Hi Friends!

The past few weeks have been quite busy, with a solid run of shoots and two trips to Melbourne. The first was on behalf of ol’ Cooee — our screenplay was shortlisted for the AWG John Hinde Award for Science Fiction Screenwriting! We ended up walking away with a runner-up ‘Highly Commended’ on the night, with the lovely & talented Jeremy Brull taking top honours for his script Self Love. Industry events are not my strong suite, but a room full of writers is thankfully about as low-pressure as it gets.

Then I was back down for MIFF last week, where I got to see some stunning films (All of a Sudden, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, Blue Heron and La Gradiva are all so, so good!), caught up with some delightful friends, and was on hand when Souvenir (written & directed by Renée Marie Petropoulos, produced by Yingna Lu, edited by Brendan Cain & 1st AD’ed by moi) picked up the festival’s ‘Best Fiction Short Film’ award on Sunday night, continuing its rather stellar run!

As you might have guessed, I’ve gone and written a piece about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey this week. While I have my quibbles (where’s the olive tree bed?!), I think it’s a truly spectacular piece of filmmaking, worth seeing on the biggest screen possible. Better still, once the ridiculous culture war nonsense finally died down, it was treat to find the internet awash in thoughtful, passionate debates about the Homeric epics — dipping into conversations that have been going for almost three millennia.

Rather than review the film exactly, I’ve done a deep dive into Nolan’s sources — what he’s changed from Homer, how he’s incorporated the Bronze Age history that underpins the poems, and which other pieces of mythology, art and literature he’s drawing from. While it’s hard to “spoil” a 2,700 year old story, Nolan’s film is built around a series of reveals that I discuss at length, so perhaps it’s best not to read this until you’ve seen the film to preserve the surprises!

In the Belly of the Beast

All told, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is a remarkably faithful adaptation of the millennia-old poem. Sure, he downplays the role of the Gods and cuts the wonderful Princess Nausicaa, but most of the story’s major incidents and its overall shape have been preserved — down to its in media res opening, the nested flashback structure, and balance between the fantastical sea-faring adventures everyone has heard of and the family drama back on Ithaca that is the story’s true heart. I’ve found much of the scholarly criticism of the film (including Emily Wilson’s very enjoyable take-downs) thoughtful but overly prescriptive, lamenting the changes while wilfully ignoring the ways in which the film is a thoughtful work of interpretation. Nolan isn’t just engaging with the poem itself; he’s absorbed other traditions, histories and sources as he grapples with what this story can mean in the 21st Century.

And there’s no better example than how the film handles the Trojan Horse.

I admit I was sceptical when I saw how prominent the horse was in The Odyssey’s marketing campaign — every trailer and poster featured the same indelible images of a black wooden stallion, either half-buried in the sand or rearing up over a maelstrom of fire and smoke. I worried because, while the Trojan Horse might be one of the most recognisable images from Greek mythology, it barely rates a passing mention in Homer’s epics. Past adaptations of The Odyssey and The Iliad (I’m looking at you Troy) have a bad habit of shoe-horning in the most recognisable bits of the myths — Achilles’ vulnerable heel, Paris’ abduction of Helen, “the face that launched a thousand ships”, and of course the Trojan Horse — regardless of whether they’re actually in the poem at hand, or relevant to the story being told. It can feel like a box-ticking exercise, weighted with less meaning than your average Wikipedia entry.

Homer’s poems were never intended to tell the complete story of the Trojan War; they were part of a wider corpus of epics, folk tales and quasi-religious texts that had been circulating through the Ancient Greek world for centuries. Just as a modern filmmaker can assume that their audience know the basics when they sit down to watch a WW2 film (Allies vs Axis, Invasion of Poland, Hitler, Hiroshima), an ancient audience already knew the gist of the Trojan War (Greeks v Trojans, Theft of Helen, Agamemnon, Trojan Horse), and was expected to grasp how each particular story fit into the wider conflict.

