By Noah Price, Monuments Toolkit
Just as there are countless statues of Founding Fathers and Confederate generals around the United States, the likeness of Odysseus is also often portrayed in stone. Despite the mythological nature of The Odyssey, the portrayal of Homer’s protagonist as a hero of the Trojan War who finally made it home to Ithaca after learning his lesson on the sea has lent itself to becoming a significant statue in the Greek monuments landscape. After watching Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey and reading so many reviews and critiques of the film, I couldn’t help but wonder how people might react to a monument of Odysseus if we all viewed the character through Nolan’s portrayal. In the United States, I think it’s quite possible that those monuments would be toppled.
Although the Odyssey takes place where The Iliad left off with the Trojan War, there is very little discussion of Odysseus’s feelings about his actions on the battlefield in most translations of the text. Nolan, however, made this the precise lens he chose to portray our hero through. Instead of being an intelligent, quick-witted man who faces the consequences of his actions on his long journey home to Ithaca, this adaptation of the epic attributes Odysseus’s trials to his war crimes, particularly the breaking of xenia (or Zeus’s Law, as Nolan calls it) by creating the Trojan Horse. When Matt Damon’s Odysseus finally returns to Anne Hathaway’s Penelope, the monologue he gives to summarize why it took him so long to find his way home centers primarily on his guilt over breaking Zeus’s Law nearly a decade ago in Troy rather than having much to say about the events he faced at sea and the stories of those he met.
While I certainly have my own opinions on this narrative choice, I will not weigh in on the debate of whether or not Nolan created a good adaptation. Instead, I want to sit in the world he created and observe the reactions of others as I believe it provides the perfect allegory for how we now view our monuments.
It’s universally agreed that there’s no such thing as a perfect politician despite our frequent choice to display these people on pedestals. The modern monument debate often centers around the question as to whether or not the good someone did outweighs the evils they perpetuated. Does perpetuating genocide of Indigenous people outweigh the expansion of U.S. territory into the lands many Americans live in today? Does founding our nation outweigh slave-ownership?
Where this relates to Nolan’s version of Odysseus resides in that notion of guilt. Take Robert E. Lee for example. On the surface, Lee was a Confederate general who both enslaved people as well as holds responsibility for the deaths of thousands of Union soldiers. Lee’s defenders, however, point to his complicated feelings on secession. Our own National Park Service documents Lee’s opposition to secession and the start of the Civil War at all. Despite his choice to remain loyal to Virginia, who voted to join the Confederacy, over the United States, some argue that his complicated feelings are worth preserving and thus so are the monuments of his likeness.
But that’s not enough for most Americans. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, 235 Confederate memorials in the United States are dedicated to Robert E. Lee, more than any other Confederate. Thus, he is also one of the most frequently removed and/ or toppled monuments in the nation. Complicated feelings, including guilt, are not enough for Americans to justify his actions.
Thomas Jefferson is another figure many people struggle with. Despite authoring the Declaration of Independence and serving the nation as the third president, Jefferson was also a slave owner. Communities are less quick to remove monuments to this Founding Father as he represents several important progressions of our nation, but that hasn’t kept him entirely safe from calls for removal. In our Toolkit, we have a case study on a Thomas Jefferson statue in New York City that was moved from the chambers of City Hall to the reading room as well as placed on common ground rather than a pedestal. This came as a result from calls in 2020 demanding such action. In Portland, protestors did not wait for the city to remove Jefferson and toppled him themselves in 2020.
For those that come to Jefferson’s defense, his guilt over slavery is often pointed to as proof he was a good man. In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson writes that the King of England “has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.” It’s difficult to reconcile that these words against the practice of slavery could come from anyone other than an abolitionist. But Jefferson was not. He enslaved more than 600 people throughout his life, only “freeing” 10 of them before he died.
So while guilt and other conflicting emotions from the controversial men often put on pedestals may exist, this is rarely enough for most Americans to cease their calls to remove them from the monuments landscape. These emotions do not outweigh the actual actions of these men. They may provide fodder for intriguing analysis from scholars, but not enough reason for the public heralding of their supposed “goodness” in statue form.
Turning back to Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, let’s reflect on the character he created. In order to win the Trojan War, Odysseus created a trick. He did not simply best the Trojans in battle, but he deceived them with a false surrender. He broke into their home, slaughtered unsuspecting soldiers in the night, and burned the city down, taking the lives of countless innocents with it. Homer primarily depicts this as unmatched wit and heroism, but Nolan chooses to have Odysseus feel guilt and shame over these actions. It’s the reason he takes so long to come home and it’s the reason he ultimately chooses to leave Ithaca again.
As audience members we are left with three pieces of knowledge at the end of the film. 1.) Odysseus is the reason the Greeks won the Trojan War. 2.) Odysseus won this war by committing crimes against humanity. 3.) Odysseus feels guilty over these crimes. So let’s pretend that Odysseus was an American president rather than the Greek King of Ithaca. Would Americans tolerate these actions and continue to keep him on a pedestal? Would letters be written asking local governments to begin community conversations as to what might be done with the statues? Or would protestors topple them in the middle of the night?
Based on the outcry of critique surrounding Nolan’s film, I find it unlikely that any option other than toppling would occur. Emily Wilson, the only woman to create a major translation of The Odyssey, wrote in her review that it is “a film that centres, aggrandises and redeems the hero of a territorial war on account of his belated and partial acknowledgment of his own guilt.” Meanwhile, the rest of her review, as well as countless other audience reactions published on TikTok, Twitter/ X, Reels, etc., all call out a common thread: so much space was made for Odysseus to feel this guilt that the stories of the dozens of other characters in the Odyssey fell short. While many are quite moved by this theme of Odysseus’ regret, many others are pointing out that they would rather hear the stories of those he harmed or encountered on his journey. Whether that may be Circe, Calypso, or something entirely new that focused on the Trojans themselves, audiences are left yearning for those stories instead of the protagonist.
This is where we have an opportunity to learn. The same message can be shared about the monuments landscape. There are, as stated before, hundreds of monuments to people like Lee and Jefferson. Decisions certainly need to be made about how to deal with the monuments of these men, but decisions also need to be made about what other kinds of monuments we ought to put forth and the discussion surrounding this film helps clarify the answer. People want to learn about the histories of more people. Just as so many wish they learned more about Circe and Calypso, they wish to know about Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman forced into a sexual relationship with Jefferson. They wish to know about the families at Arlington House who served Robert E. Lee while he perpetuated a war to keep them in his captivity.
There’s a popular phrase that “history is written by the victors.” It’s difficult to concede that as the truth considering the existence of Robert E. Lee and hundreds of other Confederate statues. Instead, history is often written by the oppressors. But it doesn’t have to be. We can make space for other stories both in film and in monuments. I believe that if we make that choice, the payoff will ten-fold.