by Emily Wilson
If you go to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, you may
be able to purchase, for a mere $69.99, a plastic receptacle shaped as a
Trojan horse. The horse is used in the film as an image of moral
decline. But the repurposing of a sinister instrument of war into a
popcorn container hints at the malleability of the conceit: A Trojan
horse contains unexpected multitudes.
This mythical item has
always been a tricky symbol, used by generations of storytellers and
artists to map shifting perceptions of deception in war. The physical
design of Nolan’s version is striking and wildly out of keeping with
earlier representations, including ancient depictions and the pull-toy
design of the giant equine in Wolf Petersen’s fun 2004 blockbuster, Troy.
Nolan’s horse rears upright rather than standing on four hooves. The
unwieldy creature is discovered half-buried in the sand, and proves
almost impossible for the Trojans to lug into the city. This cinematic
prop is an extraordinary feat of engineering: It stands nearly 40 feet
tall and took hundreds of people to drag up the beach. The physical
horror of people being trapped inside as the seawater rises is
brilliantly and terrifyingly evoked.
But on a narrative level, Nolan’s horse is light as air. In comparison with other blockbusters—such as, say, the Die Hard films, also action-packed tales of one man’s dangerous journey back to his wife—The Odyssey
contains far more pontificating about values and civilizational
decline, but much less coherence and less heart. It gestures at a
critique of xenophobia and violence, but it focuses primarily on the
perspective of the guilty, traumatized warrior rather than that of his
victims. Moreover, the movie’s devoted attention to mechanics, and its
heedless willingness to give us massacres as spectacle, undermines its
moralizing claims of caring about man’s inhumanity to man. Verbally, we
are told that people matter; visually, we are shown that they do not.
In
ancient myth, Troy was a wealthy, powerful city whose walls were built
by two gods, Apollo and Poseidon. Such walls could never be breached by
mere mortals. So when Greek warriors gathered to besiege the city and
retrieve the wife and wealth stolen from the Spartan king Menelaus by
the Trojan prince Paris, they found themselves at an impasse: The great
army, unable to break through Troy’s divinely constructed defenses,
remained immobilized on the beach for 10 years.
Things changed
only when Athena, the daughter of Zeus and goddess of military strategy,
put an idea into the mind of her favorite mortal, Odysseus: to instruct
the master craftsman Epeius to build a massive, hollow horse, inside
which Odysseus and the other Greeks could hide. Odysseus was, as Nolan
obviously recognizes, a mythical Robert Oppenheimer: a hero able to
devise the ultimate weapon that could end a seemingly unwinnable war.
We
do not know who first told the story of the Trojan horse, but it was in
circulation by at least the early seventh century B.C.E. The earliest
extant artistic depiction is on a large storage jar (in Greek called a pithos)
from the island of Mykonos. It features a long-legged horse that has
square cutout windows for the warriors to be seen through; outside the
horse, more fighters are enslaving terrified women and children. The
image is, like the popcorn-bucket horse, a joke: It would ruin the trick
if the horse had windows.
The Homeric Odyssey, along with The Iliad and the poems of Hesiod, were likely composed around roughly the same time as the making of the Trojan-horse pithos,
using the new technology that had become available in the
Greek-speaking world in the mid-eighth century B.C.E.: the alphabet.
This development enabled one or more composers—“Homer”—to create and
preserve monumental written poems based on the oral tales about the
great, lost days of heroes—characters who did extraordinary things and
were closer to the gods than any normal mortal. The myths included
partial, fictionalized folk memories of the earlier period of Greek
prosperity, when the Mycenaeans built palatial structures and formed
extensive trade routes across the eastern Mediterranean and beyond.
Homer’s Odyssey draws on many generations of preexisting myth but
reshapes the old stories for its own era—a time of migration,
colonization, urbanization, political and social diversity, and
technological change.
