The Odyssey proves the online right isn't conservative

The anti-woke warriors came for The Odyssey (and failed)

The worst housewarming gift of all time. (Photo by Rischgitz/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Some spoilers below, we have marked the one paragraph with a major spoiler for the end for those who would like to skip it.

The Odyssey is a film with a fundamentally conservative message.

Writer and director Christopher Nolan fixates on the ancient Greek concept of xenia, a ritualized form of hospitality between guests and hosts. Nolan takes several liberties with the concept — his characters call it “Zeus’ Law” rather than by its Greek name, and it’s occasionally framed in a Golden Rule-esque way to be more recognizable to modern ears — but violations of this duty are at the very center of the story.

Odysseus and his men, in their quest to return home, are constantly landing on strange shores, asking for hospitality, and finding themselves denied — whether by a hungry cyclops or by the witch Circe, who offers them food only to transform the weary travelers into pigs. Meanwhile, Odysseus’ wife Penelope and son Telemachus are dealing with unwanted suitors who abuse xenia to feast every night at the absent patriarch’s mansion, demanding that Penelope choose one of them to remarry.

Nolan’s narrative innovation is his revelation, at the end of the film, that Odysseus has had to suffer all these violations of xenia because he and his men have broken divine law themselves. During the sack of Troy, they leave the famed Trojan Horse as a symbol of peace and an offering to the goddess Athena. Then, after deceiving the Trojans, Odysseus and his men jump out of the Trojan Horse, murder the priestesses in Athena’s temple and behead her statue. Nolan’s spin on the Homeric tradition is to frame the entire Odyssey as the punishment our hero has earned for violating one of his society’s most sacred duties.

The movie was marketed with the tagline “Defy The Gods,” but it is repeatedly shown that defying the gods is impossible and attempts will only bring ruin. Every prophecy Odysseus is given comes true to the letter. He is unable to save his men, and only by finally surrendering himself to the will of the gods is he able to move past his violation of xenia and make it back home — where he is finally able to exact revenge on those who have violated his household’s xenia.

What lessons does Nolan impart? That you cannot escape punishment for defying the gods. That only by submitting yourself to the divine can you cleanse your mistakes. That the violation of tradition is what causes society to collapse. The Odyssey is a movie about a man returning to his family and a wife who stays faithful to her absent husband for 20 years.

These are deeply conservative ideals, which is no surprise given Nolan’s history of flirting with conservative messaging in films like Dunkirk and The Dark Knight Rises. So why does so much of the American right wing seem to hate it so much? I think it has to do with the very particular kind of right-wingers they have become.

Why the online right hates conservative values