Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey explained through PTSD, survivor’s guilt and moral injury.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey isn’t really about a man trying to get home. It’s about a man who’s terrified of what’ll follow him there.
Before we start, you may notice that I’m illustrating this video using my own little doodles rather than footage from the film.
First of all, how dare you criticise my art, but normally we talk about films that have been out for a while, and it’s an educated risk as to whether we’ll get away with using the footage. But with a film that’s still pounding eardrums in IMAXs around the world, I don’t want Universal to demonetise this before Odysseus has even got inside the horse.
So instead, you’re getting some drawings. Deal with it.
Also, huge spoiler warning. I’ll be talking about the entire film, including the ending. Admittedly, the source material is nearly three thousand years old, but Nolan’s changed quite a lot, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.
I went into Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey with only a passing knowledge of the story.
I knew there was a Trojan Horse, a Cyclops, some Sirens and a man taking an almost professionally long time to get home.
Did I get most of this information from The Simpsons?
Yes I did.
But unlike our favourite yellow family, I came out of this feeling like I’d just watched a three-hour PTSD metaphor.
Or at least, that’s how it landed for me.
Because this isn’t just a story about returning from war. It’s about whether you can return from war without bringing it back with you.
The film tells us this pretty much immediately.
We see the Trojan Horse standing in the surf, this enormous metal object that the Trojans have to physically drag into their own city. They take it for an offering, something sacred left behind by an enemy that’s supposedly admitted defeat.
Then night falls, the Greeks crawl out of it and Troy becomes an inferno.
The city burns. Soldiers tear through the streets. The thing the Trojans willingly brought inside their walls turns out to contain the people who destroy them. A tale quite literally as old as time.
Nolan doesn’t shoot any of this like a clean, triumphant military victory. Odysseus has won the war, but the camera keeps dragging us back to what his cleverness actually produced.
Screaming civilians. Desecrated temples. The priestess of Athena being murdered by Greek soldiers.
The Trojan Horse is the act that makes Odysseus a legend, and it’s also the thing he can’t escape.
You can feel Oppenheimer hanging over all of this.
Once again, Nolan’s telling a story about an extraordinarily clever man who creates the thing that ends a war, then has to live in the world his invention has made.
John Leguizamo’s Eumaeus warns Odysseus that his cleverness will get him into trouble, and that warning sits quietly beneath the whole film.
The horse worked. That’s the problem.
Odysseus isn’t haunted by a failed plan. He’s haunted by one that succeeded perfectly.
And PTSD alone doesn’t quite cover everything happening to him.
There’s another idea that kept coming to mind while I was watching, which is moral injury.
PTSD can involve intrusive memories, avoidance, emotional numbness, irritability and the sense that danger is still present, even when the immediate threat has gone.
Moral injury isn’t a formal psychiatric diagnosis, but it describes the guilt, shame, anger or collapse in trust that can follow doing something, witnessing something or failing to stop something that cuts against your deepest sense of right and wrong.
Put very simply, PTSD might say, “I’m still in danger.”
Moral injury might say, “I’m the danger.”
Odysseus seems to be carrying both.
He’s haunted by what happened to him, but just as importantly, he’s haunted by what happened because of him.
That’s where the survivor’s guilt comes in. It isn’t only sadness that other people died. It can become this feeling that your own survival is somehow evidence against you.
Why did I live?
Why did they die?
What did I do to make it out?
What did I ask other people to do?
And at what point did the person I needed to become in order to survive turn into somebody I couldn’t live with?
Guilt isn’t especially interested in being reasonable. It’ll quite happily build an entire prosecution against you using evidence that’d be laughed out of an actual courtroom.
Odysseus’s scenes with Athena make that guilt visible.
Throughout the film, Zendaya appears beside him as the goddess who’s supposedly protected and guided him. She often seems separate from the physical world, appearing only to Odysseus, and at first I accepted her in the same way I accepted the Cyclops.
This is Greek mythology. Sometimes a goddess appears. Sometimes a giant hand reaches out of the darkness and grabs one of your colleagues. You adjust your expectations.
But then the film returns to the sack of Troy and shows us the face of the priestess killed in Athena’s temple.
It’s Athena’s face. Or Athena has her face.
The goddess following Odysseus across the world may be completely real, but she may also be the shape his guilt has chosen to take. The murdered woman has become an image he can’t bury and can’t quite face directly.
