by Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, new from Verso. The book argues that trauma has been commodified into a politics of permanent victimhood, and that its loudest merchants trade in something other than the true suffering of people. Midway through the conversation with Ash Sarkar on Novara Media’s Downstream, Liu, a cultural critic and professor of film and , swerved into Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey
Her charge, verbatim: “Christopher Nolan has turned him into a sufferer of PTSD. And Calypso, Charlize Theron, is like his yoga teacher therapist on his island. He’s on a little retreat. She’s in her bikini. It’s not sexual. She helps him get in touch with his feelings. And he gets over his PTSD and his guilt so he can go home to his wife. It’s a beautiful story. Thank you, Christopher Nolan.” Then the two verdicts that give the joke its weight. First, the film is “anachronistic because that kind of subjectivity didn’t exist before Christianity.” Second, “the power of female desire and lust that’s embodied by these goddesses is completely erased.” She closed with the line I cannot get out of my head: “We’re a very, very puritanical world without God.”
The stakes justify her irritation. The film cost a quarter of a billion dollars, runs 172 minutes, and is the first feature ever shot entirely with IMAX’s 70mm cameras, an ambition Nolan says he held longer than any other. It opened July 17 to a critics’ score in the mid-nineties and a stampede. Within a month it had passed a billion dollars, and by the second week of October it stood at $1.78 billion worldwide, the highest gross of Nolan’s career and of Universal’s history. For most people now alive, Nolan’s version is the Odyssey they will carry, the way their parents carried Ben-Hur as Rome. When the retelling changes what the story says a person is, the change is a diagnosis of the culture that ordered it, and Liu’s book is about exactly that culture.
I saw it in IMAX the week it opened, and I want that on the record, because the critics’ accounts are everywhere in this piece and the viewer’s account belongs there too. I enjoyed the evening. The scale is real, and the sea is real. I was also disappointed by the skewed telling, and the disappointment is not the opposite of the enjoyment. They are the two ledgers this piece keeps.
Her case already exists in the critical record, in scattered pieces. The praise was real. Guy Lodge in Variety called it a “vast, thrilling, slightly aloof epic.” Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times called it “a mighty Trojan horse of [Nolan’s] thematic obsessions.” The classicists were mostly indulgent; Richard P. Martin of Stanford shrugged that every generation makes its own version of the poem. The dissenters were more interesting. Emily Wilson, whose 2017 translation Nolan has credited with making him want to film the poem, filed her dissent three times, in three registers. In the London Review of Books, on August 13, she called the writing abysmal, with nothing convincing to say about the poem’s major themes. On The Ringer’s Plain English, July 22, she called it a simple action film, “a traumatized Jason Bourne.” On NPR’s Fresh Air, July 29, she asked the diagnostic question: “He doesn’t seem to want food. He doesn’t seem to want sex. What does he want?” Mary Beard, in The Times, called it “an Odyssey without the sex,” feebly handled. Richard Brody in The New Yorker found the guilt-ridden hero a “readily digestible modernity,” an effort to “redeem Odysseus for modern times.” Emily Hauser in The Guardian noted that the film cuts the act of hubris that brings Poseidon’s curse. Chris Montanelli at Scraps from the Loft named the whole mechanism: a project that “distrusts its own material,” the gods evicted, “the ambiguous hero rewritten as a veteran seeking forgiveness, the enchantresses promoted to moralists.” Liu’s tangent is what they were all circling.
What the film does on Ogygia comes first. Liu’s yoga line is reportage, and its accuracy is the embarrassing part. Odysseus washes up half dead, screaming in his sleep. Calypso nurses his body, then brews him lotus tea, which calms him and erases his memory, and keeps dosing him for seven years. Pressured at last from above, with the gods reduced to weather and rumor, she weans him off the flower and talks him through the recovery of his past, story by story, until the man can narrate himself again. He builds a raft from driftwood he had been collecting without knowing why, and he sails away healthier than he has been in years, ready to confess. Liu said “yoga teacher therapist.” The difference between her phrase and the production design is a mat. She saw the thing for what it was.
Nolan did not invent the wound. Homer opens his hero in tears: on Calypso’s shore “his eyes were never dry of tears,” and by day he sat “on the rocks and the sands, racking his soul with tears and groans and griefs,” in A. T. Murray’s old Loeb prose (Odyssey 5.151-56). Seven years of that, and Homer does not look away. At the Phaeacian court, when the blind singer sings of Troy, Odysseus covers his face and weeps like a widow over a fallen husband (8.521-31). Jonathan Shay built the serious version of this reading with combat veterans, first in Achilles in Vietnam (1994), then in Odysseus in America (2002). Veterans recognized themselves in it, which is the only verification that matters in a clinic. The Greeks could stage damage without flinching. Sophocles’ Ajax runs mad, shames himself, and falls on his sword. Philoctetes rots on Lemnos with a wound that will not close, and Sophocles refuses to cure him; the play ends on a divine command, the wound unhealed. Nor is adaptation the crime. Joyce moved the poem to Dublin in a single day in 1904 and kept its soul. The Coens put it on a chain gang and kept its engine. Martin is right that every generation makes its own version. The offense, narrowed down, is not that Nolan found pain in the poem. It is that he prescribed a cure.
