You have to believe in the gods
On the ineluctable modality of the visible
Reviewed: The Odyssey (film, Christopher Nolan, 2026) The Return (film, Uberto Pasolini, 2024) The Odyssey (miniseries, Andrei Konchalovsky, 1997) Nostos: The Return (film, Franco Piavoli, 1989) Ulysses (film, Mario Camerini, 1954) The Odyssey (poem, Homer, 650 BC)
Seven years ago, Noor put to the seas in a black rubber dinghy. Fifty of them crammed onto a twelve-man boat, launched off the coast at Izmir and pointed in the general direction of Greece. Too many of them. When the water started seeping over the tubes and into the hull, it was only a little at a time, and maybe they could have made it if the engine hadn’t failed, but soon her feet were in two inches of seawater, and then it was over her ankles, and the faster it came in the faster the boat started to sink. Some of the men got out their phones and waved them in the air, trying to find a signal, and when they couldn’t find one they sat back down again and just swiped at the screens. The Afghan crammed in next to her spent his last hour on a sinking boat playing Candy Crush.
Then they were in the water. A cloudy moonless night, impossible to see when the next black wave would come swelling to fill her nose with seawater. The coughs and splutters around her growing sparser and sparser as the men in the water drowned, one by one. When the sky was starting to glow blue and Noor saw the boat far off in the distance, she barely had the strength to wave her arms.
But that was long ago. Now Noor lives on the tourist island of Ogygia. Every summer the Dutch and Germans flood in by the Piraeus ferry while the Afghans and Somalis land in their rubber dinghies. At night the two hostile armies scream at each other in the streets. It’s all strangely familiar; it all feels so much like home. One of these summers she’s going to hear the first gunshots, but Noor has other worries closer to hand.
For the last seven years, she’s been walled up in Konstantina’s narrow high-ceilinged house. Noor owes Konstantina her life. This is the woman who plucked her out of the water, the last survivor, and gave her safety, and a home, and nice clothes to wear. She’s dedicated her life to saving people, and in return the government seized her boat and put her under house arrest, and the fascists write her postcards about how they’ll cut her head off just like the Muslims she likes so much. Stan is the best person Noor has ever known, and what she wants from Noor isn’t even sex; when it’s only two women could you even call it sex?
But sometimes, in the mornings, when they’re lying in bed together, sunlight through the shutters, smell of coffee from across the street, and Stan lazily takes Noor’s hand and tucks it into the front of her pyjamas, palm against pubic hair, fingertips just brushing against some sea-thing frilled and wet—despite it all, sometimes Noor recoils. She knows it’s ridiculous for her to be disgusted by Stan’s body, since it’s her own body too; it’s been explained to her so many times. But she can’t help it, and then they fight. Stan accusing her of not being happy, of secretly wanting to leave, spending ages when she goes out to the supermarket, enjoying the outside world while Stan is stuck inside with an ankle monitor on, just to get away from her. I know you go to the beach, there’s sand in your shoes. Do you look at men, is that it? Why not just tell me? If you hate me so much, if you want to hurt me like this, why not just say? Say you don’t love me. I’m not here to force anything on you, just say you don’t want to be together any more. And Noor insisting no, no, not at all, I love you, this is where I want to be, there’s nowhere I’m happier than right here.
Noor knows better than to say. She’s said the wrong thing a few times and that was bad enough. Like the time she’d come home with a punnet of soft fragrant nectarines from the supermarket even though Stan didn’t like them. I’ll buy you a flight somewhere, Stan had said, New York, do you want to go to New York? I know people there, they’ll look after you. Is that what you want? And Noor had waited just a split-second too long before saying no, that is ridiculous, and then Stan crowed, Aha! It is what you want! before collapsing in tears. It took an hour for Noor to calm her down, while the thunder yowled outside—every time they fought there always seemed to be huge storms coming in from the sea—and just when she was smiling again with her wet red-rimmed nostrils and the wind had calmed down, you’re so good to put up with me like this, really you are, Noor had been stupid enough to ask, So it’s all forgotten, yes? Stan’s head snapped up. Huh? Suddenly Noor was blabbing. It’s just, you know, next time we have fight, I really don’t want this again, I don’t want you to bring it up on me, what I said, not said, about New York. Now something was twitching in Konstantina’s eyeball. A thin spindle. Ba, you don’t? she said. Tina, please, said Noor. Don’t call me that now, Stan said. You don’t want me to remember this? So why did you say it? Another little stalk appeared over the top of her eyeball, pushing up her lashes. Then another followed, and then one more. Eyeball bulging like a madwoman. You think I like to bring up old fights, she continued, bring up old stuffs, you think that makes me feel good? Do I look like I’m enjoying myself right now?
