Odysseus and Oppenheimer Aren’t Heroes
Matt Damon, I mean Odysseus, is haunted by the ghost of a woman his trickery killed. Does that make him a hero? Nah.
JERSEY CITY, JULY 22, 2026. Fuck men who do bad things and then whine about how bad they feel. They’re not heroes. That’s my reaction to The Odyssey.
Let me back up a bit. Christopher Nolan likes pondering big questions. Memento: What is memory? Interstellar: What is time? The Prestige and Inception: What is reality? Oppenheimer and now The Odyssey: Is intelligence a tragic flaw?
The Odyssey is a grand, sprawling mess of a film. It manages to be both fantastical and grimily realistic, frantic and tedious. I don’t blame Nolan for taking almost three hours to recount a ten-year odyssey. I do blame him for making his flick feel so long.
Matt Damon is great as Odysseus. He looks like a tough old warrior, muscles hardened by hacking enemies, not pumping iron in a gym. He’s ruthless when he needs to be but never cruel. He winces when his men jam a burning log in the Cyclops’ eye.
He’s a leader but not a bully. He listens to his men, he wants to get them all safely home. It’s not his fault so many die on the way. Or is it? Are the gods punishing him for being too smart for his own good?
Odysseus is clever, a problem-solver. He reveres Athena, goddess of wisdom. He’s curious, an explorer. That’s why he doesn’t sail home with the rest of the Greeks, why he strikes out on his own path with his crew. That’s why he wants to hear the Sirens. He wants to learn, experience, know.
His intelligence gives him pleasure, and power, but it also weighs on him, sets him apart. He sees things no one else sees. That doesn’t make him arrogant, it makes him sad, and lonely.
Damon’s grim mug reminds me of Holly Hunter’s performance as a wicked-smart TV-news producer in the 1987 romantic comedy Broadcast News. An executive says to Hunter, sarcastically, It must be nice always being the smartest person in the room. She whispers, with tears in her eyes, “No, it’s awful.”
That’s funny. The Odyssey ain’t funny. Damon/Odysseus seems perpetually pained--even when he’s lounging on a beach with Charlize Theron! Because Odysseus isn’t merely clever, an ancient MacGyver. He possesses moral intelligence, a conscience, he knows what’s right and wrong.
Toward the end of the film, we finally learn why Odysseus is such a sad sack: He feels awful about the Trojan horse. He came up with this trick because he was tired of war, he wanted to end the siege of Troy and go home to his wife and son.
You know the story: The Greeks pretend to sail home and leave the horse behind as a peace offering: No hard feelings, guys! The trick works really well. The Trojans drag the horse into their city, and Odysseus and his crew sneak out and let the Greek army in the front gate.
The Greeks burn Troy and slaughter its inhabitants, men, women, children. Odysseus watches one of his buddies slit the throat of a priestess of Athena, played by Zendaya. It is her ghost, you realize, who has haunted Odysseus throughout the film.
Odysseus knows he has violated a moral law: If you hold out your hand to your enemy, as a gesture of peace, you should not stab him with your other hand. This is the transgression for which Odysseus is being punished.
The Trojan horse, Nolan suggests, is our original sin. After this infamous act of treachery, humans could never trust each other again. We would remain in a state of perpetual war. That’s why, in 2026, we still live in a world wracked by war and awash in weapons, including nuclear weapons.
The Odyssey is the prequel of Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer is a modern-day Odysseus, a brainiac swept up by war. He oversees construction of the Bomb. It works really well. It doesn’t destroy the world. It brings Japan to its knees. But Oppenheimer feels awful about incinerating all those women and kids.
Yet another film about a high-IQ killer comes to mind: The Fog of War, Errol Morris’s documentary about Robert McNamara. During World War II, McNamara helps refine the strategy of firebombing Japanese cities. As secretary of defense in the 1960s under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, McNamara oversees the expansion of the Vietnam war.
Like Odysseus and Oppenheimer, McNamara is a decent guy, he feels bad about what he has done. He admits he’s a war criminal, a killer of women and kids. But what could he do? He was carrying out his duty to his country, and his president.
Morris and Nolan probably think their films are antiwar, but are they? Truffaut says “every film about war ends up being pro-war.” Yeah, even ostensibly antiwar films make war exciting, and they depict warriors as tragic heroes.
War is a terrible thing, Nolan and Morris seem to say, it makes intelligent men, good men, do bad things, but what can be done? That’s just the way the world is. And at least war inspires great art. Like The Odyssey, Oppenheimer, Fog of War.
Fuck this aesthetic fatalism, which perpetuates war. And fuck “heroes” like Odysseus, Oppenheimer and McNamara, who use their intelligence to commit mass murder and then bitch and moan about it.
I prefer heroes who don’t commit war crimes. Like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, who resisted violence and oppression with nonviolence. Like AI researcher Alex Turner, who recently quit Google because it profits from war and injustice.
I’ll include Jane Craig, the fictional character played by Holly Hunter in Broadcast News. She sticks up for journalistic ethics over ratings. Journalists like her are an endangered species.
I also admire Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses, Joyce’s modern take on The Odyssey. Bloom is nothing special, he’s a middle-class schlub, an ad salesman, but he’s smart, curious, into science. He takes pleasure in little things: eating kidneys, taking a shit, ogling a pretty girl, gabbing with his buddies in a pub.
Bloom is a lover, not a fighter. He knows his wife is cheating on him, but he doesn’t want to kill her or her lover. When Bloom gets home after a long night out, he kisses his sleeping wife’s ass, literally, because he loves her.
If we survive, it will be because of genuine heroes, like Gandhi and King, as well as unsung, gentle souls like Leopold Bloom.
Further Reading:
Is Killing Children Ever Justified?
Truman, The Bomb and Free Will
To Abolish Nukes, We Must Abolish War
Oppenheimer, Bethe and the Doomsday Hypothesis
You’re Not Free If You’re Dead: The Case Against Giving Ukraine F-16s
Dear Feminists, Please Help End War!