Odysseus as Shattered Veteran

The Return Is a Totally Reworked Version of the Odyssey, but One That Keeps Us Stuck in the Anti-Heroic “Prestige Cinema” of the Last Thirty Years

Around the Fire

In an early scene in The Return, the new film based on the Odyssey, the loyal swineherd Eumaeus and several young men of Ithaca gather around his hut’s fire, and begin to question the exhausted stranger who has washed-up on their shores. We know it is Odysseus but they do not—he just tells them he is an old soldier who fought at Troy. Their eyes light up: Tell us about it! Did you fight under Odysseus, our lost king who brought glory to our little island? Someone talks of the Trojan Horse, and he haltingly describes how it functioned, and then speaks of the bloodiness of the slaughter which followed, after the Horse had—his word--vomited its soldiers into the city. And someone mentions heroes, and barely audible, but with evident irony and pained disbelief, he says

“Heroes?”

To the Uninitiated

For those who haven’t read Homer’s Odyssey, but who are open to watching films which rely on drama and atmosphere, as opposed to stock action, The Return is worth seeing. I give it a C or a B, with the demerit coming most of all for its depressive vibe, but it surely rises well above most of the fare presently out there. And the big screen is needed to appreciate its beautiful cinematography and its close-up-reliant moments of spare-but-loaded dialogue.

So for you, what follows, which consists of my noticing the many departures The Return takes from the Odyssey, and reflecting upon them, is perhaps not worth your time. And, there are spoilers, of the viewing experience, and far more importantly, of the reading experience.

A Reworked Version of the Latter-Half of the Odyssey

But henceforth, I speak to and for those of us who have experienced some of the delight which the late Eva Brann said, in her surpassingly excellent commentary, is to be expected from reading or hearing the poem in its entirety.

The Return’s screenwriting duo of Edward Bond and John Collee are an interesting and experienced pair,¹ and to better understand what they’ve done here, let’s recall the epic’s three basic parts.

First, books 1-4 give us an initial description of the situation in Ithaca, in which a gang of “suitors” have taken up daily carousing in King Odysseus’s modest hall, abusing the customs of hospitality, eating away the wealth of the house, and pressuring Queen Penelope to marry one of them, on the assumption that Odysseus will never return. (It’s been ten years since the war ended.) This situation is mostly described in relation to his son Telemachus, and he takes a bold little Athena-prompted journey to see several kings in mainland Greece, to try to learn news of his father. These books are often labelled the “Telemachy,” for while this part whets our appetite for what happened to Odysseus, it is its own story, depicting a young man’s coming of age.

Second, books 5-13 give us the “Odyssey proper,” the story of what happened to Odysseus and his men from their departure from Troy to Odysseus’s finally making it back, with all the island-hopping adventures the epic is most famous for: the encounters with the Cyclops, the witch Circe, the dead in Hades, etc.

Third, books 14-24, nearly half of the epic’s content, depict Odysseus returned, in disguise, preparing with Telemachus and a few of his loyal servants a surprise-attack on the suitors. This part reveals much more about what life on Odysseus’s estate is like when dominated by the suitors, and about the character and actions of Penelope. It culminates in the indoor battle-slaughter, and, in her initially-hesitant reunion with Odysseus.

What The Return does is to only give us that third part, and to rework it, making it 70% changed from the original, even though it retains the main sequence of scenes. Nearly all the dialogue, with one of the few exceptions being that in the old nurse’s recognition scene, has been changed. I do not mean paraphrasing changes, but dialogue absent from Homer replacing his.

Thinking about New Versions

Now as to the changes, we should recall that retellings of the Greek myths, and especially of ones from Homer, have been par for the course in classical literature, and in the Western literature built upon it. Consider the mocking changes of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy evident in the Electra and Orestes of Euripides, or of Homer’s Iliad in the Troilus and Cressida of Shakespeare; or consider the alterations of the Prometheus myth from Hesiod in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Unbound, then also in Plato’s Protagoras, and finally in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. These changes reveal a conversation between the respective authors about how the story ought to go, given different assumptions.

This happens not merely with story-line, but with character. A later poet will tell a new story about a hero, such as Sophocles did with Odysseus in the relevant scenes of the Ajax, and it turns out not just to be an additional story about the character, but a reinterpretation of him.

Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin) is just about our paradigmatic example for this. For it looks as if the source stories about Odysseus, of which mere fragments of retellings remain, stressed the malevolent potentialities of his trickster side, befitting his relation to his grandfather Autolycus (the name means “wolf-itself”—you might recall the roguery of the character given that name in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale), and then Homer chose to focus upon the more respectable aspects of the Odysseus stories, giving us, as Gregory Nagy and other scholars have called it, the “good-news Odysseus,” one who generally uses tactics and lies in the service of just purposes (see the Clay quote below). But as seen in Sophocles, and much later, in Virgil, later poets tended to return to the perspective which preceded Homer. That’s obviously a negative judgment on whether his Odysseus’s moderate use of trickery is a believable and sustainable way of life. See also Dante’s similar suggestion, as well as his (Tennyson-seconded) refusal to accept that the real Odysseus could ever have settled down.²

The New Odysseus

But we should notice that whereas the long tug-of-war over the character of Odysseus has usually been a disagreement about whether his tactics and changeability can be seen as elements of a virtuous prudence, Bond & Collee seek to insert a new point of view into the conversation, by suggesting that a warrior who participated in the horrors of the Trojan War would have emerged devastated and guilt-haunted, and renouncing all claims to heroism. He would be like the veteran of Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan who returned broken.

To have not emerged this way, to have attempted instead to hide one’s despair about the war’s brutality, pointlessness, and even criminality, behind an exterior of the glory gained by one’s braveries, would be to become an inauthentic veteran, jingo-istic and callous. Such a veteran would be incapable of warning young men away from the call of war’s glory—he would not say, as the new Odysseus does, that we didn’t know then that those who died were the lucky ones.

My Assumptions, and Preferred Odysseus

A few cards of mine on the table:

A.) The Trojan War was an unjust and unwise war. It’s not that the Trojans were guilty of nothing in their continued refusal to return Helen and the treasure Paris stole with her, but the primary motives of the Greeks were plunder, war-glory, greater power to the Agamemnon-led confederation, and plunder. In fact, there is some evidence, at least from the Trojan Cycle, that Odysseus didn’t want to drag himself and his Ithacan people into this war.

B.) Thus, because we have to accept that the Trojan War and the degree of its brutality was a given of the era, or at the very least driven by a political dynamic which Odysseus could not extricate himself and Ithaca from without dire consequences, the question becomes whether we can admire, and whether a poet should prod us to admire, a leader like him for his fighting prowess, endurance, good counsel, and tactical genius exhibited in such a war.

C.) The heart of the anti-war stance Bond & Collee take, I believe, is an insistence that no, good artists will not encourage such admiration. I disagree, and point out that basic problems for them are first, that the deeds of warriors like Odysseus, Diomedes, Ajax, Achilles, and Hector will draw admiration even if the war itself was ugly at bottom, and second, that the human desire for heroic stories is likely irrepressible.

D.) I embrace Homer’s Odysseus. I like the decision to not give us a hero possessed by the spirit of trickery, that is, a character villainous-enough to be spoken of as a “mastermind of crime.” (Virgil, Aeneid, II, 163, albeit through the mouth of Sinon) I fasten upon Homer’s passages which describe him as having been a gentle and justice-concerned king in Ithaca(e.g., II, 46-47, 230-34), and I heartily agree with this assessment from Jenny Strauss Clay:

…in the Odyssey, the traditional Odyssean guile is used largely in self-defense and for the preservation of the hero’s companions and family. …the poet has cleansed the hero of the heavy burden of the Autolycan past by suppressing the unsavory elements of Odysseus’s character and reinterpreting negative qualities as positive virtues. (The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey, 70.)

Clay goes on to remind us that this is more the case in the Iliad than in the Odyssey, where the “doubleness” of the character remains more evident, such that

The heritage of Autolycus may be played down to a certain extent, but it is by no means completely suppressed. Developmental explanations may help explain how Odysseus got that way, but they finally interfere with a full understanding of Odysseus as the hero of the Odyssey. Once we have separated Odysseus into primitive Autolcyan and more progressive “heroic” strata, we can no longer grasp the complex but highly integrated whole whose character is delineated by its very multiplicity. (Ibid, 74.)

