I was apprehensive when I went to see Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey last week. Not because I’m one of those classical scholars who obsesses over errors and omissions in adaptations of ancient texts. Even in antiquity, the stories of the Trojan war and Odysseus’ homecoming were in constant flux as different performers — called “rhapsodes” — adapted and shaped the material. No, I was nervous because earlier this year I published The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate. I don’t believe for a second that Nolan is sympathetic to white nationalist politics, but more than a few blockbusters about ancient Greece and Rome — think Gladiator and 300 — have been embraced by the far right. And Nolan’s own Dark Knight trilogy is already a favorite in the neofascist circles I research, where Batman, like Maximus in Gladiator, provides what they see as a model for the fanatically principled man living in a society whose irredeemable corruption justifies any and all vigilante actions that man might undertake in the name of his principles. Nolan and Gladiator’s director Ridley Scott have both, with varying degrees of explicitness, rejected such interpretations of their films but it is a truism that artists can’t control what meanings their creations will take on.
The white nationalists I study love Homer’s Odyssey for what they believe it expresses about the nature of foreigners and about women who live independently of men. To them, the Odyssey is a story about a heroic man who survives a world full of hostile monsters and witches who will exploit, enslave, and kill you if you don’t exploit, enslave, or kill them first. And Odysseus not only survives this world, but makes his way back to his palace, where he violently purges his homeland of unwelcome outsiders and takes his rightful place on the throne. It’s a story that lends itself to adoption by xenophobes seeking to glorify violence against outsiders. And this way of understanding it is not unique to contemporary extremists: it’s been the dominant way of understanding the Odyssey for many centuries. For example, early European colonizers during the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries compared the indigenous people of North America to the man-eating cyclops in order to portray them as monstrous and, therefore, deserving of conquest. I didn’t have any reason to expect that Nolan would try to tell the story in this way, but I also knew that casting Black actors to play Helen, Clytemnestra, Athena, and the rhapsode who opens the film wouldn’t, in itself, be enough to keep this Odyssey from conforming to that traditional pattern.
So, I give Nolan credit for trying very hard (and following in the footsteps of the ancient rhapsodes) to tell a different story about Odysseus. Nolan’s Odysseus comes to be haunted by his experience at Troy: the violence his trick of the Trojan Horse occasioned — I confess I gasped when it was revealed why Athena appears to Odysseus in the form she does — and the suffering and deaths of the men he was supposed to lead home. When Calypso releases Odysseus, she tells him to give up trying to be the kind of hero he wishes that he was: “Give up the fight, give up control.” The form of heroism you’ve cultivated, she seems to say, is bad. It’s destroying your civilization, and it’s destroying you. This is the opposite of what the white nationalists I study want to see in Odysseus. It’s a message we need to hear in a society where the toll of maladaptive, violent masculinity is increasingly obvious, whether we’re talking about acts of mass murder or the psychic harm to boys who grow up in a culture where the Secretary of Defense mandates testosterone testing in the military while a man who boasts about enacting sexual violence on women can be elected President (twice).
However, to paint Odysseus in this light, Nolan had to alter his source material. This is not, in itself, a criticism. It’s what the ancient rhapsodes did. Nolan does minimize the extent to which, in the poem, Odysseus’ greed (and not, as in the movie, a more noble desire to find food for his men) subjects his crew to suffering and death throughout their journey, most notably in the Cyclops’ cave and on Circe’s island. I can excuse this, because Nolan’s Odysseus comes to recognize his failures as a leader. This moral arc is central to Odysseus’ evolution in Nolan’s film, even as that moral arc requires further modification of Homeric material. Odysseus repents his deception of Sinon, a character who appears nowhere in Homeric epic (he first appears in Virgil’s Aeneid) and who, unlike in Nolan’s version, is usually viewed as a treacherous villain, suffering for eternity, for example, in Dante’s Inferno as the embodiment of fraud. And the film ends with Odysseus setting off to “the unknown West” to honor the men whose lives he failed to save, whereas in Homer’s epic this journey is undertaken more simply — and self-interestedly — to appease the anger of Poseidon, the god who has inflicted so much suffering on the hero of the poem.
