By contrast with this late arrival I always try to arrive at a cinema in good time. Good in the sense of fractionally before the film itself starts in order to avoid the trailers for forthcoming attractions. Half of these are for historical sagas which, with some slight variations in costume (competing brands of body-hugging designer armor, differences in the cut of peasants’ coarse and loose-fitting work-wear), all look the same. Arriving early for The Last Viking I did catch one of these trailers and, to my astonishment, discovered that it was for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Which was surprising because it looked like all the other made-for-teens epics I’d had the misfortune to glimpse over the years.

The film came out. I had no desire to see it but if I was going to see it it had to be in an IMAX. Same with Dunkirk which proved to be an immense cinematic experience. Not that I’m easily seduced by the tech specs of a given release. The debate about whether Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest films were best seen in 70mm, VistaVision or in whatever format they happened to be served up at your local multiplex deflected discussion from the more pressing question of whether they were worth seeing at all. The Odyssey, it turned out, was impossible to see at an IMAX. Every screening in London was sold out till the end of time. A few seats were always available but, as anyone who has ended up at a chiropractor’s after the neck-strain contortions of sitting in the first couple of rows will attest, only the central segment of seats offers anything like full IMAX immersion. In a life lacking in focus and purpose all sorts of little things whoosh into the attendant vacuum so I became absorbed in the search for tickets. The impossibility of getting tickets became the motor for getting tickets. Because it was so difficult to see I became desperate to see a film I had no desire to see. And suddenly this dedication was rewarded. A batch of seats in the middle of the middle of the Leicester Square Cineworld became available for a mid-afternoon Sunday screening.

As O-Day drew closer I viewed the prospect with less-and-less enthusiasm. Reports came back from profoundly unreliable sources — my friend Rob Doyle who saw it twice, first in an IMAX and then, a week later, on a regular screen — claiming it was great. Others said that it was rubbish.

And they were right. It turned out to be exactly as feared: a total bore but this boredom had its peaks. The candle- and fire-lit feasts were the biggest bore of all. Followed closely by the fight scenes. That’s the strange thing about fights in action films, especially sword fights: they’re always a bore. (Is any sound in cinema more boring than the metallic swish of a sword being drawn from its scabbard?) The script was so unspeakably stupid it should have been called The Idiossey. A reversal of the censor’s certificates is in order indicating that a film like this which is deemed unsuitable for persons under the age of 15 should not be seen by anyone over the age of 15. Would I have enjoyed it if I were 12? Impossible to say but to my adult eyes it seemed a pale shadow of movies that warmed my young heart: Jason and the Argonauts with a hint — provided by Charlize Theron’s Calypso — of One Million Years BC.

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It looked OK but not that great. There were some big seas, big beaches and big skies, like in Dunkirk, but without the patient queuing of the British troops which lent that film its double allegorical dimension: first as a realist parable of years of Soviet-style resignation in the face of canceled ferries and rail replacement services, and then as a still more prophetic — and politically ambiguous — depiction of the impossibility of stopping small boats crossing the channel. In a way The Idiossey was like several mini Dunkirks. Matt Damon and his crew are always rocking up on some beach with high hopes of it being the fringe of a Bounty advert, drawing their boring swords, and then splashing back to their boring boats to escape whichever monstrous bores happen to be in residence there. The lesson seems to be that Odysseus never learns his lesson. I admire and share Nolan’s aversion to CGI but what I learned from this latest venture is that he had gone to enormous effort and expense to create a reality that looks CG, like the irreal world of all those other historical epics pimped out in trailers.

CGI routinely dispenses with gravity but it also works its magic on another dimension of physics, that of time itself. It has created a mysterious realm, located somewhere in the bows-and-arrows past, but lacking what might be called historical specificity. It’s a realm of battles or rather a battle where the same fight — against tyranny or injustice (in The Odyssey it’s all about the breaking of Zeus’s Law) — can be endlessly waged and refought. It’s a realm in which the supernatural is indistinguishable from reality, where the historical record is no more than a mise-en-scène for the eternal struggle of getting people into the cinema to watch something not worth seeing. After the initial scene-setting captions — some empire or other has grown corrupt, the republic is giving way to dictatorship — we settle into the saga of some Birkenstock gladiator or other coming back to restore the founding values. In the age of Trump this has a certain appeal which, to be fair, Nolan milks like a gigantic cow. (Coming soon, in the sense of never: The Obamassy.) By contrast with this curiously ahistorical idea of history the much-loved caption from Second World War films — “1940: Somewhere in England” is a temporal and spatial pin-drop of extraordinary precision. Wherever we are it’s a dungeons-and-dragons theme park with a flotsam of historical bits and bobs — spears, swords, metallic knitwear — thrown in. The Odyssey is the biggest, most all-encompassing manifestation of this trend since it is set and made in a time when gods walk among us. More exactly when, by virtue of their various disguises, they look like they walk among us. The gods might well be — always are — Hollywood stars who, when decked out in Carhartt for contemporary dramas, look exactly like blue-collar guys who, on a Saturday, spend their money at the movies. Matt Damon is exemplary. Not just a regular guy but a regular God who, this time around, takes an inordinately long time to get home from work to his wife and kid. Of which religion, pray, are these gods the focus of such worship? The religion of giant paydays for all concerned. Including Emily Wilson who translated the book and then, to her immense credit, bit the Cyclopean hand that launched millions of dollars of royalties in her direction.

