Nolan’s Odysseus, Power and the Fantasy of Remorse

What if Nolan’s Odysseus is not a flawed hero, but a psychopath?

I have been reading Kathryn Lawson’s fascinating critique of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (see below for a summary and links to the orginal article). Lawson argues that Nolan makes a dangerous mistake by giving Odysseus a contemporary conscience. In attempting to make an ancient hero morally legible to a modern audience, Nolan transforms a remorseless agent of violence into a guilt-ridden man capable of recognising what he has done.

That may seem like an ethically serious revision. Lawson argues that it does the opposite. It replaces the disturbing moral problem presented by Homer’s Odysseus with the comforting hope that powerful men can ultimately redeem themselves.

I want to push that argument a little further.

What if Odysseus is not merely a flawed hero? What if, judged through our contemporary psychological categories, his behaviour looks remarkably like that of a psychopath? And what happens when Nolan takes such a figure, gives him a conscience, and turns the suffering he has inflicted on others into the story of his own redemption?

The psychopath as hero

Homer’s Odysseus is calculating, narcissistic, deceitful, obsessed with status and capable of extreme violence. He raids settlements, kills their inhabitants and takes women and property as spoils. He treats people as instruments, manipulates those around him, needlessly endangers his crew and repeatedly places his reputation above their survival.

His encounter with Polyphemus is an obvious example. Odysseus does not simply escape from the Cyclops. Once safely aboard his ship, he reveals his identity because he wants Polyphemus to know who defeated him. His men beg him to remain silent, but the preservation of his name and reputation matters more than their safety. Polyphemus then calls upon Poseidon to punish him, with catastrophic consequences for the journey home.

Odysseus is not simply clever. His intelligence is inseparable from deception and control. He adopts false identities, fabricates elaborate histories and manipulates other people’s perceptions of reality. This resourcefulness is conventionally treated as one of his defining heroic attributes. But remove the heroic framing and the pattern begins to look rather different.

The same is true of the violence that accompanies his return to Ithaca. Odysseus does not merely reclaim his home from Penelope’s suitors. He undertakes a systematic slaughter. Pleas for mercy are rejected. Enslaved women accused of sleeping with the suitors are forced to clear away the bodies before Odysseus orders their deaths. Telemachus decides that they do not deserve a clean death and hangs them.

Odysseus is then prepared to continue the killing when the relatives of the suitors seek vengeance. The violence does not end because he experiences a moment of recognition or understands the humanity of those he has harmed. Athena intervenes and orders both sides to stop.

Most importantly, Odysseus shows remarkably little remorse for the suffering he causes. He grieves his losses, longs for home and mourns dead companions, but this is not the same as accepting responsibility for the people he has killed, enslaved, sacrificed or placed in danger. His sorrow remains largely organised around himself: his journey, his household, his reputation, his losses and his return.

Obviously, we cannot clinically diagnose a fictional character written almost three thousand years ago. Homer did not possess our psychological categories, and psychopathy is not simply a synonym for violence or moral evil. A clinical assessment would require evidence about a person’s development, behaviour across different contexts and emotional life that no literary text could adequately provide.

Nevertheless, Odysseus’s represented behaviour corresponds strikingly with many of the characteristics historically associated with psychopathy: superficial charm, grandiosity, manipulativeness, habitual deception, instrumental exploitation, callousness and an absence of remorse.

There are qualifications. Odysseus appears capable of grief, fear, longing and sustained attachments to Penelope, Telemachus, Laertes and Ithaca. He is not emotionally empty, and his violence takes place within the codes of war, kingship, slavery and patriarchal authority that structure Homer’s world.

But historical context explains the behaviour. It does not make the behaviour disappear.

Within Homer’s aristocratic moral universe, cunning, conquest, vengeance and the pursuit of greatness are not necessarily pathological. They are attributes of the hero. The unsettling possibility is that Odysseus can be both a culturally sanctioned Homeric hero and, when judged through a modern framework, a man whose conduct exhibits a pronounced cluster of psychopathic traits.

Giving Odysseus a conscience

Nolan transforms this remorseless agent of violence into a recognisably modern, guilt-ridden man. His Odysseus is traumatised by the destruction of Troy and burdened by the consequences of his own ingenuity. He possesses moral insight. He suffers. He seeks redemption.

As Lawson observes, he begins to resemble Nolan’s Oppenheimer: another exceptional man devastated by the terrible consequences of his brilliant idea. Violence becomes a burden carried by the person who made it possible. The perpetrator’s anguish becomes evidence of his humanity.

This appears to make Odysseus more complicated. In fact, it makes him considerably less so.

