Odysseus just cant stop killing

 

 Odysseus and Diomedes hauling Iphegenia to her death at Aulis. Fresco from Pompeii.

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR >  

 In Hades, Agamemnon rises from the grave to tell Odysseus the story of his own homecoming, bearing Cassandra, the soothsaying princess of Troy, back with him to Mycenae in a cage as booty, only to be slaughtered in his own bed by his wife, Clytemnestra. The maniacal king warns Odysseus that he might face a similar fate in Ithaka. Odysseus has reason for concern, for reasons Nolan doesn’t explore. His wife Penelope is Clytemnestra’s cousin and she’s likely to have learned of his own role in the vile killing of Clytemnestra’s daughter, Iphigenia. As the Greek fleet assembled in the port town of Aulis, Agamemnon decided to go hunting in Artemis’s sacred grove, where he killed a deer, enraging the goddess, who loved animals more than men. Artemis calmed the winds and Agamemnon’s invasion force was stuck in port until, warns the priest Calchas, the king sacrifices his own child. Odysseus comes up with the plan. He persuades Clytemnestra and Iphigenia that the young girl will be wed to the great warrior Achilles and escorts her back to Aulis and places her on the sacrificial rock where her father slits her throat.  It would be easier to rehabilitate Harvey Weinstein than Odysseus.

Penelope must know this. She was Clytemnestra’s cousin. She had lived in Mycenae. She was Iphegenia’s aunt. Odysseus had every reason to delay coming home to her. After all, Penelope, the siren calling from Ithaka, means a kind of predatory seabird, a kingfisher, a fisher for kings. And like Iphigenia, Penelope was once sacrificed by her own parents, who had cast her off the cliff into the sea, only to see her saved by the very birds for whom she was named.

What does Penelope think? How does she really feel about the man who left her and took his time coming home, philandering and killing across the Mediterranean? We don’t know. Nolan doesn’t tell us. He doesn’t understand women. They’ve always been one-dimensional characters in his films. But she wasn’t for the Greeks. There’s an ambiguity to Penelope, a mystique, if you will, that makes you ask, how much she’s really yearning for her lost husband. After all, she isn’t weaving a shroud to honor Odysseus, but his aged father, Laertes, who stayed home, faithful to her, her son and Ithaka.

Penelope was exalted in early Christian theology for her fidelity. But you can’t say the same for our hero. While he may have been mesmerized by Calypso, he spent a year canoodling with Circe of his own volition. He wasn’t all that eager to get back to Penelope’s bedchamber. But Nolan elides this telling detail from his film.

Only the brooding nymph Calypso succeeds in slowing Odysseus down. The wanderer stays seven years on Ogygia. But there’s little time for contemplation in Nolan’s slaughter fest. The seven years in Calypso’s thrall are squeezed into seven minutes of film and Calypso is reduced to the role of Odysseus’ therapist, feeding him lotus flowers like Prozac. Is Calypso a Freudian or Jungian? We don’t know. We don’t even learn what’s really bugging him or how he exorcizes his demons enough to apologize to Poseidon, the earth-shaker, and ride the current back to Ithaka. What did he learn? To honor the dead, maybe. But he would continue to make many more of them.

But this is not Calypso’s role in the Odyssey. She is another avenging proto-feminist, who tricks the trickster Odysseus and keeps him captive for seven years, taking her pleasure with him, doing to Odysseus what Odysseus would have done to her and had done to the Trojan women.

In The Odyssey, Odysseus doesn’t unload his story to Calypso, but to King Alcinous of the Phaiacians and his enchanting daughter Nausicca on the island of Scheria (Corfu), a city-state which treated sea-borne immigrants like Odysseus with kindness and hospitality, a running theme of Homer’s poem, which Nolan manages to mangle.

There are unanswered questions, left hanging, because of the box office. What are the sirens singing, “each to each,” Eliot put it. Are they singing songs of seduction, tempting him into the fatal waters? Or are they singing songs of horror, threnodies for the needless death, tempting him to drown himself in shame? Nolan doesn’t even hint at the answer, for there’s another thrilling episode just a few scenes away. This is high-T film-making, cinematics for the manosphere. It’s gotta move, baby. The warrior ethic ain’t got time for introspection.

We see them only at a distance, women lounging on rocks. For the Greeks, the sirens had the bodies of birds. They sang songs of death. They were made by the Goddess Demeter to search the Underworld for her daughter Persephone, who’d been taken into the eternal darkness by Hades to be his bride. Were they taunting Odysseus with shades of the men and women he sent there?

The historian Mary Beard ridiculed Nolan’s film for its lack of sex, which, as Freud made clear, is the driving force behind almost all Greek drama and comedy. But Nolan has no feel for human sexuality. Does divine Eros make even one fleeting appearance to alter the course of any film in Nolan’s brutalist oeuvre? No. He’s only comfortable in the horrorshow realm of Thanatos. Nolan makes movies that appeal to bros with college degrees, usually in finance.

The most generous thing that can be said about Nolan’s film is that it’s a movie about a man who has committed genocide and who is so mentally unbalanced by the experience that he kills and plunders all the way home, making one bad decision after another, until every member of his own army has joined the ranks of the dead. Then he finally arrives home, where he cleanses his bad conscience–to the extent he has a conscience–by killing nearly every man left in Ithaka, especially savoring the murder of a draft-dodging suitor of Penelope, someone who didn’t want to go slaughter Trojans to open the trade routes for the tyrannical Agamemnon. This final act of mass violence instructs his previously non-violent son Telemachus how to kill too, so that he can become king and the killing can go generation after generation. Nolan tacks on an ending that’s more Lord of the Rings than the Odyssey, as Penelope and Nolan’s now sanctified-through-more-blood hero Odysseus set sail for the West to honor the dead, but only the Greeks, not the Trojans whose entire population Odysseus and Agamemnon have wiped out.

In Homer’s poem, a truer ending takes place. The mass slaughter at the palace is greeted with rage by the populace, who gather to storm the gates, until Athena, once again, intervenes to save her own private mercenary, Odysseus. He just can’t stop killing. If Homer had enjoyed Cassandra’s gift (or curse) of prophecy, he too might have had Odysseus setting sail into the West to spread the genocidal method to the nascent empire across the sea.

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