Nolan's Odyssey: Manpain, Guilt, and the American War Vet

When I went to go see Nolan’s Odyssey, I tried to go in with an open mind. I wasn’t there to nitpick or be an ivory-tower weirdo about it. I had seen the trailer and the various PR images, so I thought I knew what to expect: a bunch of airbrushed-perfect Hollywood faces a little too famous for their roles, big-budget CGI, and maybe a few moments of true emotional profundity here and there because I couldn’t imagine any Odyssey adaption producing zero of those. I’m not a huge fan of Nolan’s work generally, but I did really like Inception. And I find him to be a little nostalgic. The type of film auteur that he is is a dying breed: a small-C conservative, Gen X man who wants his work to reflect the depth of his thinking (very deep, as he very clearly wants you, the viewer, to know). Past critics have called this tendency of his pretentious. I agree. I don’t like his intellectualism gimmick. But I was hoping that the source material of the Odyssey would counteract that. There is no gimmick to the poetry itself.

I was disappointed, therefore, when I walked out of the theatre exasperated and annoyed. It’s not that the film was unwatchable or that it was a total waste of time. There were bright points in the movie. The interpretation of Circe was fascinating and the associated body horror was inspired. I absolutely loved the sound of the bowstring as part of Odysseus’ theme. One can’t even say that the movie disrespects the source material. The issue is not respect. The issue is that the film is, ultimately, a very selfish adaptation. Of course every piece of art includes the artist. But at the point where everything about the ancient figure of Odysseus becomes a reflection of Nolan, the presence of the artist is overwhelming and gauche.

Nolan wants you to see the film as a profoundly deep commentary on the nature of war and civilization. The commentary must naturally be understood through the lens of Odysseus, the main character. And the Odysseus of the movie is so recognizably an American war vet of Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, you name it–all the major conflicts post WWII–that it genuinely took me out of the moment. It’s jarring. Odysseus is supposed to be many-faced, complicated, a liar, a husband, an adulterer. He’s clever, wily, curious to his own detriment, always planning something beneath the surface. He is Odysseus the city-sacker, whose first stop upon leaving Troy was to burn another nearby city to the ground to gain more loot. This is not a good man. And yet, Nolan insists that he is and insists that we sympathize for him because of it. And Nolan’s “good man” is specifically a good man in the Christian sense: someone who has a conscience and a real distaste for blood and violence. In order to sympathize with Nolan’s Odysseus, and therefore to enjoy the movie, the film is structured so that you have to take that initial buy-in. You have to agree that he is a good man so that you can feel bad for him when he suffers and when he himself feels bad for having committed atrocities. All the messy, un-Christian morality of the poem’s Odysseus has been erased, replaced with a very American war veteran whose character features are immediately recognizable.

I didn’t take that initial buy-in when watching Nolan’s Odyssey because I have a real distaste for the genre of the American war vet movie. I acknowledge that this is a personal view rather than a general one. It is my opinion that veterans who come home do need to process their trauma, both for their own sakes and for the safety of the society they inhabit, but that that processing doesn’t need to be glorified in the pop-culture way of the American war vet movie. The formula is always the same: some sharp-jawed white guy, all-American, just a good man caught in circumstances beyond his control, goes overseas to fight a noble war for the US. He comes back haunted by his dark deeds, which can range from raping helpless women and children to shooting both in the head. He feels so guilty that he drinks or even contemplates suicide. His movie is dedicated to his pain. There is no consideration of the people he tortured or killed overseas except as props to his monumental personal pain. He never faces any accountability for his actions beyond his tortured, selfish conscience. His movie ends with a recovery prompted by a childhood sweetheart or some other garish metaphor for homecoming, and you, the viewer, are expected to feel happy for him. A killer who came home, whose pain is the whole point of the story, and who deserves a good ending because he is a good man. Just a good boy, raised by good parents, another victim of the war. This caricature of the American war vet is ultimately just flat cardboard. There is no depth to him because the only world he inhabits is his own. Everyone else, including their pain, is filler.

The thing is, the Odysseus of the poems simply cannot be this. Nolan’s Odysseus is a weeping coward who seeks penance for his crimes. He is a cheap shadow of the real thing, who I would argue never felt this flavor of good-man guilt about any of the things he did. All of the profound things that the original poem has to say about war, homecoming, civilization, love, death, family—they are flattened to the same cardboard as Nolan’s American war vet character. And this is why I called this movie a selfish adaptation. Nolan wants to see Odysseus as a hero. Rather than making him a hero by the standards of the poem, he is a hero according to Nolan’s standards. There’s an element of self-projection here (Nolan has tended to do this in his previous films as well). Such a hero, someone who smacks particularly of Nolan’s guilt-wracked Oppenheimer, doesn’t really belong in the world of the Odyssey, where everything a listener might learn about love, war, etc. is couched in a morality alien to a modern American audience. 

Instead of presenting that complex morality and letting the audience grapple with it, Nolsn instead simply defangs the whole thing. Odysseus is a good man, Calypso is a helpful therapist (who looks like a walking ad for Dolce and Gabbana, by the way), the gods are hallucinations. The whole movie is fashionably agnostic. There’s hardly any blood or sex. The violence is standard fake blood-spattered/emotionally bloodless action-movie fare (with the noticeable exception of the Cyclops and Circe scenes). There is no attempt to grapple with the hard things that run as threads throughout the setting of the Odyssey, such as sexual assault, slavery, or racism. Each of these things is either skimmed over or touched on lightly at most. At each painful turn of the plot, Nolan chooses the easy way out. He chooses the cushioned option. Calypso as therapist and not predator; Trojan women being led away by Greek soldiers, but only in a background so blurred that you can hardly see any of the figures at all; the beheading of a priestess, but not her truncated body hitting the floor. Nolan cannot claim to have created some profound rumination on the lessons of the Odyssey when he has swerved the most uncomfortable parts of the story. What he has created instead is a somewhat cowardly superimposition of the American war vet movie’s tropes onto the broad framework of the Odyssey’s story–something entertaining enough to watch, morality considerations aside, but not nearly as deep as the auteur himself wants you to believe.