What Penelope didn’t say
On The Return, the subconscious, and the Homeric heroine (with a fair bit of Christopher Nolan ambivalence thrown in).
Sing to me, Muse, of a man of twists and turns, but it seems I’m not the only one making the invocation. There’s Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche having a somewhat meta reunion as Odysseus and Penelope in The Return, their first collaboration since The English Patient in 1996, and ever intriguing paparazzi shots leaking out of the Aegean as Christopher Nolan films his own take on Homer’s epic. The Odyssey, that sprawling tale of the eponymous hero’s return home to Ithaca and reclamation of his homeland, probably the poem most responsible for me choosing to study Classics, the poem that feels imprinted in my brain and omnipresent in all my other writing about art and literature, is having its cultural moment.
I have mixed feelings about this, and not just because hearing reductive and borderline misogynistic takes on Emily Wilson’s translation on X all day is exhausting. It’s not that I’m pedantic about the adaptational liberties that inevitably get taken when a plot hole-ridden oral poem becomes a coherent work of cinema. The reason I loved The Return, and have anxieties about Nolan’s adaptation, is because I see the Odyssey as a poem that starts and ends with its women.
That doesn’t mean that I solely enjoy the Odyssey for Penelope, Circe, and Nausicaa – I think one has to have a certain affection for Odysseus’ ego to really feel comfortable in the Odyssey’s world. Instead, the feminine view of the Odyssey – which has been around at least since the 1700s, when the classicist Richard Bentley wrote that Homer’s earlier Iliad was written for men, and the Odyssey was written “for the other sex” – is about how the poem lives on things unspoken, things that, within a patriarchal society, are the domain of women, and are thus not easily understood.
I can understand disappointment at The Return if you were expecting Athena to deus ex machina her way into the palace to save the day, but the absence of the gods, for me, was a perfect conduit to understand Ithaca as a place with a distinctly female psychology (to be clear, when I say ‘female’ in this essay, I’m predominantly referring to mortal women, not goddesses).
Here, the gods aren’t jumping into the fray like they were in the Iliad, but there’s a subconscious force at play that neither characters nor audience understand – both Binoche’s Penelope and Eumaeus (Claudio Santamaria), the farmer who first welcomes Odysseus back to Ithaca, allow flickers of recognition to cross their faces before they’ve formally recognised Odysseus. The first interaction between the disguised Odysseus and Penelope, candlelight dancing over Fiennes and Binoche’s faces, emotions leaping from confusion to grief to remonstration, is closer to Athena’s role in the Odyssey, nudging the characters subtly in the right direction, than any conventional humanoid depiction of the gods could be.
That force can be understood as divine, or it can be understood as some kind of feminine intuition (or, of course, both). It’s no accident that the nurse Eurycleia is the first to consciously recognise him in this version of the story, before any male characters. In the famous scene where Odysseus, still in disguise as a beggar, strings his old bow to prove his identity, there’s an odd sense of distance between Penelope and what should be her moment of triumph.
“There’s a force at play in the Odyssey that can be understood as divine, or as feminine intuition.”
Binoche stares glassily out of heavily lined eyes, and I’m reminded of how, in Homer, the bow test isn’t Penelope’s idea at all, but Athena’s, after the goddess approaches her in a dream. In The Return, as in Homer, Penelope is drawn back to Odysseus by an impulse beyond her conscious control (which her society understands to be divine), and I wonder how much control she has over her feminine intuition, how much say she really has in the restoration of the marital status quo.
Hints at Penelope’s erotic life while he was away, via charged interactions with the suitor Antinous (Marwan Kenzari, mostly sympathetic in this version), make the lines even more blurred between Penelope as faithful wife, as puppet of a patriarchal notion of duty, and as something in between. I’m also reminded of an earlier adaptation of the Odyssey, Ulisse (1954), where Silvia Mangano plays both Penelope and Odysseus’ lover, the nymph Circe; the idea of women as personified aspects of Odysseus’ psyche, of the subconscious made manifest, actually robs them of any individuality.
Outside of its central couple, The Return is an imperfect film – there’s some GCSE Drama-level acting from the gaggle of suitors, and Odysseus and Penelope’s son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) never gets psychological depth to match his screentime. But, in a way, that’s also true of the Odyssey. Penelope’s suitors (and Telemachus too to an extent) are not complex beings, because they aren’t really characters, but personifications of a type of imbalance that exists on Ithaca before Odysseus’ return. The restoration of balance is not to be found merely in Odysseus coming home, but in Odysseus and Penelope’s marriage, best conveyed by the basically untranslatable Greek word hōmophrosynē, something like “thinking together, along the same lines”.