With a tiny sucking sound, the crab crawled out from under Stan’s eyelid and shivered sideways down her face. And now, in the space it had just vacated, her crustaceans teemed. Tinier than grains of sand, crawling over each other, cannibal and blind, they tumbled down the tear-paths to her chin. Eyestalk by thorn. When she spoke, she spat flecks of krill. Growing as she shed them. Columns of langoustines marched circles around her feet, whiskers first, snapping at her ankle monitor. Black lobsters reared up against her legs, and in their sprouting prows serrated mouthparts churned. You are starting a fight, Noor managed. Maybe you do enjoy it. How do I know? A mistake. Stan’s face went very still. All the crustaceans suddenly stopped scuttling and turned, slowly, to stare at Noor. Behind Stan’s wordless head, a halo unfurled. Long segmented legs spreading out around her hair as a lumpy, knobbly, misshapen crown rose. Setae bristling, arms and their claws working like pistons. Furious protuberances that twitched and whirred. Its mouth a hard-frilled cunt. In a flash of pure terror before she fled, Noor picked up one of the nectarines and threw it at Stan’s head. It missed, smashed against the spider crab’s carapace. Crabs don’t understand. The creature raked its head with its claws, saltwater thing devouring scraps of soft sweet fruit.
That night there was a gale, and then in the morning the waves deposited the bodies of the refugees facedown on the shore.
Sometimes, when she gets a moment alone, locked in the toilet, staring at the blue wallpaper, Noor wonders: how come I was the only survivor from that boat? How come the currents were against us? How come the engine failed? How come the city where I grew up is now one huge heap of broken concrete? How far did this woman go to get me here, out of her goodness and love?
Everyone agrees that Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey is a terrible film. Not everyone in the normal sense, obviously; audiences loved it, all the major critics have been calling it a masterpiece, and it made the GDP of Tonga in its first week, but those people don’t really count. By everyone, I mean the freaks. Right-wing culture warriors, pencil-necked autodidacts, sexless pedants, people who know what a spondee is, Christian Lorentzen, Emily Wilson, and me. For pretty much everyone, the complaint is the same: The Odyssey is anachronistic, it fails to properly portray the past. I think this is wrong.
The dumbest version of this argument points out that the cast is not made up of Mycenaean Greeks from the second millennium BC, but Hollywood actors from the year 2026, and the two populations don’t look alike. The number of people around the Aegean who looked like Himesh Patel was probably fairly low; the number of people who looked like Travis Scott or Lupita Nyong’o was even smaller; the number of people who looked like Will Yun Lee was so small you can probably round it to zero without it making much difference. This is all true; it’s also true that none of these people looked like Matt Damon either. If you find yourself caring too much about this, this is God’s way of telling you that you are living your life very badly wrong.
The more sophisticated version points out that the Odyssey is set in the Bronze Age, but all of Nolan’s Greeks are wearing boring grey and black armour, plus the kind of plumed helmets that didn’t become common for another six hundred years, which is sort of like making a film about Charlemagne in which he’s wearing breeches and a powdered wig. Actual Bronze Age costume was much more interesting. Armour was made from beaten bronze, polished and oiled until it was mirror-bright; an army on the move would have looked like a stream of liquid sunlight. Helmets were made from rows of animal teeth. Some of the warriors would have worn horns or antlers. Palaces were covered in brightly coloured frescoes of naked priests and bare-breasted women, animals tearing each other to shreds; Nolan shoots the palace scenes in a decaying seventeenth-century prison with plain stone walls. This was a totally alien culture, and it existed in a brighter, starker, weirder world than anything we know. What we see on screen are a bunch of stock Greeks from central casting.