Homer confronts us with a powerful man who does not share our moral assumptions. He is capable of recognising another person’s intelligence or usefulness, but this does not mean he recognises their equal humanity. He does not secretly possess a modern liberal conscience waiting to emerge. There is no assurance that experience will make him morally better.

Nolan supplies that assurance. He transforms the question of what can restrain violent power into a question of whether the violent man can forgive himself.

That is not just a change in characterisation. It changes the politics of the story.

When remorse replaces accountability

Once Odysseus becomes a traumatised and morally reflective hero, structural violence is reorganised as the personal tragedy of the powerful man responsible for it.

His capacity for guilt becomes proof of his fundamental goodness. His emotional pain begins to balance the physical suffering of his victims. Remorse substitutes for accountability. The people he killed, enslaved, abandoned or sacrificed become stages in his journey towards self-knowledge.

Their suffering matters because of what it teaches him.

This is one of the most persistent habits of prestige storytelling. We are repeatedly invited to understand powerful men through the burden of the decisions they have made. The greater the destruction, the more profound their anguish. Their victims remain dispersed across the margins of the narrative, while the perpetrator receives interiority, complexity and the possibility of transformation.

To humanise someone is not necessarily to excuse them. Recognising that those who commit terrible acts remain human can be morally and politically important. But humanisation becomes exoneration when the discovery that a perpetrator has feelings is treated as a meaningful answer to the harm they have caused.

A man may experience guilt and remain dangerous. He may understand the consequences of his actions and continue to regard them as necessary. He may suffer terribly without repairing anything. He may feel remorse because of what his actions reveal about him, rather than because of what they have done to other people.

The presence of conscience is not the same as accountability.

The fantasy of the great man

This is where Nolan’s redemptive Odysseus converges with both the hero’s journey and the great-man theory of history.

The exceptional man remains at the centre of the world. He makes history, changes the destiny of nations and commits acts of extraordinary violence. Because he acts on a greater scale than ordinary people, he also suffers on a greater scale. Eventually, he achieves the self-knowledge through which the meaning of the story can be resolved.

The victims of history become supporting characters in the moral education of the man who made it.

The hero’s journey is therefore not only a narrative of adventure and transformation. In this form, it becomes a machine for converting violence into wisdom. The hero descends into darkness, confronts what he has done and returns with new knowledge. The scale of his wrongdoing becomes evidence of the magnitude of his journey.

Redemption restores his exceptional status rather than dismantling it.

This is politically comforting because it allows history to remain a story about powerful individuals. If the problem is the great man’s damaged conscience, then the solution is his recovery. We do not have to think about the institutions that enabled him, the cultures that celebrated him, the people whose interests he served or the systems that made his violence possible. We only have to wait for the hero to recognise his mistake.

Once he does, we can forgive him.

Power does not cure itself

Homer offers no such reassurance.

His Odysseus does not stop because he understands what he has become. He does not recognise his victims as people whose claims might transform his understanding of himself. He remains prepared to continue the cycle of violence until something outside him intervenes.

Lawson draws on Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas and Simone Weil to explain why this matters. Although they understand ethics, violence and transcendence differently, all three resist the idea that the sovereign self can provide its own sufficient moral limits.

For Levinas, ethical responsibility begins with an encounter with another person who cannot be reduced to our purposes or absorbed into our understanding of the world. Lawson suggests that Odysseus repeatedly fails this encounter. He masters, classifies and instrumentalises what he meets. Even his journey into the unknown ultimately returns him to the same place: his island, his household, his authority and himself.

For Weil, power operates as force. It transforms people into things and intoxicates those able to exercise it. Force does not naturally produce the insight that brings force to an end. The person who possesses power is often the person least capable of recognising what it is doing.

That is why Athena’s intervention at the end of Homer’s poem is so important. The cycle of killing is not resolved by Odysseus’s conscience. It is interrupted by something beyond him.

He does not change. He has to be stopped.

That may be the more important morality tale for our own historical moment. Nolan asks us to believe that powerful men will eventually recognise the humanity of others, feel appropriately sorry for their crimes and redeem themselves.

But what if they understand perfectly well what they are doing?

What if cruelty is not the product of insufficient self-knowledge?

What if powerful men do not need to learn that their victims are human, because they already know and have decided that it does not matter?

What if power does not cure itself through introspection?

Giving Odysseus a conscience may look like humanising him. But it also reassures us that somewhere beneath the calculation, narcissism, exploitation and violence there was always a good man waiting to be recovered. His remorse invites us to distinguish his essential humanity from the terrible things he has done.

The danger is that this does not challenge the psychopath. It forgives him.

