The Muffled String: A Meditation on Homer and Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey

In this essay I touch upon the story and morality of Homer’s Odyssey on the occasion of the release of Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey. I argue that the filmmaker has created a modern parable that has very little to do with Homer’s Odyssey, whatever its merits as an artistic creation. Indeed, the film only shines when it allows Homer to sound and suffers when it changes its characters and storyline to fit the intended parable. Homer’s polytropos hero is flattened into a self-reflective caricature, without helpers in his wanderings, deprived of his divine patroness, and forced to leave Ithaca rather than, through Athena’s intervention, learn to coexist with the relatives of the slain suitors.