Nolan's Odyssey: Heroism, History and the Politics of Tragedy

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has been praised for presenting a more human Odysseus. Rather than the almost superhuman hero of myth, Nolan gives us a man scarred by war, haunted by loss and struggling to find his way home.

That makes for compelling cinema. But it also raises an interesting political question. What kind of hero is Odysseus?

For the philosopher Hegel, the tragic hero represents an ethical world. Heroes such as Antigone or Oedipus are caught between two equally powerful forces. Their downfall is tragic because there is no easy solution to the conflict. Suffering ultimately reveals a deeper order in the world.

The Marxist critic Georg Lukács saw Homer in a similar way. Odysseus belongs to a world where life still has coherence. He may wander for years, but he always knows where home is. His journey has meaning because the world itself has meaning.

Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht looked at tragedy differently.

They were suspicious of stories that turn suffering into something necessary or inevitable. History, they argued, is made by people, not fate. What looks eternal is often the product of particular social systems.

That does not mean rejecting the hero.

Brecht was never interested in simply replacing heroes with ordinary people. His theatre is dialectical. He wants us to admire and question characters at the same time.

Think of Mother Courage. We sympathise with her struggle to survive. At the same time we see how she is trapped by—and helps reproduce—the brutality of war. Brecht refuses to let us settle into either admiration or condemnation.

That is the most interesting way to watch Nolan's film.

The more human Odysseus becomes, the more contradictory he becomes. We sympathise with his trauma after Troy. We admire his endurance. But we are also forced to confront his deception, his violence and, finally, the bloody restoration of his kingdom.

The film becomes strongest when it refuses easy answers.

Is Odysseus a victim of war or an agent of violence?

Does his suffering justify what he does?

Can we celebrate his return without thinking about those who die to make it possible?

These are not questions Homer asks in quite the same way. But they are questions modern audiences cannot avoid.

Benjamin would remind us that history is always written by the victors. Every heroic story leaves other stories untold. The glory of kings rests on the suffering of countless unnamed people.

Yet Nolan's achievement may be that he does not simply celebrate heroism. By making Odysseus recognisably human, he also makes him morally unstable. The audience is drawn towards him and pushed away from him at the same time.

That is where the film unexpectedly comes close to Brecht.

Not because it abandons the hero, but because it refuses to let us see him as simply heroic.

The best political art does not tell us what to think. It presents contradictions that force us to think for ourselves.

The Greeks understood that tragedy reveals conflict. Brecht insisted that those conflicts are historical, not eternal. Nolan's Odyssey sits somewhere between the two. It reminds us that even the greatest heroes are products of history—and that history is always more complicated than the stories its victors tell.