Tell me, O Muse, of a complicated text. For scholars of antiquity, it has been equal parts bewildering and gratifying to see Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey stir up such charged reactions, from the MAGA meltdown over Nolan’s casting choices, to the massive box office numbers and countless social media posts analyzing and memeifying every aspect of the film, to the critical response from many scholars—the most viral of which was a pan written by my colleague and famed translator Emily Wilson in the London Review of Books.
At the heart of these reactions lies a perennial question: Who gets to determine what a text means, and who it is for? Though obviously more grounded and sophisticated than the far-right crashout over the perceived wokeness of the film, the scholarly critique belies a conservatism of its own.
For centuries, the ownership of these texts has been a political question. The far right’s attachment to antiquity is well-documented, visible in recent years in the Ancient Greek helmets brandished by the insurrectionists storming the capitol on January 6 and in the “classical” liberal education championed by Christopher Rufo and Ron DeSantis, with Ancient Greek literature and philosophy positioned as the enlightened alternative to diversity initiatives and critical race theory. While conservatives outraged about Nolan’s casting decisions are wrong about the whiteness of The Odyssey itself—Troy is in modern day Turkey, and Odysseus plausibly washes up on the shores of North Africa—they are not wrong to associate Ancient Greek texts with whiteness and white supremacy. Classicists like Emily Greenwood, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, and Mathura Umachandran have traced how the methods and practices of classics as a discipline developed during the Enlightenment period as a way to whitewash antiquity and bolster the myth of “Western civilization,” in part in the service of imperial conquest.
Given this historical entanglement, a filmmaker’s choices when adapting a text like The Odyssey are, whether intended as such or not, inevitably political. The many adaptations of the Ancient Greek world that feature all-white casts, for example, serve to reinforce the role these texts play in the white Western cultural imagination. Similarly, the convention that historical adaptations feature posh British accents and formal language further reinforces the place of these texts in the story of Western civilization, suggesting they are properly the purview of those with an Oxbridge education or the equivalent.
Nolan, to his credit, understands all of this, and makes choices in his adaptation of The Odyssey that take seriously the nearly 3,000 years that exist between us and the text. Throughout the film Nolan indicates his interest not just in the poem itself but in what classicists often call “reception”: all the ways it has been read, and what we’ve been told it means, throughout history. Easter eggs abound for scholars and nerds as Nolan draws from Virgil’s Aeneid, Hesiod’s Works and Days, Tennyson’s Ulysses, and even a brief scene with a foreigner speaking modern Greek unintelligible to Odysseus and his men.
Some of Nolan’s decisions inevitably position his film in the tedious churn of the culture wars. It shouldn’t be controversial to cast an objectively stunning actress to play the most beautiful woman in Ancient Greece, but for modern audiences in a deeply racialized world, Nolan’s choice of Lupita Nyong’o is a deliberate provocation to the imagined whiteness of Helen of Troy. More interesting is Sinon, played by Elliot Page, an actor whose transness is not accidental to his portrayal of a character seen as deceitful by the whole world but ultimately described by Matt Damon’s Odysseus as the bravest man he’s ever known.
But the choices Nolan makes in his adaptation go well beyond the politics of representation, peeking behind the curtain of the story itself and ideologies it has served. Nolan is often criticized for his failure to write developed and dynamic female characters, and although The Odyssey doesn’t absolve him of this charge, some of the ways he depicts women as casualties of a world of masculine machination are worth taking seriously.
In Homer’s depiction, Helen is a gifted storyteller, and regretful of the ways Aphrodite imbued her with an all-consuming lust for Paris. Nolan gives us a more abject Helen, with Menelaus mocking her memorialization as the “face that launched a thousand ships,” revealing the scarred face of a pawn used to manufacture consent for a war that is really about trade routes. It is not, I think, anti-feminist for Nolan to refuse Homer’s depiction of women in The Odyssey as brilliant and powerful in order to better capture a historical context where women would have been largely stripped of their agency. Having Nyong’o also play Clytemnestra, Helen’s twin in the film and a woman who ultimately finds a way to wrest back her agency, is a fascinating choice.
