Dark red chairs. The smell of burnt popcorn in the air. Ready to settle in for a story that you already know the ending to. That is one of the fascinating aspects of The Odyssey: everybody knows how it ends. The hero makes it back home. The tale is so old that you heard it even before you read it.
I first read the Odyssey in a retelling in grade school, seven or eight years old, and then a few years later the stories were part of the ancient Greek classes in high school. What has changed, with every personal journey and getting older, is the question of "nostos," the homecoming itself.
I actually went to see the movie twice, with a couple of weeks between the two showings. The song that keeps popping in after the second time is “Two of Us” by The Beatles. Going home, going nowhere. Matt Damon strapped onto the ship’s mast, listening to the siren’s song, gives a clue to why he is on the road so long. The thing you miss most is not going to be there when you return. And you are not the same either. Though it is spoken on a ship in the middle of the sea, it is almost a verbatim quote of Heraclitus, the pre-socratic dialectic philosopher who said a man never steps into the same river twice, for both the river and he himself have changed.
To return, you must first leave, and the hero’s journey in the case of Odysseus adds the personal level of change even stronger. Nolan focuses on this more than all the other aspects, even if it gives an interesting twist on economic ambition and warfare in the late Bronze Age. The terror of the gods is present in the deeds of humans. The brutality of Agamemnon dropping his daughter into the sea to get favorable winds is harsh, and the urgency of Clytemnestra driving the dagger into him after his return comes as a quick shock. The way the victors ransack the city and the raw cruelty towards everything that is encountered play quite different from the depiction of classical heroes in classical Hollywood movies. The only goddess visible on screen is the vision of Athena in Odysseus’s imagination. There are now towering giants, with no wit and deceit by Zeus and the gang (which is not entirely true: Athena does in fact make an appearance as a beggar at the beginning of the movie, talking to Tom Holland, actually the opening scene of the original text by Homer).
The elements and the drowning in a sea that to this day takes thousands of lives a year are another aspect that pulls the story from far ago and puts it into contemporary context. Hope in general is something that is hard to find, a clear journey with deaths on every shore that is visited. Running back down to the boat, being smashed by giants and cyclops, and being tested by witches and grazing cattle.
One central little aspect of the classical story is missing. In the original text, Polyphem asks Odysseus what his name is. The trickster tells him “Outis” (or Nemo in Latin), which translates to "Nobody." The one-eyed giant then calls out to his father, Poseidon, that “Nobody took my eye”. Nemo, later famous in the works of Jules Verne and, of course, in the big homecoming story of a little fish, "Finding Nemo”.
A few years before “Two of Us” The Beatles sang about a “Nowhere Man” and it again talks about being in the middle of nowhere. Odysseus knows excactly where he needs to be, at every moment of his journey. He makes choices to prolong the journey. Or there would be no story to tell. The discovery is bleak, it is not joyful either; the people laughing in the movie are only the suitors.
Watching the film a second time, that aspect of nostos is even more present than the first time. The dialectical structure of the movie, interweaving episodes from different timeframes and landing back, but changed, is a motive that goes to a granular level. The beat of the drums accelerating when the Greeks climb out of the Trojan horse and make their way to open the gates of the city is the same as the beat of Odysseus’s final battle back in his Ithaca living room.
What added more flavor to watch the second time, is that I watched the new Spiderman in between. In Brand New Day Peter Parker/Spiderman (Tom Holland) has the same ersatz-dad dynamic going on with Frank Castle/Punisher (Jon Bernthal) as with Menelaus (also Jon Bernthal). The Zendaya connection is there as well, but does not materialize on screen like that.
The only one that seems to age on screen from a young boy to a young man seems to be Telemachus (as well as Antinous and Sinon) . Penelope and Odysseus look pretty much the same at the beginning of the movie. Which also lets you know that 20 years is actually not that long, in a lifetime and in the great span of things. The Beatles sang about that time span in the very beginning of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In the top right corner of that album, hidden under Bob Dylan is the face of James Joyce, who transferred the story the worries about getting back home into modern day Dublin a century ago.
What is left is pure cinema magic. Three hours of constant beat, no time to breathe and lean back. Visceral entertainment in a room full of people, with the sound of popcorn being crunched slowly ceasing and only the story on screen slowly melting into the subconscious. After the credits roll and when the lights go up, you enter back into the world and look for the way back home. There is a straight line, that takes you there right away. Or a stop for some ice cream or a drink maybe?
The perils and challenges of homecoming have changed for most in modern Western society. The questions and obstacles have changed substantially. But they remain. The Heraclitus quote still holds true. The river changes and the person changes. And that’s not a bad thing.