Godliness, Regret, and the Secrets of the Trojan Horse (They're Not What You Think!)
The Subversive Promise of The Odyssey
In a gritty world that prizes physical and elemental power—a world where helmets and armor are extensions of the self, straight arrows are flung from impossibly tight bows, where a loom woven and unwoven determines fate, and water and shadow move with the strength of a Greek army—it is the intangible Zeus’s law that remains paramount to Christopher Nolan’s huge new film The Odyssey. Unwritten but as integral to Greek society as the very belief in gods themselves, Zeus’s law requires a host to offer shelter and a meal to any who cross their threshold—even if your guests are terrible suitors who harass you while you seek your missing war general husband on the horizon. Any stranger who crosses the threshold could be a god in disguise, so one best act accordingly. Step wrong, and you might regret it.
While Zeus’s law is as constant as Helios charioting the sun across the sky, another word kept pressing on my brain during The Odyssey: godliness. One possible tenet (casual Nolan film reference for the win; watch me seamlessly work in Memento in a second) of godliness involves realizing that the interference of the gods is a foundational cornerstone in the lives of these characters. The gods are real; the stakes are paramount. If Zeus’s law is what steers the ship of narrative, the gods’ inescapable presence is the wind powering the entire vessel.
The more urgent definition of godliness within this essay, though, is the becoming or striving to emulate a god. If one is godly, are they also a hero? Perhaps being a hero comes with certain expectations of morality, but perhaps not. These questions find ripe soil to bloom in the field of Odysseus. While I can think of several actors who could have been able (literally and figuratively) to captain the ship, Matt Damon might have been the best choice of them all. I was consistently impressed, and maybe even surprised, by his ability to lead the movie with such a steady hand. He’s handsome, but not too handsome (by the end, his face looked as weathered as you’d expect of a man Going Through It™ for twenty years). Imperfect, yet someone you’d follow into battle. A Good Dude. A machine of war who is possessed of a heart that ticks with honor, a memento courtesy of his years as king and dutiful obeisance to the gods back home.
Yet, Odysseus’ home is in disarray, for something is rotten in the state of Ithaca. Telemachus and Penelope—Odysseus’s son and wife, the former played by a good Tom Holland and the latter by Anne Hathaway, blistering in her tenacity—live in a palace where the vibes can only be called shambolic. Led by a bratty, excellent Robert Pattinson, a horde of rude, drunken men have taken advantage of the king’s long absence and essentially taken over the place. Penelope and Telemachus mourn Odysseus even as they look for his arrival on the horizon. Prolonged years of such liminal hope does not a stable kingdom make. Mother and son feel their world closing in around them, egged on by suitors growing more bold by the day with little word from abroad. “All we know of the world is from travelers’ tales,” Penelope tells Telemachus, ergo every traveler who crosses their door is greeted with respect, a seat at the table, and a plea for any news that can be spared: Zeus’s law writ large across the kingdom, despite its crisis.
The film makes it clear society is on the brink of collapse—though dialogue surrounding this is clunky; there’s a line about the Bronze Age that made me recoil. My kingdom for Christopher Nolan to consider hiring a writers room!—even after a victorious war in Troy. And what a war it was. The film opens on a massive wooden horse marqueed across the screen, skewing wildly with hooves raised, half-buried in the sandy shore. We know what this is, even though we’re not yet given a look at what we know to be inside. Out on the beach waits a confused but loyal Sinon. The performance is a sensitive one by Elliot Page, rising full of youthful optimism before hammering down with a wallop of an emotional scene halfway through the film.
It’s not until later in the movie that we return to the horse in the sand and finally see the Greek warriors inside. The thrilling battle sequence after the horse is brought into Troy leads to Greek victory and widespread songs sung in honor of Odysseus the clever, the canny. The hero. When he pulled off one of the niftiest bits of battle trickery the world had ever seen, it was not glory that lingered in the aftermath, but shame. Odysseus had trespassed Zeus’s law in the most criminal way imaginable. Zeus’s law is not just about hospitality. It is survival, kinship, and connection. It is the one safe guarantee in a world where the handle of death’s dagger swings far too easily. Obeying such a law is not only seen as respectful, but sacred. It is treating men like they are gods, and in doing so, displaying godliness oneself. Breaching Zeus’s law transcends error: It is sin.