That highly integrated whole matters to me, because it matters to Homer, because Plato holds it up in his own hidden way,³ and because Odysseus is a bridge from the figure of the hero to that of the statesman. And in doing so he represents the statesman who is able and willing to employ, for the common good, what Raymond Aron once described as “moderate Machiavellianism.” Such justifiable and limited use of guile in war and statesmanship was of course was known to the ancients, as seen particularly in the personal example and writing of Xenophon. See also Thucydides and Plutarch. For me, then, the plausibility of Homer’s Odysseus, even though the Autolcyan side of him is still present, is linked to my conviction that the principles of political philosophers like Aron and Xenophon are coherent. I also sense that this Odysseus will be an important model in the coming decades for drawing any youngsters too smitten with Bronze Age manliness more towards statesmanship and philosophy.

So it is predictable that the Bond & Collee bid to rival Homer’s Odysseus with theirs, would draw from me a strongly negative reaction.

E.) But even a thoroughly Machiavellian Odysseus, such as the always self-serving if sometimes hierarchy-serving one of Shakespeare’s Troillus and Cressida, seems not only a more believable character than the one of The Return, but in most situations of more benefit to his people.

Can We Believe or Admire the New Odysseus?

Take the believability issue first. Again, The Return’s Odysseus looks modelled upon a devastated and now “anti-war” veteran of a modern war. That works to a degree. For I’m sure a book which I’ve not read but have heard acclaim for, psychologist Jonathan Shay’s Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, would show us some significant similarities between Odysseus and the typical combat veteran. In that light, I like the dialogue towards the end of The Return when Penelope and Odysseus agree to remember and to forget the things he underwent--Penelope provides reassurance to an Odysseus who is saying that some of those things are ones she can never understand.

But in other ways, the fit is absurd. Odysseus was not rank and file, but at the center of something like a “General Staff,” and, the strategist most responsible for the fall of Troy. That is, it’s understandable, and believable in drama, to hear blanket-condemnation all-war-is-hell talk from a regular soldier after say, Vietnam; we’re willing to hear his talk out, and even if, having been taught by thinkers like Thucydides and Aron, we are under no illusions that a world without war is possible. But could anyone benefit from such talk, or be able to stand it, were it to come from…well, a top American general of the Vietnam war? That’s basically what Bond & Collee are asking us to swallow here.⁴

Also, they want us to imagine him totally distancing himself from his greatest exploits and the attendant glory. This, even though their post-story Odysseus is going to have to stop his talk about the famous war having been evil, as it’s not a truth he’ll be able to declare without bad consequences for his rule in Ithaca and respect from other kings.

I admire Homer’s Odysseus, and can muster some respect for the cynical one of, say, Shakespeare. And I could deeply respect, in a story as different from the Odyssey as The Return is, a great war-leader who’s come to understand the hateful side of war and the comparative emptiness of its glory, who then abdicates his rule and military vocation, going out to the forest or desert for the sake of the higher truth he’s found in Buddha or Christ.

But this guy? Having lost whatever faith he had in the code of heroism, he hasn’t replaced it with anything—we see that he has a love of homeland and wife, and a felt duty towards his son and his people, but we also see him nearly give up the struggle for these (see below).

Nor do I think a veteran that a bad war drove half-insane is necessarily more soulful than one who returns from the same war with greater control over his war-demons. That second kind of vet likely holds, not incidentally, a more measured judgment of war, one that recognizes that if it more often produces horrors, it nearly-inevitably also raises up heroes.

Many combat veterans of our wars managed to arrive at such an admittedly-damaged yet still-manful character, and the accompanying wisdom. But Bond & Collee don’t want us thinking about that, and instead want us to automatically pity-admire the devastated and all-questioning veteran they’ve served up. They likely think that when a vet tries to take the path I’ve sketched, it leads him to become clenched against confessional therapeutic openness about what he went through, like the one in Gran Torino. And they likely believe that the despairing turmoil The Return’s vet lets his soul undergo is the only way back to some health. We should respect the fact that for a significant number of modern veterans, that has been the case, but we shouldn’t buy this “only way” idea in general, nor ignore its very poor fit with Odysseus.

