movies

The Odyssey (2026)

A tree forms itself in answer
to its place and to the light.
–Wendell Berry, “Sabbaths 1999–IV”

People are made by places, I thought.
–Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads

Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s nearly 3,000-year-old story features many of the director’s typical concerns and interests: the passage of time, the frailty of memory, and the centrality of human choice, among others. Homer’s story, on its face, is a story of transience. Odysseus, away from home and at war against Troy for a decade, spends nearly that same amount of time (sometimes) trying to return. In many ways, Nolan adapts this ancient story toward his typical concerns while minimizing its core feature: the deeply human desire to be home, at rest, where we belong.

Throughout Homer’s story, the notion of going home drives Odysseus increasingly at every stage of his journey. At the end of the Trojan War, this man has done his duty to King Agamemnon, giving the king a full decade of his life, suffering through devastating loss in war while his wife sits home alone and his son grows up without his father. Home dominates his thinking. The sailing journey home is nearly as difficult, with obstacles both terrifying and (apparently) fine slowing him down. Home dominates his thinking. He finally arrives in Ithaca and finds his house crowded with suitors courting his wife and eating his stores. Home dominates his thinking.

Nolan’s film certainly contains this theme, but where home dominates the ancient story, Nolan has pushed other concerns to the center and explicitly minimized the home theme. Nolan’s film certainly maximizes anti-war messaging (an ideal to which I am sympathetic), particularly in and around the film’s climax as Odysseus narrates his regrets about the loss of life during the war. On the flip side, Nolan certainly minimizes the home theme by casting the bulk of Odysseus’s decade on the road home as a time of forgetfulness due to Calypso’s lotus flowers. Homer, in contrast, pictures Odysseus, always on the shore of Calypso’s island, weeping for the home he desires.

But Nolan’s film does more than push aside or minimize this core theme of the story. The film undermines it entirely with its exilic conclusion. Homer’s whole story is about this man going and getting home. But Nolan’s film denies Odysseus home in a fundamental sense by sending him into exile to an unknown and far off location. Will he ever actually get there?

For a man who has spent nearly a decade trying to get back to Ithaca, this conclusion is devastating rather than triumphant. Odysseus ends the film leaving without his aged father (who never actually makes it into the movie) and his son, both given rather than chosen. He leaves Ithaca, a birthplace given to him rather than chosen. He leaves with Penelope (his chosen bride) and his exile (chosen to avoid conflict—a conflict resolved by Athena in Homer’s version, by the way).

In all of this, Nolan’s concept of home carries a distinct measure of transience in its disconnection from place and non-chosen family. Further, it fits into a pretty clear sense of self-determination in Odysseus (maybe the most striking contrast with Homer’s story, where the gods exhibit direct control over all elements of his story). Nolan’s concept of home keeps Odysseus on the move, without a sense of being settled, without a network of Ithacan people who have known him his whole life. In this, we Nolan hollows out Odysseus in comparison to Homer. Nolan’s Odysseus is a man we never get to see truly at home, a man always journeying but never settled, a man who has thoughts about war but no place from which to live out his ideals. In this way, Nolan has taken Homer’s triumphant Odyssey and turned it into a tragedy.

Where Homer’s story contains some measure of hope in overcoming the struggle and arriving at home (even if it is dependent upon unreliable gods), Nolan’s film points us to look within toward human choice, to see the mess we’ve made of the world, and to grapple with the deep uncertainty of our future. There is truth in both. But in an exceedingly rare story that has all the elements to give us a positive vision of overcoming the deep suffering of the world and finding home, Nolan has instead given us something more modest and common, a mere negative vision of where we’ve lost our way.

Stalker (1979)

In the last act of Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic, Stalker, the titular character utters these arresting words: “When a man thinks of the past, he becomes kinder.” As a historian, I am never not interested when someone is saying something positive about the discipline of turning our minds toward what has come before. What is Stalker communicating here?

For a little context, Stalker follows the journey of three men into The Zone, an area of mysterious power and even more mysterious origins. Due to unexplained loss of life and birth defects, the government has closed the area entirely to both the residents and any visitors. However, rumors of a Room within the zone where one’s greatest wish will come true brings seekers looking to get into The Zone. In Stalker, the lead character sneaks two others—the Professor and the Writer—into The Zone to lead them to the Room.

Their journey is marked by dilapidated beauty (many of Tarkovsky’s and cinematographer Aleksandr Knyazhinskiy’s images are among the most beautiful ever filmed), confusing turns, and occasional conversations that reveal both Professor and Writer as deeply skeptical of the supernatural or alien power that is supposed to be present in The Zone. Their views stand in stark contrast to those of Stalker (he is never given another name), who repeatedly exhorts his charges toward belief and trust in whatever or whomever rules The Zone. The Professor and the Writer, while sometimes scared into grudging respect for whatever is going on in The Zone, are not really inclined to give their trust to this mysterious power.

This tension has been building throughout the film when Stalker points the Professor and the Writer to the past. As the group nears the Room, both men have revealed the depths of their skepticism, which reads to me as deeply modernist, albeit in different ways. The Professor, who works in the sciences, believes in the power of rationality to solve problems. The Writer, who is more connected to poetic truth, but he has looked within himself for that truth and found it wanting. In both cases, these men have thought-patterns that lead them toward dark, deeply pessimistic, and death-oriented ways of being.

Into this context, Stalker exhorts them to look to their past. In the moment, he seems to be encouraging them to think of their personal pasts. But the line lingers, pointing toward a larger and more significant way of conceiving of the past beyond simply the personal. Stalker’s point, it seems to me, is to get out of yourselves in this moment, to find that “other you” from decades ago. Both men suffer from an acute case of solipsism. Part of the beauty of history (personal or otherwise), is that it forces you out of your current moment and into the life experience of someone else somewhere else—even if the someone is you and the somewhere is more or less where you are now. In other words, Stalker is pointing to the reality that the one constant related to time is change. And change, when properly acknowledged as not only inevitable but fundamental to the human experience in the created world, keeps one from hardening and rusting into a useless antique on the verge of being discarded.

So, yeah, maybe looking to the past and noting the changing of the times and appreciating where I (or others) have been and how far I (or they) have come, makes me kinder precisely because it pulls me out of myself and into the lives and circumstances of those who have come before.