The Odyssey

Thus have the gods decreed for wretched mortals — to live in sorrow, while they themselves are without care.
— Homer

When one thinks about it, Christopher Nolan has never stopped telling the Odyssey.

Leonard Shelby in Memento, Cobb in Inception, Cooper in Interstellar, the soldiers of Dunkirk, even Oppenheimer: they are all men separated from their homes, their identities, their loved ones. All of them are searching for an impossible return.

The Odyssey, then, is not an accident in the director's filmography.
 It is his hidden centre: his archetype.

Yet Nolan renounces every temptation of deconstructive reinterpretation. He does not turn Ulysses into a contemporary antihero, nor into a postmodern character. He lets him be what he has always been: a man confronted with the enigma of fate, of choice, and of time.

Nolan's monsters are extraordinarily physical.

The face of Polyphemus seems to come directly from the paintings of Francis Bacon: deformed flesh, matter that twists upon itself, features that appear on the verge of dissolution. There is none of the allure of the fantastic here, only the unease of the organic.

The monster is not other than the man. It is man carried to his own excess. It is man freed from every law. It is power without ethics.

Even the faces of the companions transformed by Circe possess a Baconian quality, deformed by the hands of the sorceress who despises and mocks their bestiality. The metamorphosis has nothing of the fairy tale about it: it is an ontological humiliation. Men are returned to their animality.

In these images one senses a subtle vein of misanthropy, almost a radical suspicion toward the human.

As if the film were continually asking itself: what truly separates man from beast?
 Perhaps very little. Perhaps only a fragile moral discipline.

This is why the monstrous in the Odyssey is never external. It is a permanent possibility of human existence.

Few lines in the film sum up its meaning as well as this one.

Ulysses's mistake is to believe that the divine can be measured according to human categories.

But the gods of the Odyssey are neither just nor unjust.
 They are powers.
 They are the name the ancients gave to what escapes control: the sea, death, fortune, the unpredictability of fate, violence, power, justice, wisdom, love, beauty, war, the unknown.

This is why the divine is present in every human experience: in pride, in acceptance, in loss, in grace, in ruin.

The gods do not eliminate human freedom — they make it tragic.
 Every choice continues to belong to Ulysses, but no choice is ever immune from consequences.

At the beginning, Ulysses is still the hero of Troy.
 He is the victor.
 The man of the horse.
 The man of strategic intelligence.

The image of the horse at the water's edge is, not coincidentally, one of the most sublime in the film: a spectral apparition, the simulacrum of a glory already past.

The journey will take it upon itself to slowly dismantle that identity.

For the Odyssey is, at its core, a work of subtraction.

Ulysses loses men. Loses ships. Loses power. Loses the certainty of being master of his own fate.
 He even loses his own name when he becomes "Nobody."

And every loss brings him closer to the man he is destined to become.
 The hero of strength becomes the man of patience.
 The conqueror becomes the survivor.
 The king becomes a beggar.

The Odyssey is the story of a maturity earned through deprivation.

Among all the sequences in the film, the descent into the Underworld is probably the most intense from a philosophical standpoint.

To know the future, Ulysses must enter the realm of the dead.
 He must dwell among the shadows. He must look the absences in the face.

Nolan dwells on a profoundly Homeric element: the duty to honour those left without burial. The forgotten. The dishonoured. Those who were denied a worthy memory.

In this sense the film seems to brush against the thought of Simone Weil: every human being, even the most anonymous, demands infinite attention, a form of justice that consists above all in not being erased.

Oblivion is the true second death.

The Underworld is thus the place where Ulysses understands that the return cannot cancel the losses.
 Every home is also inhabited by its own ghosts.

But the secret centre of the Odyssey remains Calypso.

Her proposal is vertiginous.
 She does not offer pleasure.
 She offers the abolition of the human condition. Immortality. The suspension of suffering. The exit from time.

It is here that Nolan's film becomes extraordinarily contemporary.

In an age that dreams of overcoming death, of extending life indefinitely and of every form of technological transcendence, Ulysses makes the opposite gesture.

He refuses eternity. He chooses limitation. He chooses ageing. He chooses loss. He chooses mortality.

In Nietzschean terms, he does not flee his fate but embraces it.
 He says yes to life and to his own finite condition.
 He accepts that the meaning of existence derives precisely from its precariousness.

It is no coincidence that the whole of Nolan's filmography is traversed by the same obsession: time.
 Time that separates. Time that consumes. Time that prevents any identical return.

Because no one ever truly returns home.
 When the journey ends, the home has changed.
 But above all, the traveller has changed.

From this point of view, the comparison with Uberto Pasolini's The Return is illuminating.

