“Why won’t God communicate in a way we can understand.”
This is the question Odysseus poses to Athena as he seeks to understand the tension of a world, his world, bound to such suffering and seeking hope for it’s restoration. For Odysseus, his journey is a physical one, but his pilgrimage is internal, and what frames this pilgrimage, wrestling as it does with the question of God’s communication or presence in the mess of things, is met by a simple call: the call to remember.
This point in the film hit me hard. I’ve written elsewhere about how, at a point in my own life when this question loomed particularly large, God broke in (via a world shaking spiritual experience) with the exact same words. Since that day all those years ago I have found myself on this precise pilgrimage.
What the story of The Odyssey gave to me this time around, or more specifically through Nolan’s translation/interpretation of the story, is a clarifiying context about what this pilgrimage is and why it matters, both for understanding the tension that we find in the world, and for locating my life within it. For Odysseus, he finds himself standing on a three fold precipice:
1. The line between his past and his future
2. The line between the old world and the new
3. The line between death and life
On the first front is this movement to return to what his past represents, which is to return home. To that familiar space before the world turned and when innocence had not been stolen. The imagery here is particularly powerful, as this movement overlays over top of one of the most powerful elements of the human experience, which is the process of growing up into the world and the loss that this represents. Home here can translate just as readily to our notion of “childhood.” For me, this is what I was called to remember. A time in my life when it seemed I could still hear God speak. In this story however, in Odysseus’ internal pilgrimage to return home he recognizes something important. Not unlike, to borrow from a book I recently read called Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children (Mac Barnett), where it is argued that we don’t grow old, we grow into our childhood, to return home, to remember the past is to grow into our childhood as an adult. This means, returning home requires attending for the lived life, not erasing it. It means standing in a space once familiar looking out over everything we are now forced to reconcile from a different vantage point. It is not returning to a space where the tension is erased, it is returning to a space where that tension that we feel can be known and reckoned with, with all of the regrets and failures that come with it.
It is also, in this story, not simply a matter of ones individual life. Any such pilgrimage, as the second point underscores, is forced to attend to the larger narrative of this world we exist within. Here this can be said to be about history, but in the framework of this story history isn’t held captive to the past, rather it is alive. It is present. It is a movement in and of itself. Here Odysseus finds himself reckoning with a world that, in view of the story, has chosen to defy the gods and make its own way. This is a world, framed here as a biting critique on the rise of modernism and the failed promise of the enlightenment, finds itself lost on the seas of it’s own ambitions, uncertain about what it means to see the human through the eyes of God, to see God through the eyes of the human (now as our creation), and equally uncertain about what it means to see the world being made in our own image. One thing rings true here to the experience of the characters in the story: we can seek to leave the gods behind, but we cannot outrun ourselves.
Which brings me to the third line. It’s not surprising to me that we need to seek out the old stories to find this long ignored truth about the world we experience and observe. What defines the tension is this simple and intuitive truth- Death opposes Life, and Life opposes Death. What really caught me off guard here is not just the way Nolan gets this, as modern adaptations are no stranger to burying this simple intuitive notion about existence in a modern ethos bent towards the romanticization of Death (usually by reducing the modern story to morality tales or lessons or appeals to utilitarian idealism), it’s the way in which Nolan understands the necessary place of narrative approaches in making sense of this world and our lives. The battles waging within the human experience are given coherency in how we understand the cosmic story. One of the great lies of modernism is that these two things can somehow be ripped apart. More strikingly, Nolan weaves a story that connects the human journey (which is largely bent around the ways in which the act of remembering reveals who we are) to the question of who God is. So much of the wrestling in this film revolves around the question of what God desires of creation itself, and of the humans existing in relationship to the larger created order. And one of the biggest questions is this: is God a God of Life or a God of Death. Or more specifically, does God care for this creation, or are we left to fend for ourelves as God sits at a distance leaving us to do to one another what we will in the name of remaking the world in our image.
