Dawn, and Forgetting: On Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

By Filippo Scafi

The horse is burning. It stands against the temple of Athena, black timber against white stone, and it burns like a building burns, in tiers, because it is a built thing, a device that someone designed. Around it, a city is ending. The film has waited until its last minutes to hold the two shapes in a single frame, the trick and the goddess, the machine and the law it defeated. Over the image, two voices. Penelope says that civilization will rise again. Odysseus answers: dawn, and forgetting. Then the screen goes dark, and you leave the theater with the suspicion that everything you watched was this one frame, unfolded backward.

Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) is something new. A determined, coherent attempt to take what functions for our culture as a sacred object, a text that demands reverence in virtue of its sheer authority, and to treat it instead as material, as occasion, the way a text becomes someone’s text, someone’s expression in the form of a telling. Rather than adaptation in the honorific sense, fidelity administered with imposing production values, it is a gesture close to that of the rhapsodes, who took the tradition as a permission instead of a command. Or close to the gesture of the very Ulysses it tells: a desecrator, the man whose act shows what can be done, and after whom the forbidden thing will never be forbidden again. Umberto Eco liked to say that interpreting a text is a matter of what the text allows one to do (Eco 1990), and few texts have allowed more: the Odyssey has lent its hero to Dante’s fraudulent counsellor, to Tennyson’s restless old king, to Adorno’s first bourgeois. Each figure answers a question Homer never asked, and each claims a certain fidelity to the original, extracts something from it. Nolan’s question is extra-Homeric too, though it makes no claim to speak for Homer. It speaks for him, perhaps for us, and the whole film measures itself against how far it can answer it: what does it mean to survive the world you destroyed?

Devising

The first deviation from the canon concerns the horse, and the nature of cunning itself. In the ancient economy of intelligence, deception is the weapon of those who cannot win otherwise, the science of the weaker party and the art of the fox and the octopus. The Greeks had a name for this intelligence, mètis, and Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant reconstructed its submerged ethic (Detienne and Vernant 1978, chaps. 1–2): mètis operates in the unstable instant, in the situation not yet hardened into rule; it enters, takes, and gets out before the order it exploited can close again. Its vocabulary is a craftsman’s: a ruse is woven (plékein), twisted (stréphein), carpentered (tektaínesthai), the way one plaits a net or contrives a snare; its emblems are the fox, whose art is the sudden reversal, and the octopus, whose art is never being grasped. The tradition gave the intelligence a proper bearer, Odysseus the polúmētis, of whom the commentator Eustathius said simply: he is an octopus. Greek myth places one precise scene at the center of this ethic. In Hesiod, Zeus, having conquered the sky, swallows the goddess Metis, so that no cunning may ever again be woven in the universe without first passing through his mind (Hesiod, Theogony 886–900). Cunning, the standing threat to every constituted order, is absorbed into sovereignty and becomes its property. In the divine household the pattern is explicit: Métis and Thémis are wives of the same king, the intelligence of the unstable hour and the guarantee of instituted order, and the swallowing tells how the first was made the second’s organ (Detienne and Vernant 1978, chap. 4).

The horse is the moment that swallowing happens on earth. It is, materially, a carpentered ruse, the snare-form of mètis built at the scale of architecture; but a snare belongs to the instant, it takes and releases, and this one does not release. A trick that opens a city to an army has ceased to be the science of the weak; it now is reason of state. And why is it a trick at all? Because it respects to the letter the thing it destroys. The Odyssean act fulfills the law in excess. Horkheimer and Adorno read Odysseus as the prototype of the modern subject, cunning as bourgeois instrumental reason in embryo (Horkheimer and Adorno [1947] 2002, 35); the film seems to have read them, and plants its understanding in a minor character. The horse works only because one man, Sinon, stays behind and persuades the Trojans to drag the device inside the walls. Sinon is the human component the machine consumes; in this version he does not survive his role, and much later, in Hades, his shade reproaches Odysseus for the use that was made of him. Later still, on Ithaca, not yet ready to be recognized, Odysseus gives his name as Sinon. In Homer the name was Nobody, outis, and the pun saved his life; Adorno saw in it the primal cunning of the subject, which preserves itself by disowning itself (Horkheimer and Adorno [1947] 2002, 47–48). Lacan, asking late in his teaching what distinguishes an act from a deed, answered that its weight never lies in the outcome, since crossing the Rubicon had no decisive military meaning; the act exists in the reading of the act, and it institutes, after the fact, a subject who was not there before it (Lacan 1967–68). By that measure the pun is gravid, and more than a pun: the act’s subject is no-one, and outis only writes it down. Nolan’s film contains no loss of the name, no conversation with Polyphemus, no mètis in action, no tricks and no true deceptions at all. Its Ulysses performs the outis maneuver with the dial rotated: he hides behind a full name, the name of the man his trick consumed, so that the pseudonym is disguise and confession at once. The deviser did not survive the device; a consumed man’s name is what remains to sign with.

