Nolan's Odyssey

I'm In The Mood/For Dancing/Romancing

Nolan’s Odyssey is a mixed bag: overlong, patchily great and sometimes not. In honour of that what follows will be overlong, and I will mix in good points with rubbish ones. You are forewarned.

The Nolan schtick—viz. chopping his narrative into various sections and mixing them around so that scenes in which the film moves the story on are repeatedly intercut, often abruptly and briefly, with flashbacks and remembered moments—doesn’t serve The Odyssey very well as a storytelling strategy. In interviews Nolan has said that he regards Homer as licensing his approach, since formally The Odyssey is not a straightforward a then b then c narrative—as, indeed, it is not. But neither is it a Nolanesque patchwork of out-of-order present and past. It’s a structure of three main acts. The poem starts on Ithaca, where Penelope is fending off the 108 suitors, her husband having been away twenty years. In disguise, the goddess Athena persuades Odysseus’s son Telemachus to voyage, to discover what’s happened to his Dad, which he does, meeting first Nestor and then Menelaus in Sparta. In doing so he learns that Agamemnon has been murdered by Clytemnestra (Nolan, bizarrely, makes her Helen’s twin-sister: what?) and that Odysseus has been imprisoned on the island of the nymph Calypso. Athena then petitions Zeus to free Odysseus, which he does, but Poseidon, still angry with the Ithacan because he blinded his son Polyphemus, wrecks his raft. Odysseus then washes up in the land of the Phaeacians, where the beautiful Phaeacian princess Nausicaä, and her serving maids, discover him, naked on the beach. She brings him back to the palace, where the Phaeacian king Alcinous entertains him royally. This episode occupies the middle third, roughly, of the poem.

The original Odyssey was put together out of a number of prior elements, folk-tales, stories and myths, and sometimes the joins show. The Phaeacian episode is one such: evidently a prior folk story about a princess discovering a wrecked, naked man on the beach, taking him home and discovering that he is actually a king and a hero, and marrying him—but Odysseus can’t marry Nausicaä, because he already has a wife, so the story simply breaks off, Alcinous gives Odysseus a ship and he sails back to Ithaca to take revenge upon the suitors and reunite with Penelope.¹

That conclusion is the last third of the poem. The middle third is an inset story, Odysseus telling the tale of his own voyages to the Phaeacians. As critics often note, it’s this middle section that contains all the marvels and wonders, the monsters and witches and magic of the epic; the beginning and the end of the poem are much less fantastical, more mimetic. There are interesting possibilities here to do with the reliability of Odysseus as narrator, and the relationship of this tale-within-the-tale to the larger story. But this single embedding, bracketing the wonders and marvels away, is not the same as Nolan’s multiply-laminated chopping and cutting. More, Nolan’s film has a problem with the marvels-and-wonders aspect of the epic. I’ll come back to this.

Nolan’s adaptation omits the Phaeacian episode altogether. He alters other episodes (the prerogative of an adaptation of course)—for instance, the Laestrygonians in this film are all dressed in huge stainless steel armour for some reason, and they have the magic power to move the trees of their forest around in such a way as to trap Odysseus’s men inside tree-cages (Nolan doesn’t do very much with this intriguing notion: mostly the episode is just another example of Odysseus and his men doing a Monty-Pythonesque running-away). With other episodes Nolan combines elements, such that the episode of the Lotos-eaters becomes folded into the Calypso’s island episode. In other respects he does the greatest hits: Odysseus and his men encounter the Cyclops, meet Circe and are turned into pigs, and visit the land of the dead to talk with Tiresias. Odysseus fills his crew’s ears with wax to get the ship past the Sirens’ isle, sails past Scylla and Charybdis and stops at the island of the Cattle of the Sun. Frankly some of these episodes are better handled than others: Circe—an amazing performance by Samantha Morton—is excellent, and the sojourn with Tiresias properly spooky. But the Cyclops’ episode is clumsily done, the Laestrygonians underbaked and the creature-effects for Scylla are lame.

The marvellous, as opposed to the mundane, is a problem in this film. I think this is because Nolan is fundamentally a realist film-maker, for all that he has made so many superhero and science fiction films. His take on Batman and interstellar travel is to emphasise a kind of rendered plausibility via a cinematic idiom drawn from nouvelle vague mimesis. His is a stylised kind of realism, but it is a realism, and his approach to the Odyssey foregrounds his style of ultra-HD verisimilitude throughout.