Where Nolan preserves the cosmic and metaphysical dimension of the poem, Pasolini chooses interiority instead.
 His is a film of silence, exhaustion, and trauma.
 The intimacy of Homer's personal conflict appears there more intense, more troubled, almost painfully contemporary.
 The return is no longer a triumph but an estrangement.
 Ulysses is a man who struggles to recognise his home and to recognise himself in it.

Nolan, by contrast, expands the epic breath and restores to the myth its metaphysical vastness.
 These are two opposite and complementary movements.
 One looks at the wound. The other at fate.
 One narrows. The other expands.
 But both grasp the same truth: the Odyssey is not about the journey. It is about the price of return.

At the end of it all, after the monsters, the gods, the dead and the storms, Ulysses does not conquer immortality.
 He conquers something infinitely more fragile: his own humanity.

The secret core of the Odyssey is not heroism, but finitude. Not glory, but limitation.
 Not victory, but acceptance.

Ulysses's final harbour is not Ithaca.
 It is the awareness that being human means inhabiting time, accepting loss, and continuing, in spite of everything, to desire a home.

This is why, nearly three thousand years after its birth, the Odyssey still feels contemporary to us.
 Because it continues to remind us of a truth that modernity stubbornly tries to forget:
 that man does not become great when he transcends his limits, but when he finds the courage to inhabit them.

Perhaps it is here that Christopher Nolan's Odyssey opens onto a further interpretive possibility. Because his Ulysses is not only the hero of the return, but a figure who passes through some of the great nodes of modern and contemporary thought: Nietzsche, Deleuze, Bataille, Günther Anders. As if the Homeric poem, in its antiquity, had already thought through our anxieties.

Nietzsche would probably have recognised in Ulysses the man who, having looked into the abyss of the world, chooses to return nonetheless. His greatness does not consist in refusing his fate, but in assuming it. The refusal of the immortality offered to him by Calypso is, at bottom, a profoundly Nietzschean gesture: a radical amor fati. Ulysses does not choose a better life — he chooses his own life, with its pain, its losses, and its finitude. He says yes to time, and in saying yes to time, he says yes to death as well.

In this sense, his journey is not far removed from the Nietzschean eternal return: not the material recurrence of events, but the full acceptance of existence as it is, without otherworldly compensation and without promises of salvation.

But the Odyssey is also a profoundly Deleuzian poem. Every stage of the journey is a process of transformation. Ulysses does not merely pass through places: he passes through becomings. He becomes "Nobody" before Polyphemus; he becomes almost animal on the island of Circe; he becomes a shade in the Underworld; he becomes castaway, beggar, stranger. There is no longer a fixed identity. The self fragments and recomposes itself continuously.

Yet at the journey's end, Ulysses does not return as the man he was. He returns as another.

The Odyssey is, then, the story of an identity that survives only by accepting transformation.

Even the monstrous, in Nolan, seems to take on an almost Bataillian dimension. Polyphemus, the Laestrygonians, the deformed faces of Circe, the very flesh of the monsters: everything appears as an excess, an overflow of the human. Bataille maintained that man is continually drawn toward what exceeds him, toward what threatens his order and his identity.

The monster, then, is not the other — it is what man could become.
 It is the disquieting reminder of our ontological precariousness.

And it is for this reason that the face of Polyphemus, so openly Baconian, strikes so profoundly. Francis Bacon did not paint monsters; he painted flesh when it loses its form, when identity is torn apart and man is returned to his material vulnerability. Nolan's monsters are made of the same substance.
 They are bodies exposed to the violence of the world — men pushed to their limit.

But perhaps the most surprising encounter is with Günther Anders.

Anders argued that modernity is marked by a growing disproportion between man and the world he himself produces. The human being has become too small for his own creations, for his own technology, for his own history.

Nolan's Ulysses, too, seems to live this disproportion.
 The world he traverses is boundless: the gods, the sea, time, fate — everything is larger than he is.
 Man does not dominate the cosmos; he inhabits it precariously.

And precisely for this reason, his final choice takes on an even more vertiginous significance: faced with the immensity of being, Ulysses does not choose to become a god.
 He chooses to remain a man.

Perhaps this is why The Odyssey appears, paradoxically, so contemporary. In an age that dreams of overcoming biological limits, of artificial intelligence, of technological immortality, and of every form of post-human transcendence, Nolan returns to Homer to remind us of an ancient and scandalous truth: fragility is not a defect to be corrected, but the very condition of meaning.

Time passing, the body ageing, the loved ones who can be lost, the death that awaits us — none of this impoverishes existence. It makes it precious.

This is why the final image left by the film is not one of triumph, but of reconciliation.

Having traversed the monstrous, the divine, and death, Ulysses conquers no metaphysical truth.
 He conquers a human truth.

He understands that the only eternity granted to men is not immortality — it is return.
 Return to one's dead, to one's memory, to one's loved ones, to one's home.

