The Trojan Horse Reimagined: Original Sin in Nolan’s Odyssey
SPOILER ALERT: Some spoilers below.
The story of Odysseus has been told countless times, from Homer to Virgil, from Tennyson to Joyce, from the Coen brothers to the SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. With his latest summer blockbuster, Christopher Nolan has joined these ranks, taking on the staggering challenge of adapting one of the oldest stories in the Western canon for the modern world.
With The Odyssey, Nolan recognizes that he is not just telling another story, but a story at the very origins of Western civilization and culture. Nolan seizes upon this uniqueness, telling the Odyssey as a story not just at the origin of civilization but also about that very origin and foundation. Even more, Nolan’s Odyssey focuses on the demise of this civilization, unexpectedly presenting itself as an apocalyptic film about the end of civilization as much as the beginning.
The characters themselves recognize as much. Early in the film, Penelope explains to Telemachus why she feels she must remarry: Ithaca needs a king as it faces the threat of the “people from the sea,” who are raiding cities and violating “Zeus’ law,” the Greek principle of xenia or hospitality which bids that one welcome strangers as if they are gods in disguise. By the end of the film, it becomes clear that the “people from the sea” are no outside threat to Greek civilization but an internal one: they are Odysseus himself and his men, who have shattered the laws and norms of civilization by burning Troy. The cause and symbol of this civilizational collapse is the Trojan horse, the gift meant to signify a peaceful end to the war that conceals Troy’s destruction within it.
By turning to the origins of the Western canon and seeing in it not just the foundation but also the collapse of civilization, Nolan unexpectedly approaches the theological milieu of original sin. The Trojan horse represents that aboriginal transgression of divine law that turns society against itself, destroying it from within. In order to understand what Nolan is doing with the Odyssey, I present four somewhat disparate companion-texts, all of which together will show not just the fruitfulness of Nolan’s latest film but the enduring value of the Odyssey itself.
Dante
In order to understand Nolan’s Odysseus, we should first consider not Homer’s precedent but rather Dante’s. In Inferno, Dante finds Odysseus in the eighth and penultimate circle of hell, the circle of fraud, for the deception which he perpetrated with the Trojan horse. Escorting Dante and Virgil through this circle is the monster Geryon, “that filthy effigy / of fraud” who has the face of an honest man but the body of a serpent, the paws of a bear, and the tail of a scorpion (XVII.7-27). Eventually Virgil and Dante come upon Odysseus, under his Latinate name Ulysses, and his comrade Diomedes:
Within that flame, Ulysses
and Diomedes suffer; they, who went
as one to rage, now share one punishment.
And there, together in their flame, they grieve
over the horse’s fraud that caused a breach—
the gate that let Rome’s noble seed escape (XXVI.55-60, trans. Mandelbaum).
Dante goes on to see Odysseus as the paragon of the vice of curiositas, or the desire for knowledge and experience unmediated by moral limits. But it is first and foremost the fraudulence of the Trojan horse which merits damnation for Odysseus.
Neither Homer nor Nolan tells the story of Odysseus with a Christian notion of hell in mind, and yet we can say analogically that Nolan’s Odysseus views his role in the Trojan horse as a damnable act. The emotional and thematic climax of the film comes in Odysseus’ first conversation with his wife Penelope, still disguised as a faceless beggar:
What if the Odysseus you knew lost his way? What if, one night, in a strange city, he saw things that made him think the home he knew couldn’t possibly be there anymore? What if, when he left the belly of the horse, and opened the gates of Troy, he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night? We left them a gift, an offering of peace, that they took into their home. We violated all that’s ever sacred between people. It turned a fight into a hunt. To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire, including his home.
The most moving scene of the film comes when Odysseus utters the words, “It turned a fight into a hunt.” As Odysseus says “hunt” we finally see the full flashback that had been foreshadowed a few times before: burning through Troy, Odysseus’ men come upon a temple of Athena and simultaneously decapitate a statue of Athena and one of her priestesses, a young, weeping woman who looks Odysseus in the eye as she loses her head. The audience is spared the sight of her execution, and instead sees the head of Athena toppling to the ground.
