A Pseudo-Christian Odysseus for a Late Empire

Odysseus has become a pseudo-Christian, white, Anglophone man, anxious about the crumbling of the United Statesian Empire (which he equates to Civilization), in Christopher Nolan’s recently released film The Odyssey. The transformation of Odysseus from a pagan adventurer, schemer, and lover into a brooding, moralizing prude, anxious about the fall of his own civilization, thoroughly reveals the anxieties that Nolan shares with many of his contemporary Anglophone men. (I mean “many,” not “all” such men.)

Throughout his long journey home to Ithaca, the British director’s Odysseus has no interest in sexual pleasure and no erotic drive. Thus, he has no love affair with Circe (an affair which, in the epic poem, lasts for well over a year), and he does not enjoy seven years of wildly delightful sex with Calypso. In fact, on his last night on the island of Ogygia, he does not have one last night of joyful sex with the divine nymph. No! Having willful sex with Calypso (a last reverie of shared pleasure before his sailing away) would break the useful tale that he was a “sex slave” to the nymph. (It would also break Nolan’s cute and tender understanding of the Odyssey as a story of love that grows through marital fidelity, and it would ruin the even cuter and cornier ending that involves a couple sailing into the sunset.)

Moreover, Odysseus is not a masterful, self-serving storyteller but a guilt-ridden moralizer, obsessed with the demise of his civilization. He is penitent about his fellow soldiers’ and his own actions in the Troyan War, but mainly because he sees in the sack of Troy the destruction of  his own moral world, since his deceptive stratagem of offering a horse to Athena broke the divine law of hospitality. He has moral qualms and psychological regrets of the contemporary sort, but not strong enough to pay reparations or make amends to the victims, should there be any left alive. May Zeus forbid that there be a material cost to the regret!

When he arrives in Ithaca, Odysseus is full of life-lessons, of moralejas, that he is ready to bestow upon anyone who wants to listen, including his son Telemachus and especially his wife Penelope. From his perspective, she needs his “mansplaining” to understand why the war took place and what its political, moral, and psychological consequences were. She, in turn, does not need to test him and does not resort to her own wily wit to verify his identity. When the kibng of Ithaca finally returns, Nolan’s Penelope is not suspicious of how he may have changed over time or of what he may have done. Why would any woman receive a good-looking white man with suspicion? She is there, always available, even ready to comfort him in her lap after his last battle against her suitors in the palace’s hall. In this sappy moment, she becomes like a loving mother to her son. The scene is photographed in the likeness of a Pietá. Anne Hathaway’s regal Penelope is the virginal mother to the sweet, smiling, all-American boy Matt Damon.

In short, Nolan’s Odysseus is a patronizing brood, anxious about the demise of his world. In this way, he is like many contemporary Anglo men, whether liberal or conservative in their politics. They are anxious about the fall of their empire, which they equate with the fall of civilization itself. In my view, then, Nolan’s film is an unconscious self-revelation of the angst that he shares with all those men.

To see this, it is very revealing to survey how the liberal elite of the New York Times has discussed Nolan’s Odyssey. At least I find it instructive, since sometimes I find myself in the midst of that world of liberal New Yorkers and their intelligentsia.

The women columnists have been mostly critical. Maureen Dowd has emphasized how “Nolan’s Zero-Eros ‘Odyssey'” drains the main character of much of his moral ambiguity, especially of any erotic drive, to make him more family-friendly and palatable to the film’s intended audience. Nolan accordingly turns women characters like Circe and Calypso into weak caricatures of the strong, independent (divine) women of the Homeric poem. Dowd, by the way, largely agrees with Emily Wilson’s scathing criticism of the film in the London Review of Books. Wilson calls Nolan’s Odysseus “An Uncomplicated Man” in the very title of her essay. Maya Phillips focuses her discussion mostly on Circe, claiming in the title that “‘The Odyssey’ Should Have Done Better by This Character” but that the screenwriter and director reduces her to a sorceress. Instead of a woman who thrives by her arts, courage, and acumen, Circe is just one more obstacle that the hero must overcome in his journey.

The general point is that Nolan is not interested in the women in the film or, perhaps, in the poem itself.

Nolan is interested in agonizing, sullen men. This is why David French insightfully perceives that Nolan has Christianized Odysseus and proceeds to praise him for it. French writes that “Christopher Nolan Has Rebuked the Spirit of the Age” and has shown that it is only through repentance and penitence that “the age” can be redeemed. But what does he mean by “the age”? In my view, he means the age of the United Statesian Empire which to conservative Anglo-Americans is equal to Christian Civilization with capital C. To become the alleged beacon of liberty and democracy to the world again, United Statesians must repent and atone. They must embrace again God’s order through Christian mores and natural law, the divine moral order written in nature, just like Odysseus must repent from his defiance of the gods and their moral laws for humanity in order to be redeemed.

It not only conservatives, however, that equate their empire with civilization, and this is my main point about Nolan’s Odyssey.

Witness the essay by critic Alissa Wilkinson in which she claims that “In ‘The Odyssey’ and ‘Oppenheimer,’ Nolan Knows Civilization Is at Stake.” She praises the director’s grandiose works for examining the issue of civilizational crises. Nolan allegedly probes into how the danger of the collapse of an “age” affects the moral and psychological lives of men who, like Odysseus and Oppenheimer, have brought that “age” to the brink of destruction. In this case, it is United Statesian Liberal Civilization that concerns both the director and his critic. They cannot see, however, that their concern is narrow and self-centered. They blindly and unconsciously equate the fate of their society, culture, and empire with the fate of Civilization. This is what Nolan thinks his film addresses, and this is what some of his New Yorker bourgeois critics think is at stake not only in the film, but in the politics of their milieu.

To me, the movie mainly reveals the angst of people in a society that knows that its political and economic power as an empire is crumbling under the weight of its own foolishness. As an attempt at a work of art, the film is little more than three hours of banal entertainment, as Emily Wilson forcefully argued in her essay. However, its commercial success, underwritten by its technical savviness to produce an audiovisual spectacle, allows the film to disguise its own egocentric concerns as universal values.

Given my sarcastic perspective, I am fortunate to have watched the film in a theater in Botafogo, a lively neighborhood of bookstores, art houses, restaurants, and bars, but also of clinics, schools, apartment buildings, and markets, in Rio de Janeiro. When I left the theater after watching the movie, I did not walk out into the cultural world of the liberal bourgeoisie, of people who were fretting over the fall of their empire while thinking that it is the epicenter of Civilization. I walked out into a thriving neighborhood where people still take time to talk to strangers in the sidewalk, to stroll at the beach, and to meet friends at a local boteco to talk about the simple struggles and joys of daily life over a beer. In fact, the bar Sereia do Mar was just around the corner, and groups of friends gathered there to have a good time together without needing to tie themselves to a mast.