An Odyssey for Our Own Time

A War of Hospitality and Guilt

The Odyssey, reimagined by Christopher Nolan, is a thought-provoking film that explores the theme of xenia, or hospitality, and its importance in holding civilization together. The film delves into the consequences of breaking this sacred law, as seen in the Trojan War, and the guilt that follows. The story begins with a feast turned into a desecration, as the men who have overrun the house of Odysseus, the hero of the tale, break the law of xenia. This breach of hospitality sets off a chain of events that leads to the Trojan War, a conflict that lasts for 10 years and ends with the Greeks sacking Troy by the ruse of the Trojan horse.

In Nolan's telling, the ruse is not a triumph but a moral failure, one that fills Odysseus with such guilt and shame that for a decade he cannot go home. He had turned something sacred into a weapon, and this act haunts him throughout his journey. The film leaves uncertain whether a goddess ever accompanied Odysseus or whether she is only the ghost of his greatest sin. What is certain is that until Odysseus can face what he has done, until he tells the truth about himself to himself and to others, no homecoming is possible.

The film's closing stretch shows Odysseus returning to Ithaca disguised as a beggar and seeing what his world has become. Law and order are collapsing; trust is nonexistent; scheming is rife. The man who once commanded armies discovers how men behave toward someone who can do nothing for them. The only kindness he receives comes from his son and a few loyal servants. Then, near the end of the film, Odysseus says to Penelope, 'We are the people from the sea,' by which he means the dreaded outsiders, raiders, and marauders. But they were not the threat after all. The 'people from the sea' are the victors of the Trojan War, stripped of their humanity, their civility, their xenia.

The conviction that the stranger at your door may be more than he appears runs through the Hebrew and Christian scriptures too. When, in Genesis, Abraham looks up at Mamre and sees three travelers, he runs to meet them, washes their feet, and sets a meal before them—not knowing, as the reader does, that he is entertaining the Lord. The letter to the Hebrews tells us to show hospitality to strangers, for some have 'entertained angels unawares.' And in Matthew 25, the stranger is Christ himself. 'I was a stranger and you welcomed me,' Jesus says. What he is revealing is that the stranger is where God has chosen to be found, and that every person will be judged by how they treat the outcast, the hungry, the sick, the beggar at our door.

Homer's poem, like the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament, is an ancient text. But as Nolan told The New York Times, the greatness of the poem is that you approach it as something foreign and remote, and then find it 'stunningly relevant.' On the treatment of the stranger, he added, nothing has changed—it remains essential to 'holding civilization together, or even defining civilization.' Part of what makes The Odyssey so appealing to a modern audience is that it takes civilizing aspects of Greek culture—hospitality and magnanimity—and adds later concepts, some of them influenced by Jewish and Christian ethics that were, to varying degrees, alien to ancient Greek culture: deep introspection, even confession; humility and empathy; sorrow and guilt for the harm one has done, even in victory; the conviction that the conquered count and have worth; and vengeance tempered with mercy.

In the film, Odysseus emerges as a figure haunted by his victory in a way that no ancient Greek would have been. The Odyssey presents a very human hero to a culture that desperately needs one. Nolan could have told this story several different ways, but he trusted his instinct: A summer audience would embrace an epic story and its complicated hero, brave but broken, fierce but tender toward the weak.