Nolan the Trojan: Technology and The Odyssey
“Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it.”
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology
Home. It’s complicated.
The arrival of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey feels like the arrival of the Trojan Horse at the gates of our global(ised) identities in the age of AI. It arrives at a time of crisis, a time when the talk on the town is that the very civilisation we have believed in is crumbling, or perhaps it has always been an impressive but hollow thing. We are asking questions like Penelope is asking them of her returned husband in a desperate attempt to see through webs of lies and politics and find something authentic. We are told we are at the beginning of a new age of AI, but like Odysseus, we are asking: will we have a home in it? Will we feel at home in it?
As a refugee, as someone who escaped the technology of genocide, I often wrote about home, what it means to be ripped out of one existence and thrown into another, how it literally felt like changing one’s being, one’s ontology. And yet, the more I see people sell any place as true home, especially my motherland, Bosnia, and my foster mother, Sweden, I feel disgusted.
For me, there is a deep entanglement of home, art, and technology. Home is not something at hand somewhere, made by someone else. A refugee knows homecoming is ultimately the art of homemaking. And this art requires the highest mastery of that which the Greeks called techne, that which makes technology (teknikon) possible. As Martin Heidegger explains in The Question of Technology, techne is not only the name for the skills but also for poiesis, that is, the arts of the mind and the fine arts, a creative force (unlike the passive mimesis).
Heidegger, the controversial German philosopher who dallied with an ideology infamous for perfecting the technology of genocide as a way of making a Heimat for a supremacist race, argues that human beings are technological beings. The essence of being human, he derives from Greek thought, is being entangled with technology. It is not about using tools but art(ifice), the ability to think creatively in terms of reshaping the world to fit us rather than to adapt to the world. I am from the people whose bones and entire nervous systems were remade and rewired by the destructive technology of those who sought to build their own perverted Heimat on our razed homes.
This is not how to create home. And, for Heidegger, this is why we also do not feel at home. This is why the homely (heimlich) can also suddenly strike you as uncanny (unheimlich), as Freud would have it.
The fact that we can understand Odysseus’ nostalgia, that painful longing for a lost home (nostos), seems to show that few of us really feel at home anywhere. It is like we want to go to some imaginary Ithaka, as if we are all refugees from our essence. The obstacles on Odysseus’ quest to get home are states of mind he needs to overcome for home to really be home. For if he arrives with everything that he has become while away, just like all of us refugees, the place itself, the bed itself, the wife herself, the son himself, will not be home. He knows he needs to deserve home.
And home is not an object, an artefact, but a process of continuous making and remaking, a process of constant adaptation, just like The Odyssey is an infinitely adaptable tale.
As the age of AI advances, we are increasingly nostalgic for a rawer, less technological existence. Countless people on social media swoon over digitally enhanced aerial shots of shepherds guarding their skinny sheep on tall mountains. I doubt any one of them would drink fresh frothing milk straight from the sheep’s udder. Odysseus would.
I recently went on a rather simple hike with SonNo2. We had more gear for a few days than Odysseus had for the entire Trojan War. When I was a kid, I’d make these kinds of trips in my sandals and without maps, with a homemade bow and Conan’s sword (of hard Bosnian beech tree). Grandma would say my head was harder than that, though. I wouldn’t even bring food or water. I knew where the creeks and strawberries were. That was home.
When I think of home, quite nostalgically, I think of images from films I’d seen, as that was the great technology that dominated my childhood. Images from adaptations of Homer’s tale often dominate that nostalgia, especially when Odysseus shoots an arrow through the axes before he slaughters the suitors. The stringing of the bow is not about strength but methodology. Odysseus knows the bow’s pressure points like he knows those that bend people’s minds. This is why I was so hyped to see Nolan’s adaptation. I knew it would be a clash between my nostalgia and my academic mind, but I knew that would be a good balance. I loved how Nolan used sound to recreate that single technological feature. Odysseus plucks that string and the simple sound dominates the room. A twang of warning that is clear and honest and the opposite of the Horse that is pure deception. Ludwig Göransson’s “earthy and immediate and accessible” sound flaunted the art of recreating beautiful ancient instruments from old paintings. The twang sent a single simple message to the suitors: I’m Odysseus, and I’m home.
The bow scene showcases art, both in terms of the character’s skill and also as a scene. It is a work of narrative art, which my child-self remembers more than the Cyclops and the siren song, more than any other battle, more than any conversation. The art of stringing the bow and shooting through twelve rows of axes in the plot is so artfully devised by Penelope in the film. The marriage of ingenuities. No wonder their love lasts. No wonder she is his home.