In The Odyssey, Odysseus
repeatedly finds new ways to reenact his most famous trick of hiding
inside the horse (an assumed backstory not described in the main
narrative). He hides in the care of Calypso (whose name suggests
“hiding”), beneath the name of No Man, under the sheep of Polyphemus,
and in the guise of an old beggar. Eventually, he replicates his triumph
at Troy in his own house by technological mastery of another trick
involving a wooden weapon (this time, his bow). Odysseus’s mastery of
technology enables him to invade a heavily defended home in disguise,
achieve an impossible victory, and break an impasse, answering the
long-deferred question of which man will claim the household and
Penelope as his bride.
In one of only two extensive passages in
Homer that evoke the horse explicitly (a long episode that Nolan
excises), Odysseus, while enjoying the lavish hospitality of the
Phaeacians on Scheria, asks a blind poet to sing the story of the Trojan
horse. The poet complies, and Odysseus weeps at the story of his
greatest triumph. The narrator offers a surprising simile: Odysseus sobs
“as pitifully as a woman weeps” while watching her warrior husband die
in a failed attempt to defend his city and his children. The woman falls
desperately on her dying husband, but his killers are behind her,
hitting her with spears as they force her into a life of enslavement.
The simile suggests a connection between the victorious Odysseus and the
victims of his greatest success. We are not told whether Odysseus is
crying because he feels guilt and pity at the thought of those he has
killed, tricked, and enslaved, or because he is tormented to be trapped
so far away from either the battlefield or Ithaca—the spheres where he
can be honored and known. The scene is a memorable reminder that warfare
has victims as well as victors, and that it may sometimes be difficult
to tell which is which.
After many misadventures, and eight years
in the beds of two different goddesses, Odysseus makes it home from
eastern Troy to western Ithaca. He is able to move from what Homer’s
contemporary Hesiod calls the brutal “age of bronze” and the glorious
“age of heroes” into the conflict-ridden “age of iron,” because he has
mastered not only warfare with bronze weapons but also the more social
skills of rhetoric, cunning, and technology—skills that enable him to
survive and win eternal glory, even when he is far from the battlefield.
Homer’s Odysseus specializes in clever scheming—in Greek, mētis—and the narrator does not invite us to moralize against a flexible relationship with the truth.
Many centuries later, Virgil set his Roman epic, The Aeneid, in the aftermath of the Trojan War, and modeled its narrative on both The Odyssey and The Iliad.
The protagonist, Aeneas, is like Odysseus in that he is a warrior on a
journey from Troy to his western homeland. But whereas Odysseus returns
to his original home, Aeneas is a migrant Trojan, fleeing his fallen
city for a new homeland to which he has never been: Italy, where he will
begin the historical process that is fated, one day, to lead to the
foundation of the glorious city of Rome. Virgil reinvents the story of
Odysseus in a double way. Homer’s hero becomes both the pious refugee,
Aeneas, and the cruel liar, Ulysses (the Roman name for Odysseus), who
destroys a city through his unscrupulous wiles.
Homer
leaves the Trojans to decide for themselves whether to take the horse
into the city. But Virgil adds a character who persuades them to do so:
Sinon, a cousin of “cruel Ulysses,” who shares his penchant for lies.
Sinon, whose name means “harmer,” is found bound and alone after the
Greeks pretend to sail away. He tells the Trojans a pitiful story about
how he barely escaped being sacrificed by Ulysses, claiming that the
horse is an offering specifically for Athena (Minerva in Latin), who
will ensure the city’s salvation if they take the horse inside. Yielding
to their pious respect for the gods, and their eagerness to show mercy
toward vulnerable suppliants, the Trojans free Sinon from his bonds and
take the deadly horse inside their city. Aeneas, who narrates the story
to the Carthaginian queen Dido, comments (in the translation by Scott
McGill and Susannah Wright):
His tactics and the tears he falsely shed
now captured us—we who had not been beaten
by Tydides, Thessalian Achilles,
ten years of warfare, or a thousand ships.