But the most interesting and ambitious narrative swing in the film is the incorporation of the Trojan Horse, with Nolan adding the later Roman poet Virgil’s much more critical rendering of Odysseus into Homer’s story. For Nolan, the Trojan Horse is not just an ingenious trick that ends the war, but a perversion of the sacred norms holding civilization together. With the sacking of Troy, Nolan draws a throughline with the theme of xenia—or hospitality—in Homer’s poem, the false gift itself presented as a violation of “Zeus’s law.” In doing so, Nolan asks us to look beyond Odysseus’s familiar reputation as a clever trickster who flirts and fucks to see a man—not unlike the director’s earlier characterization of J. Robert Oppenheimer—haunted by the damage his genius has wrought, afraid to return home and confront just how much his choices have cost him.
Nolan’s Odysseus is also, of course, us—a nation coming to terms with the fact that it cannot return to how it once understood itself because of the violence it has inflicted on the world. It is the story of an empire in decline, a story that resonates with American viewers in the midst of Donald Trump’s second presidency, nearly three years into a live-streamed genocide in Palestine bankrolled by our own government, and during an unprovoked and seemingly unwinnable war in Iran waged in the hope of securing, yes, better trade routes. Nolan’s imagining of the “sea people” as the Greeks returning from war is a startling innovation on scholarly conjecture, with the supposed heroes confronting the reality that they might have been the bad guys all along. If empire sustains itself through the illusion of goodness, what happens when that illusion is pierced?
Although there is much to admire in Nolan’s ambitious adaptation, this is not The Odyssey of my dreams. His analysis of the decline of empire as a consequence of the breakdown of norms cannot do justice to the way that these norms themselves, and the notion of “civilization” they have upheld, have been used as tools of imperial domination, the boomerang effects of which we are now living through. Similarly, Nolan’s invocation of xenia as a response to the xenophobia and fear-mongering about immigration across the world has nothing to say about the deeper roots of migrant crises, including America’s own crippling blockades and sanctions in Cuba and Venezuela. It is not a surprise to me that Nolan filmed part of The Odyssey on occupied Western Saharan land. The movie’s politics are hardly radical or decolonial. In fact, what has been so frustrating about the scholarly criticisms was finding myself in the position of defending a film I thought was merely good and interesting, yet ultimately lacking, because others have been so unwilling to pause and notice where it succeeds.
Given that Nolan’s film so cleverly and seriously engages with the source material, I didn’t expect to see such a harsh reception by scholars like Wilson. Indeed, the last time I’d been challenged to see Homer’s text in a new way was when reading her own translation of The Odyssey during the pandemic. Wilson’s rendering of the poem is breathtaking in its boldness and in its refusal to treat relatively recent and historically contingent interpretive conventions as necessary. Though translation and adaptation are different projects, both Wilson and Nolan see the text as their own, refusing to defer to anyone else’s vision of what The Odyssey means and why it should matter to us.
Why, then, have Wilson and other scholars been so dismissive of the film? She notes in her LRB piece that the theory of the “sea people” has long been debunked by scholars. But why should the historical accuracy of this reference matter for the narrative use to which Nolan is putting it? She also notes the regrettable absence of sex scenes in the film. But it’s not obvious to me how a three-hour blockbuster can handle with care the dubious consent of Odysseus’s sex with Circe or Calypso. A different filmmaker telling a different story might have attempted to explore the complicated and fascinating sexual politics of Homer’s world, but I’m grateful to Nolan for skirting the question altogether rather than reducing the sex of the poem to mere bawdy fun.
One of Wilson’s most substantial criticisms, in both her LRB piece and her follow-up in the Atlantic, is the charge that the film is morally incoherent. Odysseus, a warrior who has presumably fought in many battles, is so haunted by the lives he took in Troy that he’s ashamed to come home. And yet when he does, he feels no ambivalence about massacring the suitors who have overstayed their welcome. I agree with Wilson that the rules of Nolan’s world don’t make sense, but part of this incoherence, I take it, is meant to be an indictment of our own moral frameworks. What are the standards that govern the legitimate uses of violence, and how consistently are they applied? Some of the incoherence is also, surely, Homer’s. As Wilson knows, Homer’s poems are not meant to serve as morality plays. His heroes are great men who tend to not be especially good men. Indeed, his moral incoherence is part of what Plato famously takes issue with in Book 2 of the Republic: Why should we venerate these Homeric heroes when they so often act petulant and childish?