Nolan never fully settles it. Athena might be a goddess, a hallucination, a memory or some combination of the three.
I’m not sure it actually matters.
Every time she appears, Troy has entered the present again. The city has fallen, but it remains fully operational inside Odysseus’s head.
That’s what traumatic memories can do. They don’t always feel like ordinary memories, safely filed away under “Things That Happened Several Years Ago”. They can return with the emotional and physical force of something happening now.
Which makes Nolan’s usual fractured storytelling especially fitting here. He’s always enjoyed nesting memories inside other memories and having characters talk to people who may or may not exist. You’ve seen Inception, you get it.
But in this film, the structure feels less like Nolan showing off and more like an extension of Odysseus’s mental state.
He’s telling Calypso what happened, but it doesn’t come off as a clean travel itinerary.
Troy intrudes on the voyage. The voyage intrudes on Calypso’s island. Athena keeps appearing at different points like a thought he’s never managed to finish.
For Odysseus, the past is still present tense. That’s what got me about the Calypso section.
He’s supposedly safe. He’s no longer commanding an army or running from monsters. He’s living on a beautiful island with Charlize Theron, which doesn’t immediately sound like the worst fate available to a person.
But the whole place feels wrong. He can rest there, but he can’t move forward. He can tell Calypso his story, but she’s also giving him lotus flowers that blur his memories. The lotus offers him the chance not to feel any of it. And when remembering hurts, forgetting can look a lot like peace.
The problem is that the more Odysseus forgets, the less pain he feels, but the less he remembers Penelope, Telemachus, Ithaca and the person he’s supposedly trying to return to.
He can’t erase Troy without also erasing why he needs to leave.
That’s the trap of avoidance. It can make things easier in the immediate moment, but the thing you’re avoiding doesn’t disappear. Your life just becomes increasingly organised around not touching it.
Odysseus can’t remove only the unbearable parts of himself. They’re tangled up with everything that still gives his life meaning.
Then there’s his men. One of the film’s most effective choices is the way it makes the gradual destruction of Odysseus’s crew feel central rather than incidental. They’re not just a number going down between mythological set pieces.
We watch them follow him into the Cyclops’s cave. We watch Polyphemus snatch men out of the darkness. Odysseus finds a way out, but every victory leaves fewer people standing beside him.
The Cyclops sequence is massive and horrifying, but what stayed with me afterwards was fairly simple. Odysseus survives. Some of his men don’t. Then it happens again. And again.
Circe turns members of the crew into pigs after they enter her home, but Nolan makes the transformation feel less random than it does in the basic version of the myth.
Circe claims she can see the violence inside them. She believes that, without her power, these men would rob her, assault her or kill her.
The magic reveals what the war has already done.
Odysseus argues for their humanity while being forced to confront how unstable that humanity has become. They’re his friends. They’re also armed men who’ve spent ten years sacking cities. That’s far more uncomfortable than a witch turning people into pigs because that’s apparently just what happens on her island.
And the losses keep piling up.
Ships are destroyed. Men disappear into the sea. Scylla takes her victims. The cattle are slaughtered despite all the warnings, because Odysseus’s crew are apparently physically incapable of following one clear instruction.
Odysseus keeps making decisions as their leader and keeps surviving the consequences when other people don’t.
By the time he reaches the underworld, he isn’t simply visiting the dead. He’s surrounded by the dead of Troy and the men he failed to bring home. The moment where the shades of his dead army rise from the black earth was probably when the PTSD reading stopped feeling like something I was putting onto the film and started feeling like the film’s actual subject. The dead aren’t behind Odysseus. They’re waiting for him. They emerge around him silently, and it doesn’t feel like an exciting collection of fantasy cameos. It feels like an accusation.
His men can’t return to Ithaca, but they remain part of his homecoming because he can’t imagine reaching home without accounting for their absence.
Survivor’s guilt can make continuing to live feel like a betrayal. Moving forward feels like leaving the dead behind, so Odysseus keeps himself moving without ever properly allowing himself to arrive.
He talks constantly about Ithaca, but part of him seems to be avoiding it.
Calypso points this out. Athena points it out. Even when the route opens, he finds another reason to delay.
