PK in The National: Christopher Nolan's Odyssey could do modern Scots a service

The classics were born out of turbulent times like our own

Matt Damon as Odysseus (Wikimedia)

This is a fully-research-linked, mildly updated version of my weekly column in The National, published Saturday, April 19th 2025

ODYSSEUS is coming to Scotland. Or at least, Scotland has turned up on the location list for Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey, Homer’s great Greek epic text. (Alongside Greece, Sicily, Morocco and Ireland.)

Matt Damon is in the warrior title role, already visible in pre-publicity with his six-pack and red-bristled helmet (see above). Movie buffs have been wondering what the all-conquering director of Oppenheimer would be given a blank ticket for, in his next project. Not unexpectedly, Nolan has gone for one of the greatest stories ever told.

Anyone who knows a little of each – Nolan’s oeuvre and Homer’s Odyssey – can easily see how they’re well matched.

Most obviously, Nolan likes his complex, questing, trickster protagonists: Batman and the Joker, astronaut Cooper in Interstellar, Cobb the memory thief in Inception, the magicians in The Prestige.

The very first line of The Odyssey contains the phrase “that man of twists and turns”. And Odysseus, in the 20 years it takes for him to return to his home in Ithaca from battle, shows himself to be capable of “all kinds of wiles and cunning schemes” (in his words).

Indeed, the gadgetry Odysseus deploys in his struggles would surely ring Nolan’s techno-thriller bell. He creates wax moulds for his soldiers’ ears, so they cannot hear the seductive, deranging songs of the Sirens.

Odysseus also builds the Trojan Horse, a giant offering to the goddess Athena that is taken through the gates of Troy – but it’s (as we all know) stuffed with soldiers, who leap out and end a 10-year siege.

The scene where Odysseus and his men are trapped in a cave by the cyclopean monster, Polyphemus, feels like it’ll be a glorious set-piece for Nolan.

The hero stabs the beast in his eye, telling him that he’s called “No-one” – so that when the other cyclops come to help, they hear cries that “No-one has attacked me”, and leave. Smart!

The humans escape from the cyclops’ cave by hanging from the hairy underbellies of sheep, as they’re being taken out to pasture.

All of this is reminiscent of Nolan’s resourceful, multi-skilled leading men – and of course, it’s probably the origin of them. Comedian and classicist Stephen Fry talks of The Odyssey as “the beginning of human modernity”:

“Suddenly, the greatest qualities a warrior could have were cunning, intelligence and curiosity, but also a sense of home – Odysseus is constantly striving to get back to his wife and son. There was something new in that. This idea of ‘nostos’ – of returning home to the hearth after your wanderings – has been very powerful in the Greek imagination ever since.”

You can see this “nostos” at work in Nolan’s Interstellar, where the astronaut Cooper is trying to find a new home for humanity as the planet dies. In the Dark Knight movies, Batman’s quest is to bring Gotham back from the chaos induced by the Joker. Nolan’s Dunkirk is a giant “return to home” of sorts, across the kind of dark waters traversed by Odysseus and his ships.

The movie Oppenheimer starkly lays out the patriarchy’s capacity for annihilatory violence. So I am curious to see how the director handles the regular savagery of Odysseus.

After fooling both the Sirens and the Trojans, Odysseus takes the lead in their slaughter. When he finally returns to his wife Penelope and his homestead in Ithaca, disguised, he proceeds to massacre the “suitors”, who have been consuming his wealth – and pursuing his wife.

The recent movie The Return, with Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope, renders these events as a grim reckoning for the couple, chiming with many recent feminist readings of the poem.

In the film, Penelope condemns the violence of war, which her husband brings to her home. Since psychiatrist Jonathan Shay’s 2002 book Odysseus In America, the poem has been set in the context of the traumatised returnees from America’s battlefields.

There’s maybe also resentment of Odysseus usurping Penelope’s authority, after managing the household for two decades (a theme developed in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad in 2005).

We’ll see whether Nolan takes this on. Will Odysseus’s ingenious buccaneering be rendered as what he needed to do to get home, in a world where gods like Zeus and Poseidon wantonly intervene in human endeavours?

Or will his “heroism” make him more like a character from Scorsese or The Sopranos – purposeful but battered, without much in the way of morals?

It’s intriguing to muse on how Greek classical literature comes to the surface in our era. The basic texture of the Odyssey – where struggling, battling humans deal with the interventions and interests of powers on high, descending into our lives – sounds a little too close to the present.

Don’t we live in a reality where moguls, barons and autocrats of all kinds send down memes and smashing laws from on high, in order to steer and trigger the populace? That’s a present we might want to resist – indeed, and literally, demythologise.

Netflix recently ran a series called Kaos (with Jeff Goldblum as Zeus). This rendered the affairs of Greek gods as a cross between Succession and The Kardashians. Elitism plus elitism times elitism. I couldn’t take it in the end, even with liberally applied irony air quotes.

The classics expert Charlotte Higgins wrote a few years ago about how deeply classical tales had gripped her, a living stream for her most pressing life dramas. Our stories, she asserted, are theirs: “Brothers really do war with each other. People tell the truth but aren’t believed. Wars destroy the innocent. Lovers are parted. Parents endure the grief of losing children. Women suffer violence at the hands of men.

“The cleverest of people can be blind to what is really going on. The law of the land can contradict what you know to be just. Mysterious diseases devastate cities. Floods and fire tear lives apart.”

Kaos indeed - and continuing. It’s hard to imagine the movie you’d follow Oppenheimer with. That was a clear-eyed gaze at the miraculous – and horrific – outcome of science and technology .

The final scenes interpolate Oppenheimer’s stricken features with skies strafed by scores of launching nuclear missiles. But we’ve also had hours of sulphurous male leadership and strategising on the way to this terrible, terminal warning.

So I guess it’s worth returning to the ancient cultural roots of these big-picture narratives. Which were, it turns out, critiques of the destructiveness of their own times.

Higgins notes astutely: “You can read them as reflections on the moral failures of the playwrights’ own day, as Athens poured resources and human lives into a grinding 30-year conflict with Sparta. That’s partly why [Greek classical] plays are still being staged now, their urgency and vitality undimmed.”

My favourite (and wildly prophetic) image from The Odyssey is that of Penelope’s ruse to keep the rapacious suitors at bay. She tells the male horde that she must first finish weaving a burial shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes.

By day, she diligently weaves the cloth, but each night, she secretly unravels her progress. This ploy helps her delay their unwanted marriage proposals for three years.

It’s a beautiful symbol of intelligence and resourcefulness. The verb used to describe her action, tolupeuein, not only means to roll wool into rovings for spinning (notes Higgins), but also metaphorically means to compose a stratagem.

If Nolan can render The Odyssey as a human-level spectacle of lively inventiveness and tactical nous, while gods and monsters are stomping around and messing with us, he’ll have done us modern Scots a service. I’m eagerly anticipating.

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