The Odyssey knows trauma and refuses therapy. Shay reads the poem as a case study; the poem never reads itself that way. It shows the wound, prices it in blood, and moves on. Nolan’s film runs on the opposite machine, the one American television perfected in February 1983. More than a hundred million people watched the M*A*S*H finale, in which a psychiatrist sits with Hawkeye Pierce until the repressed memory surfaces. The smothered chicken was a smothered baby. Anyone over fifty can tell you about that baby. The patient, having narrated it, was discharged into peace. Nolan’s film is that episode at a quarter-billion dollars. Repression by lotus. Recovery of memory in sessions with Calypso. Confession to Penelope, who names her husband and his men as the “people from the sea,” the marauders who broke the Bronze Age. Discharge into the sunset, the cured couple sailing west together. Rotten Tomatoes’ critics’ consensus praises the result as “primal human feeling.” It is a clinical pathway with a raft in it.
Liu’s word was “anachronistic.” Her reason holds up under the scholarship. Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Mind (1946) established that Homeric Greek has no word for the self as a unified inner chamber. Mental life is distributed among thumos, phrenes, menos, noos; soma means a corpse, and a living man is his limbs, his knees, his strength. When a Homeric hero acts, a god breathes menos into him, or ate seizes him, or his thumos debates with him like a second party. E. R. Dodds named the regime in The Greeks and the Irrational (1951): a shame culture, ruled by aidos, the eyes of the others, honor worn on the outside of the skin. Bernard Williams warned in Shame and Necessity (1993) that the shame-guilt scheme is too crude, that Homeric agents deliberate and own their acts, and the warning stands. Grant Williams everything he asks, and what still never appears in the poem is the confessional, curable interior, the wound that must be narrated to a specialist until it releases you. That technology arrives with the Christian examination of conscience, with Augustine’s pear tree around the year 397, a boy’s petty theft rebuilt into a courtroom of memory, and after two more centuries of secularization it mutates into the therapist’s office. Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1989) runs the genealogical line from Augustine inward. The PTSD arc is therefore not Homer translated into modern terms. It is a Christian-era self, wearing a diagnostic manual, marched back twenty-eight hundred years into a world that had not invented it.
The deepest cut is structural. In the film’s account, Odysseus was kept from home by his own unprocessed guilt. He comes to see his ten years at sea as a subconscious wish of sorts, born of shame, and the suggestion stands that the man who felt unworthy of happiness delayed his own return. The poem knows no such man. In Homer the homecoming is the fixed star of desire. Offered immortality and ageless youth if he will stay with Calypso, Odysseus answers that Penelope is mortal and nothing to set beside a goddess, and that he wants to go home anyway (5.215-20). The poem’s engine is wanting. The film’s engine is inhibition. In the poem the sea is an adversary with a name, Poseidon, answering the taunt Odysseus hurls at the blinded Cyclops when pride makes him shout his true name (9.502-535), the act of hubris Hauser notes the film omits. In the film the sea is the waiting room outside the therapist’s office. Once the homecoming becomes a symptom, the poem has been reversed, and a reversed Odyssey is not a version of the Odyssey. It is an anti-Odyssey with the episodes in the same order.
The lotus shows the method. In Book 9 the Lotus-Eaters occupy about twenty lines of a poem longer than twelve thousand. The men who eat forget home and lose the will to return, and Odysseus drags them weeping to the ships and ties them under the benches (9.82-104). For Homer, forgetting is the enemy, and the hero is the one creature who will not have it. His men have to be dragged back from comfort. Nolan moves the lotus to Ogygia, puts it in a teapot, and places a woman in charge of the dosage. Forgetting becomes medicine; remembering becomes treatment. The hero becomes a patient, the one thing Homer’s Odysseus never is, even naked under the olive shoots, where he buries himself in leaves like a man hiding a seed of fire in black ash (5.476-93). The film deletes the single episode where the poem satirizes the film’s own philosophy. Eat the flower, forget the pain, lose the home. Homer staged that trade and spat on it. Nolan built a spa around it.