The nameless priestess is the unexpected center of the scene: she is Athena herself, the very one who has been accompanying and guiding Odysseus on his way home. The scene is open to a variety of interpretations, whether Athena has merely been presenting herself in the guise of this woman, or whether she was Athena in disguise all along. Regardless, the thematic significance resonates clearly: Athena accompanies Odysseus on his journey home not only as a guide and mentor but as a vivid representation of his guilt and as a reminder of the savagery he introduced to Troy. Having introduced this savagery, Odysseus cannot escape it; it persists as a stain on his mind and his soul.
Nolan’s Odysseus comes to recognize his sin as Dante would identify it centuries later: fraud and deception, the giving of a gift to the goddess—a shared god, a bond of fellowship even between warring peoples—that ends up destroying all that is sacred between peoples, both literally and figuratively decapitating that which is holy. Odysseus is like Dante’s Geryon: the mastermind of the Trojan horse, presenting himself and his gift as a serene and kindly countenance, hides a scorpion’s tail behind him.
Penelope then objects, reassuring Odysseus that this was not his work alone, but all the Greeks’. Odysseus rebuts, “One man’s idea, one man’s trick to break Zeus’ law forever. We lived in a world of palaces and trade, language, blind to its beauty, until we broke it.”
With these words, Odysseus begins to see his sin even more severely than Dante would: Odysseus not only takes responsibility for the desecration of Troy, but for the impending collapse of Greek civilization itself. Odysseus and the other Greeks know that they are part of the greatest civilization the world has ever known, as Telemachus optimistically reminds Penelope. From the audience’s perspective, though, these Greeks occupy a prehistoric, almost mythological place in history, virtually beyond the reaches of written testimony and historical scholarship. The end of society from Odysseus’ perspective is the beginning of society from our perspective, the furthest back into history we can see. The Trojan Horse is not just a sin, therefore, but the sin, the original sin that lies at the furthest reaches of the historical record, accessible not by direct testimony from the event but only from songs that predate their written composition by centuries.
In the world of Nolan’s Odyssey, the Trojan horse is the original sin, the ur-historical violation of divine law that explains why a peaceful society is ultimately impossible.
Homer
Though Nolan’s interpretation of Odysseus differs from Homer’s, both versions of the story have the theme of xenia—Zeus’ law, as the movie consistently names it—at the thematic center of the narrative. It is through this lens that we can see how Nolan’s Odyssey constitutes a genuine, even if not obvious, interpretation of Homer. Virtually all of Odysseus’ antagonists—the Laestrygonians, the Cyclops, Calypso, the suitors—violate this divine law, either by abusing it (the suitors) or directly breaking it (the rest). In many ways, Odysseus is a victim of the lawlessness that comes when xenia is disregarded, and his homecoming, together with his slaughter of the suitors, represents the righteous restoration of divine law.
We see this theme in the famed encounter with the Cyclops, which Odysseus recounts in Book IX. In hindsight, Odysseus recognizes that the Cyclops is lawless and uncivilized; in foresight, though, he had expected the Cyclops to follow the laws of the gods and welcome strangers. Odysseus honors the obligations of a guest, offering a gift of wine in return for the food he took from the Cyclops. But the Cyclops, Polyphemus, spurns Odysseus’ gift, offering in return only the opportunity to be the last to die.
In order to escape the cave, Odysseus ingeniously uses the Cyclops’ own lack of civilization against him. In dialogue that Nolan regrettably cuts from the film, Odysseus deceives the Cyclops by giving a fake name. The Greek word for “nobody” is outis (ou = not, tis = somebody). Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his name is Oûtis—a homonym but not quite a homophone of outis, which Robert Fitzgerald’s translation captures especially well by rendering Oûtis as “Nohbdy.” Polyphemus recognizes Oûtis as a proper name, albeit an odd one. After Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, he shouts out to his fellow Cyclopes that Oûtis has blinded him. But the distinction between outis and Oûtis becomes lost as Polyphemus’ cries echo through the caves, and his distant Cyclops brethren assume that nobody is hurting him. The Cyclopes have no civilization, no community, and thus no possibility of real communication, and Polyphemus suffers the consequences, left alone to suffer as his assailant escapes.
But Odysseus’ triumph is short-lived: as he and his men escape the cave, Odysseus infamously reveals his name to Polyphemus, who, unbeknownst to Odysseus, is a son of Poseidon. Odysseus and his men, separated from home by the sea, now have the sea-god set against them, determined to prohibit Odysseus’ homecoming at all costs. (In the film, Odysseus simply shoots an arrow at the Cyclops after he and his men escape, acting more out of rashness and anger than pride.)