However low-tech it seemed, the sound brought to mind the fact that this old story was an oral tale, an infinitely fluid art before it became the artefact we know. After all, the Homeric epic used “a relatively new technology – the written alphabet – to rework existing mythical traditions, reshaping the story of a veteran’s homecoming,” as the translator of Homer, Emily Wilson, explained. In some ways, the new technology, which would come to change the world like we expect AI to do now, tamed the free flow of creativity to make an artefact. Fathers of Greek thought, Socrates and Plato, considered writing itself to be a technology that would make people lazy and stupid and cause a loss of authentic knowledge.
For this reason, it was quite telling that the entire discourse on Nolan’s adaptation was the story of technology, just as the old tale itself. The moment the Western director of global fame announced he was adapting the supposedly greatest myth humanity has ever produced was itself an act of technology and cunning. Everything related to it has been an act of mythologizing our own identities and politics. Big walls have been raised left, right, and centre as if people’s literal homes are under attack, as if Agamemnon's armies or the mysterious Sea People were besieging their identities: the historians, the women, the men, the white men, the tech bros (mainly white men), the lit people and illit people, the scholars and translators, gods and goddesses, the pros and the amateurs. The framing that is contested. The casting that calls in ideological artillery. The arts and crafts of historicists vs. the arts and crafts of the remakers.
It was as if Western civilisation, that mythological creature some still call home, was delivered one final blow, or at least a burning poke in its eye.
The big question is: what war is this artefact meant to end, or is it more like fuel to our eternal cultural conflicts, more heat to our modern forever wars with so many losers and no clear winners? Maybe only Athena knows, but she’s offline, like Nolan.
The crux is that there is no singular authentic Troy. At the dawn of the age of AI, it feels like each of us is a Troy begging to be pillaged by new tech. Not even the borders of our bodies and our minds are sacred. Somehow we lost copyright to ourselves. No laws seem to apply across vast spaces. And without laws, especially the law of hospitality, a law so common to every civilisation, the very idea of home is made impossible.
The fight to find/make/remake/preserve home seems deeply tied to our grappling with the very idea of technology. This is what Nolan’s Odyssey suggests, not simply in the tale but in the tale of the remaking of the tale. Bottom line, the arrival of this film was prophesied and sold as a technological advent, practically a technological revelation that somehow also refutes certain technologies. The film is at once high-tech and anti-tech. Or rather, it pits a certain type of “material” technology against the elusive AI, positing a strange dichotomy. Even before our local screening in Stockholm, a staff member who usually delivers the spiel that filming is against the law and that we should pick up our own garbage took time to praise the fact that the film used no CGI and that even the Cyclops is a huge doll.
Nolan himself confirmed on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon that he does not own a smartphone and does not even use Email. But he relies on everyone else using everything available, of course. The entire production machinery employs the latest tech. It’s not like the ads for the film were only run on handwritten papyrus or announced by literal word of mouth. It’s not like there was only one original print that had to be carried from city to city or that you could only see it in the Louvre.
It is like we are back to Walter Benjamin’s question of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, except here the implied refusal of the use of anything digital, let alone AI, seems to give the film an aura, or as Gen Z would put it, it is auramaxxing. It is quite remarkable how this generation of digital natives feels nostalgia for all things analogue and is dissing CGI as if they had experiential knowledge (gnosis) of what it means to live outside digital technology.
A film, by virtue of its complex making, is perhaps the greatest example of what Heidegger claimed about artefacts: that they are always part of a system of tools, a technical system forming a whole (Zeugganzes). Homeric characters may seem to move in the world of swords and sandals, but ultimately his are stories of human beings as technological creatures and how this affects their feeling at home in the world. Like Oppenheimer, Alissa Wilkinson (The New York Times) argues, Odysseus is a “proto-modern man” who believes that the power of his mind marks the end of the Bronze Age and ushers in a new age. In our age, as Benjamin and Heidegger feared, everything would be thought in technological terms. For what other reason would scientists so often try to explain brains with computer metaphors? Generally, I dare say, we have no understanding of how computers actually work, let alone how AI algorithms function, and yet somehow we feel more at home with those metaphors than with Shakespeare’s or Homer’s.
The most iconic image that captures this conundrum is the Trojan Horse, that symbol of cunning and strategy, the supposed proof that wars are not won by extreme war machinery but through a form of art.
When I say art, I also mean technology.
The famous myth that ties humans to technology is, of course, that of Prometheus, who steals the divine fire and gifts it to humans. Fire here is a symbol of technology, but again not merely as a tool, but as the ability to think technologically. From this point on, humans can create fire, instead of having to find it as a resource. In the same fashion, to raise it a few notches, humans do not only find atoms but actively create things like isotopes for nuclear reactors and atomic bombs (nod to Oppenheimer). Maybe it is the notion that we received technology which makes us think it is alien to our being. This is not different from being inspired by muses, the idea that we can only be conduits for true creators and never creators ourselves. Perhaps this is why we, despite our technological being, always feel that technology is a kind of Trojan Horse we were tricked into inflicting on ourselves. It is like in Nolan’s Inception, an implanting of an idea, the greatest form of a Trojan Horse.