Homer’s Iliad is set over just a couple of weeks during the penultimate year of the war. It is centred on the rage of Achilles and his conflict with the Trojan champion Hector, and ends with Hector’s burial. The fall of the city is still a year away; there’s no Trojan Horse yet — hell, even Achilles’ death, while ominously foretold, is still a while off. The Odyssey takes place after the war’s grisly end, and follows Odysseus’ return to his homeland of Ithaca and reunion with his wife Penelope and son Telemachus, using flashbacks and nested stories to fill in the gaps of his lost decade on the high seas, fighting monsters and fucking goddesses. The Trojan War is already the stuff of memory and myth-making, and the Horse is referenced a handful of times as a feat of bravery old veterans love to boast about. In Sparta, Menelaus tells young Telemachus of his father’s fortitude inside the belly of the wooden beast, resisting the charms of Helen who, suspecting the trap, used sweet words to try to lure the men out. During his voyage to the underworld, Odysseus assures the shade of Achilles that his teenage son held his nerve when others in the Horse were wracked with fear.

The third recollection is the most detailed. It occurs during Odysseus’ visit to the Island of the Phaeacians (a key stop between Calypso and Ithaca, entirely skipped by Nolan). In the midst of a banquet held in his honour by his kindly hosts (who suspect he may indeed be a god in disguise), the incognito Odysseus asks the resident blind bard Demodocus to “sing the story about the Wooden Horse”. Homer never explains why Odysseus requests this song. It could be sheer vanity, or nostalgia; I interpret it as a way for the “mastermind of many schemes” to figure out whether he’s eating with sympathetic crowd before he reveals his identity. The bard Demodocus takes the request and proceeds to sing, puffed up with divine inspiration. Taking it for granted that we are already familiar with the story, Homer only gives us a brief recap, rather than Demodocus’ song in full: how Epeius built the horse, Odysseus hid a gang of men inside it, the Trojans brought it into their city, and the Greeks poured out. Odysseus, he concludes, “won at last, through dreadful violence, thanks to Athena.” It is a song of triumph — and yet it makes Odysseus weep:

It’s a startling passage — a torturous extended simile that collapses the space between mighty Odysseus and an unnamed woman within a sacked city. The city that could be Troy; a woman who could be one of Odysseus’ many, many victims. But that connection is for the reader — Odysseus later clarifies that he cried because he was reminded of his “own sad story”, adrift from his men and separated from his family. Yet the passage assures us that these unspoken war crimes will forever be inseparable from Odysseus, a consequence the wily “lord of lies” cannot truly escape.

Matt Damon’s Odysseus, played more as a weary strategist than a self-aggrandising trickster, also weeps when he is confronted with the memories of Troy. But in Christopher Nolan’s hands, Odysseus’ tears are unambiguously ones of regret. And it is this change — to Odysseus’ character and the very meaning of the Trojan Horse — that imbues his film with a fundamentally different ethos to Homer’s poem. Nolan makes the Horse a constant presence, front-and-centre from the very first scene, in which Ithaca’s bard celebrates “a trick to break the walls of Troy and burn it screaming to the ground”. Its visage returns again and again — like a talisman, like an intrusive thought, like a nightmare — to confront Odysseus with a terrible truth: his ingenious trick broke not only the walls of Troy, but unravelled the very fabric of the society that he holds dear. It is the harbinger of death, and Odysseus has become a Bronze Age Oppenheimer, destroyer of worlds.

This interpretation would have been foreign to The Odyssey’s original audiences over 2,700 years ago, but Nolan is drawing from other traditions and sources, stretching back into the history that that underpins the poem.

If there was a ‘real’ Trojan War it likely took place around 1200 BCE, during the Late Bronze Age. Our evidence is flimsy and circumstantial at best, but believers point to the excavations at Hisarlik on the Turkish coast, ongoing since 1871, that have uncovered multiple strata of a walled city that rose and fell over millennia. The prime suspect is Layer VIIa, which bears the tell-tale scars of an enemy assault, including scorch marks — but even if Mycenaean Greeks are the likely culprits, this is hardly proof for Agamemnon, Odysseus or the Horse. Even ancient historians had their doubts about the Horse. Some suggested it was either a garbled memory (Pausanias believed the Greeks used horse-shaped siege equipment, or painted horses on their shields), or purely symbolic (perhaps an earthquake sent by Poseidon, often symbolised by a horse, sent the walls tumbling down). ‘Historical accuracy’ is a ridiculous standard to hold any Homeric adaptation to, given these poems are the sum of stories, traditions and details that passed from island to island, city to city, and bard to bard over centuries — in the process, transforming a folk memory of wars waged by the Mycenaeans into a shared history for the wider Greek people.

