The Odyssey

Bound to the Mast in IMAX: Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey and the Price of Cunning

In the early 1940s, two German exiles living near Los Angeles wrote that Homer’s Odyssey is the founding story of the modern self. They read Odysseus as a man who escapes myth by outthinking it. He bargains with gods using the letter of their own rules, survives monsters by hiding his identity, and pays for his survival by giving up part of himself at every turn. Adorno and Horkheimer saw that trade as the template for everything that followed. Reason begins as a way of escaping domination by nature and ends by dominating everything, including the reasoner. Eighty-odd years later, a few miles from where they wrote, Christopher Nolan made an Odyssey that seems to have absorbed that argument. It is the most intelligent big-budget film in years, and it may be the best thing Nolan has made. It is also most revealing in the places where it cannot follow the argument through.

The Horse as original sin

Nolan’s boldest decision is structural. He builds the film around the Trojan Horse, an episode Homer’s Odyssey barely mentions, and treats the trick’s aftermath, including what it costs the hero himself, as the connecting thread of the whole film. The opening image announces this. The Horse sits half-sunk into the shoreline, recalling Kubrick’s monolith, and the film uses it to establish Odysseus’s original hubris.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, cunning is reason in its childhood. It is the ruse that turns the world’s own logic against it. Homer’s Odysseus uses it mostly on monsters, gods and nature. Nolan moves the defining act of cunning from the Cyclops’s cave to the gates of a human city, and that move makes the Frankfurt thesis concrete. The intelligence that once defended people against an indifferent cosmos becomes a technology for destroying other people. Anyone who has seen Oppenheimer will recognize the shape: a brilliant device ends a war and hollows out the man who designed it. Nolan has spent his recent career on the moment instrumental reason achieves its objective and discovers what the objective was.

The film widens this into an account of a whole civilization. Nolan brings in the Sea Peoples, who are absent from Homer, and turns Troy, the Horse and the voyage into the collective dying gasp of a golden age. Adorno and Horkheimer would have recognized that diagnosis immediately. The Bronze Age world in this film does not fall to barbarians. It undoes itself with its own cleverness.

Gods as guilt, and the return of fate

The film’s second major change is its treatment of the gods. Throughout the film, Athena appears to Odysseus wearing the face of a Trojan priestess killed in the attack. The revelation comes late. When Troy finally falls on screen, a defenseless Trojan woman’s head falls, and the camera cuts away to the head of Athena’s statue falling in its place. The film keeps it unclear whether Odysseus watched this death or caused it. One reading has him remembering that he killed the woman himself, while others read it as a murder he witnessed outside Athena’s temple. That uncertainty is the point. Memory has blurred the line between seeing and doing.

At first this looks like a standard Enlightenment move: the gods are projections, and divine guidance turns out to be a psychological symptom. Nolan even gives Circe a version of this disenchantment. She tells Odysseus she never turned his men into anything. In this film, the degradation belongs to the men themselves.

The best idea in Dialectic of Enlightenment is that disenchantment does not free anyone. Enlightenment that destroys myth tends to produce a new myth, a new compulsion that operates just as blindly as the old gods did. Nolan’s film shows this almost exactly. Once the gods are reduced to guilt, guilt takes over their job. A part of Odysseus has been circling the coast ever since he saw what the Horse did once Troy’s gates opened. His ten-year wandering is no longer Poseidon’s punishment. It is repetition compulsion, and psychological fate binds him as firmly as the old fate did.

This is also why Nolan’s habitual fractured timeline finally earns its place. The film is told out of order, from shifting perspectives, and that structure is the form compulsion takes. Time in this film does not move forward because the hero cannot let it.

The face of the victim

Simone Weil wrote in 1940 that the true hero of the Iliad is force, which turns anyone subjected to it into a thing, first in spirit and then literally into a corpse. She admired Homer for refusing to treat force as glory and for extending the same bitter fairness to conquerors and conquered. Nolan’s sack of Troy is Weilian in that sense. It is frenzied and grotesque, and the cut from a woman’s head to a statue’s head is about as exact an image of a person becoming an object as cinema could produce.

Weil also pushes the analysis somewhere Adorno and Horkheimer do not go. For her, the moral response to suffering is attention: a patient, self-emptying regard for the afflicted person as she actually is. Measured against that standard, the film’s most humane gesture is also its most troubling. The priestess gets a face but never a self. She exists only as Odysseus’s conscience. She wears a goddess’s authority and says only what he needs to hear. Adorno and Horkheimer would recognize this too. The sovereign self that dominates outer nature ends up absorbing other people into its own inner drama. The victim is remembered, but only as a feature of the hero’s guilt. The film knows what force does to its victims. It is less sure that a victim can matter on her own terms.

The sirens, with wax in our ears

The best-known pages of Dialectic of Enlightenment concern the Sirens. Adorno and Horkheimer read the episode as an allegory of class and art. The oarsmen have wax in their ears. They must keep rowing and are denied beauty so they can keep working. Odysseus is tied to the mast. He hears the song but is unable to act on it. Art becomes a concert, something enjoyed safely and without consequence. The worker cannot hear, and the master cannot move.

Nolan’s staging of this scene is the film’s best sequence and its most philosophically interesting. He shifts the point of view to Eurylochus, so we see Odysseus straining against the mast, writhing and close to tears, instead of hearing the song. What we hear is the same muffled sound the wax-plugged crew hears. The most expensive sound system in commercial cinema gives its audience the oarsmen’s experience. It is a negative gesture inside the culture industry: a spectacle that withholds the one spectacle everyone came for.