The
addition of Sinon makes it clear that deception happens not primarily
through inanimate mechanical objects but through people deliberately
using rhetoric to manipulate audiences, and through the choices of those
audiences about what and whom to believe. With the Sinon episode,
Virgil asks his readers to consider whether cities and civilizations may
fall for noble motives rather than because of moral failures.
Virgil’s
version of the Trojan-horse episode was written in the time of the
first Roman emperor, Augustus. The new leader was a canny manipulator of
words and imagery who presented his revolutionary autocratic regime as
if it were in line with Roman tradition. Virgil showcases the dangers of
deception and offers an account of how easily good people can be
deceived. The scene offers an ambivalent reflection on the culture and
politics of its time. We might read Sinon’s deceptions in light of his
Greekness: Perhaps the future Roman people need fear no such schemes, as
long as they hold fast to their own identity and maintain suspicion of
all foreigners, especially Greeks. But we can also see a dark shadow in
Augustus’s manipulation of the Roman people through clever storytelling
that disguised and enabled the destruction of the old Republic and the
slide into one-man rule.
Where Virgil’s Ulysses is cruel and
predatory, and his mendacious instrument, Sinon, is unambiguously a bad
guy, Nolan re-creates Sinon as his film’s sinless moral center. The
focus on “sin” is presumably the reason for the odd but consistent
pronunciation of the name: More normally pronounced by English-speakers
as Sigh-non or See-non—echoing the long i of the Latin—in Nolan’s film, it’s always Sin-none
as if to reinforce the Christlike innocence of Elliot Page’s version of
the classical “harmer.” Nolan’s Sinon is not a trickster but a poor
innocent to whom Odysseus has lied by omission, in failing to tell him
about the trick with the horse. The episode is a cautionary fable about a
director who fails to trust an actor to play his part: Odysseus lies so
that Sinon will give the most convincing possible performance when he
falsely tells the Trojans, with his dying breath, that the horse is a
gift.
The film’s oft-invoked “Zeus’s law” is explained as a
version of the Golden Rule: We must host beggars and strangers kindly,
to “do as we would be done by,” and because they could be gods in
disguise (a quite different point). The unkindness of Penelope’s suitors
to Odysseus’s poor dog Argos and to the blind Eumaeus is a clear
violation of this principle. Yet the film also suggests that the law of
Zeus is concerned with a quite different moral problem: deception. The
horse is presented as the ultimate violation of the law of Zeus, because
it entails wielding a weapon of mass destruction disguised as a gift.
The Homeric Zeus is a cunning schemer, whereas Nolan’s Zeus takes a
particularly hard line on deceit, especially in relationships between
hosts and guests. The film’s arch-villain, the lead suitor, Antinous,
proves his villainy by being a bad guest, and a bad host, and an
entertainingly weaselly liar. The horse is presented as breaking
“civilization” because it represents the moment when the good guy,
Odysseus, echoes the behavior of the bad guy by being a deceitful,
ungrateful guest. But the film does not explain what “hospitality” has
to do with a narrative situation in which the Greeks have been besieging
Troy for 10 years already; the Trojans are not their hosts but their
enemies in war. If the war is bad, it is nonsensical to suggest that the
most important turning point is the use of the horse rather than
Agamemnon’s choice to invade Troy in the first place and Odysseus’s
choice to yield to the empire’s demands. The visually impressive
spectacle of the horse on a stunning stretch of pristine beach (shot in
Essaouira, Morocco) contributes to the narrative muddle: The
Greeks have supposedly been encamped there for the past decade, yet it
shows no sign of human habitation.
Nolan shot the Calypso episodes
in the disputed Moroccan-occupied territory of Western Sahara without
the consent of the Indigenous Sahrawi people. The choice underlines the
lack of seriousness in Nolan’s thinking about his themes: the ethical
and cultural costs of entering other people’s homes uninvited, for the
purpose of extracting resources without respect for an unwilling host.