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I left before the end but, like Damon on one of them islands, should have headed for the exit sooner. I had a lovely bike ride home from Leicester Square. Maybe the illusory world of The Odyssey enhanced my enjoyment of the real world: the tinder-dry grass of London’s parks, the thirsty trees, all the different nationalities straying from the pedestrian half of shared lanes into the bike part. I didn’t mind. I was glad that people from all over could come to this island, this city, get in to the National Gallery for free and enjoy a pleasant stroll home. I liked all of that but mainly what I liked was the reverse opportunity cost, the thought that if I hadn’t left early I’d still be watching this moronic film, this enormous waste of material, talent (Nolan’s especially) and, though I have not read it, source material. And maybe it reasserted a sense of cinematic priorities. Action films are a bore but, at the other extreme, I can’t get excited about Eric Rohmer’s little Sunday-afternoon on-the-beach comedies and in-the-suburbs proverbs either. But on this Sunday afternoon Rohmer’s close-to-home vision seemed nothing short of epic.

From our dwindling highbrow publications, to our proliferating social media, everyone is fixated on the clash between the technooptimists and the technophobes. Is efficiency more important than justice? Will AI liberate or enslave us? These debates take us around in circles, reinforcing entrenched faiths rather than shedding new light. To reflect on these matters, we can do worse than revisit the ancients, who knew a thing or two about capturing the essence of things.

At the heart of Homer’s Iliad, beats the story of a long strike. In 18 of its 24 books, Achilles, the Greeks’ finest fighter, has downed his weapons; refusing to leave his tent to join the fray, he’s incensed with his boss, Agamemnon, the King of the Achaeans. His wrath erupted after a visit from Odysseus bearing the King’s decree to confiscate loot from an earlier skirmish with the Trojans. It is Homer’s way of introducing Odysseus to us not so much as the cunning hero, but as messenger — a lackey of an authoritarian King. Only when the Trojans slay Achilles’ best mate, Patroclus, does he set revenge against the Trojans above his miff with Agamemnon, end his strike, rise from his tent, and return to the battlefield.

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At that point, Achilles’ mother, Thetis, beseeches Hephaestus — the only useful Olympian, the god of manufacturing — to craft new armor for her boy. Hephaestus, who owes a debt to Thetis for having cared for him when he was cast out of Olympus, gets to work in his volcanic forge. From that fiery darkness he creates a stunning set of weapons: a shield, a helmet, a breastplate, and greaves. The shield is the centerpiece, elaborately engraved with scenes of earthly life, war, peace, the cosmos, and human labor: a reflection of the human world. This is no mere metalwork; it is divine craftsmanship, imbued with power that no mortal smith could fashion. It is a god’s gift, not a product of human labor or intelligence, as if to remind us that true gifts are priceless.

Cut to Odysseus 10 years later. Achilles is now dead, but has done much to make Troy’s sacking possible, even if Odysseus provided the final push with his horse ruse — another gift that brought ruin to a great city. In his film, Nolan depicts Odysseus on his arduous journey home as a man exercised by regrets, haunted by guilt over the way he treated the defeated Trojans, tortured by an understandable survivor’s guilt; the unshakeable burden of having watched all his comrades perish, one by one, while he alone reaches Ithaca’s shores. But there is one episode that could have saddled Odysseus’ moral burden with further, deserved, guilt which Nolan leaves out; a tale that Ovid appended to the canon to trouble a man already full of ghosts.

Once Troy was obliterated, as imagined by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, the Greek victors had to settle an internal dispute between Odysseus, their strategist, and Ajax, their most formidable ground soldier. Namely, who would sail home with Achilles’ divine armor? Unable to mediate, the Greek chieftains convened a tribunal; a contest not of swords but of words in which the prize was far more than a set of weapons.

Ajax’s argument was simple. He had fought more, bled more, killed more. He could handle the heavy arms better. He never hid behind ruses or deceit. Unlike Odysseus, who had feigned madness to avoid enlisting, Ajax had answered the call gladly. Achilles’ armor should be his by dint of sheer, unembellished valor; and the requisite skill at handling it.

Odysseus stunned the chieftains by conceding that Ajax was braver and more useful in the heat of hand-to-hand battle. But then he pivoted away from bravery and justice toward efficiency. “Who served the Greeks best?”, he wondered aloud. He was the one who reconciled quarrelling chieftains, infiltrated Troy as a spy, conceived the Trojan Horse ploy. Strength without cunning, he intimated, is brute force. His intelligence, not Ajax’s muscle, had brought victory.

When the tribunal awarded Achilles’ arms to Odysseus, Ajax fell on his sword, inconsolable and incapable of enduring the shame. His corpse a fine addition to all the other regrets Odysseus might agonize over as his journey home, in Nolan’s telling, turned him from a sure-footed, clinical agent to an introspective, self-doubting but more relatable character; a man who carries the weight of others’ fate as if they were lead sewn into the lining of his cloak.

What possible resonance does this have for the modern world? Well, there are several insights to be gleaned. First, it highlights how we attribute value. Today, the Ajax-Odysseus dispute would have been settled not by tribunal, not by a contest of moral arguments, but at a lavish auction organized by Sotheby’s or Christie’s. That this would not raise an eyebrow is indicative of how the frantic commodification of everything has robbed us of a capacity to appreciate value as something irreducible to the depth of one’s wallet.

A second insight is that the clash between Ajax’s appeal to justice and Odysseus’s appeal to efficiency still rages. No sooner does someone propose wealth taxes, to restore a modicum of the fairness that our societies have ditched, than the defenders of the wealthy pose Odysseus’s question: “Who serve the Treasury best by staying in the country? The ultra-rich or the paupers, who are not going anywhere anyway?”