In saying all this, I don’t mean to suggest that Wilson is wrong about what would make a good adaptation of The Odyssey, but instead to argue that there are many ways to be right. A good adaptation of an ancient text is a bit like a good conversation. Conversations can take all kinds of forms: funny and playful, probing and serious, rambling and exploratory, focused and precise. Of course, not anything goes. We’ve all suffered through bad conversations where we don’t feel seen or heard, or where an interlocutor can’t meet us on the right register, or where the conversation isn’t given space to breathe or evolve. What’s required is that two people take each other seriously, and try to be responsive to what the other person needs or wants. Similarly, what makes for a good adaptation is that someone takes a text seriously and tries to be responsive to the author. This doesn’t have to mean trying to faithfully rehearse what the author said, or even necessarily agreeing with what the author tried to do. It can take the form of a response or a challenge, an extension or a question.
In many ways, Nolan’s film is not a faithful adaptation of Homer, but in its examination of the power and perils of narrative, and the seductions of memory, it is properly Homeric: It takes seriously both what the text is doing and how it has been read since. It’s the sort of adaptation that paves the way for even more innovative and exciting readings of ancient texts. When scholars with the academic authority of Wilson dismiss the film—for example, saying it has the narrative and emotional depth of “an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display”—they give the opposite impression, that Nolan is careless or ignorant. I worry this kind of response says more about the limitations of academia itself—and what kinds of conversations it considers serious or respectable—than it does about the inadequacies of Nolan’s film. Why, after all, should we care more about what Homer might think of uses of his work than who his poem might speak to now? Who are these texts for if not us?
Grumbling about the narrow-mindedness of academia is hardly new, but these worries have taken on a special urgency as the Trump administration wages a full-on assault against higher education and humanities departments are being shuttered. What the far right understands is that texts like The Odyssey, and the universities that make meaning out of them, are a battleground, because stories are part of how we wage literal wars, how we construct and maintain empires. Nolan deliberately departs from the letter of the text in order to ask the bigger question raised by its legacy: Who gets to tell history, and to what end? The impulse by scholars to police what counts as good interpretation lends itself to the outraged responses by those on the right who aren’t entirely wrong in thinking these works have thus far belonged to them and their white Western canon.
Nolan’s questions are not mine, and his answers are often lacking. But we won’t get a great film about The Odyssey or other ancient texts unless we get good ones first. My advice to anyone coming to Homer for the first time through Nolan’s film is to have whatever conversations you want to have with the poem—however daring, creative, irreverent, urgent, or “wrong.” Take what you want and find what you need. These texts are yours, too.
Sukaina Hirji is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently working on two book-length projects, one on Aristotle, and one with Lidal Dror on ideology.
At the heart of these reactions lies a perennial question: Who gets to determine what a text means, and who it is for? Though obviously more grounded and sophisticated than the far-right crashout over the perceived wokeness of the film, the scholarly critique belies a conservatism of its own.
For centuries, the ownership of these texts has been a political question. The far right’s attachment to antiquity is well-documented, visible in recent years in the Ancient Greek helmets brandished by the insurrectionists storming the capitol on January 6 and in the “classical” liberal education championed by Christopher Rufo and Ron DeSantis, with Ancient Greek literature and philosophy positioned as the enlightened alternative to diversity initiatives and critical race theory. While conservatives outraged about Nolan’s casting decisions are wrong about the whiteness of The Odyssey itself—Troy is in modern day Turkey, and Odysseus plausibly washes up on the shores of North Africa—they are not wrong to associate Ancient Greek texts with whiteness and white supremacy. Classicists like Emily Greenwood, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, and Mathura Umachandran have traced how the methods and practices of classics as a discipline developed during the Enlightenment period as a way to whitewash antiquity and bolster the myth of “Western civilization,” in part in the service of imperial conquest.
Given this historical entanglement, a filmmaker’s choices when adapting a text like The Odyssey are, whether intended as such or not, inevitably political. The many adaptations of the Ancient Greek world that feature all-white casts, for example, serve to reinforce the role these texts play in the white Western cultural imagination. Similarly, the convention that historical adaptations feature posh British accents and formal language further reinforces the place of these texts in the story of Western civilization, suggesting they are properly the purview of those with an Oxbridge education or the equivalent.
Nolan, to his credit, understands all of this, and makes choices in his adaptation of The Odyssey that take seriously the nearly 3,000 years that exist between us and the text. Throughout the film Nolan indicates his interest not just in the poem itself but in what classicists often call “reception”: all the ways it has been read, and what we’ve been told it means, throughout history. Easter eggs abound for scholars and nerds as Nolan draws from Virgil’s Aeneid, Hesiod’s Works and Days, Tennyson’s Ulysses, and even a brief scene with a foreigner speaking modern Greek unintelligible to Odysseus and his men.