Then there is Calypso herself. In the poem she detains him seven years and beds him, and the Greek is pitiless in its economy: he lies with her at night “unwilling beside the willing nymph” (5.154-55, Murray’s rendering). She offers to make him immortal and ageless all his days if he will stay (5.135-36, 5.208-9). And when Zeus orders the release, she delivers the poem’s most dangerous speech (5.118-29). The male gods begrudge goddesses who take mortal lovers. Demeter lay with Iasion, and Zeus burned him. Artemis shot Orion for the sake of golden Dawn. And I loved this man. Homer gives her the speech and takes none of it back: female desire naming its own persecution, spoken by a goddess, sung to audiences twenty-eight centuries ago. She is also generous in defeat: the axe, the beams, bread, water, red wine, a fair wind (5.160-70). Homer can hold jailer and lover in one figure because the poem does not need her to be safe. A hostile reader will object, correctly, that the poem’s Calypso is a captor and the sex is coerced. That is the point of citing it. The poem records his unwillingness and her wanting in the same two lines and lets both stand; it can carry the discomfort. The film resolves the discomfort by deleting both terms. It strips the sex entirely, gives her a pharmaceutical in place of a bed, converts her longing into professional ethics, and lets her terminate care at the appropriate moment, knowing it will cost her the patient. What remains on the island is the first nurse in Western literature, and she does not even get a thank-you. Liu: “the power of female desire and lust that’s embodied by these goddesses is completely erased.” Beard, from a different politics and a different podium, filed the same report. When Liu and Mary Beard agree, the fact is load-bearing.
The erasure runs through every woman in the story. Nausicaa and Queen Arete, the poem’s court of female judgment, are cut outright, as Beard noted. The Sirens, who in Homer offer total knowledge of everything the Argives and Trojans suffered at Troy (12.184-91), are reduced to a hazard to evade. Circe, who beds Odysseus in the poem and keeps him a year, is sexless here as well, her magic reworked as body horror and given a backstory to explain it, as if female power required a motive. Helen, the war’s alleged prize, comes back scarred by Menelaus and apologizes to Penelope for all the things done in her name: desire converted into remorse. Penelope, whose cunning matches her husband’s in the poem, is thinned until, in Wilson’s words, there is no “possibility of believing in this marriage.” The film drops the rooted-bed test, the recognition scene in which a marriage is verified by an immovable bed built around a living olive tree (23.173-204), and lets a bowstring do the work. And Athena, the poem’s engineer, who proposes the rescue in Zeus’s council (1.44-95) and lights the killing hall with her own lamp (19.33-40), appears in the film wearing the face of a Trojan woman Odysseus watched his men behead. Nolan, asked by Time, would not say whether she is a goddess or a manifestation of his guilt. I watched Odysseus interlace his fingers with hers, and when the camera returns, his hand is empty. In Homer the goddess directs the plot. In the film she is a symptom that resolves at discharge. Nausicaa, Arete, the Sirens, Circe, Helen, Penelope, Athena: every one of them cut, chastened, or diagnosed.
Why did Nolan change it? Three causes, and none of them is stupid, which is why the failure matters. One cause is auteurial. Nolan has one protagonist: the gifted man eaten by guilt, doing penance inside a maze of his own construction, from Memento‘s self-deceiver through Inception‘s widower and Interstellar‘s absent father to Oppenheimer‘s destroyer of worlds. Nicholson saw the transplant and praised it: he cuts and rejigs Homer and a bit of Virgil into “his type of tale: one fixated on memory, self-identity, destructive genius and the slippage of time.” Montanelli saw the same operation and named the cost, calling the film a moral prequel to Oppenheimer, another parable of a genius whose invention brings down a world. A Homeric hero cannot be played by Nolan’s instrument. Homer’s Odysseus sacks the town of the Cicones and matter-of-factly divides the captured women and goods among his crews (9.39-42), the verse Brody put on the record. He taunts a blinded giant to hear his own fame. His pride is the plot. So the poem was recast around the one hero Nolan knows how to shoot.
Another cause is the audience. A quarter-billion-dollar film must be legible to everyone, and the single psychological dialect the whole market now speaks is trauma. Liu’s book makes the case at the level of politics: pain commodified, testimony sacralized, accommodation prized above solidarity, the wound promoted to identity. The film is the commodity she describes, gift-wrapped in 70mm. A hero who wants home because home is his, who needs no diagnosis and refuses even immortality for the sake of it, is illegible to an audience trained to ask who hurt you. PTSD supplies the legible wound. Therapy supplies the legible arc. The arc then delivers an ending a modern multiplex can process as an ending. Wellness with a sad face is still wellness. Even the exile at the close is a discharge in disguise: the confession has been made, the price named, and the couple sails into the sunset they dreamed about before the war.
