The song of all the promises I failed to keep: Moral injury is The Odyssey’s core

By Brian S. Powers

Critiques of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, both in scholarly and more public discourse, reveal the expectations the reviewers brought into the cinema.  Most boil down to some version of the sentiment, “This isn’t the Odyssey I wanted to see.”  Some simply reveal the racism, misogyny and xenophobia that regrettably dominates elements of public and political discourse in certain circles. Others are far more considered, concerned with what is lost in Nolan’s adaptation of the epic poem to the screen and keen to interrogate the moral narrative he seeks to tell for a contemporary audience. The most influential and erudite of these was penned by Emily Wilson, the acclaimed classicist whose incendiary review of the film has led much of the scholarly and public discourse about the film. 

Wilson is a brilliant conversation partner in navigating the space between the ancient text and the film. She understandably laments the absence of large swaths of the rich texture of Homer’s Greek world in Nolan’s film, the flattening of most of the characters not named Odysseus, and perhaps post poignantly, the redaction of Calypso’s magnificent – and certainly still profoundly necessary in the contemporary world - indictment of the patriarchal nature of the male gods’ double-standards on sexual relationships and sexual violence in the broader pantheon of Greek mythology.

However, The Odyssey is not the ancient Homeric tale, but a meditation on the effects of war on modern combatants, on shared social values and the consequences of breaching them. When Wilson claims that the film “has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours,” she reveals her own civilian privilege. She writes confidently about war and returning from it yet cannot credibly claim any lived experience of either that might inform her judgment.  She does not refer to or acknowledge the existence of the testimonies of veterans or those directly impacted by conflict in her review of the film in the London Review of Books nor in her op-ed in The Atlantic. Discourse around the film to date features few voices from those who have lived experience going to war and returning from it.

As a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a scholar and researcher of moral injury amongst veterans, I feel compelled to respond to Wilson’s critique. I do not dare to speak for other veterans as our experiences are complex and varied. Nor do I accord myself the greater share of expertise that belongs to those who experienced violence in combat far more routinely and directly than I or found themselves in far more difficult circumstances in returning home. Yet I found the film surprisingly emotional and deeply meaningful, particularly as Nolan’s allegorical commentary – informed by modern combat veterans - plays so closely to the surface of the film’s narrative. 

Moral injury and the broken world

Jonathan Shay, an American VA psychiatrist working with Vietnam veterans, brought the term ‘moral injury’ into the modern lexicon in the 1990s after realising that the condition Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder didn’t encompass many of the emotions of guilt, rage, indignation, grief, and sorrow they expressed to him as they discussed their wartime experiences. Moral injury, he eventually argued, is present when “there has been a betrayal of ‘what’s right’ by a person in legitimate authority in a high-stakes situation.” It may be characterised by the sustained and enduring presence of negative moral emotions: guilt, anger, shame, contempt and embarrassment, as well as a deep existential wrestling with a sense of self and identity. In his book Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, Shay reads the Odyssey allegorically through the lens of moral injury, and finds connections between Odysseus’ encounters with monsters, giants, witches, sirens and goddesses and the experiences veterans face, both in combat and in returning home, that are unimaginable to the civilian populace. Through reading the Odyssey, Shay contends that the most corrosive effect of moral injury in an individual is the collapse in their capacity for social trust – the foundational belief that other people, institutions and cultures will act in accordance with some shared vision of ‘what’s right’. 

The film explores the betrayal and collapse of ‘what’s right’ and involves the audience as witness to it through experiences of Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus. Nolan aims to make his moral points about humanity, lies and xenophobia through the experiences and reflections of a morally injured Odysseus who increasingly struggles with the consequences of the sacking of Troy and the deterioration of social trust. Nolan shifts Homer’s narrative in dark and almost nightmarish ways that reflect Odysseus’ anhedonic post-war lens, the generally bleak colour palate emphasising his perception of a world drained of possibilities for joy and hope. The whole journey of Odysseus is marked by the encounters he and his crew have with a world suddenly alien and strange, no longer held by common moral bonds. Odysseus leaves Troy without full provisions for his crew, noting that they will stop and gather them on the way back to Ithaca. The form of xenia, or guest hospitality, that Nolan formulates throughout as “Zeus’ law” (regardless of its relation to actual ancient practice) is what Odysseus is clearly counting on. At their first port of call, Nolan’s Odysseus and his crew find a village whose inhabitants flee rather than offer them hospitality – a hint that they themselves are now perceived as odious and feared. In Ithaca, the abuse of hospitality amongst the suitors and the ambiguity of Odysseus’ survival creates an untenable situation for Penelope and Telemachus.