What’s Been Removed? 1 ) fantasy stories

The Return’s promotion has been honest about this. None of the encounters with fantastic monsters or demi-gods are portrayed. Moreover, such mythical stories aren’t even talked about by any characters. Likewise removed are Penelope speaking of her dream about the geese and the eagle, and wondering whether it has come through the “gate of ivory” or the “gate of horn.” The “symbolic world” is shut out of this one.

Now it matters a great deal for Odyssey-interpretation that the Telemachy and the Back-in-Ithaca parts can be made to suffer a removal of most all the fantastical material and remain largely intact. (Imagine trying to do such a thing with any part, other than the “Scouring of the Shire” chapter, of The Lord of the Rings!) No-one who’s studied the epic will be surprised to hear that The Return does this, though, because most of the miraculous things which do occur in the Ithaca parts of the story can be explained in human terms. The little wonders performed by the hidden Athena at the side of Odysseus or Telemachus, such as changing a man’s appearance, or making a blow or a speech more powerful, are little enough. If we wish, we can take them as inspirations or genius moves which come out of the characters’ own souls. In fact, we can easily imagine a film that just like The Return, removed the fantastical elements and stayed in the third part, though ours would of course stick not simply to the outline of Homer’s story, but also to its content. It really is remarkable that such a film would work! And of course, it would be much better than this one.⁵

What’s Been Removed? 2) gods and prayers

We do not hear the names of Athena, Zeus, nor of any gods. We do not witness any religious ceremonies, and I don’t believe we even see any artifacts which represent the gods. This, if any you think about it, is a far more astounding operation than the removal of the fantastical elements. Nor does the removal of those elements require this second one.

(There is a possible exception: when we see Odysseus totally naked, right after he’s learned that he’s landed at Ithaca and not some other island, he looks up to heaven, and then bows to the ground to kiss--and to eat!--his home soil. So perhaps he is a believer, or a sometimes-believer, in some kind of unnamed Divine helper? )

What’s Been Removed? 3) Cretan stories

Brann highlights the fact that when Odysseus has disguised himself, he tells persons he meets in Ithaca, such as Eumaeus, Penelope, and even the stranger on the beach which turns out to be Athena in disguise, stories about his having had, prior to landing here, various adventures around the Mediterranean, as a merchant, fugitive, raider, captive, etc., and in all six of such tales but one, Crete, the proverbial land of liars, is one of the main settings. He varies these stories to fit the recipients, and while they are all fabrications, they are quite distinct from the fantastical stories he tells only to Penelope and the Phaeacians, as they all portray typical happenings in the trading/raiding Mediterranean of his era.

But The Return’s Odysseus only talks about his past in terms of what happened to him at Troy, and does so unwillingly and haltingly.

What’s Been Removed? 4) plans

In Homer, Odysseus is plotting from the moment he learns he is back in Ithaca. He disguises himself so he can scout out the situation and to prepare Telemachus, Eumaeus. and a couple others, to play their parts in the surprise attack.

In The Return, it isn’t clear what Odysseus intends, and the actions he does take are all set in motion by others. To his apparent surprise he is handed a beggar’s cup by Eumaeus when they come into the hall where the suitors are, whereas in Homer that beggar ruse was his plan. He only reveals his identity to Telemachus when pushed into it by the arrival of a suitors’ murder party, whereas in Homer, he arranges to tell Telemachus who he is as quickly as possible. And shockingly, once he learns that Penelope has a distaste for his return due to her suspicion of infidelities and war crimes (see below), and that Telemachus hates him due to his long absence, there is a scene where we are led to understand that he is going to leave Ithaca, abandoning wife, son, and people to the evil of the suitors. He is reprimanded and turned around by Eumaeus, who discloses that while he does recognize in physical terms who he is, that he no longer understands who he is. The Homer-lovers in the audience can only agree, for an Odysseus who is not a master of tactics, and who apparently is regularly second-guessing his purpose, is…what?

Even the surprise-attack is a move he improvises! No removal of weapons, no orders to lock doors beforehand. The bow-contest, which makes this attack possible, is entirely Penelope’s idea, though in the epic she had previously mentioned it to him when in his disguise, and he had urged her to do it. But this Odysseus must pleadingly ask, as he prepares to take the bow, “Is this what you want, my Queen?”

