Okay. For my money, the entire thesis of Chris Nolan’s 2026 film The Odyssey is that society chokes and sputters and dies when we abuse, ignore, or violate social norms like the laws of hospitality. That is not really what The Odyssey (the book/poem) is about, but I can clearly see why in the horror that is the 2020s, someone could read The Odyssey and go oh my god that’s a lot of bad dropping in. That’s a lot of bad visits. That’s a clear vision of how the loss of social norms and cohesion fucks you up and how war, literal, brutal war, is a terrible wound that destroys your humanity and your understanding of what civilization and society is. I don’t know that the iteration of Greek society that ultimately birthed the poem would agree with Nolan’s take, but I think this movie is quite ideologically coherent, that Nolan knew exactly what he was trying to say with each and every adaptational change, and I think he wasn’t nuts for using one of the most famous classical western civilization works as a way to make that argument.
The thing is this movie weaves that narrative together so well that it now has me questioning whether that was part of Homer's original intent that was just lost over the millennia. Like, Homer's version was compiled centuries after the Trojan War from bardic myths that had been passed down through generations, but the man knew his history too, and the Mediterranean was just recovering from the Bronze Age Collapse. Part of me wonders whether part of Homer's reasons for assembling all of these stories into a single epic was to make sense of "why did the world get so fucked up?"
Like yes, yeah, the gods were important and it was important not to defy them or think yourself above them. But in those days, gods were not at all the same as how we consider God and Religion in a post-christian monotheism-dominated world. Zeus was not "just" a big man in the sky who throws thunderbolts, he was lust and whim and hospitality. Athena wasn't "just" a woman of great wisdom, she was literally the concept of cities and civilization itself. There was an implicit understanding that gods were a kind of living metaphor, a way to grasp a concept much bigger than what you could directly see. There were gods for places and cultures and ideas and everything else. If it could be thought of or named, it had a personified god. It's just how people thought of things.
That's why you have all these reports throughout the East Mediterranean of gods literally dying around that time. Gods vanishing. They stop answering the phone. Entire pantheons were swept away because the concepts of society they stood for ceased to matter, because the chain reaction of death and pillaging and raiding and destruction caused by the fall of Troy broke the systems that supported their existence.
And yet people still celebrated the fall of Troy. At the same time that the world was falling apart, there were stories of great heroes and great deeds and exciting tales of survival being shared and embellished and passed down. Then Homer comes along and goes "hey wait a minute. This is all really tragic, actually" and ties them all together into a pair of epics so powerful they stay in the public consciousness for thousands of years.
Because if the gods are living metaphors that hold the world together, then hubris is the act of wronging the concepts they represent. Thinking of hubris in terms of "the sin of pride" is quite possibly a medieval Christianization of the story, and one that has possibly superceded the original message, or at least a message that has been there the whole time, waiting for someone to reinterpret it that way.
Is it the classic way the story is usually told? No, absolutely not. But is it valid? Is it viable? Is it something very valuable in CE 2026? Absofuckinglutely.