I penned a more indepth write up on this idea here, but in a very real sense much of this story exhibits an uncomfortable relationship to the modern ethos it is critiquing. Precisely because of the way the Greek myths have become a kind of ammunition for the modernist narrative of leaving the gods behind and remaking the world in our own image. This narrative loves the Greek myths, precisely because it allows us to create distance between myth and reality, fiction and truth, by collapsing the old world into a singular portrait of myth, and recasting these stories through the lens of what we now call reality. Any particular God or story about the gods can just get subsumed into this same singular conception that has come to be known as modern myth, and our institutions enable us to invent categories to ensure they cannot break out of this tightly guarded box (a category called classicism, or the classics).
Towards this end, the startling thing about this film is that Nolan’s interpretation never allows the story to be subsumed by those tendencies. It allows the story to function as the critique that it is, which is precisely what allows the story, or the tensions within, to challenge us with it’s questions about the nature of this process of disenchantment. Does the truth that we believe about this world actually map on to what we find? And if it doesn’t, how does that unsettle our senses in a modern, enlightened world? How does, in the words of Athena, a story like this actually open us up to giving up control? This is perhaps the most challenging thing for a modernist to do (speaking as one myself).
I recently got back from a pilgrimage to England (from Canada) which was planned as an effort to return to and remember the stories of my childhood. To walk those spaces that gave them life. In a very real way this was an act of learning what it means to grow into my childhood, now traversing these spaces, these memories, as an adult. All the way through this film I had this trip in mind as I was watching Odysseus’ own journey unfold, beginning in London where that line gets drawn in the history of Britian between East and West, walking the streets paved with both the towers and the ruins looming large and visible. And to make my way slowly to the ocean’s edge, looking out over those waters to the fascinating connections between Homer’s Odyssey and the Irish shores, standing as I was simitaneously in the soil of the deep roots of the Arthurian legend. A world of stories that awaken the unseen world in very real ways. Where the historical context for these stories awaken the clash with Empire that is still present in the divide that East and West represents, finding in it’s own sacred lineage and history a means of making sense of the cosmic narrative amidst the world’s familiar tensions.
In a very real way, Nolan hasn’t just made one of the film’s of the year (which I would make a case for), and he hasn’t just made one of the best film’s of his career (I would also make that case), he has tapped into something larger than himself. He has given us a story that is by it’s nature immortal, precisely because it reaches towards something universal. It is a story that is rooted in those symbols and patterns that reaveal those greater Truths. This is as human as stories get. It’s also transcendent. It’s spiritual. It’s revelatory. It’s prophetic. It reaches for the Divine in very real ways. For me, I’ve been spending a lot of time reflecting on how the author’s of my childhood understood this in a very real way, finding a similar and shared restlessness with the world that had been handed to them, a world where those gates of Troy were stormed in efforts to bring about the new order of human conquest and ambition. Author’s who’s stories seek in the pages they produce, pages that are intimately tied to the landscape they also inhabit, a better story, a better narrative that can actually make sense of the world they inhabit. A practice that, as it is said in the film at one point, pushes out into a moment in history where, in the absence of literacy people were handed songs. These songs became their stories. These stories became their invitation to remember. This act of remembering becomes a means of engaging their relationship to God.
I am in the midst of reading N.T. Wright’s newest book, God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal. There’s so much there that connects with the spirit and message of Nolan’s The Odyssey, inviting us to imagine a world in which God has taken up residence, not remained distanced from. A world we aren’t looking to escape, but a world that is being transformed in the overlapping of both Heaven and Earth. As Odysseus says, “I am not dying, I am exiled.” This is the image he has of the already-not-yet nature of this present tension, a world in which we find both the forces of Life and the forces of Death in constant battle. In evoking this word exile, a word that I am confident would thrill Wright’s own popular emphasis and favoured imagery, he is also evoking this picture of a homecoming, of being at home in the world carrying the tension forward into/towards, as Odysseus’s own hopeful expression states, the coming dawn, the image of a transformed world in which God takes residence among a battered and broken creation. It’s a moment of true transcendence in the film, and one I will be carrying with me for a while. As the opening script declares, this is a story about a world which still knew magic. In the film’s closing image, this becomes a world we are tasked with remembering.
The Stories of my Life 