A third insight comes from closer inspection of the bone of contention in Homer’s and Ovid’s stories. What was the loot whose confiscation so enraged Achilles? Her name was Briseis, a Trojan woman whom the Greeks had abducted, along with others, before presenting her as a prize, a slave, to Achilles. It was when Agamemnon had to give up one of his own slave women to appease the god Apollo, that he took Briseis — thus driving Achilles to down his weapons. Homer wants us to feel Achilles’s rage at this theft of his possession — which might as well have been an amphora of fine wine, as a living, breathing, terrified woman.

Are we much better? Before congratulating ourselves on how primitive the Greeks were, we would do well to cast a critical eye on our lot. Besides the rise of a manosphere relentlessly reviving every patriarchal notion of women as a form of property, frenetic commodification has led us to the ridiculous belief that water is just another commodity, students are customers, electricity markets are a good idea, fake carbon markets are an efficient way to decarbonize the atmosphere and so it goes on.

And then there is the other bone of contention: Achilles’ armour. The tribunal was a charade. The verdict was never truly in question, despite Ovid’s attempts to portray it as a cliffhanger. Agamemnon and the chieftains had already decided, very much like today when fair hearings, and rowdy Parliamentary debates, are staged over outcomes already decided elsewhere. The gods gave the armor; the powerful allocated it. Does this sound familiar? Maybe I am reading too much into Ovid and Homer, but humor me.

Before us, we have a pile of capital goods forged by Hephaestus. No mortal effort produced them. They descended from Olympus, as gifts which grant the mortals who seize them powers utterly disproportionate to how they earned them. In the case of Achilles’s weaponry, they were divinely produced means of destruction. On other occasions, like when Prometheus gifted us fire, the gods’ gifts were produced means of production. In both cases, mortals fought each other to the death over who would possess them.

Now, back to our future. Let’s swap Hephaestus’ weaponry for cloud capital: the algorithms behind Amazon’s Alexa and, more recently, the large language models behind AI bots. Unlike Achilles’ armor, these magical tools are forged not by divine labor but by our collective labor: every purchase we make, every sentence we write, every image we tag, every link we click, every correction we offer to a chatbot that has trained us to train it. We have forged the armor, collectively. But we don’t wear it. It is allocated — entirely outside any market, any election, any auction — by the handful of firms that own the algos and the data-centers. The Cloudalists, as I call them, are today’s Agamemnons issuing edicts from their towering heights while we stand outside the tent, waiting for a hearing that will never come.

Under old-fashioned capitalism, exploitation at least wore the market’s clothing. You sold your labor-power in a marketplace that resembled, formally, an exchange between equals — even if that formal freedom curdled the moment you walked through the factory gate and discovered yourself, per Marx’s vampire, drained “while there remains a single sinew to be exploited”.

Ovid’s tribunal was the window-dressing of a decision Agamemnon had already made, in the same way that presenting Deliveroo riders as free-wheeling “associates” window-dresses their precarity as freedom-to-choose, entrepreneurship even. Technofeudalism, our current system, dispenses with even that fiction. There is no market for what Amazon’s algorithm decides to show you, no market for what your feed decides you should feel today. There is only the edict — Agamemnon’s “you must submit to my wish” — now issued by a recommendation engine instead of a king, and dressed, absurdly, in the language of personalization. We have not left Homer’s tent; we have just given Agamemnon a server farm and a few AI agents and called it progress.

And here freedom’s oldest trick resurfaces. Freedom, I have long argued, cannot be defined simply as a fenced off realm from which any kind of domination is excluded. Mainly because that is to ignore who built the fence and how its erection was, itself, a form of subjugation. And Silicon Valley has perfected this fence. You are “free” to close the app, free to decline the cookies, free to walk away from the platform that now hosts your friendships, your customers, your entire social existence — free, that is, the way the desert traveler is free to refuse the only vendor selling water. That is not freedom; that is a serfdom cloaked in the language of choice. Market exchange has given way to digital fiefs, and the lords of those fiefs do not negotiate.

Which brings us to the household Odysseus is fighting to reclaim. Nolan says he wants us to take from his Odyssey the terror and dignity of the nostos — the long, humiliating, cunning fight to claw back what is yours after the world has decided, in your absence, to help itself. While Odysseus is away, the suitors do not merely court Penelope; they consume the estate, slaughter the herds, drink the wine and treat another man’s accumulated wealth as ownerless simply because its owner is not in the room to object. That is precisely what has happened to our property, to our commons — to our texts, our attention, our joint creative and intellectual output. We built the household. We stepped out, distracted, and have returned to find it being devoured. The suitors are not thieves in the night; they are the platforms we invited in, and they have made themselves at home.

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Odysseus offers two weapons for this fight, both of which I have long admired. First, cunning over force: he survives the Cyclops by calling himself “Nobody” — an identity strategically withheld — at the precise moment our economy demands the opposite, that we surrender our identities in granular, harvestable detail to systems that profit from knowing us better than we know ourselves. Second, opting for an external restraint, rather than relying on willpower: he resists the Sirens not by trusting his own resolve but by choosing to be bound to his ship’s mast — a form of restraint imposed from without because reason alone cannot counter a sufficiently seductive song. The infinite scroll is our Sirens’ song. No one wins that contest through willpower; you win it, if at all, through binding yourself to something immovable outside your self: regulation, collective action, a mast lashed by public power rather than private terms-of-service. The individual is powerless against the algorithm; only the collective, bound together, stands a chance.

