Prior to the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, I’m not sure many of us would have conceived of the Trojan Horse as a kind of proto-atomic bomb, the sort of norm-obliterating device from which civilisation cannot turn back. If anything, the horse has long existed in our collective imaginations as at best a credulity-stretching plot device – why did those overly trusting Trojans not think to look that particular horse in its wooden mouth? – and at worst a cutely comedic non-threat. The greatest civilisation of its age was taken down by a timber what?
But the true masterstroke of Nolan’s film is its parallels to the last one he dropped on us, Oppenheimer. Like that film, The Odyssey is about a haunted genius who, when presented with a problem, solves it with such speed and significance that he must necessarily cast aside implication. But rather than splitting the atom, Odysseus (Matt Damon), dismembers something considerably more significant – the social fabric.
The world of Nolan’s The Odyssey is one obsessed with civility and rules. Characters talk endlessly about Zeus’ law: a basic currency of interpersonal kindness, where each human being is treated as though they might contain the divine. Odysseus, upstanding man of the world that he is, will not even kill a deer without alerting it of his arrival via a twang of his bow: to sneak up on prey without warning is to turn a “fight” into a “hunt”, he tells us.
Of course, no such bow twanging accompanies the Trojan horse. Odysseus even hides its threat from his own cousin, Sinon (Elliot Page), who is impaled on its wooden side in the opening minutes of the movie. Poor hapless Sinon isn’t even aware of what he’s dying for. And when the horse breaches Troy’s walls, the resulting massacre is depicted by Nolan as exactly that: a massacre.
But, Nolan frets, the cost is greater than just bloodshed. The horse only succeeds in a world where humans are used to taking each other at their word; where a gift is a gift, and a surrender is a surrender. Turns out the Trojans weren’t comically ignorant. They were just decent. And so, in Nolan’s film, what Odysseus invents is the world’s first lie – its first impoliteness.
Such a concern might strike us oddly these days. In our world, handwringing over rudeness too often has the blush of quaint conservatism to it, and for decades now the centre-right have lectured the left on the importance of keeping the world “civil” even when the world in question is burning. Sure, polluters might be destroying all life on the planet, but there’s no need to deface a painting to protest them or block traffic for an hour or so. That’s just rude.
For that reason, the cynical could be forgiven for bristling at Nolan’s suggestion that telling a grand ole fib damned us to eternal destruction. There are surely larger fish to fry; problems more significant than a lie. Nolan even seems to understand that bigger picture himself: the sorceress Circe (Samantha Morton) tells Odysseus that men’s evil has existed a lot longer than the construction of some wretched horse. As she explains it, civility has just been a thin layer on top of a deep wellspring of rot. And in this version, Circe doesn’t turn Odysseus’ men into pigs. She reveals them for what they are. Which is pigs.
But, Nolan seems to say, at least they were once pigs who told each other the truth. And I must admit, such a framing shook me far more deeply than the bomb testing that wrenches Oppenheimer in two. Fire is fire; a nuke is a nuke. A horse that is not a horse does something perhaps less immediately destructive, but no less horrifying. It casts aside the notion that there are things we have all agreed not to do.
In the days since I saw The Odyssey, I have found it difficult not to see Trojan horses everywhere. We live now in a state of perpetual distrustfulness. The paranoiacs, it turns out, are right – there is poison in every water supply. Thanks to AI, no picture is a picture. To borrow a turn of phrase from David Foster Wallace, the content we endlessly consume – whether it be on our phones, or our TV screens – is not being made by people who love us. It’s being made by people who want something from us. Our politicians will lie to us, endlessly, for no other reason than they can. Cruelty now takes a friendly face, and our biggest polluters have carefully curated Instagram pages.
In short, I can’t remember the last time I saw a stranger as containing the divine; a horse as just a horse. And looking back from the point of view of our post-fall of Troy world, politeness no longer seems like the vaguely pathetic instruction that we mind our p’s and q’s. Instead it’s a bond, a default approach of care that says, the other is not a demon, but possibly a God in disguise. An approach that says, this person you do not know has something for you, and you should take it. Because, after all, what are the chances that they mean you harm?
• Joseph Earp is a critic, painter and novelist. His latest book is Painting Portraits of Everyone I’ve Ever Dated