Confessing

The second deviation is gathered into one strange scene. Odysseus is home, and hidden, a beggar in his own hall. That night, still in rags and unrecognized, he confesses his guilt to Penelope. There is no bid for absolution in the act, since she does not know who is confessing; and there is nothing revelatory in it, since he does not reveal himself. It is a gift. And the truth the man tells is unexpected.

Troy fell, he says, through the profanation of the law of Zeus: xenia, the bond of hospitality. To a modern ear hospitality is a virtue, a warmth adjacent to good manners. In the world the Odyssey comes from, it was the infrastructure of the world. Émile Benveniste, digging in the buried history of words, found that guest and enemy were once the same word: the Latin hostis, which ends by meaning enemy, began by naming the stranger bound in reciprocity, the one who answers a gift with a gift. Festus preserves the older state of the word, as the hostes were those of equal right with the Roman people, and hostire meant aequare, to make equal, to compensate. The hostis was never the foreigner in general, who was the peregrinus but the stranger admitted into a pact of compensation, and the word turned to enmity when the exchange of house with house gave way to the frontier of the ciuitas, to the bare distinction of inside and outside (Benveniste 1969, 92–95). The hospitable bond was how a world without institutions had institutions. It tied house to house across generations, under the personal guarantee of Zeus, and it converted the stranger at the door, the most dangerous thing archaic life knew, into a category with rights. The whole Trojan War is a clinical dossier on its violation: a guest named Paris abuses the house that receives him and carries off (harpazō, Homer says: seizure) its wife; the suitors devouring Odysseus’s goods are the same crime in slow motion. And every station of Odysseus’s crossing restages the violation, in the house of Polyphemus as in Circe’s, among the Laestrygonians as in the strait of Scylla, on the island of the sun god. Every passage exacts its toll. Homer even has Odysseus recite the statute to the least likely host: standing in the Cyclops’s cave he claims the guest-gift as thémis xeinôn, the law owed to strangers, invoking right in the house of a creature about to eat his men (Odyssey 9.266–68; Benveniste 1969, 67). The breaker of the law is its most fluent speaker.

The confession adds that the horse belongs to this series perfectly, and therefore completes it. The horse is a hospitality gift. It left the walls of Troy standing and defeated the door instead, the closure itself, by presenting itself under the sign of the one law that obliged the Trojans to bring it in. Whereas Paris had broken the guest-law by transgressing it, the Greeks broke it by fulfilling it. They made the sacred obligation itself the delivery system, so that Troy’s piety became the breach in Troy’s wall. Wittgenstein, at the end of his life, had an image for what is attacked in such a case. Certain certainties are exempt from doubt; they are the hinges on which the door of question and answer turns, and for the door to move, the hinges must stay put. He added the stranger observation that the axis is held fast by what rotates around it (Wittgenstein 1969, §§151–52, 341–43). The guest-law was a certainty of that kind: nothing proved it, everything turned on it, and its immobility was made of all the traffic that moved because it did not. The horse is the hour the hinge itself was made to turn. A hinge that has turned once is a hinge no longer; it has become a claim, and claims can be doubted. After the horse, every gift is a suspicion and every stranger a device, every welcome a wager and every guest a hostis. The trick worked once and, working, abolished itself, together with the world that had been credulous enough, which is to say civilized enough, to receive it. That night, in the same hall, Ulysses offers Penelope a gift of another species: a truth handed to someone who cannot repay it, a gift that opens no door and founds no order, and that the guest-law, where to receive is already to owe, has no place to inscribe.

