Why is the Odyssey Suddenly Everywhere?

The Odyssey is having a moment. This is deeply interesting to me as a classicist who was trained by two Homerists (Who knew you could even be not a Homerist - I say as not a Homerist). It is apparent that people may want and need the Odyssey right now, and what it offers as a tale that links horror, identity, and suffering.

Head of Polyphemos, Greek or Roman, about 150 BC or later - MFA

Additionally, with Emily Wilson’s recent translations of the Iliad (2023) and the Odyssey (2017), as well as Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film project The Odyssey (2026).  But deeper than that, I believe identity politics is at the core of this spectacle of the Odyssey. As a self-proclaimed gender anarchist, and long-suffering researcher of gender in ancient literature, the Odyssey is, to me, a story of gendered expectations failing each new generation. However, as the panelists at the Myth and Modernity companion conversation to Kate Hamill’s Odyssey at the American Repertory Theater (ART) on March 4 note, Emily Wilson made the decision to refer to Odysseus as “veteran,” which is a sympathetic epithet at odds with the image of Odysseus as “sacker of cities.” Kate Hamill’s Odyssey, currently playing at the ART leans far into the narrative of Odysseus as a veteran suffering PTSD. While I am firmly of the belief that Odysseus is the bad guy (in literally all situations), immigrants and refugees may feel moved by the perilous journey of a man to find “home.” The sense of long suffering and being an outsider can resonate with many, but especially may land for members of the trans and LGBTQ Communities.

At the Myth and Modernity discussion, actor Wayne T. Carr, classics scholars David Elmer, Emily Greenwood, and Naomi Weiss, of the Harvard University Classics program, and Museum of Fine Arts curator Phoebe Segal discussed the many connections they drew from Hamill’s Odyssey as new and important retelling of the text with a focus on the depiction of PTSD. The Odyssey is a story about the losses suffered in war. It struck me that prof of comparative studies discussed “The African American Odyssey” from 1854, when Frederick Douglass discussed the journey of slaves as an actual and happening Odyssey, to the Great Migration is an Odyssey, and Toni Morrison’s Home (while I have not read Home, it is apparent to me that Beloved is also an apt example.)

It isn’t hard to see why the Odysseus’s struggle to get home is a salient example in a country that is currently being especially hostile to immigrants and refugees. It is also not hard to see days after the President’s embarrassing dismissal of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Feb 28 (In my Black History Month, no less!), why a narrative about the aftermath of war is at the top of mind for a Global audience, but for an American audience, especially. The Myth and Modernity panel also discussed audience as a factor that can change reception, and, for main actor Wayne T. Carr, audience may even change performance. The Odyssey is a living document, akin to a group Google Doc, passed on from team to team in a larger corporate structure. This capitalist metaphor can also highlight the dissonance an American audience may feel as they engage with the Odyssey. Like I said, Odysseus is unequivocally the bad guy (Oh, you’re mad about my un-nuanced take? WELL!) It is hard to see the “Sacker of Cities,” and instrument of the total destruction of Troy as the good guy. Okay, it is not always necessary to call something bad/good, and there is plenty of reason to be empathetic toward Odysseus, but by my standards, and possibly by Homer’s as well, Odysseus was the arbiter of his own doom, his men’s, and Troy’s.

This, I believe, is why The Odyssey is so popular right now: the roles identity, horror, and the political oeuvre of the time have on causing people to identify with the text.  Identity, one of the current political battles being waged on countless bodies within America, but also in wars waging across Europe and conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South America stirred up my Western influence. In fact, there are very few places in the globe that are not engaged in bloody exchanges. If the ongoing COVID pandemic and the constant threat of Climate Change causing historic weather events and cataclysmic natural and unnatural  disasters.  It is not hard to see why people of many and varied identities may see not only their struggle in the Odyssey, but also in the hopelessness of battling giants, sirens, and Scylla and Charybdis (Oh My!).

I read a POV covering a similar discussion in Boston University’s alumni magazine, Bostonia, by Director of the College of Arts & Sciences Core Curriculum, Kyna Hamill that argued a different reason for the return of the epic: “Perhaps we return to adaptations of The Odyssey over and over again because we need to be reminded of human stories. To know that in the end, justice is served with the help of Athena, the suitors are punished, and Odysseus is reunited with his family,” echoing a generally pro-Odysseus bend scholars often take.