Famously Nolan eschews CGI and downplays special-effects. He wants almost everything shown on the screen to be actually captured by the camera—in this movie, a hulking iMax camera—such that if we’re watching hundreds of men swarming through the breached gates of Troy, Nolan actually filmed hundreds of extras doing just that. This works for some aspects of the Odyssey: the locations are all real, the palaces and buildings have the vibe of actual lived-in places, Odysseus’s battle against the suitors at the end is excellent cinema. Insofar as this is a movie rehearsing Nolan’s preoccupations—as much about war-guilt, like Oppenheimer, as about voyaging and endurance, like Interstellar—this works well, although it does mean that the treatment of the marvels and monsters is flattened. The cyclops is an ungainly on-set giant puppet: its motion is not lifelike, its rendering not convincing and therefore not scary. Scylla is a visually incoherent and awkward network of dry-looking tentacles. With the exception of Circe (the transformation of Odysseus’s men into swine and back again is the exception that proves my rule: treating it in a mimetic manner rather than with CGI fantastika produces a viscerally effective scene) this leeches the movie as a whole of wonder.

Nolan’s Odyssey is not a marvellous film, not a film that gleams with the numinous, the wondrous, the magical. Not that it lacks visual beauty: many of the shots are gorgeous, the seascapes in particular. But it’s not numinous. Indicative of this is the way Nolan handles the gods: apart from Zendaya’s glum-faced Athena, who appears to Odysseus at various moments, and is portrayed more as a hallucination than a manifestation, there are no gods in this film: Poseidon is simply the sea, Zeus (pronounced to rhyme with Bruce, the American way, in accordance with the Americanisation of the whole: Zooss) a flash of lightning.

We might argue that Nolan’s film is deliberately avoiding enchantment, the wondrous and transcendent, because it’s treating its subject in other ways (although we might then ask why Nolan decided that the Odyssey was what he wanted to adapt in the first place; or at least, why he doesn’t follow the original in siloing the marvellous elements away inside the protagonist’s tale-within-a-tale). Nolan’s Odyssey is not about transcendence, but about guilt and regret. It’s about xenia, or more precisely the violation of xenia, and not about kleos.

There’s much guilt in this, long tortured monologues by Damon’s Odysseus about how unhappy he is by what he has done, lots of complaining on-board ship by Odysseus’s crew—‘whine dark sea’—lots of dour unhappiness and moaning. As Mark Kermode argues, it is a film fundamentally about PTSD, which it both represents in its characters and allegorises in its set-pieces, externalising the ongoing horrors of the suffering postwar soldier as a series of devouring monsters, giant chrome-armoured warriors, swarms of pursuing dead and so on. The most characteristic action of Odysseus and his men for much of the movie is running away, sprinting desperately back to their ship to escape another such attack: all, the film in effect says, echoes of the originary trauma, the war itself, the destruction of Troy, the comrades who died, the violence and horror you yourself inflicted, the psychic wound. If Homer’s Odyssey is a story about going home, Nolan, boldly, reconfigures its throughline: Nolan’s Odyssey says: the soldier can’t go home. His experiences have changed him, and home isn’t what it was.

There are issues with this. For one thing, the film overplays it: it’s not just that Odysseus can’t go home, it’s that nobody can: civilisation as a whole is collapsing, the entire world is ending—because, by sacking Troy, the Greeks broke the social contract, which the screenplay, repeating the phrase ad nauseam, calls ‘Zeus’s law’—Zooseslaw. This is a kind of hyperbolic version of, or distortion of, the Greek code of xenia, which the film sometimes spins as a simple ‘do as you would be done by’, sometimes as ‘you are obliged to entertain strangers as guests, no matter how obnoxious they are, because the stranger might be a god in disguise’. There are repeated references to ‘the people from the sea’, mysterious raiders who are about to comes barrelling in and will dismantle Greece from the ground up, but have not yet arrived (Menelaus says something about how their raids are ‘getting closer’: how does he know?) We never see these sea-people, and the references to them feel a bit thumb-in-the-balance. Odysseus predicts darkly that soon people would forget how to read and write. Humans will turn on one another, homo homini lupus. The extent to which that has already happened is unclear: the suitors occupying Odysseus’s palace and devouring all his goods are lawless, but they persist not by virtue of their numbers and strength (‘the strong do what they want and the weak endure what they must’) but because it would be against the law for Penelope to rid herself of them—as she says at one point, she could for instance lock them all in the dining hall and burn it down. In Homer, Odysseus returns, slays the suitors (and hangs all his serving girls, cruelly) and reclaims his home, but Nolan alters this:—now we’re told that Zoosse-slaw, like Coleslaw, is so potent that for him to kill these ‘guests’ (they’ve been there a decade, they’re hardly strangers!) would result in him being exiled as a criminal. Exiled by whom is fudged: the film several times refers to, without ever showing, a council of elders—how do these elders have power over the island’s actual monarch, we wonder? Who are they? If civilisation has broken because of the sack of Troy then why do they have any authority at all? But at the end of the film Odysseus does, of course, kill the suitors, and then into exile he goes, his wife by his side.