Then the confession turns. His deeds, Odysseus says, inspired the tales of the sea peoples. The phrase points at something in the record. At the margin of history sits an event scholars still argue over, the Late Bronze Age collapse, when the palace civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean fell together within a few decades, the story Eric Cline has told (Cline 2014); and in the Egyptian records of that catastrophe appears the name of a plural, faceless enemy, the Sea Peoples, raiders out of nowhere, identity unknown to this day. They are antiquity’s image of the barbarian at the gates, destruction arriving from outside the law. And the film’s Odysseus, from inside the story, claims the name: the sea peoples were us. The civilized men, the Mycenaeans, the ones who knew the law of Zeus and decided that victory weighed more. The reversal inverts the oldest story civilization tells about its own fragility. In that story, the danger is an outside that does not know the law. The confession says ignorance had nothing to do with it: the world was closed by legible men, formed in the law, fluent in the law, who decided in full consciousness that something else counted for more. The barbarian is a mask stitched on afterward, because the fact was unbearable. The confession removes the mask. Underneath was almost his face. Almost: because there is one face the confession brushes against and cannot say.

Erasing

Athena crosses the whole film, the only visible divinity, always in the same form: a young woman with an immobile face who presses Odysseus to remember. Where every other force in the story conspires to let him drift, the lotus, the years, the sea itself, she is the one who insists. Then the confession reaches the thing it had been circling, and the film turns the figure over. In the sack of Troy, at the altar of Athena’s temple, Mycenaean soldiers killed the priestess of the goddess and struck the head from the statue in the same blow, before the eyes of Ulysses. One stroke, two decapitations, of the woman and the symbol, the servant and the served, felled together. The woman who visits him across the whole sea wears that priestess’s face, and the film offers, with scrupulous doubt, two readings, refusing to choose between them. A projection of his mind, guilt wearing the face of its object. Or Athena in truth, who has chosen to appear to him only in the form of what he cannot bear. A hallucination, or a theophany. A trauma, or a god.

The clinical reading is too small for the structure it is asked to carry. This “conscience” leads the journey instead of accompanying it. It arrives on its own calendar, from outside every scene, and bends the whole route toward a reckoning the man never chose. It cannot be answered, negotiated with, or reached, and the reason it cannot be reached is that he is the one who put it out of reach, through a mètis the audience only ever hears about and never sees at work. What visits him afterward is, by construction, neither an interlocutor nor an inner voice. It is a summons from the far side of an act. Levinas gave this structure its description, that of the face of the other that reaches me as an order that cannot be declined, and it arrives as a trace, the sign of someone who has already passed (Levinas 1986, 352–55). The film literalizes the description past anything he intended, since here the one who has passed has passed absolutely, and the order wears her features. Therapy retrieves what was pushed down; what returns here was never taken in at all. The repressed comes back from inside, as symptom; the foreclosed comes back from outside, in the real, keeping the exact shape the act gave it. The priestess is the excluded itself, arriving, and the summons cannot be delegated. No one can answer in his place (Levinas 1986, 353).

Athena does not soften when he suffers, nor when he survives; she has watched him do both for a decade with the same still face. She softens at one precise moment, the confession, when the beggar tells Penelope that the sea peoples were them: when he gives a face back to a beheaded body. Then, and only then, her eyes turn kind, and hands touch. But one fact remains that neither reading, hallucination or theophany, manages to cover. The priestess has no name. The film uses her face twice, first as victim, then as the instrument of her killer’s education, and never shows it a third time, for herself, prior to the function. Even the final gentleness of her eyes is written by others: by the goddess wearing her, or by the need of the man dreaming her. The victim appears in the film only as an organ of the conscience of the man who killed her, and this is, strictly speaking, a second use. What she was, the film does not know. Perhaps that is the only honesty available: to admit that from the survivor’s world the victim can be reached only as an apparition in his service. Stated with all rigor, the relation is unilateral: she determines the shape of his world in the last instance, and his world determines nothing in her. The foreclosure is hers, of her own accord, and owes nothing to a failure of his empathy or his art (Laruelle 2013a, xxii; 2013b, 10).

