Who can say for certain where legends end and history begins? In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers when Eomer and his Rohirrim first confront Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli on the open plains of Rohan, the horse lord hears tale of their adventures and bears witness to the drawing of the bright blade Anduril reforged from days of yore. Dumbstruck beyond his proud composure, one rider questions:
“Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?”
Aragorn, king-to-be, provides:
“A man may do both … For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time.”
Homer recounted the fabled legendarium of his people centuries removed from when it was deemed to have transpired. Like The Lord of the Rings, the Arthuriad, and innumerable works of myth, Homer’s The Odyssey squeezes into the margins between fantasy and reality. Antiquarian fears of navigating the Strait of Messina near Sicily, replete with its riptides and rocky shores, gave rise to the folklore of Scylla and Charybdis who would usher sailors to their doom. Among its multitudes, The Odyssey charts the course of a civilisation contending with newfound mobility on the high seas, during an age of exploration that must have simultaneously confounded the ancient mind whilst unmooring it from the placid norms of daily ritual. These adventures were mighty matters of legend indeed, though they were trod under light of day. In this way The Odyssey reminds us that the separation between that which is heroic and that which is ordinary is an illusion, for there are more ways for legends to come true than we realise.
A nomadic, seafaring people lived out their days in conciliation with man’s role amidst the divine order of the natural world. Their conclusion was thus: respect the governing gods, and your fellow man who might prove a god in mortal garb. This is xenia, the Golden Rule, what Nolan’s film calls ‘Zeus’s Law’. The commencement of hospitality as sacred duty which served as theological underpinning of stable society. It comes from the cognate word xenos, meaning both stranger and friend, because the person in need at your door is always both things at once. Nolan’s film takes place, an epigraph informs, “In a time of so-called magic…” That magic, subtext imparts, was a byproduct of xenia instilling implicit trust between disparate peoples.
In such a context what are we to make of our hero, Odysseus, who proudly proclaims of his repeated defiance of the gods? A heroic figure rendered such not by any deed done in life but rather by how millennia-old stories of his travails and catharsis tell of indefatigable mourning at the moral cataclysm he unleashed upon the world. There are many ideas at play to ponder in Nolan’s The Odyssey, but one emerges fully crystallised: Do not break the deepest rules of your civilisation, or else it might collapse and burn around you.
There’s an Ozymandian quality to the indelible opening image of a beached Trojan horse discovered half-sunk in the sands being eroded by the waves, akin to the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes. Monuments to a lost world. The film frames the Trojan horse as an original sin corruption of xenia. A gift meant to symbolise mutual respect and deference through shared customs becomes an instrument of annihilation. And in so doing, the war it incites doesn’t just destroy people but instructs them how to weaponise their very humanity. The character of Sinon anchors commentary on societal collapse and how the tragic first victims of conflict are often the best of us, those who still resolved to fight the good fight, and how our attempts at comfort mean nothing in the wake of their loss. The Odyssey spends the remainder of its runtime attempting to reconcile that bitter truth with our dwindling existence on a dying planet.
Odysseus was clever, yet craven, when he sequestered a band of bloodthirsty brutes inside his godly gift of equine proportions. Inhumanity was smuggled into Troy under pretence of respect, and a gentile people were slaughtered in their beds for the crime of believing that the sane will not commute unspeakable violence without just cause. In other words, the Trojans were not aware that ‘all is fair in love and war.’ Yet such bestial commandments are, The Odyssey contends, the hollowing of meaning from existence itself, where adherence strips the bark of honour from the great world tree of civilisation allowing rot and corruption to fester at the roots of all we hold dear.
Nolan’s Odysseus – King of Ithaca, a minor house of Mycenaean Greece – did not try to escape his conscription into the Trojan war at the behest of Menelaus and Agamemnon. He is drafted because a richer king demands subservience for the image of his glory, and Odysseus cannot refuse the call without forfeiting his life. Helen absconding with Paris is transfigured into Agamemnon’s solipsistic excuse for launching a campaign intended to wrest control of Troy’s trade routes. Agamemnon storms Troy’s gates adorned in a grotesque obsidian raiment, a herald of Oblivion entirely wordless until we meet his pathetic dead shade choking in the black sands of Hades. His suit of armour patently stands of its own accord, requiring no flesh within to give it structure because he is not a man but an empty cipher, surrogate for any populist leader of one’s choosing.
Nolan’s depiction of the Bronze Age collapse perpetrated in Agamemnon’s name echoes our own modern nightmare, consumed by primal fears of society eating itself through climate change and war in the name of men intent only on creating myths about themselves so as to be remembered in death, rather than catering to better outcomes for the living. Agamemnon embodies how the moral abomination of winning at any cost has destroyed our notions of essential decency. Penelope’s devastating realisation towards the film’s climax – that the veterans of Agamemnon’s war are the foreboding “people from the sea” methodically dismantling their own society – underscores how the enemies of civilisation are sometimes its self-appointed defenders, who exempt themselves from the principles they claim to uphold. As we watch Troy burn and its innocent inhabitants massacred, viewers of all ages will assuredly summon images to their mind’s eye of a formative intergenerational atrocity. I saw Palestine.
