The impossible homecoming: Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey and the trauma of war

Emily Wilson begins her celebrated translation of Homer's Odyssey with an imperative that has become almost as famous as the poem itself: "Tell me about a complicated man." Christopher Nolan has acknowledged the importance of that formulation to his own adaptation of Homer. Yet in her fierce review of Nolan's film, "An Uncomplicated Man," Wilson argues that this is precisely what Nolan has failed to give us. His Odysseus, in her reading, is essentially an action hero who feels bad about being an action hero, a psychologically flattened version of one of literature's most elusive figures.

I did not see the film that way at all. Nolan's Odysseus is complicated not because he reproduces every contradiction of Homer's hero, but because Nolan has reorganized those contradictions around one of the oldest and most difficult questions posed by the Odyssey: what does it mean to come home from war? The answer, Nolan suggests, is that strictly speaking one cannot.

This is why Odysseus's longing for Ithaca must be understood alongside his extraordinary capacity to postpone his return. He wants nothing more than to see Penelope and Telemachus again. Home is the fixed point around which his wandering consciousness revolves. Yet he remains with Calypso for seven years. More significantly in Nolan's telling, he willingly consumes the lotus, surrendering himself to oblivion. He wants to forget Troy, his companions, his guilt, perhaps even the man he has become.

The contradiction is only apparent. These are the two desires of the traumatized veteran: I want to go home; I want to cease being the man who must go home. Nolan understands something here that Kathryn Bigelow understood in The Hurt Locker: war is a drug. Its addictive quality does not lie simply in violence. War reorganizes experience. Terror, comradeship, exhaustion, danger, purpose and the constant proximity of death establish an intensity against which ordinary existence can come to seem strangely insubstantial. Once that intensity disappears, something must fill the void.

Uberto Pasolini's The Return (2024), another recent reimagining of Odysseus's arrival on Ithaca, makes the point with brutal economy. Ralph Fiennes's exhausted Odysseus observes that "war becomes home." The phrase captures the terrible paradox at the center of nostos. Odysseus is homesick for Ithaca, but war has become another home. The journey from Troy is therefore never merely geographical. The deeper question is whether the man produced by Troy can still inhabit Ithaca.

Wilson is surely right that Homer's Odysseus possesses a multiplicity that cannot easily be reduced to modern psychological categories. He is warrior and liar, husband and adulterer, victim and perpetrator, king and beggar, strategist and fool. But adaptation need not reproduce every Homeric contradiction to discover a genuine contradiction of its own. Nolan's "strong misreading," if we want to call it that, locates the complexity of Odysseus in traumatic return.

This is precisely why Calypso and the lotus matter so much. The lotus is not merely temptation. It offers release from biography. To eat it is to relinquish the burden of being the person who did what Odysseus has done. Troy disappears. His dead companions disappear. Penelope and Telemachus disappear. The terrible continuity between the warrior and the returning husband disappears. For a man haunted by what he has seen and done, there is mercy in such oblivion. But there is also annihilation. If Penelope represents the possibility of memory endured, the lotus represents memory extinguished. Odysseus is suspended between them. He can remember his way home, or he can forget why he ever wanted one.

That is hardly an uncomplicated man. Nor does Nolan allow Odysseus's dilemma to exist in isolation. His use of Agamemnon's return as a counterpoint is crucial. Agamemnon, too, goes home from Troy. His nostos is shorter and, geographically speaking, more successful. But arriving home does not save him. He returns carrying Troy with him and is murdered within the household to which he believed he had returned.

Agamemnon's fate exposes the illusion contained in the very idea of homecoming. The warrior imagines home as something preserved in his absence: the same house, the same relationships, the same identity waiting to receive him when history has finished with him. But history does not leave home untouched. Nor does it leave the warrior untouched. The man who returns is not the man who departed, and the household to which he returns is not the household he left.

Agamemnon reaches home and discovers that home no longer exists in the form he imagined. Odysseus takes ten years longer to make the same discovery. In this respect Thomas Wolfe's famous formulation-You Can't Go Home Again-could serve almost as a subtitle to the Odyssey. Homecoming contains an impossible demand. It asks not merely that we return to a place but that time itself reverse direction. Restore the wife I left. Restore the child I knew. Restore the kingdom I ruled. Above all, restore the self who departed.

But there is no restoration. Penelope has spent twenty years without Odysseus. Telemachus has become a man in the absence of his father. Ithaca has been transformed by political disorder. And Odysseus has become someone whom the king who sailed for Troy might scarcely recognize. The deepest obstacle between Odysseus and Ithaca is therefore not Poseidon. It is time. And this is where Nolan's emphasis on violence becomes particularly important. For when Odysseus finally returns, he does not simply put war behind him. He brings its grammar home.

The great irony of the Odyssey is that the warrior restores domestic order through slaughter. The skills that allowed Odysseus to survive Troy and the long journey home become the means by which he reclaims his household. Bow, cunning, disguise, calculation and killing-the instruments of war become instruments of reconciliation.