Teaching

In Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) the question of mourning and consequence is just as alive, and the break falls elsewhere. Oppenheimer’s consequences follow from no choice, cunning or foolish; they follow from possibilities internal to mathematics, physics, and technics. He deceives no one and transgresses nothing. His sin is to have unearthed a possibility, the fission of the atom, which might never have been discovered and was nonetheless always already in the order of the possible. His mourning is exactly as tragic as it is impersonal, it concerns what the world concedes at its most elementary level, and his only guilt is having been the one who actualized it. Odysseus acts inside institutions, and his deception decapitates in a single stroke both the civilization and the divinity that guaranteed it. One man, one stroke of genius, suffices to conclude a world. There are no gods quarreling over the war’s outcome in Nolan. As in our own time, the gods are all but silent.

There is another figure who lives this mourning, in the unlikely territory of a video game; he too bears the name Ulysses, and he too must reckon, like Oppenheimer, with the possibilities of technics. He is the principal antagonist of Fallout: New Vegas (Obsidian Entertainment, 2010), waiting at the end of its final chapter, Lonesome Road (2011): in an America two centuries after a devastating nuclear war, he carries an old flag of the United States on his back and waits for the player, a courier like himself, at the bottom of a ruined canyon called the Divide. Asked to account for his name, he corrects the genealogy: he took it from history, from the general of a war of two flags who made them one, a man who made his mark without being myth, Ulysses Grant. The refusal is exquisite. A figure built as the dark twin of our Odysseus begins by declining the Homeric inheritance itself, choosing history against song. Declining is, in fact, his signature. Before the war, the delivery of a certain device had been scheduled for the very day the bombs fell on the United States; two centuries later, the package is still seeking its addressee. The first courier assigned to it, Ulysses, reads the danger and refuses; the second, Courier Six, the one the player inhabits, takes the job. Set against Nolan’s Odysseus, Ulysses is the man who already recognizes the possible consequences of his acting, and declines them. But as with Oppenheimer, the matter is no longer in the hands of men; it lies with the devices, with physics and technics. Refusal is the wrong move against a logic without exit, because a logic without exit feeds precisely on the attempts to exit it.

His story is the film’s story passed through a mirror. He too survived the death of his people; he too, once, found a beginning: a small community grown in the Divide around an old flag and a supply road, a nation drawing its first breath after nuclear winter. Gramsci named such a time an interregnum, when the old is dying and the new cannot be born and morbid phenomena appear (Gramsci 1975, 311); the Divide was the new, being born, and the warheads asleep beneath its road were the old, not done with its dying. Courier Six destroyed it without knowing, delivering the package across the Divide, waking warheads that had slept underground for two hundred years. The courier was the unknowing horse, the gift that closes an epoch already closed by the mere existence of the device. Ulysses’s cunning in refusing bought nothing beyond postponement. To cling to the nation, to identity, to characters and symbols, in order to reject the ineluctable end of a world, is self-deception and nothing more.

The Ulysses of the Divide watched the end he had tried to avert, and did not break. He does not weep: across hundreds of lines of dialogue there is no word of grief. He does not avenge, by his own fierce insistence, since revenge is not the message he carries. He prepares a lesson: he is a teacher. He will launch the missiles again, on the nations still standing, so that the demonstration he received becomes public to the world: that one man can kill a nation, a symbol, and everyone gathered under its flag. Or perhaps that, whatever men do, there are things that cannot be repaired, things that are facts of the world rather than institutions, as Oppenheimer reminds us. Fallout and Oppenheimer show what happens when Metis slips from the jaws of Zeus, when cunning escapes into the world as fact. Every fact of this kind creates a new humanity.

A diagnosis offers itself here, and fits almost too well. Freud allowed that the object lost in mourning may be an abstraction or a fatherland, an ideal in general; in melancholia the libido will not detach from what is gone, and the shadow of the object falls upon the ego (Freud [1917] 2005). Every element seems present, down to the flag on the man’s back. Freud’s own criteria, though, dismiss the case: the melancholic is known by the collapse of self-regard and by ambivalence toward the lost object, and the man in the canyon shows neither: his self-regard is granite, his love for the dead nation without shadow. He escapes the diagnosis because nothing in him is ill. He is a historian who received a demonstration and is looking for an addressee.

