Nolan's Odyssey and the First Western Wasteland
A Wasteland is not a place where nothing remains. It is a place where almost everything still stands, but has ceased to form a recognizable world. Cities remain inhabited, institutions continue to function, and people retain the words, customs, and ideas they received from those who lived before them. However, they can no longer offer a common explanation of what is happening or a clear direction in which to move forward. It is like a house that is still preserved, but has lost what made it a home.
T. S. Eliot gave that experience its modern formulation in The Waste Land, published in 1922, after the First World War. Europe had entered the 20th century convinced that the advancement of science, industry, reason, and organizational capacity also led to a more prosperous, rational, and secure civilization. The war destroyed that confidence. The same capabilities that seemed to demonstrate European progress had served to build trenches, manufacture poisonous gas, organize armies of millions of men, and turn war into industrial slaughter. And yet, Europe had not been emptied. It still had cities, universities, churches, libraries, governments, works of art, and centuries of accumulated culture. Precisely therein lay the problem: almost everything was still present, but it became much harder to believe that those institutions, knowledge, and values still formed a coherent whole capable of explaining where that civilization was heading. The forms remained; what had broken was the trust in what they meant.
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey places Odysseus in a similar interval. The world from which he departs is still governed by a sacred order that establishes limits even for those who possess enough strength to ignore them. Zeus protects hospitality, oaths, strangers, and suppliants; temples offer spaces that should remain outside of violence; the dead must receive their due honors, and certain promises are binding even when fulfilling them ceases to be convenient. The strength of these rules comes precisely from the fact that no individual can decide alone when they cease to apply. They are not laws agreed upon by men that can be modified according to circumstances, but obligations whose authority comes from the gods and, therefore, are above the particular will of those who must obey them.
Odysseus introduces a novelty into that world. His intelligence allows him to stop accepting destiny as something that simply happens to him. He calculates, deceives, alters circumstances, and decides. He does not stop believing in the gods, but he begins to act as if his own judgment could determine when to accept what they have established and when to confront it. Here an early form of autonomy appears: the individual stops merely occupying the place assigned to him and begins to claim for himself the ability to decide what to do with his own life.
But that autonomy appears when there is still nothing capable of replacing the sacred order that is beginning to break down. The law of Zeus establishes obligations that no individual can suspend for convenience. If that divine authority ceases to be absolute, there is not yet a law born of men themselves, nor a shared idea of responsibility, capable of imposing those same limits from elsewhere. Between obedience to a law received from the gods and the ability of men to recognize and sustain for themselves what must bind them, a void opens, a Wasteland.
The Trojan horse is the first time Odysseus turns that autonomy into a breach of the sacred order. After ten years of war, he understands that the city will not fall by force and devises a different way to conquer it: to get the Trojans themselves to open their gates and bring into the city the men who will destroy it. The horse is a war machine that can fulfill its function precisely because it is presented as a sacred offering, something Troy cannot refuse without risking profaning what it still recognizes as sacred and inviolable.
That the offering is dedicated to Athena matters, above all, to Odysseus. Athena is his protector, and the bond he maintains with her is also sacred. To impose his will on the course of the war, Odysseus is willing to transgress even his own bond with the divine. He does not need to stop believing in his goddess or openly confront her: it is enough to turn what he himself should recognize as a sacred limit into an instrument of his desire to win.
“We left them a gift, an offering of peace, that they took into their home. We violated all that's ever sacred between people. It turned a fight into a hunt… To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world-entire. Including his home.”
What falls with Troy is not just a city. It is also the certainty that divine law must be respected because it binds everyone equally. The law of Zeus did not solely protect hospitality or given word: it established a common order to which victors and vanquished, guests and hosts, had to submit. It protected suppliants, oaths, offerings, sacred spaces, and those bonds that no individual could break simply because they had enough strength or interest to do so. Trust between men was born precisely from this: both could assume that the other was subject to the same law.
The horse destroys that certainty from within. The Trojans respect the obligation imposed by a sacred offering, and precisely by respecting it, they introduce into their city the instrument of their defeat. Odysseus has built that offering to use against them the very law they still obey. From that moment on, respecting the sacred no longer appears solely as an obligation: it can also become a disadvantage against someone who has discovered that obedience is optional and that the trust of another can be used for one's own benefit.
