Christopher Nolan’s hotly-debated new film raises questions about the crisis of Western leadership.
Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. His most recent book (with Grieve Chelwa) is How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa (from Inkani Books).
Cross-posted from Counterpunch
Now Washington, like Xerxes, crosses seas,
Assured the world must bow before its might;
But nations rise beyond its old decrees,
And build without permission – or its light.–V.P.
In the London Review of Books, Emily Wilson, the renowned translator of Homer’s Odyssey from Greek to English in 2017, made her views plain about Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey. Nolan, who won an Oscar for Oppenheimer (2023), had read Wilson’s translation and borrowed from it. But Wilson felt that the interpretation had done an injustice to Homer’s original (‘I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script’, she writes). To be fair, Wilson acknowledges – as any translator would – that each translation or rendition is an adaptation. She did not like Nolan’s film (apart from it being a respite, in an air-conditioned hall during a heatwave). That much is clear. What her review, which has been widely read, circulated as well as criticised, does not interrogate, however, is not whether Nolan is faithful to Homer, but what Nolan is telling us about our own times.
Between his The Dark Knight trilogy (2005-2012) and The Odyssey, Nolan has made it clear that he distrusts concentrated power (government surveillance in The Dark Knight and political persecution in Oppenheimer). Homer’s saga was a perfect place to lay out his own version of the damage being wrought in our age: the world was held together by Zeus’s law or xenia (a sacred, reciprocal guest-host relationship), to treat strangers as one would expect to be treated, which Odysseus violated – as Nolan suggests – with the Trojan Horse. That violation, rather than his other smaller acts of disrespect for the gods (such as the blinding of Poseidon’s son the Cyclops shepherd Polyphemus), destroyed the balance and brought the anger of the gods against the world. The balance had to be restored, for which Odysseus first returns home, kills the suitors who have entrapped his wife Penelope, places his son, Telemachus, on the throne of Ithaca, and then goes into a lifelong exile towards the western lands.
The comparison should never have been between Homer’s original text and Nolan’s film, but it should have been between Nolan’s film and an earlier attempt by Hollywood to depict the Homeric tragedy. In 1954, the Italian director Mario Camerini released a big budget film, Ulysses, starring Kirk Douglas (fresh off his box office success with The Bad and the Beautiful, 1952). Paramount Pictures, which produced the film, selected Camerini despite his role in Italian fascist cinema (he made The Great Appeal, 1936, a propaganda film for the Italian colonial wars in Africa). Camerini’s film followed the overall plot line of Homer’s Odyssey, generously translated at that time into English by the classicist and publisher E. V. Rieu during World War II, first for his family as a way to distract them from the bombs falling on London, and then for the English-speaking audience as a way to remind them of the great classical heritage that had been torn asunder by the European wars. Kirk Douglas treated Odysseus’s trial as that of a man who had to overcome obstacles to triumph. The violation of xenia was not the core theme, nor was the disorder occasioned by that violation and by the scale of the bloodshed. Camerini’s Odysseus is animated not by guilt, but by a manly sense of duty. This was a Cold War film, with Douglas as the great American hero who would overcome trials to triumph. As in Homer, Camerini’s Odysseus does not go into final exile but merely takes his throne as is his right and rules as if there was nothing of the absolute collapse of civilisation.
Nolan does not share Camerini’s politics or his era. Camerini’s Odysseus is triumphant, while Nolan’s is exhausted and remorseful. Guilt is Nolan’s central motif: the guilt of Oppenheimer for the atom bomb’s creation and the guilt of Odysseus for the violation of xenia. There is an overpowering feeling in Nolan’s films that the Western world faces an existential challenge of leadership, that it is the West that has broken an older equilibrium, and that now disaster is before us. It is as if the liberal ‘rules-based international order’ has been so significantly eroded that the West can no longer exercise leadership over the world. Nolan’s Odysseus is not merely the West in general. He is the United States after three decades of unrestrained power: victorious, disoriented, pursued by the consequences of his own violence, and unable to imagine a world that he does not organise. Matt Damon’s Odysseus sits with Nausicaa (the ‘burner of ships’) and racks his memory to understand what has happened and what he must do. The medicine to help him recover, the lotus flower, is also the medicine that blinds him from action. It is when he tosses that aside (the methamphetamines, the oxycontin, the far right of a special type) that Odysseus knows his mission.
The West has violated its own order, Nolan suggests. Ithaca’s people are worried about the Sea People, who might invade at any time. ‘Our civilisation is under attack’, says Penelope to Odysseus, who says to her that their ‘Bronze Age civilisation’ will return. He comforts her, but what does he know who does not even know the nature of the threats. The contemporary Sea People are the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and all those whose refusal to submit to Western power is interpreted as barbarism at the gates. Nolan’s Odysseus does not leave Ithaca to battle them. He goes into exile as an act of contrition, leaving Telemachus to restore xenia, which in Nolan’s political imagination becomes the liberal ‘rules-based international order’.
But the problem is not merely that the United States violated an otherwise benign order. That order was built to preserve Western privilege, with its rules enforced against adversaries and suspended for allies. Nolan can imagine the hegemon’s guilt, but not the emancipation of those who have lived beneath its power. His Odysseus can confess, surrender the throne and disappear into the West, but the world must still be repaired by his son. This is the limit of the Western liberal imagination: it can contemplate contrition and even abdication, but it cannot imagine an equilibrium made by the peoples who were once treated as marauders beyond Ithaca’s walls.
As I watched Nolan’s Odyssey, I wondered what he might have made of Aeschylus’s The Persians. Written after the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, the play does not simply celebrate a Greek victory. It enters the Persian court, listens to the grief of the defeated and presents Xerxes as a ruler broken by the hubris of imperial expansion. A contemporary adaptation would require an inversion. Despite the play’s title, it is Washington that now occupies the structural position of Xerxes: crossing seas with enormous armies, confident that superior force can compel distant peoples to submit. Iran and the other states that refuse this submission stand outside the imperial imagination, not as invaders of civilisation but as evidence that the age of unilateral Western power is ending. Nolan gives us an Odysseus who feels guilty and retreats. Aeschylus might have given us something more useful: an empire forced to recognise its limits and a world that no longer waits for Ithaca’s permission to rebuild itself.
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