In Homer, deception
is relatively benign. In Virgil, it is evil. But in both poems, we
learn directly about how the Greeks enacted their schemes, as well as
the decision-making process of the pious, thoughtful Trojans. In Nolan,
we never see Odysseus planning the construction of the horse or lying to
the innocent Sinon, and his Trojans take mere seconds to make up their
minds. The film is not interested in the social or psychological
questions of how people deceive and are deceived. Deception is a fait
accompli: The horse appears on the beach in the opening sequence as if
deposited there by helicopter, and Sinon does not know that he is not
telling the truth. What matters cinematically are the logistics: the
rolling of the horse uphill and the claustrophobic, waterlogged
interior. Once the ambush of the Trojans begins, the camera lingers
repeatedly not on the human actors but on the enflamed, toppling
buildings and the great gates of the city, whose slow-moving mechanism
is observed at great length. The script tells us loudly that people
matter, but the camera shows us that what matters is the mechanical
challenge of moving objects through space.
Nolan’s Odysseus goes
to war to protect his biological son, Telemachus, but in so doing
betrays his quasi-son, Sinon—an irony whose emotional impact is dulled
by the film’s frenetic pacing. Page is a luminous, heartbreaking
presence on-screen, whereas the Trojans are mostly masked nonentities.
Odysseus’s moral development is retold in miniature on the island of
Circe, where he shoots what he thinks is an animal but then realizes was
actually a human being. Yet neither Odysseus nor the film itself seems
to move beyond the occasional moment or two of noticing the humanity of
all humans. The face of the slaughtered deer-man is not shown, and the
film’s narrative rushes on. The final massacre of the cartoonishly
bestial suitors inside Odysseus’s house is presented with thrilling
exuberance, and the camera does not linger on the pain and humanity of
those who die or allow for the possibility that they, too, should be
mourned. Instead, the long, repetitive final fight sequence fixates,
again, on logistics: how the weapons are hidden, and how they descend
from the storeroom through a hole in the ceiling. The film’s primary
fascination with maneuvering objects creates a mismatch between what we
see and what we are being told to think and feel. We see inside the
horse, but we do not see inside the characters or their world.
In the final sequence of the movie, Odysseus leaves home for yet another journey. It draws heavily on Alfred Tennyson’s poem Ulysses,
whose narrator abandons his “agèd wife” and leaves his son, Telemachus,
on the throne of Ithaca, while he departs for the “untravell’d world”
“to follow knowledge like a sinking star.” Matt Damon as Odysseus
likewise embarks in a boat toward the sunset, although he gets to take
his wife (played by Anne Hathaway) along for the ride. The self-imposed
exile of Odysseus enables his son (Tom Holland) to rule over the
Ithacans who survive. The camera depicts the newly becrowned prince as a
sunlit golden boy, who can receive the power and wealth won by his
father’s bloody hands without having to taint his own—although we have
been given no reason to believe that Telemachus is ready for the role,
or that the concentration of power and wealth in one man is beneficial
for anyone.
The final goal of Nolan’s Odysseus is not infinite
knowledge but redemption: He is at last awake from his amnesia and
intends to bury the comrades left uninterred on his journeys. Yet the
waking vision of the protagonist, and hence also of the film, remains
extraordinarily narrow. There is no suggestion that he will offer burial
to the Trojans, or the suitors, or the various foreigners killed during
his journey. Despite Odysseus’s spiritual awakening, the dead remain as
dead as ever. But there is a spectacular sunset and yet another lavish
display of a large vehicle grandly making its way through space, across
churning waves.
Nolan’s Odyssey is itself a kind of Trojan
horse. The script grandly insists on the importance of human kindness,
while the camera shows us an entirely different set of values. In these
times of hatred and misinformation, we need more than the “apparent
magic” of deceptive images. We need art that is truthful about the costs
and the necessity of compassion, and that recognizes that a sense of
spiritual superiority may not protect us from lies. These lessons are
legible in Homer and Virgil, but are elided by Nolan’s visually
stunning, emotionally empty film.
ATLANTIC