Which brings me to the lesson buried in that old, half-forgotten insight that, in every exploitative society, any regime of allocation needs a story that makes coercion look fair and reasonable. Homer and Ovid gave the ancient world its story; the market gave capitalism one; now, the algorithm is busy writing technofeudalism’s. The task in front of us is not to win Achilles’ armor by out-arguing Odysseus. Nor is it to secure our right, as Achilles attempted, to keep others enslaved. It is to notice, finally, that the contest was rigged right from the moment Agamemnon decided upon the referees — and to sail home anyway. For the household is still ours, if we have the cunning to reclaim it and the courage to bind ourselves to the mast against the songs that would lure us to our ruin.

I waited six days. But still the theater was packed (my wife and I had to sit in the front row, and she clutched my hand in the Polyphemus scenes where poor Bill Irwin was doing his technological best to scare us — chewing live Greek soldiers, et cetera). The audience seemed ready for a large Wow! But there was an odd silence, as if some subversive word had got around. It can be fascinating to watch an audience watching a film: and it’s unmistakable sometimes, the way respect can turn to regret.

Anyway, our full house sat through it, as dogged and drained of passion as Matt Damon’s weary, soured college professor Odysseus. But, like Matt, we weren’t with it — and if you’re going to cherish large audiences at the movies you have to hope for a kind of communion. It’s like the crowd on a roller coaster, learning how every looming Up precedes a wipe-out Down. Great movies teach us their rhythm so that we may ride along on the thrill and the dread.

Consider the opening of Jaws. That film does not compromise with our attention: we are given no freedom. From the outset, there is the pulsing music (a rite of summer) and the relentless forward motion of some underwater hunter presence. The credits come up on top of this shot — as if to say, for a moment, don’t worry, this is the usual thing, the way movie stories begin. Be calm, like the ocean late on a summer evening.

We see a group of kids hanging out on the beach. We hear their vague chatter. We appreciate that a boy is looking at a girl, in the same old way. She gets up; he follows her. He calls out to “Chrissy”. The camera pans, left to right, just as it did in showing us the beach and the group. In silhouette the youngsters are stripping off as they run to the water. We know where they think they are going. The knowledge builds like arousal. That sea is so wet in the moonlight. We are taken over by the force of desire. So when Chrissy, in deep water, is startled by some mouth tugging at her, we are ravished, too. It is as if the god of cinema is sweeping us away. Before the story can start, we have been consumed by the divinity of the force. It is with us.

What on earth, or at sea, am I doing, apparently assigned to The Odyssey but talking about Jaws? I am trying to explain the gods — no, not the scenario in which big-G God struggles to keep his place. I mean the Greek gods, the cruel arbiters of fate that lurk beneath the surface of the Homeric story, and who have nothing to do with the strained moral aftermath of our God-nostalgic culture. Forget that trite scheme of apprehension — we are most gripped by music, a forward tracking shot and the certainty that our participation has been hijacked by the force. There is a god of cinema, and we like to feel it is a shark coming after us. 

If you’re making a movie from Homer, that is the required state of helpless belief, like terror. In which case the face of Odysseus has to have a nobility that is growing older before our eyes; an erotic attention — because this film must be about watching and desiring; and a fatal, flawed power in him that is cunning but tragic. And that is not quite Matt Damon.

You can say you are showing the 10 years after the fall of Troy when Odysseus does not go home; you can string together a series of fanciful adventures, with or without special effects; you can make a pretense of saying, well, please understand that Odysseus is upset by that war he won, as if in grief or some convenient PTSD. You can ask Damon to put on armor, a helmet, a beard and guilt; you can give him tin lines when every time he opens his mouth he should utter music and existential anguish. “Oh gee,” says Matt, “I can’t do that. I’m only Matt Damon.”

Not that being Matt Damon is unworthy. He has been an ingenious, valuable supporting actor — that’s how Nolan used him as General Groves in Oppenheimer. That’s how, for 10 minutes or so, he was so electric in Courage Under Fire (1996) as Ilario, a liar who is coming apart. And there are many other pictures that place Damon highly as a professional. But it is in his straightforward modesty that he will not be able to hide from us or himself that he doesn’t know what he is doing trying to be Odysseus. Matt is smart. He got into Harvard even if he didn’t finish there. But he cannot lose sight of how Penelope is more central or more now instead of tempests at sea and horrors in the caves.

Penelope is the wife of Odysseus. When he went off to Troy (and that was 10 years before the 10 years in which he pretends to be coming home), he left her with their son, Telemachus, as queen of Ithaca. And in what amounts to 20 years, Penelope has grown older, more rueful and intense in her longing for her husband. She is besieged by suitors who tell her Odysseus must be dead so won’t she marry them instead. Whereupon, the cunning wife — truly, they are suited — says she cannot take a new husband while she is weaving a shroud for her lost father-in-law. Thus she weaves, only to undo her tapestry at night while the suitors are asleep.

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That is a beguiling narrative device (so close to the Scheherazade method) and it is a marvel, or proof of his thinness of imagination, that Nolan hardly attempts to show it. It is as if he fears tapestry will bore us — so let him play at the travails and adventure, frantic scenes of battle, and the infinite landscape of journeying. Did the director decide that his audience would lose interest without lavish swordplay, terrifying monsters et cetera? Did that distract him from the remembering face of a woman growing older yet more confirmed in her feelings of love (because love flowers best when it is not realized)?