And did she intend him to unleash an attack with the bow? Not consciously, because her immediate response to it is to recoil from “so much blood” and to suggest that it might have been better to have kept the peace. Both Penelope and Odysseus are depicted as improvising in response to developments, and never really having a plan.

However, Bond & Collee were wise enough to not have gone the “strong woman character” route with Penelope, contrasting some all-capable Queen to their Odysseus’s uncertainty. Relatedly, it’s also to their credit that they portray her most knee-jerk expression of an anti-war view as errant: when Penelope does voice horror at the slaughter, and regret that Odysseus broke the peace, the old nurse pointedly says, “There was no other way, and that was no peace.”

What’s Been Removed? 5) royalty

Telemachus at one point indicates that Odysseus has been living on an island with another woman for many years, and that he was told this by a sailor. Now this information is for Bond & Collee the non-mythic truth behind the story Odysseus tells in the epic, that he was held captive on an island by the goddess-nymph Calypso. Many of the more traditional interpreters of Homer would insist we are obliged to run with the narrative truth of that story, but I’m readier, influenced by Brann, to consider it the embroidered version of his having shacked-up with some mortal woman for seven years, albeit likely under some degree of coercion.

But what I want to stress is that Homer’s Telemachus doesn’t learn about the lengthy-stay-with a mistress or Calypso from a mere “sailor,” but from King Menelaus when visiting his palace in Sparta. Apparently, while we are shown The Return’s Telemachus taking a sea-journey, he didn’t go far. He certainly didn’t make it to mainland Greece, to meet and converse with King Nestor at Pylos, and then with Menelaus and Helen at Sparta. So this change eliminates the reality of the Telemachy, which serves in the epic as his vital confidence-builder. Chucking that is maybe necessary if you’re going to present him, as Bond & Collee do, as weaker and more troubled, so much so that he attacks his father, and calls his mother a “whore”—alas, he is another character who smells more of the psychologist’s office than of Homer.

In any case, it also cuts this Ithaca off, not only from the fantastic and the divine, but from the idea of royalty, and the heroic figures of the Trojan War. News of the Trojan War only comes through rumor, or, through the embittered mutterings of Odysseus. The connection Homer’s Ithaca had, through Telemachus, to the grand personages of that war, is lost.

Moreover, there are almost no symbols of royalty to be seen in the Ithacan palace, beyond the bulk and elegance of the architecture. And Penelope, on all occasions, is the plainest-dressing queen of screen history—no crown, and no jewelry.

The full-frontal shot of nude Odysseus early in the film wasn’t put there for gratuitous reasons, but to signal that our writers will be giving us a stripped Odysseus and Ithaca, with all the poetic, mythic, religious, and royal trappings removed.

What’s Been Added? A) the suitors’ uber-villainy

In Homer, there’s one suitor character who tries to moderate the others, and who even seems ready to repent of the whole business. But in this version, it’s nearly impossible to imagine him given how overtly villainous they’ve been made. In the epic, the suitors’ being from the island’s leading families is stressed, and there is a sense that were the people of Ithaca—in the past, they had occasional assemblies—to stand together against what the suitors were doing, they could end it. In contrast, The Return’s suitors are straight-up thugs, oppressing all the people, and openly threatening Penelope and Telemachus.

Homer’s suitors are a more subtle bunch. Their injustices are more to one family’s property and dignity; they portend bad politics to come, but they do not immediately threaten every Ithacan. The community’s going along with their abuse of courting/hospitality customs is a cowardly civic way to make-the-best of the power-vacuum left by Odysseus’s assumed demise, but it is not, as in The Return, obedience to a pack of murderers who hold a gun to everyone’s head.

What’s Been Added? B) a more interesting Antinous

Arguably, the sense of evil trying to ensnare good characters with respectable-seeming compromises is not lost by making the suitors so thuggish, because it is kept alive by a reworking of their leader, Antinous. He has become a particularly sinister figure, who calls to mind a certain kind of 21st-century leader in enterprise or government, who serves as the respectable voice for an organization so corrupted as to have become criminal, and who never breaks that act. His thinking is all-cynical, but he has fooled himself enough to believe that it amounts to a higher philosophy, as his astounding conduct during the slaughter shows. (And kudos to Marwan Kenzari for his uniquely chilling performance here!)