What they preserve is far more ephemeral: an lost age of mighty kings, vast palaces and wide-ranging trade that existed before the ‘Dark Ages’ descended. The causes of the Late Bronze Age collapse are still hotly debated by historians — with various fingers pointed at the mysterious ‘Sea People’, civil wars, natural disasters, or a range of socio-economic factors — but the end point is the same: the demise of Mycenaean palace-societies, depopulation across the Mediterranean, and the loss of Greece’s original writing system. The Greek myths as we know them took shape during this ‘Dark Age’, between approx. 1180 - 800 BCE, and their chronology put the Trojan War right at the end, one final gasp of the ‘Age of Heroes’ (it doesn’t help that the war wipes most of them out). While Homer’s Odyssey lacks a clear ‘collapse of civilisation’ narrative, Nolan’s characters explicitly (and rather clunkily) pontificate about stagnation, decay, and the threat of the unseen ‘People from the Sea’. He has layered the Late Bronze Age collapse into The Odyssey itself.

In doing so, he latches on the concept of xenia, referred to in the film as ‘Zeus’ Law’. Xenia was a sacred custom of hospitality towards strangers which was a bit of a necessity for the highly fragmented societies of the Ancient Mediterranean during the Dark Ages, where a stranger had only their word to rely on. Enforced by the King of the Gods himself in his role as Zeus Xenios (‘Zeus of Hospitality’), xenia demanded that guests be offered food, shelter and protection by their hosts, and not even be forced to reveal their identity or purpose. A stranger, after all, could well be a God in disguise. Guests in turn were expected to be courteous, not to burden their hosts, and offer reciprocal friendship. Nolan’s interpretation reframes xenia in implicitly Christian terms, echoing the ‘Golden Rule’ (“treat others as you would wish to be treated”), but in practice his characters take it as a statement of human rights law — a dubiously enforceable norm that holds the delicate international order together. The Horse becomes the ultimate breach of xenia — a weapon in the guise of a gift to the Gods — and thus smuggles in a far more contemporary argument: it is the betrayal of these norms and values that will bring our own society down.

Greece emerged from its Dark Age around 800 BCE, with the consolidation of new city-states across the Aegean and rebirth of literacy using the Phoenician alphabet. Traders and pirates travelled widely once more, bringing back tall tales of distant lands that would inform the legendary voyages of Heracles, the Argonauts and Odysseus. By 725 BCE episodes of the Trojan War were frequently appearing in vase paintings, sculptures and, at last, written poetry. Homer’s poems still show traces of their origins in oral storytelling — repeated expressions such as “the early-born rosy-fingered Dawn appeared” (used over twenty times in The Odyssey) made it easier for illiterate poets to compose on the fly, and consistent epithets such as “prudent” for Penelope or “swift-footed” for Achilles helped to fill the metre — but the structural unity and sheer length of The Iliad and Odyssey make it clear they are more than mere transcriptions. Someone had to have written them. While the Greeks attributed this act of genius to blind bard named Homer (reputed to be a child of the Muses, or even a descendent of wily Odysseus himself!), scholars today use ‘Homer’ as a convenient shorthand. Were these epics by one brilliant writer, or a group — perhaps even a collaboration between an oral poet and literate scribes? Were they written in one go, or fine-tuned over the decades? And given the differences in style and subject matter, is it safe to say that different ‘Homers’ wrote The Iliad and Odyssey? We still don’t know, and probably never will.

The Iliad and Odyssey weren’t the only epic poems produced in this era, but they are the only ones to survive intact. That’s hardly an accident — from the 6th Century BCE onwards they were the most popular works of literature in the classical world, constantly performed, quoted and studied — but it has left us with gaps in the narrative. The Trojan Horse was the subject of two other epics, known as The Little Iliad (attributed to Lesches) and The Sack of Ilium (attributed to Arctinus of Miletus). These poems have been lost (to be fair, Aristotle thought they were a bit rubbish) but we have a summary courtesy of a Latin grammar teacher in the 2nd Century CE. They included elements absent in Homer’s Odyssey but re-integrated into Nolan’s, including the faux-dedication of the Horse to Athena, Odysseus’ decision to leave a solider named Sinon (Eliot Page on-screen) behind, and the desecration of Athena’s temple during the sack of Troy. While Homer’s Athena is Odysseus’ greatest patron (and does a lot of the heavy lifting), the version played by Zendaya preserves this more ambivalent relationship to the hero. If she really is a God, then she has taken the form of a innocent priestess murdered by Odysseus’ men as a reminder and reprimand; if not, she is a figment of Odysseus tortured psyche still coming to grips with the horrors he has unleashed.