The pity of this failure is that Anne Hathaway seems capable of being a mature Penelope. The actress is 43 now, and brave enough not to magic that away in so big a picture it could determine the rest of her career. Hathaway looks her age. She has consented to what can be a fatal candor in an era of so many new lies with screen skin. This is all the more admirable in that the same screen offers Lupita Nyong’o in only a few shots as a plausible version of “the most beautiful woman in the world”. And then there is Charlize Theron as Calypso.

Theron is 50 now, and she does not look it. No need to ask how that has been accomplished. Let’s just say that she is there or thereabouts in this incoherent narrative as a woman on the beach in a nice line of après-swim wear (off the shoulder and off the soul), wistful with longing for Odysseus. We get the point — that he and she have been exploring their inner lives for five years or so. (We guess the screen Penelope has been seeing them in her dreams, sewing and resewing the tapestry.)

To be blunt about it, in screen terms — or in what we actually feel struggling with the ramshackle narrative — Odysseus has not gone home because Calypso is such an obliging lay. Nolan does not need to show the engineering of their coupling. The best bodies in this film belong to the Trojan horse and the ship that Odysseus sails. Give that designer an Oscar — the only one the film deserves.

Am I being too facetious in treating a movie project where gods have withdrawn to leave room for the $250 million budget? That money is a god as fierce as anything in Homer. So the picture goes to so many tourist-ready locations — you can imagine cruise ships following the itinerary. It thrills to the Trojan horse (so Nolan films it in every way he can count). It exults in the ship, no matter that it is several centuries too modern. It still leaves room for inexplicable things — what is Zendaya doing in the film? Yet it cannot inhabit the mystery of a marriage where the spouses are most in love when far apart and worrying over reunion. Fix on that and the picture might not need the sprawl of its 172 minutes.

A few years ago, another film, The Return, understood the sad poetics in Homer and presented Ralph Fiennes as an Odysseus exhausted by nobility as well as his journey. Juliette Binoche was Penelope. That film was only 116 minutes long, but its passage of time was more palpable. The Return is instructive because it drops most of the gaudy adventures to stress how Penelope does not quite recognize Odysseus on his return. She has to learn him again, and that is poignant because Fiennes and Binoche have a history on screen: The English Patient and a Wuthering Heights.

I am not offering a conventional film review. But I’m prompted by the busy emptiness of this Odyssey, such that it is only worth writing about if one can suggest some remedy or alternative. Nolan is adorned now in reputation and budget, but he has a history of missing the point. On Dunkirk, he neglected how Germany let so many soldiers escape on the hard beaches, instead of driving them into the sea. On Oppenheimer, he had no time for the refugee mathematicians making the Bomb sweet, or the Washington that approved the venture, so “Oppy” became the fall guy. And so with The Odyssey, he overlooks how a modern film might make the story gripping.

Would it be compelling now to take the difficulty in believing in the Odyssey as your subject? Imagine a film unit roaming the world to film “adventures”, with pliant actresses on every beach. Then think of the director’s wife at home in Beverly Hills, wondering how her god is doing in IMAX, while studio suits come calling to take her to Palm Springs for the weekend. And Hathaway is halfway there already. But Odysseus needs a late middle-aged irony, and the hip asides of a droll director who sees how fatuous and tiring the Odyssey is. And maybe Penelope does succumb here or there — in the way Odysseus does what any guy is likely to do on the loose. Think of George Clooney as this distracted director. Do I see a comedy? I think I do. Something to jostle the stupor of this aimless epic. When I saw it — in that packed theater — as it ended a couple of people tried to applaud. Their clapping died a death as no one else joined in. The movie was greeted in silence — not the quiet of deep emotion, but a mix of fatigue and disbelief. We’ll see how long its glory lasts. 

I’m thinking of a movie about smart careerists who can’t understand why they’re making The Odyssey. Not when the locations they go to are ravaged by fire, flood and famine so that it’s all the director and the actress can do to swap a wisecrack in the morning. When the budget of the picture is such a Polyphemus it has become the film’s true subject. 

It might have its moments, as when Odysseus wonders if “home” will be there still, let alone his wife; or when Penelope is about to undo her tapestry once more, with fingertips raw from the needles, and recollecting how a god once warned her not to get into secretarial work or sewing. Whose is the face she keeps putting in the weave?

The Odyssey does not come from the same world as the other pinnacles of Greek culture we all know and love and tweet about. For one thing, it is much older: the events it recounts take place during the late Bronze Age, around 1200 years before the golden age of Attic culture that spawned Socrates and Plato. The poem itself was set down in writing only after centuries of oral transmission — but even the written document is older than not just Plato and Sophocles, but the Persian War, the Olympic Games, and even the Archaic poets like Sappho and Alcaeus. In fact, Homer barely ever uses words that mean “Greek” or “Hellenic” at all: The Iliad and Odyssey are really about a mess of tiny, disunited Mycenaean kingdoms whose subjects wear boar’s tusk helmets and fight with bronze weapons and write, on the rare occasions that they write at all, in a complicated ideographical script called Linear B that was only deciphered in the Fifties. 

