The Odyssey leaves a trace of disappointment when one goes in with the expectation of being stung by a poison whose effects will last longer. It is the work of a master who knows his medium — an intellectual mastery of storytelling that keeps you engaged, shifts tempo deftly, and ties witty loose ends together for key plot points. It is a film that won’t leave the engaged, curious viewer without deserved fun. And yet, the departure from the original plot, and the burden of making a commentary on civilizational fall, mean that what we get is not a lasting kick to our worlds of thought.
The choice of putting Xenia, or Zeus’ law, as the central plank on which the story stands does not come off convincingly. It makes the ending of an otherwise good story fall away from the crescendo it had built so well. Odysseus’ lament about his acts in the war is a typically modern, individualistic, analytical perspective — a defining feature of modern literature, a point of departure from the classics — and it ruins the story.
The Odyssey, a story as I know, is deeply concerned with consequence, with hubris, with men who bring ruin on themselves and others. But that weight is of fate and human actions that push and pull the fate, not confessional. The Odysseus I thought was not with individualized guilt over a choice he alone made; he is caught in a web of obligation, fate, the gods' justice, and his own choices. What we get instead is therapeutic guilt — private, interior, resolved or unresolved within one man's head.
The modern burden of providing common, individualistic foundations for every person means we can no longer really explain heroic acts. We cannot explain why some individuals choose to lead great numbers of others into apparently tragic outcomes. The ever-ticking burden of rationality we have chosen to bear means we try to fit acts that cannot be explained by it into the frame of guilt. Our modern storytellers assume that actors in violence will always arrive at a point where they see the ultimate harm they have unleashed, and that they will be forever uneasy, haunted by what has transpired through their choices.
But what if that is not the case? What if individuals who play a great or small part in violence end up holding a conviction — or whatever their personal story may be — in which there is no unease at all? If life lacks any central meaning beyond what we choose to make of it as our own story, then there is no basis for assuming that violence, or the violation of a moral code that allows for peaceful, mutually beneficial existence, must lead to painful individual reckoning.
There are a few among us who can use others as instruments of their individual choices — their private dreams of constructing or breaking the world (often the two go together) — without necessarily any explicit recognition that this is what they are doing. If we are under their spell, we call it charisma. If we watch it from outside, we might call it demagoguery.
How, then, should we portray and understand extraordinary individuals — especially those who lead large numbers of people down paths with significant consequences, for themselves and for others? One way is to treat them simply as accidents, which lets us preserve the banality and ordinariness of life as such. Another is to weave epics around them, accentuating their gifts, turning them into a metaphor we can spend our lives chasing. A third way is to put the individualist prism on them — to search for points of moral conflict where they made a choice and weighed what they did not choose.
The second and third approaches are what separate the classics from modern storytelling. Stories create metaphors, visions, which are then chased by those hypnotized by them. What do we make, then, of a story that turns a human being into a metaphor for someone torn between moral choices, forced to choose between several bad ends? Or is that itself a symptom of our own time — an age in which all beliefs are slowly eroding, and we are forced to explain everything as a conscious choice between this and that, unwilling to allow for the possibility that many of us are not burdened by any consistent moral frame at all, but are simply fluid, choosing whatever lets us be at peace?
I find Odysseus’ lament rather weak, and intellectually contradictory besides. A war stratagem is not a gift, and does not qualify as a violation of Zeus’ law. I would rather see Odysseus as a possessed man of uncanny cunning — a kind of life I wish I could live. I had hoped that something of the spirit of Tennyson’s Ulysses, if not its words, would surface somewhere in the film. What we get instead is a “woke” hero who must live in antiquity while answering contemporary questions and moral puzzles — who must retain his eccentricity and superior ability, yet also perform an elaborate moral guilt, as though this were a condition imposed by the intellectual vanguard of modernity upon us. The issue is not sadness itself — that is something most of us are bound to encounter. The issue is the placing of moral sadness above the pull of homecoming — even when homecoming itself is dampened by the urge to break its shackles, to be free again, and to long for home again and again.
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