The scene is one of the most important in the poem, as it shows the complexity of Odysseus—both his virtue and his vice, his cunning and his pride, his ability to save his men and his need for glory that ultimately dooms them. Though Nolan’s version, which is visually and aurally stunning, excludes the dialogue that most famously displays Odysseus’ wit and genius, it too holds a central place in the film’s thematic matrix. Like in the poem, Odysseus expects the Cyclops to obey Zeus’ law, even reassuring Eurylochus of as much. But then he quickly suffers the consequences of his own naiveté and of the Cyclops’ uncivility, watching the monster eat his men and imprison them in his cave. The Cyclops represents the monstrous face of inhospitality and uncivility: he disregards—or perhaps has never even heard of—Zeus’ law and kills his guests rather than welcoming them.
At this point in the film, the audience feels sorry for Odysseus and his men, whose innocent search for food leads to their imprisonment and (for many of them) their death. But by the end of the film, the line between Odysseus and the Cyclops has become blurred: the face of inhospitality and uncivility is no longer the Cyclops but Odysseus, mastermind of the Trojan horse. Of course, the two are not exactly parallel: the Cyclopes are uncivilized tout court, having no language and society to begin with; Odysseus, on the other hand, represents a de-civilizing force, contributing to the demise of civilization and its reversion to the kind of lawless, isolated, and illiterate existence of the Cyclopes.
Is there basis in Homer for this claim? Not obviously, as Homer’s Odysseus never registers the kind of regret we see in Nolan’s. At the very least, Nolan aims to develop the theme of xenia in Homer and suggest how one might reasonably see Odysseus not only as the victim of lawlessness but also as its perpetrator. But there may also be some subtle precedent for this view in Homer. In Book VIII, as Odysseus hears the tale of the Trojan horse recounted by the Phaeacian bard Demodocus, he weeps, and the poet offers a remarkable simile:
As a woman weeps, lying over the body
of her dear husband, who fell fighting for her city and people
as he tried to beat off the pitiless day from city and children;
she sees him dying and gasping for breath, and winding her body
about him she cries high and shrill, while the men behind her,
hitting her with their spear butts on the back and the shoulders,
force her up and lead her away into slavery, to have
hard work and sorrow, and her cheeks are wracked with pitiful weeping.
Such were the pitiful tears Odysseus shed from under
his brows . . . (VIII.523-532, trans. Lattimore).
Homer compares Odysseus to a woman weeping over the body of her husband, beset by invaders seeking to lead her into slavery. In other words, Homer compares Odysseus to his own victims, to the many women who mourned their husbands due to his own devising, due to the violence which his gift engendered. It is no wonder that a later writer such as Euripides would focus less on the heroism of Odysseus than on the suffering of the Trojan women and children, and Nolan picks up where Euripides left off. For example, in The Trojan Women, Euripides’ Hecuba, the erstwhile queen of Troy now enslaved to Odysseus, maligns Odysseus as “a foul man of trickery, / an enemy of justice, a lawless monster / who turns everything inside out / and then back again / with his double tongue, / transforming men to hatred of what they once held dear” (283-89, trans. Morwood). Does Homer want his audience to reach such a conclusion? Is Odysseus beginning to realize as much? The text does not allow us to say so definitively, but it nonetheless makes suggestions in this direction which Nolan brings from the margins of the narrative to the center.
We can also consider the case of the Phaeacians, whom Nolan excludes from the film for the sake of narrative facility, but at the expense of thematic depth. After miserable encounters with various transgressors of divine law, Odysseus finally washes up on the shores of Scheria, the island home of the Phaeacians. Unlike the aforementioned characters, the Phaeacians welcome Odysseus, shelter him, and ferry him home to Ithaca. In a story full of characters who scorn the laws of xenia, the Phaeacians are the very symbol of xenia itself, famed for their unique hospitality to strangers such as Odysseus.
What is their reward for the mercy they show Odysseus? Poseidon, still intent to avenge his son, destroys them, turning their ship into stone and erecting mountains around the island so they can no longer welcome strangers. With the destruction of the Phaeacians, we see that Odysseus’ failures have civilization-altering consequences.