Contemporary eyes tend to see the Trojan horse as the final boss of wartime cunning. Odysseus shamelessly pwning the Trojans is what I expected from Nolan, whose explosions-go-boom tendency towards bombast has been well established for as many years as Odysseus’s journey. What I did not expect to see was regret as deep and swirling as Charybdis’s maw. His guilt is present in Homer’s poem, but I was not expecting the film to showcase it so thoroughly. The sirens sing that he is too ashamed to go home, and Athena, played by a compassionate Zendaya, haunts his every step. For Nolan’s Odysseus, the Trojan horse was an act so unthinkable that he languished with Calypso (a weak portrayal by Charlize Theron, though in fairness, she doesn’t have much to do) and the lotus flowers for years, so unwilling was he to face the full implications of what he had done in authoring the war’s final act of violence. The man of twists and turns holds one more twist.
The Trojan horse Trojan horsed us, and the movie is all the better for the subversion.
When situating The Odyssey next to Nolan’s previous film, Oppenheimer (maybe you’ve heard of it?) one suddenly finds a duo of men grappling with the horrors they unleashed upon the world. Less grandiosity, more guilt. Forget the specially licensed Trojan horse popcorn bucket, remorse is on the menu! Does Odysseus veer closer to godliness with his guilt, or to humanity?
A particular moment in the film might give us the answer. Calypso offers Odysseus salvation on her island, where he would see immortality in drugged nirvana. It would also represent forsaking his family and royal responsibility, and bar him from traveling to the unknown west to honor his fallen comrades. Instead of accepting Calypso’s godliness, Odysseus is determined to remain mortal. His rapsheet is leagues long, and choking guilt doesn’t exactly make the highlight reel of happy human moments, yet he builds his creaky raft and floats off at the mercy of the gods all the same. In doing so, he sheds not only the sails and oars of his previous vessel but also the hubris which had him believing he could control what the gods had in store for him. He’s done defying the gods, as he once told Circe (played by an utterly magnificent Samantha Morton and featuring a scene that is instantly one of the best of the year, horrifying in its beauty) in her hut, and has learned his lesson in a fascinating subversion of expectation: In choosing humanity, he is closer to the gods than ever.
A hero he must certainly be, right? Maybe. Nolan makes it clear that our idea of heroism stands on shaky ground and can shift as easily as the sands on Calypso’s shore. Heroism is a type of godliness. Curiously, revenge might be, as well. The suitors trespass Zeus’s law by overstaying their welcome at Penelope’s; therefore, the gods enact their divine retribution through Odysseus’s murderous actions. The film’s third act is one long Kill Bill-esque revenge fantasy, and is all the better for it.
At the very least, revenge seems to be the prize bestowed upon Odysseus when he passes the test of his journey and finally lands at Ithaca’s shores. That single twang after he strings the bow alone is worth the price of admission (it’s like a firework; you’ll feel it in your chest.) The word “prize” provokes, however: Taking his revenge might not be a prize, but it is finally a choice he can make on his own. It’s not rewarded either, because when the dust has settled, Telemachus is crowned king and Odysseus is exiled (perhaps people found it problematic that their revenant king murdered a significant portion of Ithaca’s eighteen to twenty-nine-year-olds?) Exile is fine: After an epic amount of justifying the abandonment of his killed men, he is finally going to honor them by sailing into the unknown west with Penelope. It is another step towards casting off Troy’s long shadow, in what we might imagine will be a lifelong process for Odysseus. For somebody who lived and nearly died by the will of the gods, turning from godliness towards something a little more mortal is as welcome as an arrow shot cleanly through twelve axes, hitting its mark.
Shayla Frandsen (she/her) is a writer, runner, reader, and mother of three. A proud Newsies apologist, she will watch Cher in anything, compel you to read romantasy, and can quote Back to the Future 3 verbatim. When she was a kid, she started doing the Jabba the Hut laugh as a joke but it’s...kind of just her laugh now?
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