The Odyssey-Homer-Part 3

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# Adieu, Odysseus. Enough Already.

Aug. 10, 2026


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By Frank Bruni
Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.
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I don’t minimize what Odysseus went through. Scylla, the Cyclops, the suboptimal bedding and plumbing in the Trojan horse — it’s a lot. But if we’re being honest, there were mercies as well as Furies. He found uncrowded beaches. He didn’t need Orangetheory or Ozempic to stay slim.
And ancient Greece didn’t share modern America’s enervating penchant for taking anything that has been deemed a major cultural event and inflating it until it bursts, chewing on it until it’s mush, critiquing it in so many different media and exploiting it for such diverse purposes that it becomes intrusive and obnoxious, like a scrum of suitors with bad table manners camped out just a few feet from your loom.
If I see or hear one more word about Christopher Nolan’s new version of “The Odyssey,” I’m going to hurl myself into the nearest Charybdis.
I liked the movie fine. The vistas, the vestments, a cast so overloaded with talent that the Oscar winners Charlize Theron and Lupita Nyong’o are reduced to cinematic throw pillows — I’ve spent three hours in much, much worse ways.
But three hours was hardly the end of it. The movie’s blockbuster opening weekend was an open invitation for commentators to commence commentating, intellectuals to initiate intellectualizing, moralists to moralize. The chiming-in was clangorous. The piggybacking was gluttonous. A timeless allegory became a teeming trough.
Which, I guess, is an allegory’s job? It insists on consideration, demands interpretation, means to be mulled along political, psychological and spiritual lines.
But along culinary ones, too? A recent article in Bon Appétit remarked not only on the ick factor of the entrail stew that Circe serves to Odysseus’ shipmates in Nolan’s movie but also on the dubious historical accuracy of that slop. According to the food magazine, Greeks were more likely “roasting goat and sheep” and pairing that protein with “a dense barley-based bread.” I await a chain of “Odyssey”-inspired bakeries: Au Bon Penelope.
Perhaps you didn’t leave “The Odyssey” wondering what kind of chief executive Odysseus would be. That’s OK — Forbes has you covered. The business magazine published an article promising“three key lessons for leaders” in “The Odyssey,” and just in case that wasn’t C-suite tutorial enough, Forbes subsequently examinedwhat the movie “teaches leaders about great storytelling.” Clearly, Homer’s epic poem, the source for Nolan’s movie, belongs not in the literature section of the bookstore but on the self-help shelves, possibly retitled “How to Win Friends and Influence Athena,” “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Ithacans” or “Who Moved My Feta?”
I tip my hat to the journalism just mentioned; it’s enterprising and entertaining. But when you add it to the travel-related articles (from Forbes, Reuters, Variety) about Favignana, the Sicilian island that played Ithaca in “The Odyssey,” and then throw in think pieces about the movie’s meditation on family, faith, duty, defiance, loyalty, treachery, courage and cowardice, you wind up with oceans of material that could take, I don’t know, 20 years to navigate. Processing Nolan’s “Odyssey” is its own odyssey.

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On one hand, I’m delighted by any movie, any musician, any sporting event with an appeal broad enough that, for a short while, a true mix of people who usually travel in discrete tribes and speak in specific dialects discover a common interest and a shared vocabulary. This has been a summer of such nexus: the championship run of the New York Knicks, the World Cup, Odysseus in IMAX.
But the digital age has a way of turning excitement to exhaustion, of reducing everything to content to be molded in whatever fashion a given messenger or medium desires. I think back to Taylor Swift’s Eras tour and how the magic of it evaporated a bit with every new exegesis on its significance. Or how every other Super Bowl must generate a dozen subplots and serve as a social mirror.
And the memes. Always the memes. They began even before “The Odyssey” hit theaters in mid-July, and they were indisputably clever. One smart-aleck strand of social media mischief made fun of the IMAX ideal for “Odyssey” viewing by showing people using, say, a smartphone instead. The scene in which Matt Damon, as Odysseus, is lashed to a wooden pole and cries out in agony as he hears the Sirens sing yielded so many jokes that there were separate reflections on that bounty.
And here I am, reflecting on that. Pundit, heal thyself.
I don’t have a solution. The internet’s gonna internet, burying us in lotus leaves of distraction; we have to summon the individual will to stop munching on them. I now pledge to do just that. Having shamefully bent “The Odyssey” to my own ends, I’ll now leave Odysseus to his Ithaca and his indolence.

