Why Odysseus couldn’t just say: ‘I’m home’
Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ invites a fresh reading of Homer’s epic: not as a story of return, but of a survivor who cannot yet narrate what war has made of him
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Ten years at Troy. Ten more lost at sea. When Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca – in Homer’s poem and again, played by Matt Damon in Christopher Nolan’s new film – he doesn’t walk through the door and say who he is. He lies. He invents a stranger’s life story. He tests his wife Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway), his father, even his old nurse before he lets any of them see him as himself. For a man who has spent 20 years trying to get home, he is remarkably reluctant to arrive.
That reluctance is usually read as suspense, or cunning, or simple survival instinct. But there’s a more unsettling possibility: that Odysseus cannot tell his own story because, on some level, he cannot yet bear to know it.
Read the full story on Times2.