And once that possibility is demonstrated, it no longer belongs solely to Odysseus. The exception conceived to win a war spreads as a new way of acting: plundering what was previously to be respected, lying where word previously bound, taking advantage of others' trust, and turning any limit into an opportunity for whoever is willing to cross it. Profanation does not end with the fall of Troy. It begins there and spreads far beyond the purposes for which it was conceived.
That is why Ithaca is the mirror of Troy. The suitors do not conquer the palace by assault either. They enter as guests and turn the hospitality that should limit their conduct into what allows them to occupy the house from within. Troy fell because it still trusted that a sacred offering could not hide an invasion; Ithaca begins to fall because receiving someone as a guest no longer guarantees that they will respect the house that receives them.
The forms remain. What disappears is the trust in what they mean.
The return, then, is not a heroic feat. It is a journey through the world opened after Troy, through the Wasteland that arises when sacred law still exists but ceases to be a common obligation. Each stage confronts Odysseus with a different form of that rupture, although at first he is not even able to recognize it as his own.
His first encounter with it occurs during one of the plunderings on the way back. Odysseus asks why they have not been received according to the laws of hospitality and hears for the first time about the sea peoples: men who arrive from the coast, plunder whatever they find, and continue on their way without recognizing the law of Zeus or any obligation to those they encounter. Odysseus still imagines them as others, as an external threat to be feared. He will need a good part of the journey to understand that these sea peoples are precisely men like him and his own: warriors who left Troy carrying with them a war that no longer recognizes borders, sacred places, or reasons to stop. The first image of the Wasteland thus appears before the awareness of having contributed to creating it.
Polyphemus returns that contradiction to Odysseus and his men when they arrive expecting the hospitality protected by Zeus after having committed in Troy the most brutal violation of that very principle. A city had opened its gates to a sacred offering, and they had hidden within it the plundering, destruction, and profanation of what should remain inviolable. Now they need that same law to continue to be binding when they are the ones who depend on its protection. But Polyphemus, son of Poseidon, does not respect it either: he receives the foreigners by devouring them. Odysseus then imposes himself again through cunning and manages to escape. As he leaves the cave, he draws his bow as a sign of victory, because it is not enough for him to survive: he needs the act to bear his name, to make it clear that it was his will that prevailed. Even when hiding would be safer, he claims authorship of what he has done and thus turns his victory over Polyphemus into a direct challenge to Poseidon.
The Laestrygonians show that rupture in its most elemental form. There is no longer any hospitality to betray or sacred appearance that can be used as deception. The encounter leads directly to destruction, and almost the entire fleet disappears. When there is no longer a common law or a bond that binds men to each other, force ends up becoming the measure of things: whoever can impose himself has no reason not to do so.
Circe recovers the appearance of hospitality to pervert it again. There is a house, a table, and food, but the banquet that should welcome the foreigner turns men into animals. Here, however, a transformation in Odysseus begins. His companions give in to their appetite; he manages to restrain himself. After having discovered in Troy that his will could be placed above a sacred prohibition, he begins to discover the inverse difficulty: being master of oneself also requires being able to limit oneself, to know how to say no to oneself.
The descent into the underworld carries that learning towards another kind of obligation. Odysseus hears there the claim of his own men, of those who put their destiny in his hands and died trusting him. What they demand does not respond to the convenience of the moment or an immediate need for survival. They demand what is due to them precisely because they gave that trust: to be remembered, to receive due honors, not to be abandoned simply because continuing the journey is more useful. Odysseus thus begins to encounter obligations that cannot be omitted whenever they cease to be convenient. Some relationships generate debts that remain binding even when there is no sacred law that imposes their fulfillment.
Scylla and Charybdis show another price of autonomy. Being master of one's own destiny does not always mean finding a correct solution. Between both threats there is no cost-free choice: any course implies a loss. Choosing for oneself also means accepting that every real decision excludes other possibilities, and that its consequences can no longer be attributed simply to what the gods had disposed.
Helios' cattle show the problem from the opposite side. His men know the prohibition and yet decide that hunger is enough to set it aside. They do not thereby exercise an autonomy similar to that which Odysseus began to claim in Troy: they obey immediate appetite and call that obedience choice. Odysseus begins to understand the difference. Being able to break a norm does not mean that every norm should be available for one's own will, just as deciding for oneself does not mean doing what one wants at every moment.
