμονος ἕρκεος αὐλῆς,
εἴλεον ἐν στείνει, ὅθεν οὔ πως ἦεν ἀλύξαι.
τοῖσι δὲ Τηλέμαχος πεπνυμένος ἦρχ’ ἀγορεύειν:
“μὴ μὲν δὴ καθαρῷ θανάτῳ ἀπὸ θυμὸν ἑλοίμην
τάων, αἳ δὴ ἐμῇ κεφαλῇ κατ’ ὀνείδεα χεῦαν
μητέρι θ’ ἡμετέρῃ παρά τε μνηστῆρσιν ἴαυον.”
ὣς ἄρ’ ἔφη, καὶ πεῖσμα νεὸς κυανοπρῴροιο
κίονος ἐξάψας μεγάλης περίβαλλε θόλοιο,
ὑψόσ’ ἐπεντανύσας, μή τις ποσὶν οὖδας ἵκοιτο.
ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἂν ἢ κίχλαι τανυσίπτεροι ἠὲ πέλειαι
ἕρκει ἐνιπλήξωσι, τό θ’ ἑστήκῃ ἐνὶ θάμνῳ,
αὖλιν ἐσιέμεναι, στυγερὸς δ’ ὑπεδέξατο κοῖτος,
δειρῇσι βρόχοι ἦσαν, ὅπως οἴκτιστα θάνοιεν.
ἤσπαιρον δὲ πόδεσσι μίνυνθά περ οὔ τι μάλα δήν.

Odyssey 22.457–473

But when they had set in order all the hall, they led the women forth from the well-built hall to a place between the dome and the goodly fence of the court, and shut them up in a narrow space, whence it was in no wise possible to escape. Then wise Telemachus was the first to speak to the others, saying: “Let it be by no clean death that I take the lives of these women, who on my own head have poured reproaches and on my mother, and were wont to lie with the wooers.”
So he spoke, and tied the cable of a dark-prowed ship to a great pillar and flung it round the dome, stretching it on high that none might reach the ground with her feet. And as when long-winged thrushes or doves fall into a snare that is set in a thicket, as they seek to reach their resting-place, and hateful is the bed that gives them welcome, even so the women held their heads in a row, and round the necks of all nooses were laid, that they might die most piteously. And they writhed a little while with their feet, but not long.

A. T. Murray translation (1919)

Homer’s Gods

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In the Odyssey and most of the literature that followed it, right up to (and often past) the Enlightenment, gods were there to fill up holes in the plot; in order to help further the logic of the story. How exactly did Ajax and the Greeks turn a rout into a successful defence, chasing Hector and his men back off the beach and into the city of Troy? Why, Poseidon, you see, moved by their plight, raced towards them in his chariot from his wooded place on the mountains of Samos and parking his chariot, putting golden manacles above the horses hooves, went up to Ajax and struck him with his staff, so inspiring him with great courage and skill. Greek gods brought a kind of understanding, or, at least, an order to the chaos of feelings and events.

The light of Greece leads straight across the millennia to the even brighter light of 17th century Enlightenment in Europe. After that, on the whole, the old stories and gods were abandoned, and they fell away: gods that once ordered the cosmos, like Quetzalcoatl, stopped being venerated and became just stories once again. What was once a cornerstone of existence, becomes an eccentric tale recounted in a book. A feathered snake! What were once living religions become mythologies and fairy stories and modern critics judge these formerly-sacred narratives by using shallow, au courant devices from anthropology, literary criticism and historiography, and ignore the possibility of divine inspiration and transcendence.

But bygone stories and myths don’t vanish. They lie about ready to be harvested by prison inmates in the USA invoking ‘Thor’, by Welsh nationalists posing as druids. Old stories can be weaponised to justify the theft of whole countries. Academics like Sir James George Frazer used The Golden Bough to construct a complex (and tiresome) account of progress. First came magic, then religion, then science. Whoopee! He justified colonial domination. The West inherits history; the ‘primitive’ myths of other societies become evidence of their inferiority and of the proof of the superiority of the strand of European human evolution. Joseph Campbell abstracted myths into a smorgasbord. Pick from it in order to create your own Hero’s Journey, the journey a template for consumeristic individualism and adaptation to the market as the natural order of affairs.

Hollywood is an expert at weaponising myths; the Ten Commandments helped consolidate positive perceptions of Israel and promote the right of the settler state of Israel to exist; the film about the 300 served to justify the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, Dune argued for northern interventionism and settler colonialism in the Arab World. And so on and so forth, Hollywood, ad nauseum, produces a world-flooding, brain-fattening, torrential mixture of entertainment and propaganda.

What was the Odyssey? Who was Odysseus? Ask Chris!

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Why not ask a British-American man, a public schoolboy, about the Odyssey? He lives on the West Coast. He’ll show you, and he’ll tell you. And do so resplendently! There he lives, in Los Angeles, living on the flat, stolen landscape under a conquistador’s sun. He is a product of one empire and a loyal bard to the next. And full of philhellenism; he’s anachronic, anatopistic and anametristic.

The story of Odysseus, abandoned long ago, is there for Christopher Nolan to pick up and reuse, with the help of an awful lot of US corporate money.

Still, the real text of the epic is there manifested in the film. Nolan engaged with it, read many versions, translated it with AI perhaps. As a reader he seems to have found a way through into some level of believability and absorbing psychodrama: golden earrings from a museum, low-ceilinged smoky Aegean halls, roiled seas, clothes in blues and whites and browns, creaking wood, Mediterranean-looking actors.

A big liner slips into the harbour of Piso Aetos blocking up the entrance. Down the gangplank walks a couple from the large ship. Nolan’s customers. You hear:

So this is it, huh? Where Odysseus and Penelope stayd? Unreal!

Sure is. Let’s go get a Greek pizza. I heard they have good pizzas

There is a way you can get off Nolan’s all inclusive cruise ship, The Odyssey, and get even closer to Homer. Learn some modern Greek and go and live in Ithaca. Eat bread, olives, fish, Tzatziki and lemons. Drink watered wine or kykeon. Sit in a sheltered place on some rocky promontory. In the afternoon, surrounded by goats, read Homer from a good translation. Reading is harder work than watching, but reading gives you your own Homer. Language casts a stronger spell than film. Tremendum et fascinans!

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Phil Hall was born in South Africa into an ANC family with British, French, Austrian, and German roots. After his parents were exiled, they lived in East Africa and India before returning overland to the UK. In the UK he studied Russian and Spanish literature, politics, and economics. After graduating he specialised in descriptive and applied linguistics. Phil has lived and worked in Spain, the USSR, Mexico and the Gulf. Returning to London during the pandemic, he co-founded the Humane Socialist magazine, Ars Notoria (the Art of the Noteworthy) and the micropublisher, AN Editions.