Homecoming in exile in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is proving quite controversial, in part because it admits of so many different interpretations.

Is it a nefarious piece of woke propaganda? A parable about PTSD? Or an “apologia for Christian morality,” as Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire insists? The internet cannot decide.

On one level, this very confusion is a mark of Nolan’s success. Bad art is easy to see through; only good art contains murky depths.

Even so, The Odyssey is hardly unfathomable, and I think a close viewing suggests Shapiro is not far from the mark. On this interpretation, the movie is fundamentally a meditation on how, due to the alienation resulting from sin, man’s only hope of homecoming lies in exile.

Consider how Nolan’s The Odyssey differs from Homer’s original.

The latter is all about man’s need for a home in this world and concludes with its hero, the Trojan War veteran Odysseus, reclaiming his native kingdom of Ithaca. In Nolan’s version, such an end is impossible—Odysseus’s destruction of Troy has unleashed a global wave of violence that dooms Ithaca, and the hero must sail on indefinitely.

This recalls the fate of the titular scientist in Nolan’s previous film, Oppenheimer, who enables the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to win World War II, only to find that those acts of mass murder have undermined the very civilization he set out to save. Both he and Odysseus, argues Fr. Mike Johns in Evangelization & Culture, are stand-ins for modern man in general, who has “invented the sure means of his own annihilation” and thus “forever put his home out of reach.”

But The Odyssey is not just a commentary on modernity. As indicated by its mythical setting, the movie’s message is meant to be universal. Moreover, Odysseus’s great offense, unlike Oppenheimer’s, is not characterized as technological or merely moral—it is explicitly spiritual.

Yes, the sacking of Troy, like the deployment of nuclear weapons against civilians, is abominable in its own right. But in a confessional monologue to his wife, Penelope, Odysseus makes clear that his chief regret is not the destruction of the enemy city per se. It is his concoction of the impious Trojan Horse ruse, whose abuse of the Trojans’ religiosity constitutes a profound betrayal of the gods.

That betrayal harkens back to original sin, and its effects are the same.

In the theology of Pope St. John Paul II, sin alienates “the sinner from himself, from God, and from the community.” In The Odyssey, it condemns Odysseus to wander for ten years in the wilderness, where he is stripped first of broader society, then of his comrades, and finally, albeit temporarily, of his memories.

All the while, Odysseus is also bereft of a direct word from the gods. Only Athena appears to him, and she turns out to be something akin to a figment of his guilty imagination. It seems that when Odysseus lost his spiritual innocence, he, like Adam, also lost the comfort of easy friendship with the divine.

There is hope, however, for man and the hero. As John Paul loved to repeat, the one can rediscover his true self “through a sincere gift of himself,” and the other can achieve a spiritual, if not a permanent physical, homecoming by going into exile to atone for his sin.

For Odysseus, this means relinquishing his desire to be “master of [his] fate,” as one character puts it, by abandoning himself to the gods—literally allowing the wind and sea to blow him where they will. Then, after he has returned to Ithaca and purged it of the stain of his sin, represented by the villainous suitors, he must leave home again, sailing beyond the known world to make a sacrifice on behalf of the dead.

This leaves Odysseus simultaneously “perpetually adrift,” in Fr. Johns’s words, and restored to a kind of personal integrity. Like the Christian, he is dead to the world. But the world of The Odyssey, like our own, is already dying as a result of the evil man has unleashed upon it. To seek restoration outside it is the only path forward.

What of those who remain?

Nolan ends his movie with an image of the Trojan Horse to warn them that they live under its shadow. And, by extension, under the shadow of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Neither Odysseus’s cleverness nor Oppenheimer’s scientific ingenuity could deliver them from that, and neither, suggests Nolan, can our own civilization save itself.

In this, the epic filmmaker and the epic poet have more in common than they first appear to. While Homer allows Odysseus to stay in Ithaca, he also allows the kingdom to descend into a blood feud with no end in sight when the suitors’ families stake their claims for revenge. Ultimately, only the gods can put a stop to the madness.

“Call a halt to the great leveler, War,” demands Athena in Robert Fagles’s translation of The Odyssey.

Nolan’s adaptation makes a similar appeal, but both works acknowledge that their audiences cannot comply without help. Now, as in the time of the ancients, this world’s salvation must come from Another.