No heroic figure better illustrates just how different these two worlds — the Homeric and the Attic — were than Odysseus. It is true that he was often admired by the Greeks of the Athenian Golden Age: the intelligence evinced by his ruses was impossible to ignore for such a self-consciously brainy civilization. But just as frequently, Odysseus was deplored for his lack of scruple, his amorality, his low cunning. Pindar suspected that “the fame of Odysseus is become greater than his toils, through the sweet lays that Homer sang”. Sophocles had his main character, Philoctetes, berate Odysseus for being a “shameless wretch! from whom nor truth nor justice, / Naught that becomes the generous mind, can flow”. Even Socrates, who was generally rather keen on intelligence as a virtue, stopped short of straightforwardly defending the man from Ithaca in the Lesser Hippias, preferring instead to show how his interlocutor is just as bad as Odysseus, because he is a deceiver, not of others, but of himself.  

What was it about Odysseus’s intelligence that proved so unsettling to these vast, rational, civilization-founding minds? In a series of essays and books published in the Sixties and Seventies, the French classicists Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne offer one interesting interpretation. In the Homeric epic, they point out, the words used to evoke Odysseus’s particular kind of intelligence are very different from the words that denote intelligence in later Greek. In Plato and Aristotle, for example, the usual abstractions of choice are nous, logos and episteme — all of which suggest the faculties and forms of knowledge concerned with grasping a stable, intelligible order. Homer, by contrast, tends to use the word metis, which denotes a more practical kind of intelligence. Something flexible, unrepresentable, as variegated as the flecks of light that glint off bronze armor: the uncanny knack some people have for getting things done. 

All through the Odyssey, Homer lingers over Odysseus’s feats of knowhow and craft every bit as lovingly as he does the feats of martial strength performed by Achilles, Hector, and Ajax in the Iliad. In Book 5, we watch him fell trees, bore joints and build with his own hands the raft that carries him from Calypso’s island; he steers himself across the open sea armed only with his knowledge of the stars. In Book 21, we see him string his great bow “like an expert singer skilled at lyre and song” in order to best the outrageous suitors who have colonized his house. In Book 23, we learn of his skills at carpentry, and the fact that he fashioned his marriage bed by carving it from the living trunk of an olive tree. Even the famous scar by which the servant Eurycleia eventually recognizes him is testament to his knowhow — specifically, in the distinctly non-Mycenaean art of hunting for boar. 

What distinguishes these skills from the kind of airy, abstract knowledge we find in, say, Plato? Vernant and Detienne list several divergences, but perhaps the most important is the peculiar relationship metis has with its own formal representation. For Plato and Socrates, a written or spoken representation of the truth is the truth; indeed, words like episteme actually imply some kind of representation of the world. Metis, by contrast, cannot be grasped abstractly; the moment you try to write it down, or codify it, you lose it. Odysseus may be best remembered as a creator of elaborate plans, but these plans are rarely laid out before him as a nice, clear set of steps; they are always provisional, prone to being revised whenever a cyclops bars the doors to the cave you are hiding in, or the sea-god who has taken against you tears apart your raft — when, in short, reality proves to be stranger and more variable than your own ordered representation of it. In Book 13, the goddess Athena explicitly admires this quality in her champion. When she meets him in disguise on the shores of Ithaca — and begins, for what it’s worth, one of the greatest, most under-appreciated flirtation scenes in all literature — she adores the fact that he begins to lie to her without yet knowing why he is lying. He has a blind conviction that pretense might yet prove useful in future improvisations: “Here among mortal men you’re far the best at tactics, spinning yarns, and I am famous among the gods for wisdom, cunning wiles [metis] too.” 

The choice of words is no accident. In ancient Greek theogony, “metis” had another important meaning. Specifically, it was the name given to Athena’s mother — the Oceanid nymph who marries Zeus in the primordial age of the Titans, before the Greek pantheon has settled into its familiar form. As Hesiod records it, after the wedding, the couple receive a prophecy. Metis will bear two children: a daughter, who will match her father in wisdom and strength; and a son, who will one day overthrow him. In response, Zeus swallows Metis whole — “put[s] her away inside his own belly … so that this goddess should think for him, for good and for evil”. The message is clear enough: power and strength are all very well; so too are patriarchal authority and abstract Apolline knowledge. But if you want to be King of the Gods, you gulp down metis, the most mysterious, unrepresentable form of intelligence of all. 

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It is striking, too, how many of Odysseus’s 20th-century admirers seem to single out something like metis as unusually appropriate to the modern age. Joyce, who reimagined Odysseus as an unassuming Jewish advertising agent named Leopold Bloom, always stressed that what he admired most in Homer’s protagonist was his completeness and wholeness, his ability to adapt to any task. He was, according to Joyce, “son to Laertes … father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy, and King of Ithaca” — all of which combine to render him the “most human” character in world literature. Over the course of Ulysses, Odysseus, in his wiliness, his adaptability, his endless capacity for reinventing himself, becomes a kind of antidote to modern alienation: by being identified with him, Bloom somehow transcends his boring bourgeois job and predictable bourgeois relationships, and becomes whole. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt went so far as to suggest the Homeric ethic as an anti-capitalist strategy: “In the world of Homer, Paris and Odysseus help in the building of their houses, Nausicaa herself washes the linen of her brothers, etc. All this belongs to the self-sufficiency of the Homeric hero, to his independence and the autonomic supremacy of his person.”