What’s Been Added? C) an initial rejection by Penelope

In Homer, the meetings of Odysseus disguised as the beggar with Penelope are fraught with a question that I think the text makes it impossible to answer: does she recognize him? Are they communicating to one another, testing one-another, through the roles they’re keeping up at that point? Scholars disagree, though more of them reject the early recognition idea. Bond & Collee seem aware of this debate, as they give us a scene which, while still ambiguous-enough, does signal that she has recognized him, and he this recognition. But the key thing is that she poses a question to this beggar who claims to know a thing-or-two about Odysseus’s doings: could Odysseus deny that he has engaged in rape and pillage? At his refusal to answer this, she turns away. The private interview is over, and she has rejected him, even though she has just learned that he is her long-lost husband.

Again, this rejection plunges both characters into fundamental uncertainty about their lives and what they should do.

As to how just the implicit accusation of Odysseus is here, that involves questions of moral calibration which I will not try to resolve, such as whether it is right to label those instances when the ancient practice of slave-taking in war included the taking of mistress-slaves as rape, and whether it is right to stress the kinship between ancient wives’ worry about their men and that practice and modern wives’ worrying that their men will utilize the prostitutes near any army. And then there’s the additional issues raised by plundering/raiding, in an age and place where some degree of, well, piracy was expected of war-leaders, mixed with their trading and gift-exchanging visits.(Brann, 182, 246) That, incidentally, is why it feels strained that Penelope, as opposed to Bond & Collee, would be all that troubled by instances of Odysseus joining in or instigating pillage, apart from when it included slave-taking.

Now it is the case that the first disaster Odysseus and his men face during their journey home, and the one non-fantastical trial of the “Odyssey proper,” is an unexpected counter-attack of the Ciconians, retaliating for a purely-for-plunder raid on the coastal town of Ismarus the day before, which Odysseus had led, and which did involve slaughter of the men and the taking of their wives as slaves.(IX, 40-61) Another reason Penelope’s darkest suspicions in The Return are plausible, is that early Cyclic sources outside Homer claim that Odysseus was involved in the desecrating theft of the Palladium and in atrocities at the sack of Troy.(Clay, 187)

Final Thoughts, on the Film and Addition C

For reasons already evident, I think removals 2-5, and perhaps addition A also, are mistakes, both in artistic and moral terms. And my refusal to buy the remake of Odysseus into a shattered veteran is plain.

But I do think that addition C needs to be weighed more carefully. The scene has a real power and resonance, and is the place where some of psychology’s observations about a certain kind of veteran’s experience do link up with the epic. Some vets probably did want to delay their return home because they felt like the Odysseus here who says he stayed away because he couldn’t bear for her to see who he had become. And while that line doesn’t fit the real Odysseus’s spirit, he probably did feel some of the mixed feelings (including shame) about returning to marital life that a modern shell-shocked veteran does. Moreover, in Homer there really is a tension in the reconnection of Odysseus and Penelope, linked to evident lapses of his sexual fidelity when abroad. Many of the fantastical stories he tells her after they’ve reunited in their bed (XXIII, 300-341), about Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, and Calypso—so many female monsters and demi-gods!—seem, whatever else they may be, a way to convey core truths about his experiences that would otherwise be unspeakable. Consider this in the light of a teaching Jonathan Shays apparently makes—see 16:30-18:20 of this video—that the 6^th trait which veterans of sustained combat learn is to “consider fixed rules [including ones of marriage] as possible threats to one’s survival and the survival of one’s comrades.”⁶ Thus, in the “fairy-land” part of his story Odysseus had to become Circe’s lover, to save himself and his men, which is nearly parallel to the way in the “historical” part of his story, if Brann and I are right, that he had to reciprocate a sexual advance from Helen when on his solo spy expedition into Troy, to save himself and the Greek army.

The Return’s Penelope eventually does accept Odysseus back. It’s likely she will put her flashes of uncompromising war-hatred away, schooled by the old nurse’s reprimand, and by how it was Odysseus’s prowess that saved them. It also seems likely that she and he will be capable of talking through what he suffered and did during his long absence (even though Bond & Collee, having removed mythical storytelling, have removed the primary tool by which, as Homer implies, they will now be able talk about it).