# ‘The Odyssey’ Gives Us the Hero We Deserve

July 26, 2026


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By B.D. McClay
B.D. McClay is a critic and essayist.
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Some people are going to tell you that the problem with Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is that it’s about modern people, not ancient people. Not me. It is about modern people, but so is everything else made by modern people. If you want to encounter the ancient world, you have to open a book. (Homer is available in several translations; I like Richmond Lattimore’s.)
Other people are going to tell you that the problem with Mr. Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is that he’s using an ancient text to revisit his own preoccupations: heroism, guilt, memory and the nature of time. Not me. I like an artist who’s not afraid to keep gnawing at the same bone.
No, for me the problem with Mr. Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is something else. It’s Odysseus.
To refresh briefly for those who don’t remember the story and haven’t seen the movie: Homer’s two epic poems, the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” follow the story of the Trojan War, when the abduction of Helen, the wife of Menelaus, triggers a huge conflict. The Greeks lay siege to Troy for 10 years, with great losses on both sides, and finally achieve victory when Odysseus tricks the Trojans into bringing a horse full of soldiers into the city. Odysseus, sailing home in victory, then angers Poseidon, the god of the sea, delaying his homecoming by another decade. When he finally makes it back, he discovers his home is full of suitors courting his wife, Penelope, and plotting the demise of their son, Telemachus. Penelope has cleverly kept the suitors at bay through trickery, but she’s been betrayed by some of her servants and cannot hold out much longer.
One thing that may strike contemporary readers of Homer is that Odysseus is one of a handful of epic heroes whose motivations actually make sense to us. He doesn’t want to be in Troy; he wants to be home. He is devious and clever without being an out-and-out scoundrel, and he’s generally motivated by curiosity and a thirst for knowledge.
In Mr. Nolan’s hands, however, wily Odysseus becomes a different, if still recognizable, type: the halfway hero. He’s a man who in some way fails to be a father, a man who dirties himself in the name of a higher cause but then discovers that the cause wasn’t worth it, a man with the power to change the world but who, in the end, either fails to do so or makes the world worse.
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Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of Mr. Nolan’s previous film, this halfway hero seems protected from self-knowledge, either through culpable naïveté or blinding arrogance. Mr. Nolan’s Odysseus, for instance, is shocked that once he gets the Greeks into Troy, his comrades loot it and kill the inhabitants. He plucks his bow while hunting out of a sense of sportsmanship and, when his ships set sail to go home, he decides not to take provisions from Troy because, he says, they’ve taken enough from the city already.
This is, as mentioned, an Odysseus for modern people, and modern people struggle with the idea of true heroes. A figure who identifies what needs to be done and then does it without tremendous inner conflict? What’s the point of that? Such a person will make most modern audiences feel only like failures. Perhaps contemporary viewers don’t trust the idea of a sharp, decisive leader, or perhaps the notion of doing something without feeling bad about it seems inherently villainous to them. In contemporary politics, Americans tend to alternate between people who tell us nothing can be done and people who swear everything can be done, both of which disappoint in their own ways. So Mr. Nolan’s Odysseus, who struggles after doing something that turns out to be the wrong thing, feels like a particularly compelling figure.
In stories, we seem to be drawn to these halfway heroes: people who sort of know what to do but have a lot of trouble doing it and whose eventual moment of personal resolution somehow fixes everything in the end. In its least artful forms, this turns art into an ersatz therapy session in which you forgive yourself for your failures — and then you save the world.
Mr. Nolan is more artful than that. His heroes are often exceptional men who cause problems, then agonize over how to make amends. The fact that they are men is no accident. Their failures at both masculinity and intimacy are essential to understanding them. They aren’t good men, in the sense of upstanding members of the community who work toward building something better. And they aren’t bad men, which is to say violent parasites. Instead, they’re halfway heroes, charismatic but hollow people who deem love as something best shown by their absence because their presence proves to be too dangerous.
The problem that shapes “The Odyssey” is what has happened in the neglected homes while the men have been away. The suitors who pester Penelope to marry one of them are lesser men than Odysseus, and in the absence of men like Odysseus, no one has taught them how to behave. The generation they represent has gone astray, and there’s no fixing it.
It isn’t giving too much away about the movie to say that, much like Mr. Nolan’s interpretation of Batman, and even his Oppenheimer, his Odysseus decides to become a sin eater, someone who atones for the misdeeds of others — seeking not only to rectify the disorder that has overcome his home but also to make amends for the entire Trojan War. His solution to the disastrous generation that lies between his own and his son’s is the same as in the poem: Odysseus kills the suitors. They are dangerously weak men, not strong enough to rule or to exhibit self-control but strong enough to terrorize the elderly, the blind, women and children. In the film, Odysseus tries to keep his son’s hands clean of blood, but he fails, so the project of creating a genuinely innocent new generation is over before it’s started. But having taken all this violence onto himself, Odysseus can attempt to purify his home simply by retreating and leaving it again.
In real life, outside the movies, we are certainly presented with many examples of dangerously weak men, much like the suitors: men whose conception of being a man begins and ends with a sense of being able to humiliate others, men who live off the work of others while contributing nothing, men who are manipulative cowards who love to tell tales of their own virtue. When we try to imagine alternatives to these men, we come up with the halfway hero — someone who can’t prevent a crisis but will try mightily to fix the mess he made. As one of Mr. Nolan’s characters in a different film said, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain” — an epigram that applies equally to Batman, Oppenheimer and Odysseus.
It’s not Mr. Nolan’s job as an artist to give us a solution to these dilemmas, and in some ways, I’m glad that in “The Odyssey” he doesn’t really try. Still, I watched the ending of his “Odyssey” with a kind of resignation. Maybe, to riff on another well-known linefrom one of Mr. Nolan’s movies — “not the hero we deserved, but the hero we needed” — halfway heroes seem to be the heroes we want, because certainly they’re the ones we think we need right now. But we could deserve another kind of hero entirely.

