Who is Christopher Nolan’s Odysseus?
Spencer Klavan unravels the summer blockbuster’s epic hero.
Picture: Universal
In Oscar Wilde’s dialogue on The Critic as Artist, a character named Gilbert announces that “there is no such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” Not because Hamlet is a fictional character. To the contrary, “works of art are living things—are, in fact, the only things that live.” But for that reason a new Hamlet is invented afresh with every performance and every reading. “There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.”
If that’s true of Hamlet, it must be still more true of Homer’s Odysseus, the man “of many ways.” Homer announces in the first word of the Odyssey that his subject is anēr: a man. Then he waits 21 lines before naming the man in question as Odysseus. In between, he gives him that slippery adjective polytropos, meaning full of twists and turns—always doubling back and maybe even contradicting himself, his soul as complex and perplexing as the journey he takes to find his home again after ten years of war in Troy.
Like Odysseus’ character, the story Homer tells about his voyage is elaborately coiled and multi-layered. To try and unravel the tale is to realize how difficult it really is for Odysseus to come back to himself. Has posing in so many guises for so long made him forget how to be the man he truly is? Or can he—can any of us—be many things at once?
Certainly every generation has drawn something different out of him. The tragedian Sophocles turned him into a conniving villain. The poet Virgil, remembering the war from Troy’s side, made him out to be a sinister nihilist. Dante condemned him to hell for fraud, whereas Tennyson sent him sailing off into the sunset in search of new adventures.
So the question of the day is: who is Christopher Nolan’s Odysseus, the one played by Matt Damon in this summer’s biggest blockbuster? Is this version more like Homer’s, or Dante’s, or Tennyson’s? He’s more of a gentleman by modern standards, certainly. Nolan veils Odysseus’ seven-year-long stay with the beautiful Calypso (Charlize Theron) in a tasteful shroud of ambiguity and amnesia, making it easier for us see him as relatively faithful to his long-suffering wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway). Arguably Homer’s Odysseus stays devoted to Penelope by ancient standards in that he insists on going home despite an offer to live forever in Calypso’s flawless arms. But he certainly doesn’t stay chaste.
Nolan’s Odysseus is also drowning in guilt over his most consequential stunt, which was filling the Trojan horse with Greek soldiers and making it out to be a peace offering. “We violated all that is ever sacred between people,” he tells Penelope. Homer’s Odysseus weeps when he hears the story of the horse echoed back to him as poetry, and Nolan’s does too: “they make me cry,” he says of the songs sung in his halls.
Nolan definitely has the Greek epic closest to the center of his vision, and he mercifully doesn’t inject it full of lectures on the prejudices of Western civilization, as some critics feared he might do. But Nolan’s Odyssey certainly takes plenty of departures from the source material, and each one brings out a slightly different Odysseus.