Addition C makes me nervous as a defender of Homer’s Odysseus, because it invites the crudest kinds of anti-war and “women-empowering” judgments against him, especially from viewers who won’t grasp that Bond & Collee do not present this as Penelope’s finest moment. But I cannot deny that there is hard truth in this scene, on top of it being the stand-out display of Binoche’s and Fiennes’s excellent acting. This is the case even though I also suspect it is integral to the stripping of Odysseus and Penelope of their celebrated ability to plot and plan.

My final judgment is that this experiment of exploring how we feel about them when stripped of that, and of so much else, simply does not work. The procedure cannot find the line between core interior personality and custom-drenched exterior, and winds up cutting away much of the substance of Odysseus and Penelope. This leaves us struggling to see who each of them is other than a sufferer, unable to hold out hope for them until a tactical opportunity falls into their laps, and all-in-all, stuck in a hostile-to-heroism and philosophically-nihilistic view of the world. Some other time we could speculate about why that view has long been typical for the “prestige cinema” of the last 30 years, but The Return makes plain its life-draining impact.⁷

1. Bond is regarded in Britain as major playwright known for leftist political content, and a willingness to shock, but he also was the main writer for two important films of the late 60s: the iconic (yet perhaps overrated) Blow-Up, and the amazing (and definitely under-appreciated) Walkabout. He passed away this March, so I do hope he got to see good rushes of this film. Collee is a columnist, author of three novels, and has had an extensive screenwriting career, including his having been one of two writers who worked with Patrick O’Brian on the excellent and quite pro-heroic Master and Commander.

2. W.B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero, is the work which best details what I’m saying here, taking the story up to Joyce. For the “Autolycus heritage,” see Jenny Strauss Clay, The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey, chap 2. For Dante’s take see Inferno, Cantos 26-27, or the first footnote to my Milton piece.

3. There are positive allusions to Odysseus in the very place where the Republic’s Socrates is going on against the bad example set by the portrayal of Achilles in the Iliad. 386b-392d, and see the notes in Bloom’s edition, p. 451, for the references. Moreover, Odysseus is portrayed as the only philosophy-guided chooser of lives in the Myth of Er.

4. In these discussions, I’ve been going along with the idea I believe Bond & Collee hold, that Vietnam was a uniquely unjust war that often involved Americans in war-crimes. My views of that war, however, are closer to those of Norman Podhoretz, Why We Were in Vietnam, 1983. Its blurb: “Podhoretz presents the provocative argument that while America’s intervention in Vietnam was a politically reckless act, it was far from immoral or criminal, …and was instead an act of political idealism…” (Do be wary of too-neatly separating failures of prudence from pure intentions, but you see his basic idea.) And regarding American atrocities, his key sentence is this: “Yet no evidence existed at the time—and none has materialized since—to substantiate the charge that My Lai was typical.”(188)

5. Odysseus only tells the tale of the Odyssey proper at two moments in Homer’s poem. First, the version we hear, at Phaeacia, itself a fantastical place, and second, to Penelope, in their bedroom. That second telling is the only direct connection between the fantastical Odyssey proper and the realistic in-and-around-Ithaca Odyssey, apart from one stray mention of the Cyclops in the third part, and the report Menelaus makes of his conversation with Proteus. To consider what that might mean, I again urge my readers to consult Eva Brann’s Homeric Moments, in this case looking for what she says about the “fairy-land” on pages 5, 66, 72, 77, 123, 138, 160, 163, 165, 169, 196, 202, and 246-248.

6. As the video demonstrates, what I know about Shays’ ideas comes through an excellent commentator on and reader of The Odyssey, the high-school teacher Jay Pawlyk. Through his explanations, I do suspect that some aspects of Shays’ account of combat veterans’ experiences are too-categorical, and that Bond & Collee were too-influenced by it. Pawlyk, a wiser reader of Homer, is careful in his lecture to indicate that while he is highlighting Shays, he understands that his book provides only one lens into the epic, among many others which should also be consulted.

7. For my previous writing on the Odyssey, see “Reading the Odyssey,” “The Best of the Odyssey Commentators,” Parts one and two, and “Eva Brann’s Helen,” parts one and two.