EZRA KLEIN

# Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse

Aug. 2, 2026


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By Ezra Klein
Opinion Columnist
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Elon Musk did not understand Christopher Nolan’s "The Odyssey"
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‘The Odyssey’ is the political movie of the decade.CreditCredit...The New York Times

### Christopher Nolan Stared Into Elon Musk’s Soul

“The Odyssey” is the political movie of the decade.
I’ll admit I’m a little late weighing in on “The Odyssey.” Chalk it up to having young kids. I don’t make it to the movies much. But what a trick its director, Christopher Nolan, has pulled off. Elon Musk did not understand what this movie was. But this movie understands what Musk is. It understands who we are becoming and who we have become, and it points a way out.
Tricks are central to “The Odyssey.” In myth, Odysseus is a trickster. He is described, in the first line of the story, as the man of many ways or of many wiles or of many turns. He is, depending on the translator, an ingenious man, a cunning man, a complicated man. He is a man of appetites and contradictions, a man who wants nothing more than to go home but keeps choosing to stay abroad, a man who yearns for his wife but cannot stop bedding goddesses. Odysseus is never one thing; he is always many things.
Matt Damon is no trickster. I thought he was going to be the problem with Nolan’s “Odyssey.” Amid the right-wing outcry over the casting of Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page, it was Damon’s casting as Odysseus that I couldn’t reconcile with “The Odyssey.” Damon often seems to me like a man of a single way, a man who wakes up early and keeps to a clean diet and rarely has more than one glass of wine before bed. That’s not Odysseus.
But Nolan wasn’t looking for a trickster. His Odysseus is something else. That, you can say, was Nolan’s first trick.
I want to stop here and say a bit about tricksters, because I have spent the past few years quietly obsessed with the archetype. The trickster is Loki in Norse mythology, Eshu in Yoruban stories, Coyote or Raven in Native American tales, Maui in Polynesia and Hermes and Odysseus among the ancient Greeks.
The function of the trickster, writes Lewis Hyde in his wonderful book “Trickster Makes This World,” is “to uncover and disrupt the very things that a culture depends on.” The trickster dances across customs and taboos, says what may not be said, does what should not be done. The trickster injects disorder into order, renders visible what is ordinarily hidden. The trickster causes the damage that makes growth possible. But a happy ending is never guaranteed. The trickster can be regenerative or ruinous. Coyote brings fire; Raven brings the sun; Loki brings Ragnarok.
Hyde’s argument is that tricksters are both necessary and dangerous. They represent a tension every society must grapple with. A culture that cannot meet disruption with creativity cannot survive change. A culture that cannot protect its core values will be consumed by corruption. Too much order leads to paralysis; too much chaos invites collapse.
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We are living in an age of chaos. We have been living in an age of tricksters. Musk, President Trump, Tucker Carlson, Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes — the grammar of the modern right is tricksy. What is serious, and what is not? What is a provocation, and what is a promise? Why did they say that, and how did they get away with it? I am not saying these men are only tricksters. They are not the culture makers Hyde prefers to focus on. But I am saying that the dominant personalities of the age have gathered power by bulldozing customs and taboos, by saying what may not be said, by doing what should not be done.
Hyde said that Americans love a trickster “because he embodies things that are actually true about America but cannot be openly declared.” That might have been true in 1998, when Hyde published his book. And I can see the argument that American institutions and mores ossified in the years since — that our society had become too rulebound and bureaucratized, that too much had become unsayable, that there was too little openness to transgression and invention.