In his Idylls of the King, Tennyson used the Camelot myth to comment on his own time, warning that societal progress and empire can be entirely dismantled by moral weakness. In the chronological aftermath of Troy’s sacking, The Odyssey plays out as a series of intercut vignettes as Odysseus lands on various islands intent to pillage provisions for an ever-attenuated journey home. The film achieves something the cinematic medium is perfectly calibrated for, which is relocating the moral and thematic weight of Homer’s poem into one man’s interior struggle, so that it feels more like a modern psychological drama than an oral epic of tragic hubris. The Odyssey depicts an age of polytheism where the divine is both everywhere and nowhere, and it’s never clear where the gods end and inner monologue begins. Zeus is a thunderstorm, Poseidon the roiling waves. And Athena, invisible to all but Odysseus, assumes the form of a young Trojan priestess he watched beheaded before the goddess’s own stone idol, itself decapitated in insult. The goddess of wisdom’s presence as a splinter invading the world’s pre-eminent military mind speaks to an acknowledgement of her shame at how he chose to direct his strategic faculties. Odysseus is taunted by a realisation shared by Nolan’s previous protagonist, Robert J. Oppenheimer, that sometimes a man is so smart he breaks the world. Odysseus communes with Athena as a manifestation of his guilt, and fear of returning to a home forever contorted by his self-contempt. She is the mournful spectre of his transgressions, their dialogue akin to how the faithful might ‘hear’ the word of God intermingled with their own thoughts and feelings.
During an encounter with the Sirens, Odysseus is tormented by a “song of all the promises [he] failed to keep”, of his manifold failures as a human being and so-called leader of men who betrayed the invested faith of those kept near and dear. The nymph Calypso pleads for Odysseus to stay with her in a lotus-induced stupor of amnesia, because a problem forgotten is a problem solved. He ultimately rejects the offer, having vowed to Penelope in a happier epoch that death alone would prevent his return from a war of ruin. Odysseus disavows Calypso’s oasis because he realises only once his shipmates are dead and gone that the world might collapse under the weight of one more broken promise, and that the most tragic thing in the universe is losing precious time to be with the people we love. Such things knowingly forsaken are too much for even his fractured soul to bear. The vestiges of a shattered life still call out to him, echoes of their long-forgotten message lingering faintly on the wind. Aboard a rickety raft, Odysseus departs the shores of illusory certainty one final time. Borne hence along uncontrollable currents into unknown waters, to face head-on his solitary parlance with fate, as all mortals must lest we wander this life aimless and depraved and festooned with despair unto unmarked graves.
Odysseus returns in secret to his Ithaca as an Aragorn-esque hidden king – the king in our midst clothed in beggars’ rags – because this is no homecoming of swaggering victory, but a reckoning with his complicity in devaluing the sacred codes of the world. In the wake of the Greeks streaming out of the Trojan horse’s bowels to raze destruction, like Pandora’s Box spilling all the world’s evil across the battlements erected by our petty jealousies, all that remains is hope. The redeeming belief in a sacred fire that burns eternal, beyond reach of the dark shadow of man’s lust for war. That an essential part of the human spirit yet cleaves to companionship and compassion despite a collective unconscious steadily relinquishing its fealty to honour. Pilfering suitors who have unknowingly adopted Odysseus’s defiling of xenia must be drawn like septic pus from a self-inflicted wound and removed by violent delight from his home. Task complete, albeit with no place fit for him beneath a hollow crown, Odysseus sails into the West. It is a self-imposed exile not mirrored in Homer’s poem but reminiscent of that undertaken by Tolkien’s Frodo Baggins, a heartbroken lament for the world that might have been. As their ship gives chase to the setting sun Penelope assures her husband, much like the first beams of light that radiate across the horizon before eventually unifying into a bright new dawn, “Civilisation will rise again.”
I’m not so sure the crowds congregating to watch The Odyssey before grand cinema screens (our contemporary home for communal storytelling where once a fire-lit cave sufficed) quite qualify as the manifestation of Penelope’s prophetic insight. We remain too divided, too discordant with our place in nature’s hierarchy, too riven by greed and excess, too disparaging of truths we don’t want to hear. The gods have abandoned us. But if any of their magic is still left in this world it exists in the shared soulspace between people who care for one another. It is the most evolved element of our nature that as creatures marooned on a hostile planet we would seek safety and solidarity in numbers. The challenge laid before each new generation is to expand that space until it can accommodate a whole species, and not just a tribe. One might insist the divine magic of xenia is not then vanished, but merely a long-dormant genetic memory waiting to reawaken in our hearts… The old stories hold secrets many have forgotten, and I think we are drawn time and again to the tales of aeons past because they contain the codex for our salvation. Seeing The Odyssey writ large on IMAX film, kept alive after 3000 years for the world to rediscover anew, tells me all hope is not yet lost and we may yet rise again.
J.W. Bloggins 