The Odyssey in a Time of Apparent Magic
Nolan made Homer’s epic a spectacle. But the poem belongs to the man, and the woman, who win without any.
A few months ago, I went to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in the largest, loudest room I could find. The whole apparatus conspired to convince me I was being enchanted.
I sat there, watching Matt Damon’s face gaunt with twenty years of salt, being enchanted, and thinking … this is precisely the wrong spell.
The Odyssey, at its heart, is not a poem about magic. It is a poem about the man who survives magic by not being magical.
The Greeks had a word for his particular gift: mêtis. Cunning. Craft. The intelligence that doesn’t break and that wins by turning. Homer’s very first word for Odysseus is polytropos, “of many turns,” the man who twists, who improvises, who is never quite where you left him. Circe has divine power. Poseidon has the sea itself. Odysseus has only his wits, a good lie, and an unreasonable determination to get home. That is the whole contest. The gods deal in apparent magic; the man deals in patience and deceit, and the man wins.
So there is a lovely irony in watching this story rendered as the most expensive act of apparent magic in the history of one director’s career. A quarter of a billion dollars, cameras that have never existed before, a cast assembled like a pantheon. To tell the story of a man whose entire genius was that he had none of these things.
Nolan, to his credit, seems to know this. His Odysseus is not a wizard. He is tired. So are his men.
After years of war, no one could stand between my men and home. Not even me.
The obstacle to the homecoming, in the end, is the hero himself — his pride at the Cyclops’s cave, his refusal to sleep, his need to hear the Sirens sing. The Odyssey has always known what our own age keeps forgetting: that the longest distance a man travels is the one back to the place he started, and that he is usually the thing standing in his own way.
The suitors are always at home
But let me tell you what I could not stop thinking about, sitting in the dark.
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While Odysseus is off being shipwrecked and seduced and generally heroic, the real catastrophe is happening quietly at home. The suitors have moved in. More than a hundred of them, eating his herds, drinking his cellars, courting his wife, lounging in his hall as though the household were an ownerless thing to be consumed. They are not villains in any grand sense. They are simply men who found an institution with no one guarding it, and decided to help themselves.
I have spent a good part of my working life reading ledgers in rooms where the master of the house has been absent a long time. And I promise you there is no more precise ancient portrait of elite capture than the halls of Ithaca. The suitors do not conquer the estate. They do not need to. They colonize the gap— the space left when responsible person sails away and forgets to come back.
And this is the quiet radicalism of the poem. Its climax is the reckoning. The master returns, in disguise, and counts. He walks his own halls as a beggar precisely so that he can see clearly who has been feasting on what is not theirs. Xenia, the sacred law of hospitality, has been inverted — guests devouring their host — and the whole bloody final third of the epic is the restoration of a violated account.
Nolan films thisp like a horror movie. Of course he does. Justice, arriving late and total, always looks like horror to the people who assumed it wasn’t coming.
Penelope, who unweaves
There is a second kind of intelligence in the poem, and it is not Odysseus’s.
Penelope, besieged, agrees to choose a suitor when she has finished weaving a shroud. And every night she quietly unpicks the day’s work. For three years the loom goes nowhere — a refusal to let the powerful men in her hall force a conclusion before its time. It is the most underrated act of political resistance in the classical canon.
I think about that loom more than I think about the Cyclops. How much of good governance is exactly this — the discipline to not conclude prematurely, to keep unpicking the convenient answer the powerful would like to weave for you. To wait for the true master to come home.
The bow
The film ends, as the poem does, with a test. Penelope sets the great bow of Odysseus before the suitors: string it, shoot an arrow through twelve axe-heads, and win the estate. They cannot. They are strong, and well-fed, and entitled, and not one of them can even bend the wood.
Only the beggar can. Because the bow does not answer to appetite or status. It answers to the one who actually belongs.
I walked out of the theatre into the ordinary evening, the apparent magic dissolving the way it always does. The poem’s magic has stayed for two thousand eight hundred years.
Which raises the only question worth closing on: in your own hall, right now, who exactly is eating the sheep, and can any of them bend the bow?