Nevertheless, there is something slightly unfamiliar about reading the accounts of Joyce and Arendt — or, for that matter, other modern Odysseus-fanciers like T.E. Lawrence and Derek Walcott — in the 21st century. The jury’s decision is in, and it has been decided that the Greek ideal means top-down planning, rational bureaucracy, vast sovereign efforts to make the world conform as neatly to abstract standards as possible. For Le Corbusier, Greek ideals justified razing half of Paris and replacing the curlicued old buildings with Parthenon-esque cuboids; for contemporary politicians, the grand old Greek word “democracy” is used to justify an increasingly inane and arbitrary form of abstract proceduralism. These days, the rational, modern institutions that claim to be the heirs to the Greek tradition — the halls of democratic government, the geometrical housing estates, the immaculate American universities with Greek letters on their porticoes — seem less capable than ever of producing a single individual as well-rounded, as universally capable, as polymetis, as Odysseus.

If there’s one hope I have for the wave of Odyssey-mania that is set to crest this week, it is that it might remind us that the intellectual legacy of Ancient Greece is far more mysterious than our culture likes to remember. The importance of un-representable knowledge is hard to discern in the philosophers of Golden-Age Athens — though even Plato, it must be said, put rationality in its place, giving over a good chunk of the Phaedrus is to the discussion of the revelatory power of the mania induced by poetry and sex and alcohol. But the further back you go, the clearer the mystery gets: the Pythagorean geometers guarded the secret of irrational numbers, and drowned Hippasus for revealing them to the world; the Orphic cults refused to disclose their secret wisdom to anyone who had not undergone elaborate purification rituals. But for my money, it was the earliest Greek writer of all who did it best. No-one since — in any language — has better captured the essential wildness of the human intellect, its storminess, its amplitude, that is matched only by the wine-dark sea. 

Nyong’o is an educated woman, who holds a bachelor’s degree in film and theater studies from Hampshire College, Massachusetts. She is a very 2020s figure, and naturally, roaming around in search of something to say, wasn’t satisfied until she found a class of people who she might be able to present in the light of Victimhood. As for the lack of “the female perspective”, she might have forgotten for the moment that the Victorian writer Samuel Butler was so struck by the highly feminine character of the Odyssey that he wrote an entire book on the subject. It was dedicated to the proposition that if a man called Homer wrote the Iliad, it was quite a different writer from the one who set down the Odyssey. This author was familiar with the Iliad, but the approach, the psychological framework, the patches of intense knowledge and total ignorance led the very learned Butler to one conclusion. The Odyssey, far from being “told from a very masculine side of things”, was strongly suggestive of being written by a woman. Butler’s book was called The Authoress of the Odyssey and was published in 1896.

Butler was a wonderfully intelligent and puckish mind, quite indifferent to generally accepted conclusions — he was homosexual, and skeptical of conventional proprieties. In 1863, he published an essay entitled “Darwin Among The Machines”, wondering what would happen to the human race if machines acquired the ability to build themselves, and acquire the processes of intelligent self-improvement — a remarkable warning about AI from 160 years ago. His excellent short novel The Fair Haven is a grossly sarcastic religious treatise that first fooled everyone who read it, and then utterly enraged them. He withheld his outrageous novel The Way of All Flesh to be published after his death in 1902, one of the funniest eviscerations of religious hypocrisy ever written.

Unlike a Hollywood actress putting on the voice of a great thinker at work, he didn’t care what people thought. The Authoress of the Odyssey is a brilliant mounting up of evidence, and a compelling and complex set of ideas about what animates male and female writers. Whoever wrote the Odyssey, it argues, had very little idea about the construction of boats, putting rudders at both ends, about how sheep feed their young, about the sound of wind at sea, about hawks tearing prey apart, and evidently believed that “dry and well-seasoned timber can be cut from a growing tree”. On the other hand, though evidently barred from practical matters that men would have no difficulty with, the author realizes immediately what it would mean to kill a large number of suitors in a banqueting hall, and that the first thing that “Homer” thinks of after the bloodspilling is “the dining room carpet”.

Butler notices, too, that it is exclusively the men who are mocked in the poem. Excuses are constantly found in a sympathetic way for the women, and laughter never falls upon them. In other Greek tellings of the story, Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, has her scandalous behavior condemned. Butler notes how “Homer” “whitewashes” Penelope, and puts it down to sex-based fellow feeling. It is an ingenious and very learned book, which rests on the knowledge that, in fact, there were plenty much-admired women poets in the pre-Athenian age of Greek poets — not just Sappho, but Damophila, the Paphylian and Erinna of Telos among many others. Butler’s marshalling of evidence suggests that, even if his premise isn’t true, there is, at the very least, a “perspective of women” in the Odyssey. So why say something so evidently absurd as “it’s told from a very masculine side of things”?

In Kingsley Amis’s 1978 academic comedy Jake’s Thing, an angry English don reports an encounter with an undergraduate essay on Shakespeare. “Her case was roughly that since Hamlet is far too nice and intelligent to be a man, he must be a woman because there’s nothing else to be.” Things have moved on: that undergraduate would these days be hauled over the coals for ignorance of non-binariness and accused of transphobia. But the underlying sense that the attitudes of the past, and the quality of their writing too, were appallingly limited until some present-day enlightened figure came along to put things right has only sharpened in the last half century of increasing orthodoxy. Of course, we can improve on Homer, and Shakespeare too!

The duty of improvement is so imperative, moreover, that we no longer need to read the great epics we’re improving on, let alone books of commentary by someone as intelligent and well-informed as Samuel Butler. Butler foresaw ChatGPT in 1863. He had no difficulty whatsoever in telling us about the limits of people many decades in the future, talking confidently about one of the great classics of literature. “Every scholar has read a Book of two of the Odyssey here and there; some have read the whole; a few have read it through more than once; but no one that I have asked have so much as been able to tell me whether Ulysses had a sister or no — much less what her name was.” So, Lupita, did he have a sister? I mean, before you start ticking off one of the greatest poets in world literature about his interest in women, presumably you took so important a question into account?

