The Greek in us

 

messages of the movie

Christopher Nolan must have felt called 

to the defining story of The Odyssey,

we of the West trace the essence of who we are back to the Greeks,

and this story sings of those beginnings,

at its worst it sings of male dominance and violence,

the misogyny and arrogance that Agamemnon preaches,

he who had no problem sacrificing his female child

for good sailing wind, to get him to the battle,

he was shocked at being killed by the mother of the murdered child,

in his world Zeus disempowers nearly all of the Earth Goddesses

to whom the Greeks prayed before the new power structure,

in this new world, economic greed is at the heart of most of our wars,

imperialist Rome the model for how to treat other cultures,

to consider them to be as fodder for the beasts

of our selfish assertion of will:

pillage, rape, the sacrifice of our soldiers,

the price we pay for how clever we are,

how good we are at asserting our selves upon the world,

as Troy is being sacked, we are forced 

to notice the heavy price being paid

as we are one with the revelatory shock Odysseus feels,

Nolan knows that we need 

to revisit this founding story,

to look at our past,

to look at our present,

to look at the future that calls to us,

and figure a better response 

than keeping to the same path,

it is easy to quibble 

about how he might have made 

different choices with the movie:

of cast, of costume, of language,

of what to include,

of what to exclude,

instead it is far better to intensely watch the movie,

as I did for a second time this week,

and to consider the message emblazoned in every frame:

that the Odysseus within us

should know the price of our arrogant willfulness,

of our submissive yielding to a tyrant as leader,

instead we should do what is right

for the sake of those who gave their lives

so that we can be where we are now,

Nolan's film argues that the way 

we treat visitors, the way we treat those different,

is key for us to be ourselves at our best,

we need to be saved from the consequences of our insularity,

of our dependence on a dominating father figure,

of reverting to identity solely through the tribe,

Nolan hopes that we will 

wake up from the Olympian dream,

and create a future 

that is far more inclusive, transcendent,

than what the lesser within us keeps choosing,

how ironic that one of the great gifts from the Greek uplift of culture

is the understanding that we are not stuck in cycles of history,

that we can overcome adversity,

the Greek in Nolan reminds us 

that we can find a better way forward.

by Henry H. Walker

September 2, ‘26