As Gen Z, I Found Nolan’s Odyssey to be Only an IMAX-Sized Cliché
Strip off Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Odyssey of its grandiosity and you will find that underneath the 250-million-dollar production, it is a riveting film pivoting around a simple human desire: to return home. The original 'John Brown,' long before Bob Dylan’s composition – it is the story of Odysseus’ homecoming.
However, as Paromita Chakraborty observed in The Indian Express, "homecoming is not a reversal of departure." Then, what is it? Is it only an essentialisation of a romantic journey immersed in nostalgia? Or is it the becoming and unbecoming of an entirely new person? How do you return home when one night, in a strange city, you see things that make you believe the home you once knew couldn't possibly be there anymore?
The stunning grandeur of Nolan’s representation of Odysseus’s homecoming, coupled with the embedded, subtle hero-worshipping, fails to address any of these complexities. It feeds on nostalgia, grows on romanticism and thrives on an I-Max-sized Odysseus’s guilt.
The idea of home has changed through generations. Writing in 1882, American reformer May Wright Sewall defined home as “the meeting-place of the family, the form or sphere under which these abstract relations exist and manifest themselves.” After more than a 100 years, Mary Douglas, a British anthropologist, wrote, “Home is not necessarily a fixed space. It doesn’t need brick and mortar... It need not be a larger space, but space there must be, for home starts by bringing some space under control. Having shelter is not having a home.”
Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Odysseus's wife, in The Odyssey. Photo: YouTube/Universal Pictures.
However, for us, Gen Zs – an identity we were hesitant to assert even a few weeks ago – the notion of ‘home’ is one of negotiation, contestation and questioning. If it is possible to "grow up" and "grow apart" in relation to people, why do we presume the same is not true of homes? Our homes, thus, cannot be the same space we return to; they must evolve with us.
Home is now the tenement that tethers unapologetic self-expression, an ever-evolving, mutating personal identity and digital connection. The brick-and-mortar house our parents built brick-by-brick has been demolished by a contemporary paradigm shift, as we question and critique permanence and claustrophobia in a way our parents never did – not capitulating to the asphyxiation of the existing way of life.
If a film on homecoming fails to take into account these complexities, how can it be called a story suitable to our times?
Odysseus’ homecoming was a metanoia. In Troy, he violated Zeus’ law. He marched his men into a horrendous pillage and desecrated everything ancient Greek society revered as the sanctum sanctorum. He literally brings about the collapse of the Bronze Age, cascading the world into barbarism, and his redemption is to set out to sea with a beautiful, loving wife, while chasing the escaping sun like some feel-good romantic comedy.
But often, homecoming – as seen in Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound – is survival in a world that vehemently regurgitates you because the only other alternative is to die somewhere far off and be forgotten. A home that the protagonists of Homebound left in the hopes of a better life, only to return to that same confined space with no room or resources.
Odysseus wrecks the world and yet returns to the arms of a loving wife. But many in the real world, far away from the mythical Odyssey, cannot afford to imagine or define a home.
Photo: YouTube/Universal Pictures.
Nolan’s Odysseus is not faultless. He commits heinous crimes and is actively cognisant of his actions. However, we never see Nolan implicate his protagonist with the brunt of the consequences. All we see is externalisation of Odysseus’ guilt. Nowhere did I find the irreverence in the treatment of a flawed character. The portrayal of guilt seems to cover for a lack of accountability – a typical Boomer/millennial instinct.
Jodie Shaw, the author of Leading Gen Z: Why Old Management Fails and What Works Now, in one of her articles, notes, “Boomers and Gen X grew up in hierarchies where you earned your right to question later. Gen Z believes questioning early is how you avoid being exploited.”
It is this subservience that our preceding generations are notoriously known to associate with reverence. Reverence permeates through society, settling like soot in holy scriptures, religion, politics and especially mythological tales. To revere is to accept the prevailing system in its entirety. However, my generation seems to be ever the cynic, refusing to buy into the morally-grey-epic-hero propaganda.
Nolan offers us exactly this. Made in today’s time, with lots of technological grandeur, it could have reinterpreted the idea of home; it could have reimagined reverence. But it did not. While Gen Zs looked for fresh definitions and new languages, Nolan reproduced clichéd imaginations with a pinch of Greek mythology and technological surprise.
Shreya Banerji is a writer and currently a student at Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Symbiosis International University, Pune, India.
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