Because monsters are much more straightforward than home. A monster wants to eat you. You stab it, escape from it or distract it with a sheep. The rules are unpleasant, but at least they’re clear. Going home means looking at the people who loved you before the war and letting them see what came back.
Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, who worked extensively with Vietnam veterans, used Homer’s Odyssey to explore this problem. He saw patterns in Odysseus’s wandering that could also appear in the lives of returning soldiers: danger-seeking, explosive violence, isolation, substance misuse and an inability to leave the dead behind.
His argument wasn’t that Homer had somehow read a modern psychiatric manual.
It was that struggling to return from combat is ancient.
Somebody can become extremely well adapted to war and, for exactly that reason, find peace almost impossible to live in.
Odysseus survives because he’s suspicious. He hides his identity. He studies people before trusting them. He assumes betrayal is possible and prepares to act before anyone can act against him. Those instincts are extremely useful when something genuinely is trying to kill you. They’re less useful when attempting to rebuild a marriage.
Although, in fairness to him, he eventually returns home to discover more than a hundred armed men occupying his house, eating his food, threatening his son and trying to marry his wife. So his nervous system does receive an unfortunate amount of positive reinforcement.
The scene where he returns in disguise and saves Telemachus during the temple ambush is a good example of the distance between the soldier and the father.
Odysseus doesn’t approach Telemachus as his dad. He watches. He assesses the threat. He conceals who he is and intervenes as a fighter. Telemachus meets the soldier before he meets the man behind the stories. Their reunion is emotional, but it can’t be simple.
Telemachus has spent his life chasing the idea of Odysseus. He’s grown up with stories of a brilliant warrior and absent king. The real man is exhausted, secretive and followed around by a goddess who may have borrowed the face of a murdered priestess.
It’s difficult to compete with an idealised parent, especially when you are that parent. Odysseus tells Telemachus not to look for gods in men because he’ll only be disappointed. He’s talking about Mentor and Athena, but it sounds like a warning about himself as well. Don’t confuse the legend with the man standing in front of you. Maybe that heroic figure never existed in the first place.
And Odysseus isn’t the only person shaped by the war. Penelope and Telemachus have lived inside its consequences for twenty years. Penelope has kept Ithaca functioning while surrounded by men who treat her grief as an administrative inconvenience. Telemachus has grown up without his father while being expected, eventually, to become him.
Odysseus has been absent from his family, but that absence has taken up an enormous amount of space.
That’s one of the more painful realities of trauma. It rarely remains contained inside one person. Withdrawal and emotional numbness affect partners, children and everyone trying to reconnect with somebody who’s physically returned but still feels miles away.
Putting Odysseus back inside his house isn’t enough. They’ve all changed. Now they have to find out whether the people they’ve become can still form a family. And that brings us to the slaughter of the suitors.
On one level, it’s extremely satisfying. I love Robert Pattinson in most things, but specifically fuck him here. These men have taken over Odysseus’s home, consumed his wealth, abused his hospitality, threatened Telemachus and attempted to force Penelope into marriage.
Then Matt Damon picks up a bow and deals with the situation in the least diplomatic way imaginable. But the scene never feels entirely triumphant. Odysseus has returned to a domestic and political crisis, and the language he knows best is violence. He turns his home into another battlefield.
Blood runs through the same hall Penelope has spent years trying to protect, and for a moment Ithaca starts to look an awful lot like Troy. That’s the contradiction facing the returning warrior.Society rewards somebody for becoming effective at violence, then expects those instincts to disappear the second the fighting ends.
Be alert, but relax. Trust nobody, but reconnect with your family. React immediately, but control your anger. Survive at any cost, then explain why you survived when the people beside you didn’t.
And then Penelope says what might be the most important line in the film.
“You are the Sea People.”
Throughout the story, Ithaca has been afraid of mysterious raiders arriving from the sea. These people apparently recognise no law, violate hospitality and destroy whatever stands in their way.
Odysseus sees them as part of the chaos released by the fall of Troy. Penelope makes him see the connection he’s been avoiding. The Greeks are the Sea People. Odysseus is the violence returning by boat. The monster has made it home. Which is a fairly devastating thing to hear in a film that also contains an actual Cyclops. Greek mythology gives you both the metaphorical monster and a huge man eating sailors in a cave, just in case the symbolism wasn’t doing it for you.