Of course, in Homer it is just the demise of one civilization. But the status of this civilization, as one uniquely built on hospitality and generosity, makes it stand out in the narrative, however small in size it may be. Again, Nolan brings these suggestions from the margins of the text to the center. Homer’s Odysseus returns home, exacts vengeance on the suitors, and ends the story at peace, learning nothing of the Phaeacians’ doom. Nolan’s Odysseus is not quite as fortunate; he must struggle with the burden of knowledge, of the knowledge that his actions have the strength to undo a civilization. Though there are many asymmetries between Nolan and Homer, some more serious than others, the film ultimately offers a valuable adaptation of Homer insofar as it brings these uniquely suggestive moments of the poem into the center of the narrative.
Still, Nolan’s depiction of Odysseus leaves much to be desired. Nolan adds the interesting and valuable layer of penitence to Odysseus, but simultaneously dilutes the character. Odysseus’ wit and genius are indicated throughout the film, but never shown. His pride, so central to the narrative of Homer’s Odyssey, appears only once, in Odysseus’ insistence that he will be the first to survive the Siren song. This leads to one of the most memorable scenes in the film, brilliantly weaving together Odysseus’ pride and remorse, and leaves the audience wishing that this side of Odysseus’ character were developed more thoroughly. But at its best, with his portrait of Odysseus, Nolan takes elements that are strongly present in authors such as Euripides and Dante, latches upon marginal suggestions in Homer himself, and synthesizes them into a unique presentation of Odysseus that will challenge and stimulate twenty-first century audiences.
Oppenheimer, The American Prometheus
Perhaps the most important companion-text for Nolan’s Odyssey is neither Dante nor Homer, but Nolan’s previous film, Oppenheimer (2023), which likewise tells the story of a brilliant man facing the world-destroying consequences of his invention. Oppenheimer, the “American Prometheus,” sees the atomic bomb as Odysseus sees the Trojan horse: an ingenious piece of technology that ends a horrible war, but at the cost of humanity and civilization, ushering in the end of an old world that can never exist again and the beginning of a new world that can only live on the brink of its own destruction.
Perhaps the greatest scene in Oppenheimer is the final one, featuring the conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein by the pond at Princeton. Earlier in the film, Oppenheimer had come to Einstein with the troubling possibility that the detonation of a nuclear bomb might set off a chain reaction that would ignite the earth’s atmosphere and destroy the whole world. We had observed this second conversation from afar a few times in the movie, but only now discover what was actually said:
Oppenheimer: Albert, when I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world.
Einstein: I remember it well. What of it?
Oppenheimer: I believe we did.
The scene cannot be adequately described in mere words. The expression of Einstein’s face, the regretful, terrified eyes of Oppenheimer, the swell of Ludwig Göransson’s score: all contribute to a uniquely memorable scene that leaves the audience in the same dreadful position as Oppenheimer. The scene also closely parallels Odysseus’ confession to Penelope in Odyssey, both thematically and narratively: in the end, Odysseus and Oppenheimer can equally confess, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
With Odyssey, Nolan explores how the human proclivity for destruction goes deeper than the technologies of modern warfare. By turning from the recent memories of World War II to the distant memories of the Trojan War, Nolan explores how the same tragedy of Oppenheimer lies at the roots of history, civilization, and culture—in other words, how the Trojan horse represents not just one crime among many but a kind of original sin. Odysseus and Oppenheimer end their respective films in a similar position, fully conscious of what the world has become but powerless to change it.
The final scene of Oppenheimer also compares well with the final scene of Odyssey. After slaughtering the suitors, Odysseus finally reunites with Penelope and has the opportunity to retake his throne twenty years after he left it. Unlike in the poem, he declines this opportunity, sending himself into exile and leaving Telemachus (who has not exactly shown his fitness to rule) as king of Ithaca. Herein lies Odysseus’ heroism for Nolan, not that he ends the war or destroys the suitors, but that he attains self-knowledge, recognizing his complicity in the fall of Greek civilization—“our age of bronze is collapsing,” he says—and sailing West to honor his fallen men.
The ending is also far more ambiguous than that of Oppenheimer, even bordering on the incoherent. In one sense, The Odyssey ends optimistically: the music becomes more hopeful, the colors brighten—Homer’s wine-dark sea finally becomes blue—and Damon delivers his final lines with a tone of hope and expectation. But the content of Odysseus’ speech indicates something quite different. Odysseus confirms Penelope’s fear at the beginning of the film: Greek civilization is collapsing, with “centuries of darkness to follow,” and in the future people will not even be able to write. Though civilization will rise again, they will forget the mistakes of the Trojan War and become doomed to repeat them.