Revisionist spins on the Trojan War multiplied in Athens during the 5th Century BCE, where the great playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides explored the moral culpability of these supposed heroes. Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy deals with the bloody aftermath of Agamemnon’s homecoming, supplying the motives and means that Clytemnestra uses to murder her (awful, awful) husband in Nolan’s film. Sophocles’ Ajax and Philoctetes show Odysseus at his duplicitous worst, cheating and deceiving his supposed allies to enrich himself and keep the war running. And Euripides’ gut-wrenching Trojan Women and Hecuba take place in the aftermath of the city’s fall, following the desperate women whose only future is death or slavery, their tragedy finally centred while their captor Odysseus haunts the edges of the stage.

But it is not until the Roman era that we find a story of the Horse that fully aligns with Nolan’s. Virgil’s The Aeneid is an epic poem very deliberately cast in the mould of Homer, an act of literary nation-building. Virgil brazenly retcons mythology to assert that Rome’s true founders were not wolf-suckling Romulus and Remus, but a band of heroic Trojans who resettled in Italy, led by the noble Aeneas (a minor player in The Iliad). It might just be the greatest piece of fan-fiction ever written. Seen through Roman eyes, “cruel Ulysses” (the Romanisation of ‘Odysseus’) is an unambiguous villain, insidious and ignoble when set against the simple martial valour of the Trojans. This Ulysses springs his trap by leaving Sinon behind to convince the Trojans that the Greeks built the Horse as a farewell offering to Athena; in fact, it would anger the Gods not to bring it inside the walls. Virgil reminds us to “beware of Greeks bearing gifts”, but no one listens to the warnings of Cassandra or Laocoön. Once the horse is brought into Troy, the Greeks slaughter the guards and open the gates, allowing Agamemnon’s forces to surge into the city and set it alight. Nolan’s climactic flashback to the sack of Troy plays like a direct adaptation of Virgil’s maelstrom of violence:

“Greeks are masters of these flames,” a priest laments. “The horse is looming.” The centre cannot hold. The fear of societal collapse and anarchy loosed upon the world that has been steadily building in Nolan’s work ever since his Dark Knight trilogy reaches its terrible crescendo as the towers of Troy come tumbling down.

Yet Nolan’s Odysseus is no cackling Joker, delighting as he watches the world burn. Nor is he Virgil’s conniving villain, or Homer’s “complicated man”. Even as Nolan reframes Odysseus’ greatest feat as a civilisation-ending catastrophe, he sands off his hero’s sharp edges. This stalwart, PTSD-ridden veteran works tirelessly to save his men, remains faithful to his wife, and doesn’t execute his slave girls. He barely even lies, and that’s kind of Odysseus’ whole thing! Damon’s Odysseus wanders through the crumbling Troy like a passive observer, despite being the architect of this slaughter. It’s fair to wonder whether this is a failure of nerve. But then consider Odysseus’ narration of this moment to Penelope:

“We broke it.” Above all else, Nolan has sought to preserve that “we”; to make his Odysseus just enough of an everyman that his confession can startle us with our complicity in the precarious state of our own world. It’s hardly subtle, but clearly this is a reckoning aimed squarely at Americans and other coddled westerners who watch cities burn on distant shores and have begun to wonder… “are we the baddies?” You can hear in Odysseus’ trembling voice Nolan’s own despair at the disintegration of our own long-held norms; the decline of a liberal world order — or, less generously, an age of American Empire — that once brought stability and wealth. Nolan’s outlook might be implicitly conservative, but he is commendably clear-sighted about how the festering animosity towards strangers (read: foreigners, immigrants, refugees) is loosening the bonds between people, and hollowing our civilisation out from within. Elites place the blame on “People from the Sea”, but of course they are only a chimera. We have brought the Trojan Horse inside our own walls.