Some of Nolan’s decisions inevitably position his film in the tedious churn of the culture wars. It shouldn’t be controversial to cast an objectively stunning actress to play the most beautiful woman in Ancient Greece, but for modern audiences in a deeply racialized world, Nolan’s choice of Lupita Nyong’o is a deliberate provocation to the imagined whiteness of Helen of Troy. More interesting is Sinon, played by Elliot Page, an actor whose transness is not accidental to his portrayal of a character seen as deceitful by the whole world but ultimately described by Matt Damon’s Odysseus as the bravest man he’s ever known.
But the choices Nolan makes in his adaptation go well beyond the politics of representation, peeking behind the curtain of the story itself and ideologies it has served. Nolan is often criticized for his failure to write developed and dynamic female characters, and although The Odyssey doesn’t absolve him of this charge, some of the ways he depicts women as casualties of a world of masculine machination are worth taking seriously.
In Homer’s depiction, Helen is a gifted storyteller, and regretful of the ways Aphrodite imbued her with an all-consuming lust for Paris. Nolan gives us a more abject Helen, with Menelaus mocking her memorialization as the “face that launched a thousand ships,” revealing the scarred face of a pawn used to manufacture consent for a war that is really about trade routes. It is not, I think, anti-feminist for Nolan to refuse Homer’s depiction of women in The Odyssey as brilliant and powerful in order to better capture a historical context where women would have been largely stripped of their agency. Having Nyong’o also play Clytemnestra, Helen’s twin in the film and a woman who ultimately finds a way to wrest back her agency, is a fascinating choice.
But the most interesting and ambitious narrative swing in the film is the incorporation of the Trojan Horse, with Nolan adding the later Roman poet Virgil’s much more critical rendering of Odysseus into Homer’s story. For Nolan, the Trojan Horse is not just an ingenious trick that ends the war, but a perversion of the sacred norms holding civilization together. With the sacking of Troy, Nolan draws a throughline with the theme of xenia—or hospitality—in Homer’s poem, the false gift itself presented as a violation of “Zeus’s law.” In doing so, Nolan asks us to look beyond Odysseus’s familiar reputation as a clever trickster who flirts and fucks to see a man—not unlike the director’s earlier characterization of J. Robert Oppenheimer—haunted by the damage his genius has wrought, afraid to return home and confront just how much his choices have cost him.
Nolan’s Odysseus is also, of course, us—a nation coming to terms with the fact that it cannot return to how it once understood itself because of the violence it has inflicted on the world. It is the story of an empire in decline, a story that resonates with American viewers in the midst of Donald Trump’s second presidency, nearly three years into a live-streamed genocide in Palestine bankrolled by our own government, and during an unprovoked and seemingly unwinnable war in Iran waged in the hope of securing, yes, better trade routes. Nolan’s imagining of the “sea people” as the Greeks returning from war is a startling innovation on scholarly conjecture, with the supposed heroes confronting the reality that they might have been the bad guys all along. If empire sustains itself through the illusion of goodness, what happens when that illusion is pierced?
Although there is much to admire in Nolan’s ambitious adaptation, this is not The Odyssey of my dreams. His analysis of the decline of empire as a consequence of the breakdown of norms cannot do justice to the way that these norms themselves, and the notion of “civilization” they have upheld, have been used as tools of imperial domination, the boomerang effects of which we are now living through. Similarly, Nolan’s invocation of xenia as a response to the xenophobia and fear-mongering about immigration across the world has nothing to say about the deeper roots of migrant crises, including America’s own crippling blockades and sanctions in Cuba and Venezuela. It is not a surprise to me that Nolan filmed part of The Odyssey on occupied Western Saharan land. The movie’s politics are hardly radical or decolonial. In fact, what has been so frustrating about the scholarly criticisms was finding myself in the position of defending a film I thought was merely good and interesting, yet ultimately lacking, because others have been so unwilling to pause and notice where it succeeds.
Given that Nolan’s film so cleverly and seriously engages with the source material, I didn’t expect to see such a harsh reception by scholars like Wilson. Indeed, the last time I’d been challenged to see Homer’s text in a new way was when reading her own translation of The Odyssey during the pandemic. Wilson’s rendering of the poem is breathtaking in its boldness and in its refusal to treat relatively recent and historically contingent interpretive conventions as necessary. Though translation and adaptation are different projects, both Wilson and Nolan see the text as their own, refusing to defer to anyone else’s vision of what The Odyssey means and why it should matter to us.
