The Odyssey Is About the Life You're Not Living
15 years ago, I moved across the country to pursue a dream. I had this vision of what success would look like, and I told myself that achieving it would justify everything. The sacrifice. The longing. The years of grinding toward a thing. The failures, the small victories would all add up one day to achieve what I would consider to be success. And I have sacrificed a lot in pursuit of this dream. Often sacrificing the very thing that fuels the possibility of the dream. My own physical and mental well-being. Spending time with loved ones. Being present in the world. Putting all of that on pause for the pursuit of the dream. And then I sat in a theater to watch Christoper Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey and watched a man tied to the bow of a ship and realized that everything he ever wanted, he already had. In that moment I saw myself tied to that boat.What makes The Odyssey the quintessential story, the one that has lasted thousands of years, is that we can see ourselves in it no matter where we are in the journey. Perhaps we are stranded on that beach for ten years waiting for our shot at glory. Perhaps we are within the walls of Troy itself, the bitterness and rage of denial finally unleashed as we get exactly what we came for. Or perhaps we’re somewhere along the journey home, wondering if everything we did was worth what we gave up.You look at Christopher Nolan’s filmography and there’s a recurring theme about time, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we think we are. Memento. Inception. Interstellar. Oppenheimer. Each one a different angle on the same question. Who do we believe ourselves to be? Versus what do we actually do? The Odyssey is his most ambitious attempt at that question yet. And it’s very much an interpretation. The dialogue is modern. The characters speak in plain American English. There’s no overwrought Shakespearean cadence. There’s no archaic formality we’re used to out of these sword and sandal epics. At first it can feel jarring, but I think Nolan is doing something very specific here. These stories began as an oral tradition, and the movie begins as such.They were told around fires and in feasting halls. They were passed between people. They were kept alive in the mouths of whoever was telling them. They were never meant to feel like these archaic museum pieces. They were meant to feel like they were of the now, like us. Like something happening to someone you know. The choice to embrace the modern dialect and vernacular here, I think, is Nolan saying this story belongs to you, it belongs to us, it belongs to this present moment. And it has a lot to say about who we are and where we are in this current moment of our civilization.Because in many ways, The Odyssey is about literally everything. It’s the story of stories. Grandeur, ambition, regret, hope, dreams, victories, failures. That mishmash of all the ideas could leave you feeling like you got a buffet of everything but not a singularly satisfying meal. But I think Nolan very astutely locks into something specific. He has a very specific take here. I want that to be clear. I don’t think this is necessarily Homer’s Odyssey. The ancient text is not particularly interested in Odysseus’s guilt. In fact, maybe the ancient Greeks weren’t really that concerned with it at all. Odysseus is a hero. Granted, he’s flawed, but he wins. He comes home. This is something very different. This is Nolan’s Odyssey. And Nolan is obsessed with the weight of victory. What it cost to win and whether the world is better off for it. For me, it actually puts the film in direct conversation with his last film, the Oscar winning Best Picture, Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer, facing a great evil, tasked to rise to the occasion, won the war with his mind and his ingenuity by creating the bomb. And in doing so, he handed humanity the means of its ultimate and seemingly inevitable nuclear damnation. Was the world better for it? He spent the rest of his life inside that question. Nolan asks the same thing of Odysseus. At the center of it all is the regret of what might be the single greatest evil one human can visit upon another: offering peace as a ruse for violence and power. And that is Nolan’s Trojan horse. Odysseus lives with this. It haunts him quite literally. The journey is long. The gods are cruel. And yet some part of him knows he doesn’t deserve to go home. He knows what he did. And he knows exactly when he did it.There’s a really interesting moment in The Odyssey that the audience in my theater absolutely erupted into cheers for. Odysseus has come up with the concept of the Trojan horse. It works. The horse is taken inside the gates of Troy. They are able to infiltrate Troy, and Odysseus goes to open the gate. He opens the gate and there stands Agamemnon. He’s towering. He’s commanding. He looks like a freaking superhero. He looks like Batman. And you can feel the electricity in the theater. Everyone