Zoe Williams Critiques Nolan’s 'Odyssey' for Cutting Sex From 3 Key Mythic Encounters
Updated
Updated · The Guardian · Jul 28
Zoe Williams Critiques Nolan’s 'Odyssey' for Cutting Sex From 3 Key Mythic Encounters
2 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Jul 28
Summary
Zoe Williams argues Christopher Nolan’s hypothetical The Odyssey strips sexuality from Odysseus’s encounters with Circe, Calypso and the Sirens, weakening both the myth’s logic and its emotional charge.
Those omissions, she writes, make Odysseus’s long delay in returning to Penelope harder to explain, replacing erotic temptation with a trauma-centered account of why he cannot go home.
Matt Damon’s understated monologue about war trauma is one of the film’s strongest elements in her view, but she says it clashes with the ending’s mass killing of Penelope’s suitors.
Williams frames the adaptation as an example of how modern expectations of fidelity and restraint can de-sex the classics, even when desire is central to the original story’s structure.