What the keeper of the Divide does with his knowledge has an ancient name. Nicole Loraux, studying how Athens after its civil war made every citizen swear, one by one, “I shall not recall the misfortunes” (Loraux 1997, 150), collected from a veteran of another civil war, a modern one, the most compressed definition in her book: hatred is nonamnesty (Loraux 1998, 92). It is the exact word for the Ulysses of the Divide, and Greek keeps older ones for the condition: alaston penthos, the grief that will not let itself be done, and behind it mēnis, the memory-wrath whose motive force is precisely never to end, a motionless always installed against the other always, the civic continuity that nothing must break (Loraux 1997, 163; 1998, 44). The Divide holds the first always against every city still keeping the second. Mark Fisher called this condition a failed mourning, the refusal to give up the ghost, and gave haunting two directions, the no longer and the not yet (Fisher 2014). What is not given up here belongs to the second: a future, the nation at first breath and the not-yet that never arrived and therefore can neither age nor end. The film’s Odysseus is haunted by what he did. The game’s Ulysses, by what he failed to prevent. A first breath cannot be buried.

Forgetting

The fork, then. It runs between two answers to the same discovery, made at the same altar: that worlds are mortal, and one blow is enough. One answer we know. The Ulysses of the Divide fills the void the act left, guards it, makes it doctrine, and concedes it to no one. Lacan left a criterion for sorting the two positions, in a late remark Badiou liked to repeat: the analyst has horror of his act, and whoever is content with his act was never in it. Badiou compressed the contented position into a single verb: the philosopher fills and is filled (Badiou 2013, 168). The teacher of the Divide is the filled one, and his doctrine is a stopper cut to the width of the void. Nolan’s Odysseus keeps the horror, and to read his answer one has to separate the three forgettings the film keeps distinct.

The first is a flower: the lotus Calypso administers to the castaway out of pity and love. The scene rewrites the island’s oldest bargain. In Homer what Calypso offers is to make the man athanatos and ageros, deathless and unaging, and Vernant read the price written inside the offer of an eternity without witness and an anonymous survival that for a Greek was indistinguishable from oblivion, which is why Odysseus’s answer stands as the first heroic refusal of immortality in our literature (Vernant 1989, 150–52). Nolan keeps the island and collapses the bargain’s two terms: the flower delivers directly the oblivion the old offer carried as its price. The film delivers its verdict in one small, terrible image. The man who remembers nothing keeps gathering the wreckage of his ship and fitting the pieces back together, patiently, without knowing why. The hands remember what the flower dissolved. It is Calypso who draws the conclusion, withdraws the lotus, and tells him the truth the flower could not touch: he needs to remember. The heroic refusal is conserved, displaced onto the goddess herself. Amnesia fails because it is impossible. The act is stored beyond the reach of memory, where a flower could find it. It is stored in the man.

The second forgetting is the one all Ithaca awaits: restoration. The king returns, the usurpers die or are driven out, order resumes. Every element is ready, and the film declines it. Odysseus fights alone, with an insistence the camera underlines: he refuses help, takes the arrows into his own body, and on his face there is no triumph, only the calm of someone executing a judgment already passed. Because the suitors, whatever else they are, are guests. Vile guests, guests who devoured the house; guests nonetheless, killed at the hearth by their host. The cure repeats the disease, the man knows it while administering it, and the knowledge is visible as method: he keeps every other hand clean. Telemachus, in the melee, kills exactly one man, Melanthius, a servant and a traitor, never a guest. The bookkeeping is fair: when the slaughter ends, Odysseus cedes the throne to the son whose hands the law permits, and sentences himself, with Penelope, to exile.