Summary: “Nolan’s Odyssey is naive about the nature of guilt and power”

Kathryn Lawson’s original article, “Nolan’s Odyssey is naive about the nature of guilt and power”, is behind a paywall. I wanted to discuss the ideas it raises, but that discussion is difficult if many of the people encountering it cannot access the argument itself. I have therefore posted the following summary so that readers can understand Lawson’s central claims and participate in the conversation.

This is not intended as a substitute for the original article. It is a summary written in my own words to make its argument more widely accessible. If you have access, I encourage you to read Lawson’s full version, which is linked below.

In this article, philosopher Kathryn Lawson argues that Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey appears to offer a timely meditation on hospitality, xenophobia and our ethical responsibility towards strangers. However, by transforming Odysseus into a recognisably modern, guilt-ridden hero, the film ultimately weakens the more disturbing ethical challenge posed by Homer’s poem.

Lawson develops her argument through the work of Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas and Simone Weil, three twentieth-century thinkers who returned to Homer while attempting to understand war, atrocity and the operation of power. Their readings suggest that the importance of Homer lies partly in his refusal to impose contemporary moral assumptions on violence. Homer’s Odysseus is not a fundamentally decent man traumatised by what he has done. He is a powerful warrior who generally regards conquest, enslavement and killing as legitimate expressions of heroic action. This makes him more difficult to admire, but also more valuable for thinking about how power actually behaves.

Nolan’s film instead gives Odysseus an immediately recognisable contemporary conscience. He witnesses the destruction of Troy with horror and appears burdened by the violence committed in his name. Lawson compares this version of the character to Nolan’s Oppenheimer: a brilliant man devastated by the consequences of his own ingenuity. He is thoughtful, morally conflicted and capable of recognising his culpability. For Lawson, however, this creates a comforting fantasy. It suggests that those who exercise destructive power will change once they understand the suffering they have caused. History and contemporary politics offer little reason to believe that this is true.

The film’s treatment of the Cyclops Polyphemus illustrates the problem. Homer complicates the encounter by giving Polyphemus a community and by showing Odysseus invading his home, consuming his food and using deception against him. Nolan removes some of this context and presents the Cyclops more straightforwardly as a monster. The stranger therefore becomes an object to be overcome rather than a genuinely different being whose claims might challenge the hero’s view of himself.

This matters particularly in relation to Levinas, for whom ethical responsibility begins with an encounter with another person who cannot be reduced to our own categories. In this reading, Odysseus himself resembles a Cyclops: he sees the world from a single perspective, masters whatever he encounters and repeatedly returns everything to himself, his home and his desires. Homer does not resolve this by granting him remorse. Even near the poem’s conclusion, Odysseus orders the execution of enslaved women associated with Penelope’s suitors and remains ready to continue the cycle of vengeance. He does not naturally recognise the humanity of those over whom he exercises power.

Lawson also argues that Nolan’s decision to reduce the role of the gods removes something ethically important. Homer’s cycle of violence does not end because Odysseus reflects on his behaviour and becomes a better man. It ends because Athena intervenes and commands the combatants to stop. For Arendt, Levinas and Weil, the divine can be understood in different ways, but in each case it represents something beyond the sovereign self: an external demand, mystery or interruption that prevents power from treating its own perspective as absolute.

Simone Weil’s concept of “force” is especially important to Lawson’s conclusion. Weil describes power as intoxicating and self-perpetuating. Those who possess it are driven to exercise and expand it, often without recognising their victims as fully human. The exceptional moment occurs when someone has the power to harm another person but refrains from doing so. For Weil, this is not the predictable product of self-awareness but something closer to a miracle. In Homer, Athena’s intervention creates that interruption. Nolan replaces it with psychological growth.

Lawson therefore concludes that Nolan has made Odysseus less like Homer’s unsettling, self-assured warrior and more like the dutiful and morally serious Aeneas of Virgil. The result may be emotionally appealing, but it makes the story less capable of explaining contemporary violence. The film asks us to hope that powerful men will recognise the humanity of others, acknowledge the harm they have caused and voluntarily change course. Homer’s poem offers the darker and perhaps more realistic warning: power seldom recognises its own cruelty, and those who wield it may need to be stopped by something beyond themselves.

Note introducing the original article

This post summarises and responds to Kathryn Lawson’s article, “Nolan’s Odyssey is naive about the nature of guilt and power”, published by the Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI). The original is behind a paywall, but readers with access can find Lawson’s complete argument here: https://iai.tv/articles/nolans-odyssey-is-naive-about-the-nature-of-guilt-and-power-auid-3665