So, too, does Nolan emphasise the breakdown of social trust in the intimate relationships between Menelaus and Helen as well as Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Helen in Nolan’s universe has been presumably disfigured by Menelaus and exists bitterly in a violent and resentful marriage. Clytemnestra’s act of betrayal/justice in killing Agamemnon occurs through trickery also – a trusted spouse sensually manoeuvres her husband into bed only to shockingly and violently stab him. Her plot to kill him is also linked to what Penelope describes as a ‘monstrous’ breach of the social order – one so fundamental to relational trust between a husband and wife that one might assume it need not ever be spoken: a husband will not sacrifice their own child in the cause of his war. The bedroom killing is a terrifying scene, particularly with the dead Agamemnon in Hades narrating it and instantly imputing a new fear – that those close to him will betray him – into the mind of Odysseus. We are reminded in the encounter in Hades that Odysseus has also committed a parallel ‘monstrous’ act of betrayal to Agamenon’s in sacrificing Sinon to sell the trick of the horse at Troy. After the destructive encounters with the Cyclops and the Laestrygonians, Odysseus is reminded in Hades by one who has reaped the whirlwind of his own sacrifice that there may be no safe harbour, even at home.  

Nolan’s Odysseus not only suffers from the collapse of his own capacity for social trust, but comes to believe that in the ‘trick’ he devised and executed with the Trojan horse, he has destroyed the moral order and rent asunder the world that relied implicitly upon it. He has done so for a cause he believes to be dubious. Joe Winnikka-Lydon notes that moral injury amongst veterans is an ‘inherent political critique’. Essentially, if societies send their military members into war for a cause they feel is in line with societal values, and the combatants return with guilt, shame, anger and contempt, then societies would be wise to treat their experience as an inherent critique of those societal values.  Similarly, Tine Molendijk calls this a form of “moral knowledge” that negative moral emotions create. In the film, this theme emerges through Odysseus’ guilt and shame, as through it we see the consequences of power used for questionable ends: Menelaus’ pursuit of Helen and Agamemnon’s desire to break Troy’s hold on trade routes. 

A critical piece of ‘moral knowledge’ that combatants carry is the humanity of their enemies and those their own society has ‘othered’. Militaries have often tacitly dehumanised their enemies in order to train combatants to attack them without hesitation – a bit of moral trickery that often exacerbates moral injury when combatants realise their enemies are just like them. Nolan shows this unfold slowly over the course of the film through Odysseus’ eyes. As part of the ‘special operations’ team in the horse that infiltrates Troy, Odysseus initially cheers as he and Menelaus open the gates and Agamemnon and the rest of his army pours through. Yet we see an Odysseus increasingly uncomfortable with what he’s unleashed, and eventually, through his own testimony a decade later, come to know that he has carried the humanity of one of his victims the entire time. His speech to Penelope is a confession of what they broke as well as an open testimony of his moral knowledge that speaks as much to the audience directly as to his wife. 

The American accents present in the film, and the blending of the notion that Odysseus has indeed become ‘the sea people’ – the vague threat that Nolan’s Greek cities seem to fear – make a clear point about the dangers of false narratives, xenophobia and becoming the very threat to a shared idea of welcome that one sets out in moral certitude to defend it from. It is difficult to separate this from the current xenophobic fears about immigration perpetuated by political parties in both the US and the UK. As Wilson identifies, Nolan’s moral vision focuses on the collapse of shared cultural values and the axiological consequence of the lies and xenophobia that shaped the US ‘global war on terror’ and discourse around Brexit. These forces have unmoored us from a sense of shared values and this unravelling is collapsing the world order as we know it. 