It is true that most of the actual victims in Nolan’s Odyssey remain safely concealed behind bulky helmets and quick cuts; their screams echo off-screen. Only Zendaya’s pleading priestess looks us — and Odysseus — in the eye. Emily Wilson and others have argued this is a failure of empathy unbefitting the even-handed Homer, but I disagree. In typical Nolan fashion, time moves in both directions. Every stop of Odysseus’ journey depicts another betrayal of Zeus’ Law, as if the rupture of the Trojan Horse has rippled out in every direction and trapped these Greeks in a purgatorial loop in which they must re-enact the slaughter at Troy, assuming new parts every time. The Cyclops devours his presumptuous ‘guests’ and is blinded in his own home; the technologically superior Laestrygonians slaughter their visitors unprompted and without mercy; the Sirens’ song lures men to death rather than respite; and even Ithaca itself is overrun with ravenous, unwanted visitors using xenia as their shield.

And then there’s the finest sequence in the film, coming right at the midpoint: the encounter with the witch Circe (played by the magnificent Samantha Morton). On the first watch, Circe’s terrified reaction to the arrival of Odysseus’ men can appear calculated, and her decision to turn them into pigs nakedly villainous. Yet Circe plainly tells us she sees “truths”, a power gifted by the Gods — and nonetheless we are encouraged to side with weary Odysseus, who pleads that his men didn’t hurt anyone; “they just want to go home.” Nolan has invited us to chew on the lotus leaf and forget what war and history and our own society has taught us.

But by the film’s end, we have shared Circe’s vision: the horse looming, the nameless women weeping, a city brought screaming to the ground. On their journey, these men have been given chances to atone; to empathise with their victims. They have not. As Circe transforms the pigs back into men, she whispers, softly softly, “go back, back to your disguises.” Sure enough, their final punishment comes after they have gorged themselves on the sacred cattle of the Sun God. Circe was right to fear these men, and to loathe them. She knew.

Odysseus alone makes it home. Given the weight of his crime, he seems to get off rather lightly. We’re invited to cheer as he cuts down the craven suitors and is reunited with his wife and son. In Homer, Zeus and Athena hand down a divine peace plan to prevent another cycle of violence; whereas Nolan’s Odysseus accepts exile, resolving to travel “beyond the horizon” with Penelope by his side. Here, Nolan is drawing upon one last tradition. In Dante’s Inferno, Odysseus can be found in the eighth circle of Hell amongst the ‘Evil Counsellors’. He recounts how he soon grew restless on Ithaca, and set off on one last doomed voyage to see “the world beyond the sun”. Dante conceives this wanderlust as as sin, but by the 19th Century it had taken on a heroic tilt. Tennyson’s poem ‘Ulysses’ gives him a valiant sign-off:

Yet The Odyssey does not conclude with the hero on the prow of his ship, loyal wife in his arms, flattered by the dying light. Instead, we return one last time to the sack of Troy, and to a moment Nolan has replayed over and over: Odysseus dropping down onto the stairs of Athena’s temple. He looks up, and a terrible resignation passes over his face. At last, in the very final shot, we enter Odysseus’ perspective, and see — what else? — the Trojan Horse, wreathed in smoke and fire, a demonic visage, staring down at us. No matter how far he sails, no matter what sacrifices he makes, no matter what feats he accomplishes, this is his legacy. The Horse will haunt Odysseus’ story until the end of time. A plea, from the distant past to the present, not to burn our own world down.

In writing this piece, I worked and quoted from Emily Wilson’s translations of The Odyssey & Iliad, and Sarah Ruden’s translation of The Aeneid. For background on the composition of the poems, I drew on classicist Bernard Knox and historian Robin Lane Fox, and for bonus mythology reading I turned, as always, to Robert Graves and his contentious volumes The Greek Myths.

Odds & Ends

• Phoebe Bridgers’ new album, Lost Weekend, is finally out and it is just gorgeous. She remains the queen of sad, beautiful, unsettling songs, with a unique ability to glide between wry observation and earnest confession within a single line. Adore her always. For visual accompaniment, check out her ren faire-coded music video for ‘Lost Boys', a spark of magic in the mundane.

• In a stupendously on-the-nose act of villainy, AI companies have been secretly bulk-buying vintage books (a valuable source of data ‘untainted’ by — you guessed it — AI slop), only to rip them apart, scan their contents and shred the remains. The AI companies claimed this was fake news… only for an investigation to discover massive shipments of books are going to a secret Amazon AI training facility outside Las Vegas, which has a logo of a dinosaur ripping a book to shreds on the door. You cannot make this up.

And that’s all for this week - thanks for reading!