I don’t mean to sound like some kind of ultra-trad advocate of heterosexual marriage here, because I do deeply value how The Return does, briefly, let Penelope give voice to her anger at Odysseus’ role in the perpetuation of male violence and war. But whether or not Penelope really has any choice in the matter (spoiler: I don’t think she does), their marriage is synonymous with restoring peace after wartime, with uniting outward-looking travel and trade with inward-looking domesticity, with counterbalancing the masculine realm of conscious thought with the feminine realm of the subconscious.
“The Odyssey is not just about Odysseus’ return, but Penelope’s.”
Both characters begin the film in places of weakness, but every show of strength – Penelope’s ability to assert her power over the suitors, or a traumatised Odysseus coming to embrace his former identity – comes after some kind of interaction with the other, conscious or not. Their first conversation in The Return as reunited husband and wife ends with the line “your past is my past”. This would sound corny if said by any other couple in world literature, but here it’s a reminder that the Odyssey is about reconciliation as well as homecoming, and is not just about Odysseus’ return, but Penelope’s.
Which brings me to Christopher Nolan. I’m no purist, and I really do think there’s a lot to love about Nolan being the one to bring the whole Odyssey, not just a truncated version of the second half, to the screen. Odysseus, psychologically, has a lot in common with the protagonists of Oppenheimer, Interstellar, and the Dark Knight trilogy – they’re all men of twists and turns, deeply flawed yet exceptionally talented people with personal responsibility for fixing society’s woes.
Nolan’s affinity with non-linear timelines can also only mean good things for his ability to understand how Odysseus’ psychology evolves and contradicts itself throughout the Trojan War, his wanderings, and his arrival back on Ithaca. I am, of course, excited to see how the Cyclops, Scylla the sea monster, and the Sirens will be rendered given Nolan’s famous refusal to use CGI.
But I don’t trust him with Penelope. I don’t trust him to deal with her distinctly feminine model of heroism-that-may-not-be-heroism, the complex interplay between intelligence, instinct, and divine influence outside of her control. Much ink has been spilled over the director’s alleged woman problem.
Oppenheimer’s wife and lover don’t exist far beyond a sexy manifestation of the physicist’s evolving relationship with radical politics, and Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Dark Knight dies so that Batman can avenge her (as though his parents weren’t enough). The Nolanesque woman most similar to Penelope is perhaps the daughter of Matthew McConaughey’s character in Interstellar, Murph (Jessica Chastain), the symbol of all he has left behind on his voyage through the wormholes, who only reunites with him on her deathbed. It would be all too easy for Nolan to dismiss Penelope as Odysseus’ reason to return home, and not a character in her own right, or a crucial element in the restoration of society at large after conflict.
Part of the problem here is that Nolan makes ‘great man’ movies – I’ve long defended his depictions of women, especially in Oppenheimer, with the idea that all supporting characters in these films, male and female, exist to prop up the troubled genius rather than stand on their own. Nolan is hardly uncritical of the valorisation of Oppenheimer or of Bruce Wayne, so this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it’s still not right for the Odyssey.
“Christopher Nolan makes ‘great man’ movies – all supporting characters in these films, male and female, exist to prop up the troubled genius rather than stand on their own.”
Sometimes I think Nolan would be better off adapting the Iliad, a poem I’ve never quite gelled with, because it requires investment in the psychology of Achilles, a character who leaves me cold, to such an extreme degree. Achilles’ rage and internal battle with his own fate is so all-consuming that the director of a film adaptation could be forgiven for allowing Hector, Agamemnon, Briseis, and the rest to fall into archetypes. The same is not true of the Odyssey, because the Odyssey is not about Odysseus, but about the society in which he lives. Achilles was able ‘just’ to be a soldier, but Odysseus is soldier, leader, king, father, and husband, who absorbs a little of everyone he meets on his journey. We’re not in Troy any more, Toto, and the world of the Greek hero has got just a bit wider.
I think back to the rare Nolan film without a clear hero, Dunkirk (2017), which Nolan has described as “not a war film, but a survival story”. The Odyssey is what would happen if Dunkirk were to have a hero, some sort of general leading the men across the Channel, but still invested the same amount of empathy in others fighting in the war, those left behind, and the ghosts of conflicts past.
Now, Dunkirk has received some necessary flack for its failure to give any voice to female experiences of conflict. But I still wonder if its central thesis exploring what it takes to survive a war can inspire Nolan’s approach to the Odyssey. Odysseus is an exceptional cog in the machine, but he’s still a cog in the machine, and part of his journey, which on several occasions involves him taking advice from female characters, is adjusting to what it means to be a hero not just on the battlefield, but in a peacetime society.
That society is one where women like Penelope have a crucial role to play, alongside every other inhabitant of Ithaca. I hope Nolan can step away from lofty ideals of heroism long enough for the world to open up.