Penelope does eventually recognise Odysseus, although Nolan replaces the famous test involving their marriage bed with the figurine of Athena. Odysseus gives it to her as proof of who he is. But the figurine also represents everything he’s carried back from Troy: the violation of Athena’s temple, the murdered priestess and the guilt that’s followed him across the sea. He proves who he is using the object that represents why he no longer knows who he is.
Penelope can’t turn him back into the man who left. He can’t restore the years she spent waiting. Telemachus can’t become the child whose father came home on time.
That’s why I liked the ending so much.
Odysseus doesn’t slaughter the suitors, reclaim his throne and sit down for twenty years with all’s well and that ends well.
Telemachus becomes king. Odysseus and Penelope leave Ithaca together, sailing west so that he can honour the members of his crew who never returned. At first, it seems ridiculous. The whole film has been about this man trying to get home, then approximately five minutes after succeeding, he gets back on a boat.
But I don’t think the ending is undoing the homecoming. It’s completing it. Odysseus can’t become the person he was before Troy, and Ithaca can’t become the place it was when he left. Coming home doesn’t mean travelling backwards through time. It means finding a way to live after time has moved forward without you.
This final voyage feels different because Odysseus isn’t running from his memories or pretending the gods alone are responsible for everything that happened. He’s choosing to acknowledge the dead, and Penelope is choosing to go with him.
Home stops being an island and becomes the possibility that the two of them can move forward together without pretending the past didn’t happen. It’s hopeful without pretending that everything is fixed.
The dead are still dead. Troy is still destroyed. Odysseus is still responsible for the horse. But guilt doesn’t have to be the final form of responsibility.
Moral injury can convince someone that they’re permanently defined by the worst event of their life. Recovery doesn’t mean deciding that event was fine. It means working out how to live according to the values that were violated, rather than spending the rest of your life trapped inside the violation. Odysseus can’t undo what he did. He can still decide what he does next.
It’s worth saying that this interpretation belongs much more to Nolan than it does to Homer. I’ve since done a bit of research, and the Odysseus of the original poem isn’t consistently presented as a brooding, conscience-stricken modern veteran. Homer’s hero is charming, boastful, deceitful, brutal and frequently quite pleased with himself.
He isn’t wandering the Mediterranean because he feels morally unworthy of Penelope. He’s largely wandering because Poseidon is furious, his crew won’t follow basic instructions.
Classicists have pointed out that Nolan turns a post-war poem into something much closer to an anti-war film. He applies modern ideas of guilt, trauma and psychological responsibility to a character who wasn’t necessarily understood that way by an ancient audience.
I don’t think we should diagnose a fictional ancient Greek and claim we’ve uncovered Homer’s secret intention. Nolan hasn’t simply translated The Odyssey. He’s taken the raw materials and built his own interpretation around PTSD, survivor’s guilt, moral injury and the question of whether somebody trained for war can learn to live in peace.
That doesn’t make it less valuable. It explains why this version of the story feels relevant now.
Ancient audiences might’ve understood Odysseus’s suffering through the actions of the gods, the violation of sacred hospitality and the demands of fate. We’re more likely to see memory, trauma, leadership failure and the psychological cost of violence.
Athena can be a goddess and the face of guilt. Poseidon can be a literal god and the feeling that the entire world has turned hostile. The lotus can be magic and the temptation to avoid pain. The shades can be the spirits of the dead and the memories of everybody who didn’t come home. Myth is useful because it can hold all of that at once.
And that’s ultimately what stayed with me after The Odyssey.
The war doesn’t end when Troy falls. It doesn’t end when the soldiers board their ships, and it doesn’t end when Odysseus reaches Ithaca.
For Odysseus, the war only begins to end when he can remember what happened without being forced to live inside it again.
When he can look at his family without believing they’d be better off if he’d died. When he can honour his men without treating his own survival as a crime. When he can accept responsibility without deciding that redemption is impossible.
The gods, witches and monsters make the film spectacular, but Odysseus’s biggest obstacle is his belief that he no longer deserves to return.
And maybe the most heroic thing he does isn’t creating the Trojan Horse, blinding the Cyclops or killing the suitors. It’s allowing Penelope to see what came home. Then continuing the journey with her anyway.
Although blinding the Cyclops was still hella cool.
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Tom Baker
I like Star Wars, heavy metal and BBQ Pringles.