The third forgetting is in the film’s last line, and it is the one the Greeks gave an institution. In 403 BC, after the civil war, the Athenians legislated oblivion: amnesty. The city that swears knows exactly what it forbids itself to recall; knowledge is the premise of the oath, never its casualty. Amnesty is memory placing itself under discipline for the sake of a future; in the lightning formula Loraux reports, it is the subtraction of eternity from grief (Loraux 1998, 92). The film closes with that oath in its ear: our mistakes will once again be forgotten. The weight of the line sits in its two smallest words. Once again: the film treats forgetting as the law of epochs rather than the misfortune of this one. Koselleck described historical time as the tension between a space of experience and a horizon of expectation (Koselleck 2004, 259–62); the oath is the instrument that prunes the first so that the second can open at all. A world unable to forget its mistakes would be a world unable to expect. He, meanwhile, will remember, since that is what exile is, memory serving the sentence. And the world may forget, because what came before has been destroyed and erased, already and always, the way the fission of the atom cancels the prior world even before it is actualized. That world can no longer tell us anything, teach us anything, in its letter. What has passed exists now only in function of what takes its place. This is why there is only Nolan’s Odyssey, ours, yours, or theirs; Homer’s is no longer available.

There is one scene the film leaves intact until everything else gives it a meaning. In the strait of the Sirens, Odysseus is bound to the mast; the crew row with stopped ears. He alone listens. Past the strait, one of them asks what he heard. He describes an itch under the skin that cannot be scratched: what you desire most is what you cannot have, and what you cannot have is what you already had, and lost. The song told him one thing, and told it in the form of a broken promise: that he does not truly want to go home.

He is bound in the instant he learns he does not want the destination, and bound in such a way that he cannot turn the prow. The song strips him of the desire for return; the rope compels the return anyway. Adorno heard in this scene the birth of a civilization: the one who listens is powerless, the ones who act are deaf, and pleasure survives only tied to the mast, as a neutralized object. Since that meeting, he wrote, all songs have ailed (Horkheimer and Adorno [1947] 2002, 47). The film adds the diagnosis Adorno lacked. It says what the song is sick with. It is sick with the world before the horse.

That is what the Sirens deliver to him, and only that, the world before the deception, before cunning became verdict and the verdict ash. The world in which mètis still went in and out without locking the door behind it, in which a trick opened an escape route and signed no sentence. But that world, once destroyed, proves never to have existed. Lacan gave this object its statute in the seminar on ethics: das Ding, the Thing, the center the whole signifying economy circles without touching, the object every desire presents as refound though it was never possessed, and of which he says that it “is not nothing, but literally is not” (Lacan 1992, 63). The world before the horse has that mode of being. What Ulysses wants lies in a before that has been erased, and no ship reaches it. That is why he does not want to return. The house still stands, the walls, the grass; it is the rest that is gone, and was never there. The three forgettings arrange themselves around a loss none of them touches. They all work on memory, and the world before the horse was never a memory that a flower could dissolve or an oath subtract. The song kept it elsewhere. It is the one thing that survives a finished world without passing through its memory, because it is desire, and desires cannot be sworn.

The song remains. The Odyssey we received is that song: the way a destroyed world reached us, the broken promise sung well. It kept the man’s name and his cunning, and it let the priestess’s name fall, as every song lets fall what it cannot carry. It is the successful forgetting, the amnesty that time signs on everyone’s behalf. And yet a song that says it lost a name has not lost it entirely. Her empty silhouette remains, and no signature closes it, because a named forgetting is the only kind that fails. Our own world is an amnesty in progress, as every world is while it lasts. Somewhere in it, as we cross it, someone is being forgotten well; and the day will come when it is us, reaching whoever follows the way the Mycenaeans reached us, a name in someone else’s song and soon less than that.

There is a small European tradition of watching shipwrecks, Hans Blumenberg catalogued its positions, that of the Lucretian spectator, safe on shore, enjoying the solidity of his own standpoint; Pascal too, who abolished the shore, you are embarked; Nietzsche’s rescued man, for whom firm ground is only the improbability of having reached it (Blumenberg 1997, 10–26). The film’s last image occupies the position the catalogue lacks: the man who watches the wreck, with no shore anywhere, because the wreck is his own work. The last ship sails west wanting nothing more from the world, only its dead, to deliver them to a time without him, to whoever comes, as the thing the song will never know how to say.

Behind it, on water that keeps no memory of anything, the song goes on, carrying a hole inside it. The keeper does nothing for the world to come, because he wants no new world. The one who delivers, even if what he delivers is a confession, gives: something is left, however crooked and porous. There is no Odyssey except as confession.

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