The Odyssey and the Monster of Trauma

Christopher Nolan's new film, Odyssey, is a tale of trauma. There’s a lot a filmmaker can do with Homer’s classic story, and the director has chosen to highlight the costs and consequences of trauma.

In brief, the movie focuses on the hero Odysseus, who is trying to return home from his fateful conquest of Troy. In Homer’s epic, the hero has been spurned by the God Poseidon for blinding his son, the cyclops named Polyphemus. In the film, this does happen, though as Nolan tells it, Poseidon’s curse pales before the curse Odysseus sets upon himself. In creating the famous wooden horse that allows his Greek cohorts to sneak into the city of Troy, he has violated “Zeus’s law.” This is the law of treating others as you would be treated, of applying civility and hospitality to strangers.

In Odysseus’s case, giving the “gift” of the horse was an act that took unfair advantage of the law of Zeus. The Trojans had assumed the Greeks were following the rules of civility. But the opposite was true. And this assumption cost them everything.

A Metaphor for Trauma

In the film, we witness the Greeks climb out of the horse and open up the gates of Troy. The ghastly sacking and destruction of the famed city follows. As Nolan sees it, this act caused Odysseus to curse himself, and perhaps all of Mediterranean civilization.

Nolan’s interpretation is striking: The destruction of Troy demolishes the psyche of Odysseus. He winds up spending years trying to forget, self-medicating on lotus flowers in the company of the beautiful Calypso. He looks lost and haggard.

Psychological studies of trauma show that victims often experience horrible nightmares resulting from their experiences, and that “monster” visions can be common. Summarizes one study, “Monster imagery psychologically represents the collapsing border between our ideas about self and world, and the destabilizing experience of the shattering of pre-trauma assumptions.”

In this film, the monstrous cyclops Polyphemus plays a key role in highlighting Odysseus’s trauma. The men enter his cave-home and decide to wait for the owner. Odysseus assumes that Zeus’s law will hold, that the cyclops will offer his men hospitality and food. Instead, the cyclops starts eating his men. In desperation, they blind the giant and escape. As in Homer’s original work, they soon learn that the monster was the son of Poseidon. Thus, they are now cursed.

But the film spins this event in a new way. They have cursed themselves not simply because they had blinded Poseidon’s son, but also because they, like the Cyclops, have violated Zeus’s law. The Cyclops did to them as they did to the Trojans. Odysseus himself has been “blinded” by his own deceptive wooden horse plot. The cave monster highlights Odysseus’s crime.

From Hero to Monster

Nolan has, in a sense, flipped the script. In Homer’s book, Odysseus is proud of his horse. Here, he is mortified by it. Odysseus’s self-inflicted trauma may be the engine for the film’s inner plot. He doesn’t “see” it, though, until he finally comes to terms with the Trojan horror many years later. Only then can Odysseus return home to Ithaca. But by this point he is an old man, and much damage has been done to his home and his family in the meantime.

While the film spins a somewhat happy ending for Odysseus and his long-suffering wife, the effects of trauma remain. The Mediterranean is about to descend into darkness, and Odysseus’s actions in Troy have led to it. Like the monster he faces—the Cyclops—Odysseus has become a monster himself. Realizing this has traumatized him.

One final note. Nolan tells us that repressed trauma has kept Odysseus away from home. His return to Ithaca occurs only when he chooses to remember his experience. Again, psychology can teach us about this. One way of successfully dealing with trauma is to use the technique of “imaginal exposure.” This means the patient, guided by the therapist, recounts their traumatic experience in detail. Over time, they can find ways to come to terms with it.

Once Odysseus sees the root of his trauma, he expunges it and, quite literally, sails off into the sunset.