And perhaps the cinema of Christopher Nolan — forever obsessed with time, with loss, and with the desire to recover what has been lost — has done nothing else, film after film, but prepare itself to tell this story. The oldest, and perhaps still the most necessary.

Because his entire filmography is inhabited by characters who pass through the impossibility of return: men who discover that time gives nothing back identical to what it was before, that every home is now a different home, and that every return entails the painful acceptance of having become someone else.

In this sense, The Odyssey is perhaps Nolan's most deeply Nolanian film, and at the same time, perhaps, his most deeply Homeric.

Because it understands that the meaning of the journey does not lie in conquest, but in metamorphosis.
 That heroism does not consist in conquering the world, but in accepting its irreducible otherness.
 That maturity is not an increase in power, but a slow education in limitation.
 And that the sea, in the Odyssey, is not merely a geographical space — it is the very figure of existence.

Mobile, unpredictable, indifferent.

Man sails upon it for a brief stretch, losing companions, loves and certainties, stubbornly seeking a shore that perhaps no longer exists. Yet he continues to row, continues to seek, continues to return.

Because being human, Homer and Nolan suggest, means precisely this: traversing the infinite knowing oneself to be finite.

Nolan does not use Homer to speak of myth, but uses myth to speak of the human condition and of our difficult reconciliation with time, limitation, and mortality.

And perhaps, having traversed Nolan's Odyssey and the entire history of cinema that, in different ways, has sought to engage with Homer's poem, one further question remains — almost a critical game, an exercise in cinephile imagination.

What would the Odyssey have looked like in the hands of other filmmakers?

How would the return of Ulysses have appeared if it had been told by a director capable of pushing existential conflict to its most radical consequences?

Lars von Trier would probably have transformed the nostos into a long interior via crucis, an itinerary of guilt and expiation. The monsters would have become states of the soul — manifestations of depression, desire, and cruelty. The return to Ithaca would have had nothing consolatory about it: it would have been another name for the wound.

Stanley Kubrick, on the other hand, might have seen in the Odyssey the relationship between man and the cosmos, between intelligence and the enigma of being. Ulysses's journey would have taken on a metaphysical and glacial dimension, traversed by a sense of vertigo before the incommensurable. Polyphemus, the Sirens, the Underworld would not have been merely narrative episodes, but ontological thresholds, passages through different states of human consciousness.

Yorgos Lanthimos would probably have insisted on the absurdity of conventions, on the hidden violence within bonds, and on the strangeness of men to themselves. The family of Ithaca, the suitors, even the return of Ulysses would have taken on a disturbing, almost Kafkaesque tone, in which the order of the world appears simultaneously ridiculous and terrifying.

And Radu Jude? He might have been the filmmaker most surprisingly close to the original spirit of the poem. He would have made the Odyssey a corrosive reflection on power, war, the ruins of History, and the memory of the defeated. He would have interrogated the dark zones of heroism, dismantling every rhetoric of triumph to bring back to the centre the dead, the forgotten, those whom the myth leaves at the margins.

And yet, this very exercise of imagination ends up telling us something about Nolan's film as well.

That his most courageous choice was not to reinvent Homer — it was to trust him. To understand that the Odyssey already contains, within itself, everything that modern cinema continues to interrogate: trauma, time, desire, loss, memory, the fragility of identity, and the incessant tension between the need for the infinite and our irremediable finite condition.

This is why every new version of the Odyssey appears, inevitably, incomplete.

Because Homer's poem continues to be a promise addressed to cinema: that of a work no image can ever fully exhaust, and which every filmmaker, sooner or later, will feel the desire to traverse.

But it is precisely here that a critical question arises.

Does fidelity to a work necessarily mean preserving the received form?
 Or does true fidelity consist in recognising that every great work already contains, within itself, possibilities still unexplored?

Perhaps the Odyssey, to go on living, does not only ask to be celebrated.
 It asks to be questioned anew.

And one of the great zones of shadow in the cinematic tradition remains precisely Penelope.

An apparently motionless figure: while Ulysses traverses the world, battles monsters, confronts gods, and descends into the underworld, Penelope undertakes an entirely different journey — a journey without movement, without spectacle, without grand landscapes.

Her space is the room. Her battlefield is time. Her weapon is intelligence.

The web she weaves and unravels is not merely a narrative device: it is an extraordinary metaphor for human resistance. Ulysses must conquer time by traversing it; Penelope, by contrast, must preserve it, slow it, dilate it, prevent it from finally consuming what remains of her identity and her home.

If Ulysses confronts external monstrousness, Penelope confronts another form of it: daily pressure, waiting, siege, the need to survive without ever knowing whether the return will come.

