Christianity Today: Why Christopher Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ Haunts Us Right Now, by Russell Moore:
One of the biggest cultural events this summer isn’t a superhero sequel or a streaming series. It’s a 3,000-year-old Greek poem. That The Odyssey would be a box office powerhouse is not all that unexpected—after all, filmmaker Christopher Nolan gave us The Dark Knight Rises and Oppenheimer.
But this is more than that. Bookstores are moving copies of the epic at just the time most people would have expected the typical American to answer “Who is Homer?” with “Bart Simpson’s dad.” People who had never before thought about Ithaca, Penelope, or the Cyclopes are arguing over which translation to buy.
I should have known something was afoot when I opened a movie theater app to buy tickets. The reserved seats weren’t marked by little red squares anymore; they appeared as tiny bronze helmets until the whole virtual auditorium looked like a Trojan battlefield. Our obsession with the story seems to be more than just opening-week hype. Something ancient suddenly looks urgent again. And some people—including some Christians—are asking why.
Some, Christian and otherwise, have argued that Nolan has made a film that is “kinda Christian,” as one writer put it, softening Homer’s ancient heroism with mercy, guilt, and forgiveness. There’s truth to that observation. But I think the film’s deepest significance lies elsewhere—not in the answers it gives but in the longing it exposes.
The Odyssey—the original poetry and the modern film—is not really about adventure, although it has an abundance of it. It’s also not primarily about virtues in some abstract way, whether the kill-your-enemies or love-your-enemies type. The Odyssey is about home. Odysseus wants to return to his place but comes to see that his obstacle is not merely geographical. He must become a different kind of person, the kind of man who can receive home as gift rather than as trophy. And at almost every step of the path, those who imaginatively walk with him can feel the ache.
Some of us are pulled toward nostalgia, looking to something better in the past. And some of us are pulled toward discontentment, looking to something better in the future. Regardless of where we turn, we all recognize something is missing. And all kinds of people—politicians, marketers, tech lords—are there to say, “You want to get home, and I can get you there.”
But it never works.
That’s because homesickness points in contradictory directions all at once. In “Homesick,” songwriter Noah Kahan sings of being stuck in a Vermont hometown of winter “hibernation” that is so slow “I feel my organs failing,” yet he is too disillusioned to find the will to leave. “Spend the rest of my life with what could have been,” he sings. “And I will die in the house that I grew up in. / I’m homesick.” Homer imagines a man desperate to get home. Noah Kahan imagines a man desperate to leave home. Those sound like opposite longings. They’re actually the same.
We’re either trying to get back to something (to re-live some place or situation where we once were happy) or trying to get away toward something (a new job, a new love, a new identity that will fill the void of the emptiness we feel). We become bored of what’s familiar and scared of what’s not.
For Paul at Mars Hill in Acts 17, the pagan poems demonstrated that, deep down, we already recognize that something’s missing in all our attempts to find and create meaning, whatever our rhetoric.
The ancient problem says “I can’t get home.” The modern problem says “I got home—it isn’t home.” One longs for return, and one longs for escape. These are not two problems but one. No matter which way we turn, we don’t know what home is. That’s why Homer still rings true, even in the era of IMAX and SpaceX.
And that’s what makes the Christian story stranger than the pagan ones. Odysseus spends 20 years trying to get back to Ithaca. Jesus has spent 2,000 years (so far) telling us to stop mistaking Ithaca for Eden.
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