The Man Who Returns

For ten years Odysseus fought beneath the walls of Troy. For ten more he tried to return to an island that perhaps no longer existed as he remembered it. Monsters, gods, sorceresses, shipwrecks, the dead, immortal lovers: all of them stood between the war and the house. None of them was the true enemy. The true enemy sailed home with him, wearing his face: the man the war had made.

That is the story Christopher Nolan seemed destined to film. His entire body of work, time that keeps living without us, identity that depends on the story we tell of it, the guilt of what we did to complete the mission, the public man and the intimate one, the invention that turns against its inventor, reads like a long apprenticeship for the Odyssey, shot now entirely on IMAX film for the first time in the history of cinema. Nolan has not arrived at the poem the way one discovers new territory. He has returned to the poem he had been filming all his life without knowing it. And the question that matters is not whether he has been faithful to Homer, a poor question for a work that lived for centuries as breath and voice. The question belongs to the poem itself: the Odyssey was never about reaching home. It asks whether the man who returns can still inhabit it.

The distance between the Iliad and the Odyssey is the distance between dying gloriously and learning to return. Achilles belongs to kleos, the glory that outlives death: offered a long anonymous life or a young death turned into song, he chooses the song. Odysseus belongs to nostos, the return. He does not want to live forever in other men’s memory. He wants to survive, touch Ithaca, and lie down again beside Penelope. But the nostos has nothing to do with geography. It means recovering human form after living too long inside the war: ceasing to be commander, sacker of cities, executioner, in order to become again husband, father, mortal man. Every island is a question about identity. Every delay is another way of not returning. The poem’s secret subject is the enormous resistance the soul mounts against its own homecoming.

You know this resistance. You have felt it on a Sunday night, in an airport lounge, in the silence after a victory that should have felt like arrival and felt instead like exile.

Homer calls his hero polytropos: the man of many turns, many roads, many shapes. Not the strongest, not the bravest. The most adaptable. His faculty is metis, the winding intelligence that defeats the strong by bending. Achilles goes straight at things; Odysseus goes around them. Achilles declares who he is; Odysseus survives by ceasing to be it. Which is why the Cyclops holds the poem’s secret heart. When Odysseus names himself Nobody, the trick is the least of it. He discovers survival’s most radical price: to escape the monster he must surrender his name. And once safe he cannot bear the anonymity. He shouts his name from the ship, because he needs Polyphemus to know who beat him. His intelligence saves him. His hunger to be recognized condemns him. His pride adds years to his exile. Count, if you dare, the years yours has added to your own.

Nolan has understood this, and he has anchored it in the law that morally orders Homer’s world: xenia, the sacred hospitality between host and stranger, guarded by Zeus. In a world without hotels or passports, the traveler arrives unarmed at the threshold, and the beggar at your door might be a god in disguise. The whole poem runs the spectrum of that law, from the monster who devours his guests to the suitors who turn welcome into occupation. And here lies the film’s boldest reading, Nolan’s reinterpretation rather than Homer’s doctrine: the Trojan horse is a gift transformed into a weapon, the supreme violation of hospitality, and Odysseus, its architect, is the man who poisoned trust between strangers. His twenty years of wandering are the inhabited consequences of his own trap. The man who broke the world’s xenia must cross that world as a defenseless stranger, door by door, until he reaches his own. The kinship with Oppenheimer runs deep: both build the instrument that wins a war and opens a wound in the world; both discover that victory is only the beginning of the judgment. For Odysseus the judgment lasts ten years and is called the sea.

We still build such horses. The strategy that wins the promotion and hollows the marriage. The persona that conquers the room and locks the soul outside it. Whoever poisons the world’s trust, or his own, crosses that world afterward as a beggar.

The Homeric gods act at once in the cosmos, the city and the soul. The film naturalizes much of that Olympus, and one may argue whether it gains psychological depth or loses religious mystery. But the gods survive inside the man. Athena is his lucidity. Hermes, his ambiguity. Poseidon, the sea itself, is his debt: the consequence that keeps returning, the thing that refuses to be converted into strategy. And the figures of the voyage resist the allegory manuals. Circe, who drags men down into the animal, is also the initiator: she is the one who teaches him to cross into the world of the dead. Calypso offers something more refined than seduction: a life outside time, safe from death and therefore expelled from the human condition. An eternity without belonging would be an exquisite form of inexistence. Some of us have already signed for it. It is called comfort.

The most vulgar error is to imagine Penelope as the wife who waits. Penelope is polytropos too. He deceives in space; she deceives in time, weaving the shroud by day and unweaving it by night so that time cannot close over her. He changes his name; she guards the name’s meaning. She does not wait. She keeps Ithaca in a condition where return can still mean something. The word of their bond is homophrosyne, likemindedness, and that is why she refuses the man who claims to be Odysseus: she tests him. The film keeps its most eloquent decision here: a single face for Helen and Clytemnestra, two sisters, two wives, two destinies of the returning man, the home that receives and the home that kills, and Odysseus does not know which one awaits him. The beggar’s disguise then rhymes with the Nobody of the cave, and that rhyme is the poem’s hidden architecture. There he gave up his name to escape a monster. Here he gives up every sign of his power to find out who can see him without them. The hero must appear as no one to discover who recognizes someone.

The poem’s answer is an object: the marriage bed carved around a living olive tree. Everything in the Odyssey has been mobile, ships, bodies, names, loyalties; the bed remains because it is joined to something rooted and untransportable. A true marriage is not the absence of voyages. It is the thing that cannot be moved without ceasing to be itself. And home, in the end, is not a place we return to but a reality someone remembers with us. There is such a tree in you. The Daimon is the living root your life was carved around, and every voyage that forgets it ends in a house you can no longer inhabit. Though the ending should not be sweetened: the return culminates in a massacre, and it is fair to ask, before Homer and before Nolan, whether Odysseus purifies his house or brings the war permanently inside it. Many returns do.

Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, polytropon: sing to me, Muse, of the man of many turns. Homer asks the Muse to speak of that man. Nolan asks whether, after so many roads, so many lies, so many faces, that man still knows his own. The question does not stay on the screen.

After becoming everything the world demanded of you, can you still come home?

— Gil Carrasquero
The Religion of Genius (Forthcoming)