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But today there is little that may no longer be said. The ideas and morals upon which the best of our culture was built have been disrupted and desecrated. The question now is whether that disruption can be met with creativity and renewal.
This is the central question of Nolan’s “Odyssey.” This “Odyssey” ostensibly hinges on Zeus’ law: Treat the beggar and the stranger as you would want to be treated. But as a horde of classicists have pointed out, that is not the law of Zeus, which is narrower: It demands hospitality toward the guest or the stranger, recognizing that anyone could be a god in disguise. It is not an ethic of compassion or even reciprocity.
And here we find Nolan’s central trick: Nolan has smuggled the core of Judeo-Christian ethics into “The Odyssey.” Zeus’ law, in Nolan’s “Odyssey,” echoes Leviticus 19:34: “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” It echoes Rabbi Hillel, who said: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.” It echoes Matthew 7:12, when Jesus says, “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the law and the prophets.”
Such an ethic is demanding. Few of us live up to it. But the problem with adherents of the modern right is not just that they don’t live up to it; the issue is that they detest it. To treat the foreigner residing among us as well as we treat our native-born is derided as suicidal empathy. The Trump administration glorifies cruelty toward the immigrant, the stranger, the weak and the poor. It takes money from Medicaid to cut taxes for the rich. It threatens the destruction of whole civilizations.
The modern right is built on the logic of tribute and dominance. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Stephen Miller, a top White House adviser, told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
But weren’t those iron laws replaced by the Golden Rule? When Odysseus concocts the trick of the Trojan horse, taking advantage of Troy’s veneration of the same gods he worships to sack the city and make its streets run red with blood, is he a hero or a villain? Is it a trick or a crime? To Homer, he was a hero. To Nolan, he is a soul in need of redemption. Between Homer’s time and ours came a revolution in civilizational values, an upending of what civilization even means. Which side of that divide are we on?
The modern right believes that Western civilization has lost the appetite for strength and dominance and hierarchy that built it. There is a reason a theorist like Bronze Age Pervert has become required reading for young Trumpists. There is a reason right-wing intellectuals like Curtis Yarvin and Michael Anton have mused about the need for an American Caesar. There is a reason the Trump administration is obsessed with Roman-style architecture. It is not an accident that they keep circling this era, both intellectually and aesthetically.
A recent exchange Musk had on X reveals how far this thinking has gone. A user told Musk it was time to “wise up” and abandon classical liberalism, because “universal suffrage leads to universal suffering.” His reply: “I have wised up.”
Helen of Troy, in Nolan’s “Odyssey,” is just an excuse for a war launched to dominate routes of trade. It’s a telling choice during an administration that is crashing into the global order in pursuit of more dominance over trade flows.
In the cry of protest by the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, against this regime, he also reached back to Greece to describe what he saw happening: “The strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must. And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.”
When Nolan’s Odysseus recalls the sacking of Troy, he blanches at the memory of 10 years of rage pouring into a city in a single night. It was hard for me not to think, then, of the pent-up rage that Hamas poured into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and that Israel has poured into Gaza a hundredfold in the years since. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, now describes Israel’s future as “Athens and super-Sparta.”
Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli-born historian who wrote “Sapiens,” sees the diminishment this foretells clearly. “A lot of the thinking, and also the practice, about what it means to have freedom of thought, what it means to be a powerless minority, was done by Jewish thinkers,” he told me. He added:

> For 2,000 years, Jews all over the world saw studying and learning as the highest spiritual activity. After 2,000 years, you ask them: What have you learned? You have studied for 2,000 years. What have you learned?
> And then people like Netanyahu tell you: Oh, we have learned that you need to be a Roman, that you need to be strong, that you need to build legions, that you need to destroy cities. This is the only thing that matters in life.
> It’s a legitimate value system. Rome had its usefulness. But if after 2,000 years, the Jews simply become the Romans, what was the point? Why did you waste 2,000 years, then? You could have just become Roman back then.

This is Nolan’s finest trick: to make one of our oldest moral rules sound new again. To turn the best of Judeo-Christianity into the law of Zeus, so we can see why it might matter and what it might still have to say to us.
What Odysseus sees, eventually, is that his violations of the moral order have brought ruin to all around him. Agamemnon, the king who launched the war against Troy, is dead, his throat slit by his wife, who never forgave him for sacrificing their daughter for fair winds. Troy is destroyed. Ithaca, Odysseus’ home, is overrun by suitors who seek his wife and land and think nothing of murdering his son in their pursuit. Odysseus and his men were not fighting the barbarians; they were the barbarians. And their actions led to more barbarity.
So, too, has the political movement that rose promising to make Western civilization great again betrayed its inheritance. The world now looks at America and sees us as the barbarians: the country obliterating the global order, the country that takes what it wants and demands tribute from those who cannot resist.
And what the political opposition has to do now is recognize what Nolan recognized: That it is an affirmation of our civilizational values to say that cruelty is a weakness. That only compassion and reciprocity build a durable and decent society. That order is necessary but order without ethics and restraint is perversion or authoritarianism. That there is both beauty and wisdom in the injunction to avoid inflicting on others what we would not see turned against us and in remembering that we were strangers in the land of Egypt, too.
At the end of his book, Hyde considers when the trickster’s tale ends in ruin and when it ends in regeneration. His answer is that devastation comes when you cannot rejoin the worlds. Loki is bound beneath the earth, with poison dripped on him for eternity, and the end of the world is the result. Hermes becomes a connector between our world and the underworld, allowing Persephone, and spring, to return each year. In other words, it is only when severed worlds can be bonded that cultures can rediscover their strength.
I do not want to make this too didactic, so I will just end here: Justice in America has come, repeatedly, when those seeking progress realize that the language of the Torah, of the New Testament and of the Declaration of Independence can be wielded on behalf of a new world. It has been some time since religion, liberalism and patriotism had a comfortable relationship in this country.
But the shape of the modern right has created space to do that work again. Regeneration is hard. It requires seeing old values in new ways. It requires recognizing that a moral inheritance that has collapsed into cliché holds power in an age when it has been debased and forgotten. But it can be done. It needs to be done.
Nolan’s Odysseus is not a trickster. He is a man living in the ruins brought about by tricksters. So, too, are we. This movie, and the reaction to it, is a sign that the age of the trickster is ending.
Now we need those who would remake this world.

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