I like the idea of Nolan’s Odysseus. I believe in the power of repentance. I believe that men can become better fathers and husbands and friends by confronting their trauma and recognizing that the forms of masculinity we are taught to admire do not, in fact, serve us or those we claim to love very well in the contemporary world. It’s something I’m working on in my own life. But it’s very hard to get Homer’s Odyssey to tell this story. Nolan may be a modern day rhapsode, adapting the stories of the Trojan Wars to convey a message he believes his audience needs to hear, but ultimately, he’s constrained in the same way those ancient performers were. They could decide what to emphasize and what to minimize. They could incorporate mythologies local to their performance venue into the grand epic. They could shape their audience’s understanding of scenes through the artful development of similes. But there was a limit to how much they could change. There were no versions of the Trojan war in which Troy did not fall. There were no versions of the Odyssey in which Odysseus fails to reach Ithaca. Even to suggest it is absurd: it wouldn’t be the Odyssey if the hero drowned or wasted away on Calypso’s island. And to be the Odyssey, it’s not enough for Odysseus to make it home. He also has to murder the suitors who have occupied his house in his absence. And it’s this inevitable, inescapable violence — so dear to far right interpreters of the poem — that sinks Nolan’s vision of a traumatized, repentant Odysseus.
You can feel that Odysseus slipping away from the film as soon as he arrives at Ithaca. The slave Eumaeus asks whether Odysseus will take revenge on the suitors. Pausing to let the camera frame his profile ominously in a doorway, Odysseus replies in traditional heroic fashion that he will. And the feat of prowess by which Odysseus reveals his identity — and gives himself a weapon with which to exact his revenge — is taken right out of the playbook of a hypermasculine warrior: stringing a bow that no one else is strong enough to string and shooting an arrow with more precision than anyone else can muster. The film even emphasizes that this feat is characteristic of Odysseus before the transformation Nolan asks us to believe he has undergone, showing a flashback of a strutting Odysseus achieving these feats before a cheering crowd of men and — most crucially for idealizing portraits of violent masculinity — an admiring Penelope. And as Odysseus cuts down the suitors one by one — made even more “heroic” in Nolan’s portrayal by the director’s decision to have Odysseus fight them single handedly rather than, as in the poem, aided in combat by Telemachus and Athena herself — some of the suitors decide to kneel before him rather than be killed. This is Nolan falling into the trap of idealizing Odysseus: in the film he spares them but in the poem he shows no mercy. And Nolan also, conveniently for his portrait, leaves out the scene where Odysseus instructs Telemachus to murder the enslaved women who, in Odysseus’ absence, had done nothing worse than do what women have always done when men’s wars leave their societies in chaos: whatever they need to do to survive. The impression given as Odysseus looks around the great hall at the suitors kneeling before him amid the gore of their slain colleagues is unmistakable: the king has returned and restored himself to his rightful position by righteous violence. This is a long way from the Odysseus Calypso sent home, lying powerless on a shoddy raft as the waves wash over him. It looks a lot more like the Odysseus that white nationalists celebrate.
It’s true, the suitors abused the hospitality of Penelope and Telemachus. It’s true, they violated “the laws of Zeus,” as the movie continuously reminds us. But Nolan very perceptively understands, and makes us see, that any claim that the suitors “deserve” to die at Odysseus’ hand must be tempered by a recognition of the hypocrisy of such a claim, given that the Greeks, and Odysseus in particular, were themselves guilty of much more egregious violations of those same laws of hospitality in Troy. He’s really trying to complicate this story for the present moment. But it’s this contradiction — between Nolan’s emphatic, even innovative, demonstration of this hypocrisy as Odysseus exacts his revenge — that reveals the futility of trying to use Homer’s Odyssey to tell the story Nolan wants to tell. The Homeric Epics are a product of a culture that celebrated violent masculinity, that consigned women to second class status (or worse), that saw foreigners and outsiders as dangerous threats and deserving of enslavement (it’s telling that Nolan’s characters refer to slaves as “servants” throughout the film). Five years ago, I would have written here that these are the values white nationalists want to impose on our societies. In 2026, they are in the process of doing so. The ancient Odyssey doesn’t offer a full-throated endorsement of these values, but nor does it imagine a society based on anything else. Odysseus must make it home, and the outsiders must die. If we want to structure our society around different values, the Odyssey, even in the hands of so visionary a director, won’t be able to provide much guidance for what those values might be without becoming another story entirely. Which might be what the present moment needs.