The most sophisticated argument says that Nolan’s Greeks are psychologically anachronistic: really they’re just modern-day Americans. The people of the Bronze Age lived in their own very particular moral universe, which prized virtues we can no longer comprehend and tolerated a level of violence that’s now totally beyond us. Odysseus shuffles around as a beggar, delivering nice morals on charity and humility, before suddenly turning into a blood-splattered vengeance demon who strangles defenceless women and tortures people to death while they beg for mercy, and this is all part of the same lesson. The document of a society that might as well have been built on Mars. Meanwhile, Nolan’s characters are all good twenty-first-century neurotics. The gods aren’t really gods, they’re just your guilt and trauma. In fact, everything’s trauma. Matt Damon spends the whole film moping and miserable, making tortured beardy faces at the beer-grey sea. Nothing particularly antique here; what Nolan’s trying to tell is basically an Iraq War story. In his version, Helen was only a pretext, and George W Agamemnon launched the Trojan War so he could control the all-important trade routes. Instead of the titanic infant in the poem, creature of pure screaming id, expressing all the primal mythic forces of avarice and pride, we get a bureaucrat in silly armour, trying to maximise shareholder value.
All of this is true as well, except for the minor detail that the Odyssey is not a Bronze Age poem. The version we have was written in the archaic period, hundreds of years later, and it’s already anachronistic. Homer describes the dead being burned, which is what the Greeks of his time did, but the Bronze Age Greeks buried them. He gives his heroes circular shields, which they wouldn’t have worn, and has them fight in phalanxes, which they wouldn’t have formed. Even the titles are wrong. Odysseus and Menelaus are described as basileis, which in Homer’s age meant kings, but in the Bronze Age a basileus was a very minor official, leader of a small village or a group of craftsmen. This is what happens when a society collapses and local authority is the only authority left; maybe in the future the terrible despot ruling a planetary empire of a hundred billion slaves will call himself Mayor. But the Odyssey is also anachronistic in the other direction. The Homeric epics might well be older than the Trojan War; they have what looks like a pair of very distant cousins in the Mahabharata and Ramayana. The two cycles even contain some of the same epithets. Six thousand years ago, on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, there was a story about a man on a journey with an imperilled wife on the other end of it; when poets told it again, thousands of years later, they set it in their own place and time.
This is a story that speaks to every age, but you could even argue that the Odyssey was always pointed at one era in particular: ours, the age of capitalist modernity. Odysseus really is an American. Isn’t it strange how, from the seventeenth century on, you start getting a whole host of major retellings of the Odyssey—Monteverdi, Tennyson, Joyce, Kubrick—while almost nobody ever tried doing the same for the Iliad? Derek Walcott and that’s about it. But the Iliad is a social epic; one long squabble between opposing forces in a single camp, constantly at each other’s throats for the spoils. Achilles trying to assert his claims according to the rules of his very particular honour-bound society. In the Odyssey, that’s all gone. We’re now on the open sea, lonely and wandering, untethered to any social whole. ‘You sail the sea as rovers, with your hands against every man, and every man’s hand against you.’ Odysseus doesn’t angrily insist on his individuality; he’s been condemned to it. He’s experiencing the kind of subjectivity that wouldn’t reappear until the beginning of modernity. This is why, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer write that Odysseus and his men ‘embody the principle of the capitalist economy even before they make use of any worker.’ Meanwhile, back on Ithaca, the same collapse is taking place. The ruling classes no longer bother to rule; they’re just having one long party, stripping the island of its livestock, doing Epstein stuff with the slave girls. This is one thing Nolan’s film gets absolutely right. Instead of a portrait of a wildly different society, it’s a portrait of a society that used to be different, but not any more. Everyone keeps talking about Zeus’s Law, but they all know that it’s gone: that world is over, and we’re in the twenty-first century now.