Why, then, have Wilson and other scholars been so dismissive of the film? She notes in her LRB piece that the theory of the “sea people” has long been debunked by scholars. But why should the historical accuracy of this reference matter for the narrative use to which Nolan is putting it? She also notes the regrettable absence of sex scenes in the film. But it’s not obvious to me how a three-hour blockbuster can handle with care the dubious consent of Odysseus’s sex with Circe or Calypso. A different filmmaker telling a different story might have attempted to explore the complicated and fascinating sexual politics of Homer’s world, but I’m grateful to Nolan for skirting the question altogether rather than reducing the sex of the poem to mere bawdy fun.
One of Wilson’s most substantial criticisms, in both her LRB piece and her follow-up in the Atlantic, is the charge that the film is morally incoherent. Odysseus, a warrior who has presumably fought in many battles, is so haunted by the lives he took in Troy that he’s ashamed to come home. And yet when he does, he feels no ambivalence about massacring the suitors who have overstayed their welcome. I agree with Wilson that the rules of Nolan’s world don’t make sense, but part of this incoherence, I take it, is meant to be an indictment of our own moral frameworks. What are the standards that govern the legitimate uses of violence, and how consistently are they applied? Some of the incoherence is also, surely, Homer’s. As Wilson knows, Homer’s poems are not meant to serve as morality plays. His heroes are great men who tend to not be especially good men. Indeed, his moral incoherence is part of what Plato famously takes issue with in Book 2 of the Republic: Why should we venerate these Homeric heroes when they so often act petulant and childish?
In saying all this, I don’t mean to suggest that Wilson is wrong about what would make a good adaptation of The Odyssey, but instead to argue that there are many ways to be right. A good adaptation of an ancient text is a bit like a good conversation. Conversations can take all kinds of forms: funny and playful, probing and serious, rambling and exploratory, focused and precise. Of course, not anything goes. We’ve all suffered through bad conversations where we don’t feel seen or heard, or where an interlocutor can’t meet us on the right register, or where the conversation isn’t given space to breathe or evolve. What’s required is that two people take each other seriously, and try to be responsive to what the other person needs or wants. Similarly, what makes for a good adaptation is that someone takes a text seriously and tries to be responsive to the author. This doesn’t have to mean trying to faithfully rehearse what the author said, or even necessarily agreeing with what the author tried to do. It can take the form of a response or a challenge, an extension or a question.
In many ways, Nolan’s film is not a faithful adaptation of Homer, but in its examination of the power and perils of narrative, and the seductions of memory, it is properly Homeric: It takes seriously both what the text is doing and how it has been read since. It’s the sort of adaptation that paves the way for even more innovative and exciting readings of ancient texts. When scholars with the academic authority of Wilson dismiss the film—for example, saying it has the narrative and emotional depth of “an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display”—they give the opposite impression, that Nolan is careless or ignorant. I worry this kind of response says more about the limitations of academia itself—and what kinds of conversations it considers serious or respectable—than it does about the inadequacies of Nolan’s film. Why, after all, should we care more about what Homer might think of uses of his work than who his poem might speak to now? Who are these texts for if not us?
Grumbling about the narrow-mindedness of academia is hardly new, but these worries have taken on a special urgency as the Trump administration wages a full-on assault against higher education and humanities departments are being shuttered. What the far right understands is that texts like The Odyssey, and the universities that make meaning out of them, are a battleground, because stories are part of how we wage literal wars, how we construct and maintain empires. Nolan deliberately departs from the letter of the text in order to ask the bigger question raised by its legacy: Who gets to tell history, and to what end? The impulse by scholars to police what counts as good interpretation lends itself to the outraged responses by those on the right who aren’t entirely wrong in thinking these works have thus far belonged to them and their white Western canon.
Nolan’s questions are not mine, and his answers are often lacking. But we won’t get a great film about The Odyssey or other ancient texts unless we get good ones first. My advice to anyone coming to Homer for the first time through Nolan’s film is to have whatever conversations you want to have with the poem—however daring, creative, irreverent, urgent, or “wrong.” Take what you want and find what you need. These texts are yours, too.
Sukaina Hirji is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently working on two book-length projects, one on Aristotle, and one with Lidal Dror on ideology.
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