Then Nolan adds something Homer did not include. One crewman pulls the wax from his ears and leaps into the sea. In Frankfurt terms, he is the only person on the ship who treats art as a real claim on his life rather than as entertainment or as a danger to be engineered away, and the ship’s division of labor kills him for it. His death is the film’s most haunting image.

The irony cuts back at the film, as Adorno would have insisted. If the crew is us, so is the man at the mast. Admirers praise the film for demanding total immersion at a time when entertainment is mostly consumed in fragments, and they are right. But the IMAX auditorium is a very refined mast. We sit bound in our seats, overwhelmed and safe, and then we go home. The film critiques the domesticated sublime while delivering it at record scale. It is better at this contradiction than almost any blockbuster I can name, but it cannot get out of it, and no blockbuster could.

Nobody, no longer a trick

Nolan’s Cyclops sequence is a remarkable piece of practical filmmaking. It also contains a quiet but important omission. The film drops the wine and the “Nobody” joke from Homer’s version, and the Cyclops is mostly silent, which makes it eerier. For Adorno and Horkheimer, “Nobody” is the key to the whole poem. Odysseus survives by denying his own identity, which is self-preservation through self-erasure. Then, once safe, he cannot help shouting his real name, and that boast brings Poseidon’s anger down on him. The cunning self wins by making itself nothing and is undone by its need to be someone.

Nolan removes the trick but keeps its underlying logic. He has said the truly disturbing thing about the Cyclops is that, from its point of view, humans are irrelevant. In this cave, being nobody is not a strategy. It is simply the human condition in front of an indifferent nature. Something is lost along with the joke. Matt Damon’s Odysseus is weathered and muted, and the film has little of the original’s mischief or its hero’s appetite for being known. The Frankfurt pair would read that joylessness as a symptom too: an enlightenment so aware of its guilt that it no longer has any fun left.

The veteran comes home

Jonathan Shay, the VA psychiatrist who read Homer alongside the testimony of Vietnam veterans, is the most useful reader for the film’s second half. He saw the Odyssey as a homecoming story, about a combat leader who brings none of his men home and arrives carrying the war with him. Nolan’s film sees Odysseus the same way. The Laestrygonians smash two of his three ships, and the slaughter deepens the crew’s fear that following him will get them killed. The film also stresses that he deliberately did not take Agamemnon’s route home, choosing a longer course so he and his men could see some of the world first. In Shay’s terms, the wound is moral injury, the betrayal of what is right by someone in authority during a high-stakes situation. In this film, Odysseus is the authority who did the betraying, both at Troy and at sea.

Shay’s remedy was communal. The veteran needs to tell his story to listeners who stay in the room. He pointed to Homer’s Phaeacian court, where Odysseus finally narrates his wanderings to an attentive audience, as an ancient model of that kind of healing. Nolan’s film omits Phaeacia. In its place, the scrambled structure becomes the testimony, and we become the Phaeacians.

Here the two traditions genuinely disagree. Shay would see a work of shared witness, with thousands of strangers sitting in the dark and attending to one man’s war. Adorno and Horkheimer would answer that a cinema audience is not a community but a mass, an aggregate of consumers whose attention is bought rather than given. The film does not settle the question, which is to its credit. It asks us to listen, and it leaves open whether listening in a multiplex counts.

A beautiful exile

Shay noted that the slaughter of the suitors is a soldier’s violence coming home with him. Nolan stages it inside a sealed palace and softens it slightly: with their leaders dead, the remaining suitors surrender. Even so, the disloyal maidservant Melantho is executed for her betrayal, and in a Weilian touch, force marks the one who wields it. Gravely wounded after killing the traitors, Odysseus abdicates to his son and sails away, unable to live in a kingdom founded on the moral catastrophe of the Horse. Penelope, who had long ago urged him to sail away with her, goes with him, and he vows to keep sailing west in honor of the companions who died on the journey.

It is a moving ending, and that is the problem. Renunciation is the bourgeois subject’s signature virtue in Dialectic of Enlightenment: the self that sacrifices to the gods learns to sacrifice itself, and comes to call that sacrifice nobility. Nolan’s final exile is the last and most beautiful of those renunciations, staged in golden light, with the throne handed to a generation that is supposedly free of its fathers’ crimes. The reconciliation is too clean. One sharp critic argued that Nolan’s film, like its hero, craves moral certainties and narrative closure, and the ending bears that out. Shay would see the exile as an honest admission that Ithaca cannot receive this man. The film presents it instead as a choice he makes freely, and a dignified one. Guilt that compulsively circled the Mediterranean for ten years becomes, in the last minutes, something close to grace.

The work at the mast

The film has other flaws. Some dialogue is louder and brasher than the rest of the movie, the occasional F-words stand out, and Nolan’s sound mixing is as questionable as usual. These are minor next to what the film achieves. It is a mass-market epic that understands the founding story of Western reason as a story of violence turning back on itself. It turns its central hero’s cleverness into his central wound. It also finds, in the Sirens sequence, a way to make the culture industry briefly confront itself.

Adorno distrusted art that seemed at peace with the world that produced it. Nolan’s Odyssey is not at peace. It is tied to the mast, hearing a song about its own complicity, and straining against the ropes. It does not get free, because no film made at this scale could. But the straining is real, and watching it is one of the great experiences in recent cinema.