What Odysseus Saw the Fourth Time

The second time I saw The Odyssey, I had this peculiar feeling that I had barely sat down before it was over. This was inconvenient. I had come prepared to inspect it.

A few days earlier, I had written that perhaps Odysseus was not entirely to be trusted. The gods might be gods, memories might be memories, and the distinction had become increasingly expensive. I expected a second viewing either to produce evidence for my suspicion or to reveal that I had merely been entertaining myself.

Instead I found four falls, three sunsets, two appearances of a girl in a temple, and this guy, Sinon.

Odysseus falls on the temple steps four times. I remembered the falling from the first viewing, especially the pose afterward: he sits there, lost. Then he raises his head and stares ahead with the vacant expression of someone who has seen something considerably worse than the floor.

The obvious answer is Troy. He has watched a city burn and cannot forget it. We have several respectable modern nouns available for this and can feel reasonably pleased with ourselves. Three times, Odysseus looks and we look at Odysseus. Nolan gives us the reaction and withholds the reverse shot. The arrangement is so conventional that we obligingly supply the missing image ourselves.

The fourth time comes very late. Only then does Nolan permit us to join him.

The horse is burning directly in front of his eyes. It is burning and collapsing, and the temple is collapsing beside it. Troy would make Odysseus a witness to catastrophe. The horse makes him the culprit. It is his intelligence made timber, his mētis given wheels. Ten years of heroism failed to take the city; Odysseus had a better idea.

He won, by the way. The songs have been admirably consistent on this point for three thousand years.

Now we are allowed to see what winning looked like to him. Ten years of war had rules. Odysseus found what the rules had forgotten to forbid. It worked. The horse and the temple fall together.

The gods may survive the fire. Their age does not.

We are comfortable speaking of the cost of victory because the phrase allows “victory” itself to remain safely intact. The bill may be monstrous, but at least somebody won. Nolan’s image is less accommodating. If this is what winning looks like, the word may require some maintenance.

The fourth fall alters the first three. Nothing in those earlier images has moved. We have.

Nolan does the same thing with the sunset, which appears three times. The first belongs to Penelope. Before war has converted everyone into the people history requires them to become, she imagines another life. They could leave Ithaca. Go west. Run away together.

The second comes while Odysseus is on his way home. This unsettled me much more the second time. He has won. Ithaca lies ahead. Penelope is there. The entire machinery of nostos is finally pointing in the approved direction, yet when his mind reaches toward the life he wants, it reaches toward Penelope’s old dream of leaving.

Home has already become the dream of escaping home. Calypso’s seven years suddenly require rather less administrative assistance from the gods.

The third sunset comes at the end. This time they actually go west. Penelope gets her wish, although the itinerary was admittedly inefficient. Odysseus gives the voyage a nobler purpose: he is going to honor his dead men. I see no particular reason to call him a liar. By this point, I see equally little reason to assume that Odysseus always knows the whole truth about Odysseus.

Penelope wanted to go west before Troy. Odysseus dreamed of going west after Troy. At the end, they go. The sunset has its own memory.

Then there is the girl in the temple. I had remembered her only once from the first viewing, but she actually appears twice. This is mildly embarrassing in an essay about unreliable memory, so we may as well proceed.

The first appearance is almost nothing. A face in close-up for perhaps a second or two. Something in it made me recognize two people at once: the girl in the temple and the Athena Odysseus would later describe to Penelope. I cannot tell you exactly what did it. Firelight, perhaps. Makeup. Something in Zendaya’s stillness. Probably some indecent collaboration among all three.

That uncertainty is mine.

What belongs to Odysseus is the image itself. Whatever years separate the temple from the telling, this is the form in which she survives in his memory. The frame is his remembering.

Later, when he tells Penelope what happened, the doubleness is gone. There is no girl who also resembles Athena. There is Athena.

The image contains two people. Odysseus' story chooses one. One has to wonder, did he add some stuff? As Odysseus' Sinon once put it.

Sinon is almost comically easy to overlook beside Cyclopes, witches, dead kings and everyone else with stronger mythological branding. He comes from the wider Trojan tradition preserved in Virgil rather than Homer’s Odyssey, and Nolan gives him an unexpectedly large job. Achilles, meanwhile, disappears from the Underworld.

Before the horse, Sinon volunteers for the part that may kill him. He wants one thing if he dies: Odysseus must tell his father what he did. As Odysseus walks away, Sinon adds a line that seemed considerably funnier the first time.

“Feel free to add some stuff.”

On a second viewing, the joke acquires paperwork.

On the surface, it is a joke about glory. If I am going to die, at least improve the obituary. Sinon is choosing the old heroic bargain: life may be exchanged for kleos, provided the story survives in decent condition. A little narrative authorization (make me sound good) seems only prudent.

Then Odysseus meets him among the dead.

Homer gives Odysseus Achilles there. The greatest hero of the Iliad, having once accepted the bargain of short life and immortal glory, has had time to reconsider the terms. He would now rather serve a poor living man than rule over the dead.

Nolan gives us Sinon. Alive, he volunteered for the possibility of glorious death. Dead, he appears considerably less impressed by the arrangement. Achilles is gone, but some of his work has been handed to a nobody.

More troublesome is the permission Sinon gave before he died. Odysseus seems unusually conscientious about his other requests. The dead soldier’s wishes follow him all the way back toward Ithaca.

We know where Sinon gave permission.

We have no idea where Odysseus stopped.

On the first viewing, I regretted that Nolan had left out Achilles. On the second, Sinon made me miss him less. What I truly missed instead was the olive tree.

Homer’s Penelope ultimately tests Odysseus through their marriage bed, built around a living olive tree. The bed cannot simply be moved. After monsters, disguises, divine interventions and professional lying, Homer gives husband and wife something extraordinarily stubborn: a fact rooted in the ground.

Perhaps that is why Nolan’s Odysseus can finally sail west.