There’s something very badly wrong with Nolan’s Odyssey, but it’s not accuracy. You’re not supposed to be accurate. The story at the start of this piece is a version of one I wrote a decade ago. I told my then-girlfriend that I was thinking of writing a book of short stories based on themes from the Odyssey. Oh God, she said, not again. Turned out her ex had just published a book of short stories based on themes from the Odyssey. She might have a type. But this is what people have been doing for thousands of years. Take the narrative and pull out the innards, subvert it, détourn it: that’s how old stories survive. If anything, Nolan’s Odyssey isn’t anachronistic enough. Why not just set it in the present? Why not have Odysseus and his Marines journeying home through the hollowed-out cyclops-riddled ruins of mythic America? Why not have the entrance to Hades in the basement of an abandoned mall? Rust-belt Laestrygonians? That might be fun. The film we actually got isn’t even fun. This is what all the people who hated it graciously allow; well, at least it’s entertaining. But it’s not even particularly entertaining! It’s not enjoyable to look at. What’s the point?
This Christopher Nolan guy—what does he actually like? What does he want to point his camera at? Most film directors are deeply horny and fucked up people, which is why they keep catching allegations. There is an erotics of the image. Not for this guy. His camera is never impolite enough to linger over anyone’s arse. His Odysseus doesn’t fuck Circe and he doesn’t fuck Calypso either; there’s a huge naked cyclops but we never even see its dick and balls. No pleasure on this journey, for its hero or for us. The most revealing bit is Nolan’s treatment of the sirens. When Odysseus hears their song, he isn’t entranced or seduced, he isn’t filled with an unbearable longing; he just starts screaming like he’s being tortured in a Syrian black site. Nolan is simply indifferent to desire. None of his shots have any of the base-level libidinal charge that makes cinema interesting. An Odyssey ought to be all sun-lacquered islands, the sea and the sky, the naked arms of the rowers, earth-brown, speckled white with salt, and there should be monsters with their terrible jaws absolutely going to town on all that supple naked flesh. I should have left the cinema very slightly gayer than I entered it. I should be acutely aware of the thin layer of linen that separates the suitors from Penelope’s body. It needs blue, lots of blue, overflowing out the screen. It’s incredibly difficult for living organisms to be blue; you need to construct dense, intricate molecules to reflect its short wavelengths. But the sea and the sky supply blue in overwhelming quantities. A colour from beyond the realms of mortal things.
But there’s none of that here. Nolan makes mostly-grey films for people terrified of seduction, Gulf Arabs and thirteen-year-old boys; that’s why he’s so popular. He isn’t even into violence. All the fight sequences in his Odyssey are perfunctory, bloodless, slightly squeamish. Homer loves to describe spears slicing through heads and the blood running out with the brains; here, whenever a throat gets slit it’s always just out of frame. He’s a technician: he likes tricks, twists, gimmicks, he likes to flash between scenes so one starts before the next one’s really ended, he takes an autist’s pleasure in that kind of thing, but the images he puts on the screen are the cinematic equivalent of those spotless millennial homes with grey walls and grey velvet sofas and grey vinyl flooring and nothing but protein and supplements in the fridge.
In a way, though, this is also a kind of fidelity to the text. What did Homer know about the immortal blue of the Aegean? He didn’t even have a word for it. And what did he know about the lurid red of human blood, or purple hyacinths in sacred groves, or the way the sun can shine so bright that the sky turns black? Homer was blind.
Maybe a better way of describing what’s gone wrong here is that Christopher Nolan does not believe in the gods. They never really appear in the film: there’s Zendaya as an apparition that might be Athena, but she doesn’t really do anything and turns out to just be a manifestation of Matt Damon’s guilt anyway. A real god is something different, an image so intense it generates and obliterates a potentially infinite number of meanings. The only way to make a decent work of art is to believe in the gods. But he can’t, and he’s not alone. It’s strange how difficult cinema finds the Olympians. You can make statues of them, or paintings, or write about them, but unless you’re making Clash of the Titans-level shlock it’s very difficult to show them onscreen. Nolan is just the latest in a long line of movie adaptations of the Odyssey, and they all come up against the same problem. Cinema is not capable of representing the gods.