Americans have suffered bruising blows for four years now: the Covid shutdown, urban riots and crime, ballooning inflation and debt, open borders, civil strife, the gloating of our enemies and the collapse of the international order. The electorate is weary and dispirited, and seems ready, like a boxer on his last legs, to take a sweet nap on the canvas. 

Kamala Harris’s handlers understand this perfectly well. Having accurately discerned the national mood, they have made her the woman of the hour. She seems to float above all weighty issues. In her campaign poster “Forward”, a knockoff of the iconic Obama “Hope” image, her uplifted gaze radiates joy and “upliftment”. Her invocation of “What can be, unburdened by what has been” is happy and hopeful.

If all that sounds attractive, consider that Harris’s candidacy involves a deep memory-wipe. Politically speaking, she has sprung into being as a fully formed adult with no discernible past or historical recall. Her plan to control food prices repeats a common, famine-inducing error of communist regimes. Her tough-on-crime and border-securing persona rests not just on amnesia, but on media-driven amnesty. And yet, propelled forward by the cheerful drone of the “KHive ” and the good vibrations of “Brat summer”, Harris may surf all the way to the Oval Office.

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However, she won’t get there without the votes of one crucial constituency: the Lotus-Eaters, a mythical tribe now found right here in America.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew encounter the Lotus-Eaters at a moment of great vulnerability. After 10 years of grinding war, the Greeks had finally defeated the Trojans and sacked their city. Pushing off for home with Trojan women and loot, Odysseus’s 12 ships were driven off course by strong winds to the land of the Cicones, an actual historical tribe, where they sustained heavy losses in a pitched battle. Then they narrowly avoided total destruction amid “a howling, demonic gale”. Making for the western isle of Ithaca after the weather cleared, they sailed south to Cape Malea, where the fingers of the Peloponnesus extend into the Mediterranean.

But they were far from home. After a tantalising glimpse of native soil, they were torn out to sea by high winds and a ripping tide. Nine days later they arrived, “bent with pain and bone-tired”, in the Never-Never Land of the Lotus-Eaters. By then, they must have wanted only to lay their heads on the sand and sleep. Mental and physical exhaustion had prepared them to ingest the Lotus, a “honey-sweet fruit” that left the body intact but wiped away the mind.

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The Lotus-Eaters didn’t attempt to kill the men Odysseus sent to scout the land. They don’t seem even to have spoken with them: they “simply gave them the Lotus to taste”. The fruit induced profound forgetfulness. Those who ate it “no longer wished to report back or return” to their shipmates. They ceased to care about anything or anyone. They desired only “to remain with the Lotus-Eaters, feeding on lotus, and to forget about their homeward journey [nostos]”.

Nostos is the root of “nostalgia”, the pain associated with the thought of home. Odysseus’s men must have felt that pain intensely. The Lotus was for them a powerful analgesic, precisely because it induced a kind of total amnesia. For home is not just one thing among others. To forget about home, to cease to feel its deep tug, is to forget about everything: spouse and children, farmhouse and fields; the city of one’s birth and the graves of one’s ancestors; “the ashes of one’s fathers and the temples of one’s gods” — all that, held in memory, inwardly nourishes involuntary exiles by giving hope and meaning to their struggle and suffering.

This amnesia is not just personal. It wipes away all patriotic feeling, all care for the polity that gave one life and liberty. It annihilates cultural and historical memory, the rich topsoil of the past from which all future growths spring. All that remains for those who ingest the Lotus is a sterile present. More than that, its effect is metaphysical: it obliterates the pith and ground of our individual and collective being. Nostos and nous, “intellect”, both derive from an Indo-European root meaning “return to light and life”. The Lotus kills all spiritual and intellectual effort to uncover transcendent, humanly essential truth and to rescue it from oblivion.  

This is not to say that some degree of filtering — forgetting or ignoring things better left in the dark — isn’t essential to life. Every living thing, Nietzsche observes, “can become healthy, fruitful, and strong only within a horizon”. But when our horizons contract to the infinitesimal dimensions of the vanishing present, we are condemned to idiocy. This is the work of the Lotus, a potent symbol of the forces that today militate against memory: censorship, identity politics, ideological litmus-tests, the erosion of free speech, the replacement of education with indoctrination, and the noise of our digitally-distracted age, which drowns out whatever authentic and prophetic voices might otherwise still be heard. 

Today, the Harris campaign has cleverly repackaged oblivion as a panacea. Forget about the spirit of Tennyson’s Ulysses, who urged his men “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”.  The way forward, we are told, is to lay down our citizenly oars — to forget where we’ve been or where we thought we were going, and submit to being carried along in a joyful stupor by the ship of state. Never mind that it’s unclear who is steering that ship, or the destination they have in mind. 

In Homer’s epic, Odysseus dragged his scouts away from the Lotus, lashed them under the rowing benches, and once again took to the heaving seas. Ours, though, is an age not of heroes, but of know-nothings and buffoons who wish only to take us for a ride. This is more the stuff of comedy than of epic. Many would agree, of course, that it would be tragic to succumb to the political equivalent of a lobotomy. Yet in the blank and leaden eyes of those who have traded their human past and future for a zombie-like narcosis, such an exchange would not rise even to the dignity of error.