Certainly, victims’ lives are present in the film only in Odysseus’ guilt and memory and lose the fulness of their proper human subjectivity as a result. This is a narrative choice as well as a limitation of a story centred around one protagonist’s experience. However, through the haunting appearances of ‘Athena’ in Odysseus’ memory the film evinces what combatants often know – that grand narratives that ‘other’ and dehumanise the enemy quickly shipwreck on our encounter with the undeniable and haunting humanity of the enemies whose lives or dignity we violate. Michael Yandell, a theologian and US Army veteran of the war in Iraq contends that moral injury is a ‘negative revelation’ by which we only come to know that which we truly value through the experience of its absence or negation. Odysseus’ confession is an expression of the importance of what has been negatively revealed to him: the beauty of the world as it was, the humanity of the priestess of Athena at Troy and the importance of sacred trust and of the concept of xenia. This scene invites the audience into that negative revelation and perhaps leaves it to them as to what to do with this testimony and moral knowledge. 

Moral injury and the personal – conflicting desires, guilt and hope

Nolan’s narrative goes far beyond Odysseus simply “feeling bad” about war – Wilson’s patronising description of the complex experiences of guilt, grief and loss. Rather, the weight of the moral knowledge he possesses is reflected in Odysseus’ conflicting desires about returning home. Shay draws attention to the very brief encounter with the Lotus-Eaters in the Homeric text as resonant with the temptation common to many military veterans to simply numb moral pain with alcohol and drugs and forget the complicated feelings they might have about going home. Nolan echoes this, utilising the Sirens to alert Odysseus to a truth of which he might only be peripherally conscious until he hears their song: he might not want to go home. Veterans who have experienced the distorting trauma of war and know things they wish they could unknow may fear that in coming home with all of their burdensome knowledge, their existential suffering, their comfort with violence, and mistrust of themselves, they have become a distorted and distinctly different version of the person who left. On return, they risk burdening those they love and even unintentionally harming them. His encounter with Calypso illustrates this struggle – the conflicting desires to go home, the need to remember and the seductive allure of forgetting the guilt and horror.

I suspect many who have experienced moral injury, war and its effect may recognise the other complex motivations of Nolan’s Odysseus as they develop over the course of the journey. He desires to go home, but also slightly dreads and fears returning. He desires to see his wife again but fears he has changed irretrievably and may no longer be the man she loves. He desires to properly honour the dead and rightly remember them but is also tempted to forget the horrors he’s seen. He wants to see his son, Telemachus, and to live up to Telemachus’ expectations, but fears that he will not – perhaps because of who the war has shaped him into. He desires a way to make meaning of the world again and he desires a sense of moral clarity, to find a way to process his guilt for surviving and for his command decisions that have killed his men. He desires to tell his story and be heard. He desires to protect his family, even if he has to bury his humanity within himself to do it, and, perhaps most poignantly, to find a way to live with what he’s done. This is not an uncomplicated man – nor are the veterans who exist in similar states of contradiction. 

The psychological and emotional climax of the film is Odysseus’ return – but the moral weight Odysseus has been carrying is evinced most fully in his conversation with Penelope. In exploring his own guilt, he invites the audience into his moral injury indirectly, by asking questions like “what if he saw ten years of rage pour into the city in one night” as the film shows us his confusion and seeming regret as he moves through a burning Troy. Penelope echoes a common refrain that veterans hear amongst well-intended civilians who try to mitigate their conscience – pointing out that the agential burden was on everyone, not just him. However, like so many veterans, Odysseus knows he is personally guilty, and his experience with Athena confirms it in his own mind.

For Nolan, the gods and goddesses are absent in the film (with one ambiguous exception), perhaps to emphasise the totality of Odysseus’ responsibility. He asks, “what if he knew that very night as he walked through the fires of anarchy and pain...what if he knew exactly what he’d done?” This expression of knowing culpability finds a corollary in many veterans’ sense that they are completely responsible for their own actions and unable to easily contextualise them, resulting in a crippling sense of guilt and shame. The absence of the voices of the gods and goddesses narrows the horizon for potential recourse – Odysseus feels that they broke the world and there is no relief valve, no deus ex machina, no divine intervention that will restore the trust amongst peoples that he has destroyed. It is a recognition of the fragility of the world order, of justice, and of any shared notion of the sacred. 