With these prophetic words, Odysseus looks forward directly to the modern world of Oppenheimer, a world that clearly remains with Nolan as he turns to the oldest story in the Western canon. This convergence with Oppenheimer accounts for both the great strength and great weakness of the film: strength insofar as it completes a narrative circle connecting antiquity and modernity, weakness insofar as it makes Odysseus more like Nolan’s other guilt-ridden protagonists than Homer’s “man of many ways.” But Nolan’s film is an adaptation, not a translation, and it seeks not only to open up the world of Greek antiquity to a modern audience but to say something about modernity itself. By connecting Odysseus and Oppenheimer, it succeeds in doing so.
Simone Weil
In 1940, with her own civilization on the brink of self-destruction, Simone Weil penned an essay entitled “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”:
The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors.
In his adaptation of the Odyssey, Nolan occupies a position similar to that of Weil, looking out from the modern world into the oldest story in the Western canon and seeing its enduring truth, “today as yesterday, at the very center of human history.” For Weil, focusing on the Iliad rather than the Odyssey, this truth is the all-consuming power of force, which turns persons into things; for Nolan, it is the destructiveness of inhospitality, symbolized by the Trojan horse, the fraudulent gift that destroys not just a city but the bonds of fellowship that unite human society. Like Weil, Nolan sees the circularity of this truth: the ur-historical crime is the modern crime, and Homer is “the purest and the loveliest of mirrors.”
Weil’s essay ends with a similarly foreboding tone as Nolan’s Odyssey, though without the strange ambiguity of the latter: “Perhaps [the peoples of Europe] will yet rediscover the epic genius, when they learn that there is no refuge from fate, learn not to admire force, not to hate the enemy, nor to scorn the unfortunate. How soon this will happen is another question.” Weil wrote these words mere months after Hitler invaded Poland.
But there is some ambiguity in Weil’s essay because, despite its haunting ending, she does see signs of break with the cycle of violence. The principal of these signs is Patroclus, the only one in the Iliad who can exercise the “truly heartbreaking exertion of the powers of generosity.” Weil sees “courage and love,” “justice and love” shining through the darkness of the Iliad, and even points to the “tradition of hospitality” as one of these signs of love. There are few of these, but they are sufficiently powerful: “These moments of grace are rare in the Iliad, but they are enough to make us feel with sharp regret what it is that violence has killed and will kill again.”
Weil also considers a world that Nolan does not, either in Odyssey or in his other films: that of the Gospels, which are “the last marvelous expression of the Greek genius”:
Here the Greek spirit reveals itself not only in the injunction given mankind to seek above all other goods, “the kingdom and justice of our Heavenly Father,” but also in the fact that human suffering is laid bare, and we see it in a being who is at once divine and human. The accounts of the Passion show that a divine spirit, incarnate, is changed by misfortune, trembles before suffering and death, feels itself, in the depths of its agony, to be cut off from man and God.
In the Gospels, this “being who is at once divine and human” undergoes what Homer reveals as “the common human lot.”
Weil’s reflections on the Gospel are brief and suggestive, as she chooses not to stage a full encounter between Greek literature and Christianity. But the suggestion is enough to point, however faintly, to the one thing—or the one person—who brings salvation from the cycles of human history, unveiled as the history of deception, violence, and destruction.
If Nolan’s Odyssey is a film about original sin, about the primordial violation of divine law that corrupts all human society, then it is only a film about one side of original sin, which is essentially a two-sided reality: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor 15:22). The Odyssey is a film about the Adamic—now, the Odyssean—side of original sin, leaving unspoken—but not necessarily foreclosed—the possibility of its second, Christological side. Having recognized his complicity in civilization’s collapse, Odysseus can only acknowledge his powerlessness to restore civilization to its original justice and peace, being but a man and no god, as he repeatedly confesses.
Nolan’s adaptation may not be perfect, but it succeeds in raising the question of the foundations and origins of civilization, and of the crime that fractures these foundations. Nolan leaves his audience with an acute awareness of the destructiveness of human transgression and the impossibility of a purely human salvation.