Hers is an epic of the everyday — an invisible epic, an epic of duration.

And it is precisely this feminine Odyssey that some contemporary filmmakers might have explored in radical ways.

Lars von Trier, a director inhabited by female protagonists submerged in pain, sacrifice, and resistance, would probably have shifted the centre of the story onto Penelope herself. His Odyssey would not have been the hero's journey homeward, but the inner journey of a woman forced to live inside an absence. A story about solitude, faith, and the capacity to love what is not present. A tragedy of waiting.

Yorgos Lanthimos, too, could have transformed Ithaca into a disturbing space, exposing the hidden violence behind family and social structures, interrogating the role assigned to women, the weight of expectations, and the absurdity of the rituals that regulate power.

Stanley Kubrick might have represented Penelope as the necessary counter-shot of masculine heroism: she who does not conquer space, but resists time.

And Radu Jude might have radicalised even further this marginality that is, at the same time, so implacable and so decisive.

And it is precisely here that the most complex relationship with Nolan's film emerges.

His fidelity to Homer is certainly an act of respect, but it can also be read as a form of reassurance: a choice that allows the myth to achieve a universal and spectacular dimension without fully entering into conflict with the expectations of the contemporary viewer.

Nolan makes the Odyssey our collective imagination knows.

But perhaps the cinema of the future must still make the Odyssey we do not know.

The one that shifts the centre.
 The one that interrogates the silence.
 The one that understands that the journey of Ulysses is possible only because someone, on the other side of the sea, resisted long enough to make the return possible.

Perhaps the truly revolutionary gesture toward Homer will not be the destruction of the myth.
 It will be listening to what the myth has left in shadow.

Because every great work does not live only through what it shows.
 Can absolute fidelity to an archetype also become a form of immobilising the archetype itself?

Julia Ducournau and Jessica Hausner would probably have thrown into crisis the deepest boundary of the poem: what does it mean to be human after having crossed the limit of the body, of desire, and of transformation?

If Nolan approaches the Odyssey as the journey of man through time and fate, Ducournau and Hausner would have interrogated what remains most mysterious in the poem: the body.

The body as the site of transformation.
 The body as the territory of conflict.
 The body as an unstable frontier between human and non-human.

Julia Ducournau would perhaps have made an Odyssey of radical metamorphosis. Her attention would not have focused solely on the return of Ulysses, but on the more disturbing question: after everything he has traversed, is Ulysses still the same man?

For the Odyssey is already, at bottom, a poem about mutation.

Ulysses changes identity, changes role, changes appearance. He becomes "Nobody," becomes stranger, beggar, vulnerable body. Circe transforms men into animals; the monsters deform the boundary between human and bestial; the Underworld shows the body in its final transformation — that of death.

Ducournau would probably have pushed all of this to its extreme.

She would have shown the return not as a restoration of lost identity, but as the impossibility of truly going back.

The body of Ulysses would have been the site of the journey's memory: every wound, every metamorphosis, every encounter with the monstrous would have left a trace.

The true question would no longer have been about the possibility of return, but about the true identity of whoever returns.

Jessica Hausner, too, could have offered an extraordinarily radical reading of the Odyssey, but from a different perspective. Her cinema, apparently cold and geometric, often works on the relationship between individual and system, desire and norm, the aspiration to happiness and hidden unease.

Her Penelope could have been a tremendously powerful figure — not merely the woman who waits.

But the woman who observes, calculates, constructs strategies: an almost scientific Penelope, engaged in an experiment on time.

The web would no longer have been merely a deception aimed at the suitors, but a conceptual machine through which to suspend reality, to create an autonomous zone in which the masculine time of conquest is neutralised by the feminine time of preservation.

Hausner might have told the Odyssey as a story about normality as a disturbing surface.

Ithaca would not have been simply the place of return, but an environment traversed by a disturbing question:
 what happens when the one we waited for twenty years finally returns? Is he still the same? Do we recognise him? Do we still desire him?

In this perspective, Penelope would become not the character who awaits the conclusion of Ulysses's story, but the one who possesses her own autonomous story, a different knowledge, a different form of power.

And perhaps this is precisely the point that many future rewritings of the Odyssey could explore.

Not replacing Ulysses with Penelope.

But understanding that the poem already contains two parallel journeys:
 that of the one who traverses space,
 and that of the one who traverses time.
 That of the hero who returns,
 and that of the woman who makes the return possible — and who can also call it into question.

Nolan chose, coherently with his own poetics, the first.

But perhaps the cinema of the future must still find a way to tell the second.

Because perhaps the archetype of the Odyssey is not immobilised by the fact that we continue to repeat it.
 It is immobilised when we forget how many different Odysseys it still contains within itself.

No creature is more wretched than man, among all those that breathe and move upon the earth.
— Homer