Homeric Greece was a warrior society, but Homeric qualities of kleos, of the glory and fame to be won in battle, are entirely absent from Nolan’s flick. It’s an anti-war movie that presents one act of war—sacking a single city—as if it is a world-ending apocalypse. This over-inflation debilitates the resonance of the whole. Clearly there must have been battles and wars before, or what is all the armour, why are all the weapons, why does Mentor go to the bother of training Telemachus in swordplay? War was part of the Greek world, and xenia not part of it: soldiers meeting on the battlefield were not obliged to offer one another a cup of tea and a biscuit first.² But Nolan’s Odysseus is wracked, wracked I say, with guilt. Nor does he actually manifest what is, in Homer’s poem, his defining characteristic: his cleverness, his wiliness, his twisty-turny-ness. He is on the contrary ashamed of his nimble wits—that he lied and tricked others, that he dreamt-up the clever deceit of the Trojan Horse in order to win the war, are to him ghastly faults in his integrity as a person. This isn’t incoherent in terms of characterising a wartime veteran, perhaps, but again: why is this hoisted on Odysseus, of all figures?

There’s another regard in which Nolan departs from Homer’s characterisation of Odysseus. He frames his movie as a grand and epic love-story between Penelope and her husband—separated by his sense of duty, his obedience to the Greek king, and thereafter by war, happenstance and fate. Hence Nolan’s addition of the Tennysonian coda in which Odysseus, having come home, immediately departs to the west, with Penelope, so the two of them can enjoy their happy-ever-after together, whilst presumably the Sea People ransack Greece behind them. In this respect Nolan has a problem: because in Homer Odysseus spends seven years bonking Calypso on her island. To get round this Nolan combines the lotos-eater episode with the Calypso episode: to excuse his hero for his adultery. So traumatised has PTSD’d and shipwrecked Odysseus become that Calypso feeds him the lotos flower to opiate his mind. Accordingly he doesn’t remember that he even has a wife, or that he had a crew. After seven years Calypso, for reasons that the movie doesn’t divulge, decides to wean him off the magic flower so that his memories can return, and even advises him on how to get home—by surrendering himself to Poseidon’s wrath, lying on his back on a flimsy raft and letting the ocean overwhelm him. This is contrivance on Nolan’s part, to absolve his hero. It’s one thing for a man to be grief-struck by the things he did as a soldier; it would be another to be guilty for cheating on wifey.

It’s a big film, and it does, as I say, have some memorable and striking moments and set-pieces. But bigness is not, in itself, an absolute virtue. Huge cameras, colossal iMax screens, enormous run-times, giants on-screen crashing and bashing ordinary sized men, and biting their heads off, huge seascapes—watching it I started to wonder if it was, in some sense, a film about bigness. A film informed by a disorder of the cinematic pituitary gland, via which an excess of growth-hormone’s hypothalamic precursor (GHRH) has created a gigantism. Like Mallory at the foot of Everest, we could ask Nolan why he made such a big movie, and he might reply: because I could. Epic, though, is not a synonym for enormousness.

1. Another example: which struck me very much when I was an undergraduate studying the poem: Odysseus and his crew are trapped in the Cyclops’ cave and the monster is eating them one by one. They blind him with a wooden stake, and then strap themselves under his sheep, such that when he lets the flock out in the morning to graze they get past him: the Cyclops, now blind, runs his hand over the back of the livestock, but misses the escaping Achaeans. But Homer’s text describes Odysseus putting this stake in the fire until it glows red hot— ‘I thrust our stake in a bed of embers/to get it red hot … then, the glow terrific, yes/I dragged it from the flames’ [Fagles’ translation]— prior to jabbing it in the monster’s one eye. An earlier version of the story clearly had a hero using a metal stake to blind a monster. A metal pole would glow red hot when put in a fire, where a wooden stake would simply smoke and burn. Since there wouldn’t be metal stakes hanging around inside the Cyclops’ domicile, Homer swaps-out for a wooden stake, but the specific hexameter phrasing stays true to the earlier version.

2. Agathe Thornton’s People and Themes in Homer’s Odyssey (Methuen 1970) summarises the specifics of Greek xenia: 1. The arrival and the reception of the guest. 2. Bathing or providing fresh clothes to the guest. 3 Providing food and drink to the guest. 4. Questions may be asked of the guest and entertainment should be provided by the host. 5. The guest should be given a place to sleep, and both the guest and host retire for the night. 6. The guest and host exchange gifts, the guest is granted a safe journey home, and the guest departs. Xenia also entails not keeping the guest longer than they wish and ensuring their safety while they are within the host’s home.