The revelation that Zendaya’s Athena was in fact a priestess slaughtered in the sacking of Troy opens an evocative set of possibilities. Either this is the way Athena appears to Odysseus, and her weeping as she reaches up to meet his outstretched hand evinces a desire to absolve Odysseus of his guilt, or she could be simply a recognition of his desire to make peace with war itself, or she could be a vision fully contained within his own mind that reminds him of the peoples to whom he owes a moral debt he can never pay. Absolution and clarity remain as elusive as she does when he returns to glance at her again.

As in the experience of moral injury, hope is fleeting in the film, but present in the grace notes of those that recognise Odysseus and his humanity underneath the damaged and violent man. The audience is invited to share in his relief after the battle with the suitors that he can finally keep one promise that he couldn’t make: that he could return to Penelope, as well as at least one promise that he did: to sail west, honour his men and perhaps ease the weight of their memory. For morally injured veterans, true “healing” is perhaps an impossibility – they will live with the weight of it as long as they live. But there are ways to share the burden, to learn to bear it and perhaps explore meaningful ways to make amends.

The film does not depict Odysseus fully making amends or giving an account of what he owes to the Trojans or his other victims. Rather, he seems to understand that through his own transgressions both at Troy and in Ithaca, he has forfeited his right to rule and acknowledges the moral right of Telemachus to govern – particularly as he has consistently shown kindness and compassion in trying circumstances. Odysseus leaves to recover a sense of his own self and honour, first through remembrance and keeping the promise he made to his own dead. Yet his departure also suggests that sometimes moral repair on a broad scale first involves tainted leaders whose rule will negatively impact future reconciliation stepping down and leaving hope to those not poisoned by the conflict.   

The power of the space to grieve and feel

The cinematic magic of Nolan’s film is that in telling the unfolding story of a morally injured war veteran attempting to return home through the allegorical distance of the ancient narrative, he offers those who have been deeply impacted by war a rare and fleeting moment to feel seen and heard through a story. This is particularly meaningful in the present, where the civilian populace so often misunderstands their experience and appears uninterested or unable to hear them. 

I found the final bits of the film deeply cathartic. I have seen it twice and wept through the entirety of Odysseus and Penelope’s dialogue both times. For the arrogant and righteous rage I helped channel after 9/11, for the identity I lost, for uncritically trusting leaders and a national narrative of our own goodness, for the lies we believed, for all the things we broke and can never repair, for all we’ve done that we can never take back, for the world we destroyed, for the lives we ruined and for the lives I couldn’t save, for the years my wife spent patiently dealing with my grief and anger...for everything. Even for an avid cinephile and one who has spent 20 years returning in my own way, this was an unparalleled experience: a profound space and permission to grieve, lament and feel acknowledged by a film in doing so. For me, Nolan and his brilliant cast and crew have told a tale at the perfect remove, in just the right key, so that it resonated with my own experiences, and I could unreservedly connect them with the film and Nolan’s psychological and emotional arc. While many may not share this reaction, I also suspect I am not alone.  

What Christopher Nolan puts on screen in Odysseus’ return is both a meditation on the moral costs of breaching social trust and the heavy weight of returning home. The film invites us to see that pain expressed, holding together the messy emotionality of the final scenes of return and departure so that we may feel the fear and agony, the trepidation, triumph and horror of Odysseus’ return. It offers no tidy bow to the difficult moral questions it raises - particularly on the themes of moral absolution, the moral accounting we owe to victims and the world, and to moral repair. It tells the tale of someone who sought to be honourable, found himself deeply compromised, and who has journeyed home with a significant amount of acquired moral wisdom. It lets us hear Odysseus’ testimony, and the film leaves the audience with the haunting and open questions about how we ourselves receive that ‘moral knowledge’ and how we respond to it.