Coming Home: Odysseus, Arjuna and the Hero’s Burden

Two epics, two archers — one strings his bow, one lays it down. Both are trying to get home. Neither is a straight arrow.

"Tell me of a complicated man." — The Odyssey

Recently, I watched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. There were moments when I was watching the epic tale where I found myself on the brink of crying. But the tears never came.

There were numerous times when the film touched on the fragility of being human and the perpetual sorrow that a long life brings. There were moments where it highlighted the beauty of true love. The kind of love that is patient. Understanding. Thoughtful. Unifying. Honest. Deep. There were moments of real loss. Loss of self. Loss of beauty. Loss of innocence. Loss of loyalty. All of these moments could have been tear-inducing. But they weren’t.

And they weren’t, largely because it was all a little too obvious. A little too shallow. A little too Hollywood. And, a little too removed from who we all are. This is a real failure in the retelling of myth, whose purpose is to use the fantastical to expose the real. What is myth if not a pool for us to gaze into and recognise ourselves in the reflection?

Nolan’s Odysseus is not the complicated Odysseus of the poem. Homer’s Odysseus is a man of cunning, hubris, self-obsession, compulsive deception, brutality and coldness. Homer’s Odysseus brings us to tears. He does so because he unashamedly, fearlessly, without modern sensitivities, shows us that we all are polytropos. We are all complicated men and women.

Odysseus is, indeed, a man “of many turns”. A man of shadow and light. Of deep polarities. Of unbelievable range. And Homer uses the extremities of this range to force “the hero’s” complexity into our consciousness, so it echoes our own complexities. Odysseus is a liar, pirate, sacker of cities, teller of false autobiographies even when there's no need to lie. He is a man whose brilliance is inseparable from his vices. He deceives even those he loves, a leader whose vanity and recklessness cost every one of his men their lives, and a returning king whose homecoming ends not in mercy but in the slaughter of a hundred suitors and the hanging of the serving women. This is a fact Nolan clearly sees as too brutal for our modern frailties. It seems that modern society can’t face this Odysseus. Because facing him would mean facing ourselves and recognising the Odysseus in all of us.

Ignoring this, Nolan, instead, gives us a PTSD-riddled warrior whose only conflict seems to be an unhealthy disregard for the fallen, and yes, a sprinkling of remorse for the innocents slain. But, this is not a review of the film, nor is it a commentary on what it gets “right” or “wrong”, or how true it remains to the original text, nor is it a commentary on the controversy around the casting. 

The Odyssey is myth and myths are never static. It is a narrative that carries a civilisation's deepest self-understanding. We read, or watch, myth through a filter of our own loss, heartbreak, journey with monsters, Penelopes and Calypsos. Myth is less fantasy than reality. Less monsters and more personal demons. It’s Nolan’s prerogative to treat myth as he wishes. It’s the audience’s prerogative to be moved by it, or not.

I was, largely, unmoved. But it did get me thinking… Odysseus is not that dissimilar to another epic hero, Arjuna, the great man who Lord Krishna schools in the Bhagavad Gita. And Arjuna, like Odysseus, was no saint. Oddly, though, unlike Odysseus, Arjuna’s shadows seem less important to defining the man as heroic. Most people know that, at least, in part, Odysseus is a cad, while Arjuna is usually seen as only saintly. But he, too, breaks his vows. 

Arjuna is a warrior whose devotion coexists with real stains. He is a man of wounded pride and rash vows who nearly kills his own brother over an insult, who wins his greatest victories by breaking the warrior code he claims to embody (shooting Bhīṣma from behind Śikhaṇḍin, killing Karṇa while he is stranded at his chariot wheel.), and who stakes, in silence, his shared wife Draupadī's dignity by never once protesting as she is gambled away and humiliated.

The Mahābhārata, like Homer, refuses to give us a clean hero – dharma in the epic is famously sūkṣma, subtle, and every victory is morally stained. But Arjuna's defining moment is the opposite of Odysseus’s defining trait. Where Homer's hero signs his name on his violence, Arjuna collapses before his. He drops the Gāṇḍīva, sits down in the chariot, and says, I will not fight. The first chapter of the Gītā is literally titled “Arjuna Viṣāda Yoga” – the yoga of Arjuna’s despair. The entire Gītā exists because a warrior was undone by grief at what war would demand of him. Ironically, it is this hero whom Nolan tries to turn Odysseus into. Nolan’s hero is more Arjuna than Odysseus.

Having said that, Homer's Odysseus never has a viṣāda moment. A profound state of deep dejection, emotional collapse, or existential crisis. He weeps on Calypso's shore, yes, but he never questions the killing. Nolan deals with this from a distance with the recognition that Odysseus and his men are the “sea people” so feared by Penelope and the Trojans. 

But more than this, Nolan, to make Odysseus palatable to a modern audience, gives him exactly what Homer withheld and what Vyāsa put at the centre of the Gītā: the warrior's crisis of conscience. Homer's heroes grieve over the dead, over the cost, over the lost years,  but always after the act, never before it. No one in Homer drops his weapon and refuses to fight because killing might be wrong. That refusal is where the Gītā begins. Nolan's guilt-haunted Odysseus, guided by a divine presence toward an inner homecoming, is Arjuna in Greek armour. 

Regardless, both men, through myth, show us not that heroes are extraordinary, but that they are recognisable. Their monsters are ours. Their wars are ours. Their longing is ours. Whether our arrow is complete, crooked, or straight. Whether we string the bow or lay it down, every journey is, in the end, the same journey: the long and difficult return to ourselves. 

We are all just trying to get home.