in my theater burst out cheering because it’s awesome. It’s pretty badass. He comes strutting in and the entire army rushes in and begins to destroy and sack the city. Nolan brings you back to this exact moment much later on in the film, and like Odysseus himself, you understand what you’re actually looking at, and it’s not a heroic moment. It’s the moment he opens the gates to destruction. He lets in violence where he offered peace. He betrays the ethic. He betrays the law of Zeus. Odysseus is introduced as a man of principle. He demands that beggars be fed. He demands the weak and disenfranchised be given what they need. He plucks his hunting bow in pursuit of equanimity. He wants even the animals he’s hunting to have a fair chance. He is by every measure he holds himself to a good man. And then he burns Troy to the ground. Through trickery, he tricks an entire city with the promise of peace and rains down destruction in its place. The burning horse. The screaming. The ash. He spends the rest of the film wandering through a purgatory of his own making. The winning itself was the wound.On a personal level, despite the scale, the scope, the battles, the fury of the elements, the pounding of the score, there is a singular scene that clarified not only the thesis of the film but my own personal connection to it. Odysseus is tied to the bow of the boat as they drift past the sirens on the rocks. We all know this scene. The famous siren song. All the men put wax in their ears save for Odysseus. We only perceive the song through Matt Damon’s heartwrenching performance. When asked what the siren song said, he remembers: “It told me what you most want is what you most can’t have. What you most can’t have is what you already had and lost. And most, it was the song of all the promises I failed to keep.”That line took my breath away. He already had everything he could have ever wanted. Before the war. Before the idea of the horse. Before he burned the city to the ground. It was already in his hands. He left it all behind in pursuit of something he convinced himself was greater. It made me think about my own journey, the vision I carried halfway across the country, the version of success that I told myself would justify everything. How much of my life I have put on hold in pursuit of the idea of a dream. How much of my life I sometimes don’t live because I’m waiting around for the phone to ring or for an email to come through. And I wonder how much of what I’ve been chasing has already been there. Already mine. Before I decided it wasn’t enough.Most of us have never burned a city down. Most of us do know what it feels like to convince ourselves that winning is more important than how we win. That the achievement of our success will justify everything we give up in the present. That not living now, that putting our life on hold, that not spending time with our loved ones, that not prioritizing the things we already have at our fingertips, it’s all going to be worth it when we finally achieve something we don’t yet have.I think the ultimate takeaway for me is that going home is about being present in this very moment. I believe in hard work and I think hard work comes with sacrifice. But I found myself recently asking, what does that mean? What kind of sacrifice is it? The sacrifice of comfort and leisure? Okay, I’m willing to give some of that. But is it the sacrifice of my own mental and physical health? Is it the sacrifice of being present for the people around me? Is it the sacrifice of family and loved ones? Is it the sacrifice of my own ideas for other ideas that I think would be deemed more valuable? It’s really easy to give everything up that you already have in hopes of something better. The truth is, often the best things you have to offer the world, you already have. They’re already inside you. Next to you. There with you. Your mind. Your heart. Your loved ones. The people you’re on the journey with.This movie reminded me that returning home, embracing what I already have, is an act of bravery. Is an act of courage. So much of our society revolves around rejecting that notion. Believing that value is achieved by earning a certain amount of money, or having a certain title in your job, or achieving a certain amount of success for your peers and for the people that follow your work. The truth is, if you give up everything that made you you in the process, what’s left is nothing. An empty shell.I love that The Odyssey made me think about the world, our country, and my own very specific personal journey as an artist and as a creator and as a person living on this earth. And that’s the power of stories. That’s the power of the quintessential story, a story like The Odyssey, which is the story of humanity itself. It asks the essential questions. The question of whether or not we are still wandering. Whether we are finally ready to go home.Thanks for reading Story Matters by Curt Mega! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit curtmega.substack.com