But, is there justice in the Odyssey? Or, to reframe the question: Is there a way forward for an audience that may, too, be an unwilling participant, and often a willing participant, in genocide and forever wars? (*cough cough*)

These are my display books because I'm about it with my nerd nonsense

I am not in a minority of people that believe in the therapeutic powers of poetry. With respect to the Odyssey specifically, Homerist Joel Christensen of Brandeis University discusses the emphasis on human agency in respect to their own suffering to describe how an Ancient Greek audience may have engaged the performance of the Odyssey as a way toward collective healing, in his 2020 book The Many-Minded Man: The Odyssey, Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic. This would have been particular important in a society that had historically a tenuous hold on its identity as a singular “country” (More like a union between sovereign states—Greece has always been complicated). Christensen argues “Our Odyssey’s resolution encourages audiences to see that bringing an end to the political problem of Ithaca requires an evaluation of what it means to create a community and to consider communal good. (p. 242). There lies a common refrain among modern progressive spaces that individualism is the ultimate tool of our communal downfall. A narrative that encourages social healing, again, will resonate with a Western audience facing disconnect from their lives, friends, and government.

There is also much to be said about the therapeutic quality of horror, which finds its roots in marginalized people existing in patriarchal societies. You can look to movies such as Pet Semetary, the 1989 film based on Stephen King’s 1983 horror novel. Many have claimed the “scariest part” of the movie was Rachel Creed’s sister Zelda, bed bound and deformed by her spinal meningitis, (which didn’t even make sense). Marginalia can often be a direct stand in for the horror of a story, as Zelda is horrific simply because her disability is horrific, but there is no more grace allowed to the young girl. The Odyssey, too, uses women, enslaved people, and the disabled as a tool to detail horror. Christensen notes a particularly voyeuristic scene in Book 20, of a disabled, enslaved woman working into the night, longer than any others due we are to assume to the cruelty of the suitors. But, “her suffering is only worth mentioning as far as it contributes to Odysseus’s glory.” (p.153). (Y’all, I told you; Odysseus is an OP).

Horror is noted to be a useful tool in recovering from trauma or PTSD, as an “exposure therapy” that allows “trauma survivors regain a sense of agency and control,” from a safe space. (Danielle Rousseau, “Using Horror as a Therapeutic Tool for Trauma and Trauma Disorders” (2024) . Jordan Peele’s Get Out premiered to audience and critical acclaim in 2017. The film is credited with ushering in a new age of “woke horror” as it laid bare the racial injustices faced by black Americans and made it clear that the experience itself is horror. I would argue that since then an age of Horror has dawned, which was further solidified by the Covid Pandemic, wherein people flocked to zombie movies and films about outbreaks such as Outbreak (1995) or Contagion (2011). I myself have what I call an “emotional support zombie movie” in World War Z (2013) (I will not hear your criticisms on my taste!). The Odyssey, even, contains elements of cosmic horror with its aloof (but admittedly not at all indifferent) gods, or Polyphemus, who cares not at all for Greek customs. It is an Ocean horror, as Odysseus faces the raging and never-ending width of the sea with unknown forces encountered in figures like the Sirens. And, my favorite, a creature feature as the great and horrible Scylla drives Odysseus towards the impossible whirlpool of Charybdis. The “wokeness” of Get Out lies in the racial dynamics between a Black man and his white girlfriend’s family. This narrative focuses on the long and sordid history of white people using and abusing Black bodies as slaves, as sexual objects, as animals to fight for their entertainment or to till their land all for whiteness to police them with the constant threat of murder and disenfranchisement once fully released from chattel slavery on. Juneteenth, 1865.

When Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris escapes and enacts revenge on the Armitage family at the end of the Get Out, the theater in which I watched the movie in 2017 let out a collective sigh of relief. While racism was not solved, there was a moment of respite in seeing our narrative enacted on screen and resolved. It is in this way I imagine a Greek audience could see itself in the Odyssey. War was not going anywhere, but a reflection on its damage to the heroes, the marginalized, and the generations to come as a community continues to give its audience a moment of recognition and relief.