Kyrios Mykonos@kyriosmykonoss
Christopher Nolan violates the sacred world order of Homer to tell a story about Odysseus violating the moral order of Christopher Nolan’s world. Odysseus, and the rest of ancient Achaea, receive a just punishment. They will be exiled and their civilization will be destroyed by the sea peoples. What will the consequences be for Nolan?
Nolan has always concealed abrasively simple moral messages in ostentatiosly complex storytelling. It’s his calling card. Interstellar is mind-being story of relativity, the dilation of time, and interstellar travel, whose final revelation is, alas, that familial love transcends space and time. Inception builds an elaborate architecture of dreams within dreams in order to tell a man that he must release his guilt and return to his children. Even Oppenheimer reduces the nuclear age and its cosmic significance to the psychological torment of the great, but troubled, man who fears his brilliance has destroyed the world. HIs method has always remained the same. It only feels offensive when he applies it to millennia-old foundational story that has never had an easy or digestible moral. Homer’s Odyssey detonated across the imaginative world twenty-five centuries ago, scattering its many-wiled meanings through everything that followed. Nolan has forced them back into a single atom: neat, simple, and insignificant.
The story that spawned a civilization introduced a sacred landscape that has always felt foreign to modern sensibilities. Indeed, it is the very strangeness of the world Homer remembers in his Odyssey that makes it such a compelling and enduring story across time. It calls us out of our familiar and ossified obligations to something higher, while challenging our notions of what we claim is higher against those the ancients held.
The Achaeans of Odysseus’s time are forced to navigate a complex web of sacred obligations and divine responsibilities. Homer’s Greeks are no strangers to the vast horizon of possibilities that limit and lay claim on their lives. Their cultural landscape mirrored their geographical landscape—islands in an endless sea upon which they relied for everything and which created limits to their action. In both The Odyssey and Iliad, we discover five structures of obligation, identity, and heroic action. Hospitality (xenia) is the reciprocal obligation between host and guest. The host provides food and shelter for the stranger before inquiring into his intentions. The stranger is expected to receive the hospitality freely. The household (oikos) was a place of hierarchical order and obligation. Every member had their place, and each place had imbedded in it longitudinal and latitudinal obligations. While men in the Iliad rarely act according to reason, man is becoming self-conscious of his capacity for wisdom, cunning, and intelligence (mētis) by the time of The Odyssey. In a word, he is awakening to his reason, and how he can use it to order, manipulate, and strategize. In possessing reason, he balances the tension between responsible action for and deceptive action against the other agents acting in the world—gods, men, and nature. While more prominent in Iliad, honor (timē) is what men desire above all. It is the public recognition of his worth by other men, expressed materially through prizes, rank, precedence, gifts, and deference. It is what he aims to possess within the living social order. Because timē must be conferred by the community, it can also be taken away. Finally, glory (kleos) is what circulates through speech: literally, what is heard about someone. It is reputation preserved in story and song, especially after death. If honor belongs chiefly to one’s standing among the living; glory belongs to cultural memory.
This is no simple world. Especially to modern eyes and ears, the world of Homer should feel disorienting and contradictory. In a world of monsters, hidden islands, and gods that appear in disguise, we ought to pause and give more credence to the foreign cultural landscape tied up within it.
When Nolan gets ahold of the Odyssey, he wipes the slate clean. Rather than offering a window into another world from which we might learn and be challenged, he imposes his world onto Homer’s, thereby erasing what makes The Odyssey so enduring and convicting in the first place. Besides xenia, all of the values of Homer’s world are dependent on hierarchy—obliging them requires the elevation of oneself or some to the exclusion or diminishment of others. In today’s liberal, egalitarian climate, it is only xenia that belongs, and a neutered form at that.
To make the movie he wants to make, Nolan is forced to borrow extensively from The Aeneid, where the story of the Trojan Horse is told in full. (It is only briefly mentioned in The Odyssey.) Through an Odyssean sleight of hand, however, Nolan’s use of The Aeneid plays a more pivotal role in establishing the foundational motif of his film. In the Aeneid, the Greeks are the aggressors. The hero is the one aggressed—the Trojan—who is a surviving victim of the cunning and dominance of the Greeks. This is the real trojan horse of Christopher Nolan’s movie: insofar as we are meant to identify with the Greeks, our ancient forebears, we are viewed not through Homer’s eyes, but through Virgil’s. We are not conquerors, heroes, and upkeepers of sacred order; we are aggressors, oppressors, and guilty parties.
Homer’s Odysseus is a many-wiled, cunning man, who holds his many sacred responsibilities and heroic possibilities together against the raging sea of life. Virgil’s Odysseus, further metastasized through Nolan’s Christian lens, is a simple man, wrestling with and succumbing to the guilt of his original transgression. In Nolan’s film, we are no longer dealing with a hero pursuing restoration of the sacred order—cosmic, political, and household. We are watching a guilty man willingly drag himself through mud until he has paid his debts. And as we will see, that is still not enough.