The third is the business of offense. The film is rated R for violence and some language, and it contains no sex at all, a choice the Christian review site Redeemed Reader praised by name. Slaughter clears the ratings board. Desire does not. Gods do not either, because gods divide a global audience along creed lines, so the divine is fogged into visions that may be symptoms, and Zeus’s law survives as a hospitality code with no Zeus to speak of. The wanderings, as Montanelli observed, lose their logic of divine persecution and become a string of accidents, and antiquity becomes psychologically our contemporary, which is the one thing antiquity was not. A hero who commits atrocities cannot headline. A hero who witnesses atrocities and feels sick about them can headline everything. Guilt is the laundering mechanism: the film keeps the thrill of the sack of Troy and sells the absolution in the same ticket. Liu’s last sentence describes the arrangement exactly. We kept the shame, lost the rites, and now we call the residue healing.
Much of the film works, and it would be easier if it didn’t. That it works makes the substitution worse: craft at this level launders replacement into reverence. The analog weight is real: you can smell the sea and the congealing blood. The horse has tonnage; the burning tower has heat. Nolan’s shuffled chronology is genuinely Homeric in form, since the poem itself hands four books to Odysseus as a flashback sung at Alcinous’s court. A bard frames the film with the horse story, singing it while the war’s smell still hangs in the hall, and that frame honors the poem’s own obsession with who gets to tell. The horse is told and retold, each version darker, until Odysseus’s own confession replaces the legend: a genuine invention, and one that understands something about oral tradition. Robert Pattinson’s smiling Antinous deserves the slap every critic wanted to give him. Samantha Morton’s Circe is, by common consent, the scariest thing in the film. Where the film trusts Homer’s images, horse, sea, shroud, bow, it works. Where it replaces Homer’s engines, gods, desire, cunning, hunger for home, with the therapeutic arc, it becomes a wellness seminar in bronze armor.
So where is the line between adaptation and disavowal? Not at the level of incident. Susan Orlean defended the film on the principle that an adaptation which differs from its source becomes its own work, and Joyce and the Coens are the proof of the principle: change every incident, keep the engine. Ulysses ends in Molly Bloom’s yes, the most desire-drenched sentence in English. O Brother, Where Art Thou? ends in a flood and a song. Both are faithful to the poem; both keep its account of what a person is. The line is metaphysical. A title borrows the poem’s account of the world. Homer’s account: a person is what he does amid gods, hunger, sex, weather, and fame; home is a good worth refusing immortality for; memory is kleos, glory sung aloud, a public possession. Nolan’s account: a person is a container of wounds; the world is feelings and weather; memory is evidence for the defense; home is where you are permitted to go once you have forgiven yourself. Keep the skeleton and the name; swap the soul. That is the disavowal. The film argues, scene by scene, that Homer was wrong: cunning is pathology; desire is captivity; the gods are symptoms; a man may not come home until a woman has helped him get in touch with his feelings. An artist may argue all of that. Borrowing Homer’s name to argue it, and pocketing the name’s authority at the box office, is the part that earned a tangent on a stage in London. The machine employs consultants for the armor and the rigging. Liu offered to consult on the next one. Nobody will call.
The poem has other endings, and the film wanted none of them. There is the rooted bed: Penelope tests the stranger by ordering the bed moved, and he flares, because he built it around a living olive tree and it cannot be moved (23.181-204). A marriage, in Homer, is a tree in the ground. It is the scene I give people who ask why anyone still reads Homer. The film has no use for that image; the film’s marriage is a boat pointed west. There is Tiresias’s prophecy: when you are home, take an oar and walk inland. When a traveler asks what the thing on your shoulder is, and calls it a winnowing fan, plant the oar there and sacrifice to Poseidon. A gentle death will come to you from the sea in old age (11.121-37). The sea’s grudge ends alone, on foot, in a country that has never heard of ships. The film converts that solitary penance into a couples’ cruise at sunset and a closing benediction about new dawns and mistakes forgotten. And there is the poem’s actual last scene, the one nobody films. The suitors’ fathers come for vengeance, and Athena, wearing an old man’s face, imposes peace. It is a mass forgetting at the end of a poem about remembering, because, in the reading of the Homerist Joel Christensen, “all of this is too dangerous.” Homer ends in politics. Nolan ends in wellness, and between those two endings lies the distance Liu measured without notes: twenty-eight centuries in which we learned to heal our heroes and forgot how to sing them. In the film’s one perfect accidental image, the cured man reaches for the goddess beside him and his fingers close on air. Nolan meant the gesture as ambiguity. I take it as the film’s confession. He reached for the old gods, and there was nothing there.
The tangent did not stop at the stage. It became a book. is the full prosecution: the poem’s weather and the clinic’s invoice, the letters of 1868 and the manuals’ page numbers, the changers who kept the engine and the disavowers who kept only the furniture, with the test folded into the last pages so you can run it yourself the next time a remake hands you a cup of tea. It is out now in , , and
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