Robert Sibley, an award-winning author and a former senior writer and columnist with Postmedia, holds a PhD in political science from Carleton University.A former academic colleague once recounted how his male students were suddenly silent when he lectured on Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey and described Telemachus, son of the war hero Odysseus, being raised by his mother and growing up never knowing his father.“When I depict Telemachus as a boy from a broken home, forced at a too-early age to be his mother’s protector, compelled to bring himself up in a way that he hopes his absent father will be proud of, the young men in my undergraduate classes tend to become very quiet and reflective,” he said. For a few moments, he added, “they are Telemachus.”I thought of my colleague’s anecdote after watching Christopher Nolan’s new film Odyssey. The movie has proven popular, generating blockbuster attendance in theatres in North America and around the world, grossing $264 million in its first week of release.While there was some controversy over Nolan’s casting choices, the choices he made in adapting a 3,000-year-old epic poem to the movie screen still capture the Homeric spirit. He has taken a tale of mythological gods, monsters, and supernatural forces and made it relevant to our time.Homer, who is believed to have lived in the eighth century BC, laid the foundations of Western literature with The Iliad and The Odyssey. Together, they tell the story of the decade-long Trojan War ignited by Paris of Troy’s abduction of Helen, the beauteous wife of the Spartan king Menelaus. The war leads to Troy’s destruction after the Trojans are tricked into hauling a hollow wooden horse filled with Greek warriors into their city. While the city sleeps, the Greeks come out for slaughter.The Odyssey recounts the struggles of the poem’s hero, Odysseus, to return home to his kingdom of Ithaca after the war. He went to war as a young man, leaving behind a wife and a son. It takes Odysseus another decade and many difficulties after the war to return home. Meanwhile, his wife Penelope must fend off numerous suitors who want her to abandon her hope for Odysseus’s return and choose one of them as a new husband and king..The film is billed as an adventure story, and it is. Odysseus has plenty of exotic encounters as he tries to return home. But the story goes beyond thrills and chills. Behind the stunning cinematography are lessons on moral virtues with which contemporary audiences may be unfamiliar — lessons on family, loyalty, fidelity, duty, honour, and faith.We, as moderns, may treat Homer’s poem as entertainment, but earlier generations regarded The Odyssey as a text in moral education. In the words of Scott Masson, a classics professor at Tyndale College in Toronto, Homer “shaped moral imagination long before philosophy developed its technical vocabulary.” For generations, the poem was “a form of wisdom literature that instructs the soul,” Masson writes in his online essay, A Visual Guide to Homer’s Odyssey.Nolan keeps this soul-shaping moral purpose front and center in his portrayal of various episodes from Homer’s poem. The sorceress Circe turns some of Odysseus’s crew into pigs because they could not control their appetites as men should. When they show the same lack of self-restraint and eat the sacred cattle of the sun god Helios, the god sinks their ships in a storm.The lure of life’s diversions — drugs, drink, entertainment — is also subject to moral analogy. (Nowadays, we’d add social media and scrolling.) When Odysseus washes ashore after the loss of his ships, the beautiful sea nymph Calypso nurses him back to health, feeding him mind-altering lotus flowers that make him forget home and family. He lives blissfully with Calypso for seven years until, after finding wreckage from his ship on the beach, his longing for home is restored.For me, though, the movie’s overarching theme is its exploration of the consequences of a fatherless society. This theme emerges right at the beginning as Penelope and Telemachus face her would-be suitors who, in Odysseus’s absence, occupy the household and take advantage of the family's resources. In doing so, they violate sacred laws of hospitality — the laws of Zeus, as Nolan calls them — that require welcoming strangers (they might be gods in disguise) and obligatory giving of gifts to hosts. Interestingly, the suitors are themselves men without fathers because of the war.Too young to challenge them physically, Telemachus sets off in search of his father in a desperate effort to save his mother from the suitors. In his travels, he learns of his father’s courage, intelligence, and perseverance. Thus, Telemachus gains indirectly an education in what it means to be a man that his father would have provided with his presence. As he tells his mother, “I don’t know where he is, but I now know who he is.”.Odysseus, too, gains wisdom. He comes to recognize his guilt in the moral disorder that results from the war. The Trojan horse was his idea, but it was dishonourable because it violated Zeus’s law regarding gift-giving obligations. This alone made Odysseus culpable for the bloody horror that followed, including the rape of Cassandra in the temple of Athena.Homer's moral lessons have long shaped Western culture. Plato, for example, drew on many of the themes in The Odyssey — the conflict between reason and appetite and the proper ordering of the soul, especially those of young men. For Plato, a young man’s “spiritedness” informed his character and conduct. In The Republic, Plato explores the need to educate the “spirits” of young men to high purpose, training them to direct their desires to the well-being of the community. Unless that spiritedness is educated to serve worthy ends, it too easily degenerates into barbarism.Modern secular society tends to neglect fostering a sense of purpose that satisfies the spiritedness of the young. This lack is evident in the popular debasement of masculinity. For the last half-century, our public institutions have engaged in a vast social experiment to effeminize society. This effort is rooted in the assumption that males are inherently violent and therefore “masculinity” must be suppressed.The original goals of feminism — legal and political equality — were eminently worthy. Today, though, the radical feminist agenda promotes a more extremist idea — eliminate all distinctions, psychological and physical, between men and women because the role of men and women must be the same. Uproot traditional notions of manliness, treat traditional male virtues of tenacity, pride, and honour as patriarchal pathologies, and you’ll produce “men” with “socially inclusive” habits. In other words, convert boys into de facto girls, and you’ll have a kinder, gentler society.Does anyone remember the 1999 movie Fight Club starring Brad Pitt in which young men relieve their boredom in basement fighting? These are young men who don’t want to be effeminized, but who lack worthy father figures to teach them about genuine manliness. This message is delivered by Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden: “I’m a thirty-six-year-old boy. I knew my dad for about six years, but I don’t remember anything … What you see at Fight Club is a generation of men raised by women.”Psychologically, young men need to undergo certain rites of passage to achieve a healthy masculinity. Traditionally, these rites were overseen by fathers and other father figures. What happens to a society where fatherhood is denigrated and, indeed, some think fathers are no longer necessary for raising children? According to theorist Leon Podles, a society of absentee fathers leaves young males in a confused state of “hypermasculinity” in which they swing between hedonistic self-indulgence — nights in the bedroom with video games? — and demonstrations of violence, as in Fight Club.Homer and Plato knew this. So, too, does Nolan. His retelling of Homer’s morality tale is a much-needed restorative to our deracinated, demoralized culture.Robert Sibley, an award-winning author and a former senior writer and columnist with Postmedia, holds a PhD in political science from Carleton University.