In Homer’s Odyssey, the story starts in media res, and we learn that Odysseus has offended Poseidon, the god of nature. Coming upon the island of the cyclops, Odysseus and his men encounter Polyphemus, who has long since absconded from Zeus’s law of xenia. The complexity of conflicting obligations and expectations in this encounter provides for an ambiguous and nuanced read. What obligations extend to the guest when the law of xenia is violated by the host? There is no easy answer. And Homer doesn’t provide one for us. Odysseus uses his cunning to blind the cyclops and escape. This alone, while messy, is not cause for Poseidon’s anger. It is only when Odysseus boasts to Polyphemus about having blinded him that Odysseus clearly violates a sacred limit. Desiring kleos, he taunts the son of Poseidon, symbolically extending human action beyond its bounds. Even the beast who resides outside of civilization has a place within the cosmic order. Odysseus is a man learning his limits, and he is punished by Poseidon for overextending himself. Hence, the divine obstruction of his journey.
While Nolan reshapes Odysseus’s wanderings as subconscious refusal to return home due to psychological guilt for “tricking” the Trojans, Homer expresses a much deeper truth about what it means to be human in a world of various obligations. Man has limits to his action, and violating those limits has consequences, the source of which need not always be easily defined. Ironically, Nolan creates a world in his own contemporary vision, void of a cosmic order of competing obligations. Nolan’s Odysseus is a post-Augustinian man, who has turned inward, collapsing the external, hierarchical, and divine order, into an architecture of the self, where man’s only responsibility is liberation from guilt. His punishment is not from god or nature, it is from himself, from the nagging voice within that indicts him for injustice and pain he might have caused to another person. This is not a bad motif, but it is a conspicuously modern one that throws Homer’s complex world of hierarchical obligation to the wind in favor of a secularized and digestible therapeutic Christianity. As far as honoring the sacred landscape of Homer’s story, Nolan has egregiously overstepped.
Nolan elects to push the external trials Odysseus faces into the periphery to highlight instead how his trickery at Troy will have civilizational consequences. To not see the political undertones at which Nolan is hinting at this point would be obtuse.
One gets the idea in the book that Odysseus’s men are expendable. They are mostly nameless, and they incrementally drop like flies at each trial he endures. Nolan deals with them similarly. But now uses them as minor-scale representation and foreshadowing of what will soon happen to the entire Achaean civilization because of Odysseus’s original sin. We live in a society, and when one man violates another, as Odysseus does the Trojans, society will pay the consequences. Our actions are repeated by those who see them. And when Odysseus finally realizes the wrong he did, it is too late. His men, now, are mirroring their master, tearing down the sacred walls he already broke.
Some scholars have surmised that the Bronze Age civilization collapsed in 1150 BC from the invasion of sea peoples. Who these people were, no one is sure. But it is one among a few serious explanations as to how so many civilizations might have all seemingly disappeared around the same time. Nolan shamelessly integrates this theory into his story, suggesting that one man’s violation of xenia, followed by the inevitable imitation of that violation by society, spelled the end of civilization. If you cannot follow the law of xenia, civilization will not survive. What Nolan fails to consider is that the trojan horse is an act of wartime deception, not clearly a counterfeit act of hospitality. To suggest that the trojan horse violates the law of xenia relies on an interpretation, that while fair, changes the trajectory and meaning of the entire story.
For Homer, the consequence of Odysseus’s violation of cosmic order is heroic restoration. Finally returning home, he recognizes his limits as a human being and puts his house in order. This is no easy task. It requires severe bloodshed and struggle. In a word, homecoming is heroic. And it requires violent restoration without a neat resolve. At the end of Homer’s Odyssey, more suitors are on their way before Athena steps in. It ends on a cliffhanger, emphasizing the neverending struggle for balance and restoration in a world that demands so much from man. Not so much with Nolan’s Odysseus, where homecoming is also the confession of guilt and the self-imposed renunciation and exile that necessarily follows. Odysseus cannot ultimately be king because he is guilty. He must instead sail into anonymity and exile, while others, in this case his son, take the throne.
Nolan brilliantly transformed a heroic story about the limits of human action in a complicated civilizational and cosmic order of obligation into a parable of inherited guilt and permanent moral disqualification. It is a pessimistic story for a pessimistic and self-defeating people who inhabit a moral landscape of guilt-ridden offenses to the “other”. Even the dialogue, favoring a casual and wholly modern dialect instead of the heroic and elevated, is a reflection of the milieu we now inhabit. It is a cynical world, where even language might be offensive, insofar as it indicates hierarchical value and judgment. Perhaps, when all is said and done, it is not the movie we wanted, but the movie we deserve. As a people who have discarded the transcendent order with hierarchical degrees of value and obligation for the inane and flattened world of egalitarian democracy, where offense is the greatest transgression, it is no surprise we must justify our worldview by imposing it onto the stories that apparently built our civilization.
I asked at the beginning what the consequences for Nolan will be. And the answer is simple: praise and applause. He has done exactly what the contemporary liberal order has been doing for the last quarter century: indicting the powerful for taking advantage of the oppressed. What has for centuries been an ancient challenge to our modern suppositions has finally been changed into an ancient reiteration of our modern perspective.
Nolan, after all, might not be so dissimilar from Odysseus, having overreached the limits of his creative license and violating what for millennia has been a check on our own limited, modern assumptions. Homer called that Hubris. We call it heroism.