Tiresias' warning concentrates that contradiction:
“Your men don't want you to defy the gods. But the gods say only you make it home.”
“Then I defy the gods.”
His men ask him not to defy the gods, but the destiny that those same gods have arranged requires that they die and that only Odysseus return home. That is why he defies them. He does not do so only to assert his will against the divine, but because he refuses to accept a destiny that condemns the men who depend on him. The tragedy is that it will be those same men who, unable to restrain themselves before Circe, the sirens, or Helios' cattle, will end up fulfilling what Odysseus wanted to prevent. His rebellion against destiny is not enough to save them because autonomy demands more than being able to say no to the gods: it also demands being able to say no to oneself.
The sirens take that transformation to its most intimate form. Odysseus knows that this time the danger does not come from a god or an enemy, but from himself. That is why he orders himself to be tied before listening to the song and not to be released even if he later begs for it.
“All the things you wanted to be and then all the things you wished you never wished for… the most you can't have is what you already had and lost. It was a song of all the promises I failed to keep. And it told me I don't really want to go home.”
The song reveals to him that his own desire can also lead him to perdition. It is not simply about containing an appetite or accepting an external prohibition. Odysseus understands that there may come a time when what he himself wants is precisely what he should prevent himself from doing. That is why he ties himself: he places a limit between his desire and his ability to obey it. After having spent a good part of the journey confronting what sought to decide for him, he discovers that he may also need protection from himself. Autonomy then ceases to consist solely of conquering the right to choose; it begins to demand the ability not to blindly obey even one's own will.
Calypso poses the last obstacle before the return, and it is different from all the previous ones because it no longer requires winning, escaping, or resisting. Odysseus has spent the entire journey trying to impose his will on what seemed decided by the gods, but he finally reaches a point where he cannot control what has happened or undo its consequences. Calypso offers him oblivion, the possibility of abandoning that story and no longer carrying it. Returning requires the opposite: accepting that Troy, the men who died, the Wasteland he has traversed, and the Ithaca he will find are part of the same story, even if none of those consequences were what he intended to produce.
Here the parallel with Cobb in Inception clearly appears. Cobb also cannot return as long as he continues to separate what he wanted to do from what he finally caused. He implanted an idea in Mal to save her, not to destroy her, but that intention is not enough to erase his responsibility for what the idea ended up producing. Odysseus faces the same difficulty. He wanted to win a war and return home; he did not want to spread a world of looting, profanation, and broken bonds. But returning requires recognizing that an action can produce consequences that completely exceed the intention of the person who performs it and that, even so, remain linked to him. He cannot return as long as he imagines Ithaca as the untouched place that existed before Troy. He must first accept the relationship between what he did and the world to which he now intends to return.
That is why the return does not simply restore what was there before. Having recovered the throne, Odysseus leaves again to honor the dead he left behind, precisely an obligation that for much of the journey he had treated as something that could be postponed in the face of more immediate needs. That gesture completes the transformation. It does not mean returning to the blind obedience of the ancient divine law, but understanding why some of the obligations that law protected cannot be subjected to the convenience of each individual.
Burying the dead, respecting the guest, protecting the suppliant, or recognizing spaces where violence must stop are not sacred simply because a god has declared them so. They are sacred because there are bonds that can only be maintained as long as we all accept that they are not available for our particular benefit. If anyone can suspend them when they cease to be convenient, they cease to exist for everyone.
Here appears the possible way out of the Wasteland. Odysseus had opened that space by discovering that he could place his will above the sacred order. During the journey he learns that autonomy cannot be reduced to that capacity for transgression: it demands containing one's own desire, assuming the cost of decisions, and recognizing obligations that remain valid even when no one can impose them from without.
The law of Zeus begins to lose its authority, but there is not yet a human law capable of replacing it. That is the interval Odysseus crosses. The palace, the temple, hospitality, the given word, and honors to the dead still exist, but it is no longer enough for their forms to remain. They will only recover their strength when men are able to sustain for themselves what they once respected because it belonged to the gods.
That is the first Wasteland of the West: the time that elapses between ceasing to obey something because it is sacred and understanding that it is sacred precisely because we cannot disobey it without destroying what sustains us as a society.