This is why we are fascinated by Homer’s Trojan Horse beyond the thousands of testosterone dudes with swords (or machine guns, or drones, or whatever is next). The Trojan Horse is the essence of human existence, the essence of art as craft and craft as both a creative and a destructive force.
Homer, himself a literary device of mythological proportions, a metaphor for all master craftsmen (and women), does not leave a blueprint for the greatest con that brings down Troy. He invites us to add layers of cunning and participate in Odysseus’ exercise of techne. Nolan, however much we want and can criticise his vision, excels in this. He makes me swallow it even though I know it is a bait. It is, after all, such a spectacular bait.
The Horse is a shortcut to victory.
Thus, it is also a metaphor for how language works, well, chiefly through shortcuts, that is, metaphors. The Horse is a metaphor for metaphors. We can write hundreds of pages of scientific descriptions, but a metaphor tells all in the blink of an eye. Remember how Odysseus tricks the Cyclops by using a pun on his name, calling himself Nobody, so when he pokes the creature’s eye and it calls the other Cyclopes, they misinterpret everything and think nobody attacked it (which Nolan did not use). This is the ability that Penelope fears when she meets her returning husband. Thus, even the ability to create metaphors, to use language, is techne as much as poiesis.
In short, there is nothing outside technology.
The name itself, “Trojan Horse,” is an artful deception. The horse itself is not Trojan, just as the war was not Trojan. It was a war ON Troy. The gift was not a gift but poison (pharmakon) that would eat the Trojans from the inside. Names themselves could be more of a technological malware than the impressive construction itself.
It is hardly a coincidence that one of the most prominent features of our digital lives has been the Trojan malware. As soon as we built fortresses of our computer systems, we invited modern Odysseuses to break into our homes, plunder and destroy, or just extort.
The fact that the term “Trojan” has survived as a name for infectious malware shows from whose perspective we have been reading the story. Odysseus is not good. Nolan acknowledges this but tries to make him feel the burden of, well, genocide. Whether a man of hubris, angering the gods, or a PTSD-ed mastermind of destruction, the story is told from his point of view. There we have a crafty technological device, Point of View (POV), the consciousness that filters information into a narrative and produces a digestible shape through particular media. Narrative itself is the greatest Trojan Horse. Who gets to tell the story and how? Who puts on the mask of Odysseus? This is art as the highest form of technological craft. Think of Circe’s magical turning of Odysseus’ men into swine. In Nolan’s film, she does it like a sculptor molding clay. Magic is the art of technology. But not CGI technology.
It’s supposed to be the magic of that Trojan Horse called IMAX. No other thing dominated the hype as the most demanding and cumbersome technology in our digital age. Out of eight articles in The New York Times, at the moment I write this, five focus on the IMAX technology. Nolan and Hoyte van Hoytema describe it as something simultaneously extremely technologically advanced and quite primitive, like a mythological creature (Melena Ryzik). They are combining “new inventions … with century-old techniques.” It’s all about “real places, on real locations, having stuff in front of the camera that is tangible and tactile,” like Penelope’s bed, like the bow and arrow, like the Horse. It is all analogue and “finding real-world solutions” to “create a much more convincing illusion.”
Like the myth itself, the technology used is supposed to be nostalgic for simpler times when men fought men (and women and children) and not killed with drones. A time when humans had to face humans they killed. When home was analogue.
In my view, no other pieces of art/technology show home as Penelope’s shroud and her marital bed. Penelope is the only character in the entire story who resists auramaxxing but cuts to the core of the art of homemaking. She invents new technologies of misdirection and mimicry to carve an authentic piece of territory.
The shroud captures so beautifully how being human is an exercise of techne: there is the craft of making the shroud, the tools, the human labor, but also art. To repeat Heidegger’s point: as an artefact, the shroud is a complex technical and narrative system forming a whole. Aside from the object itself, it figures in the techne of the plot: the making and the unmaking of the shroud is an excellent literary device. Penelope is craftier than Odysseus. For him, the world is the canvas while she is confined in time and place and resources, and even shortchanged by the gods.
Penelope’s art is of a higher order than the Trojan Horse because, to preserve home, she literally needs to extend time with a single invention. The device must be so great and effortless that no one would ever consider it as craft. Nolan makes it so subtle that it is on the verge of neglect, and yet we read how much effort was put into making it as complex and realistic as possible. It takes a traitor to reveal its secret to Antinous. Most of Odysseus’s achievements are quick solutions to concrete problems. Penelope’s work creates space-time. She performs magic using the same kind of technological prowess, but her display of techne is subtler and less pompous. Her work is instrumental in capturing the essence of technology as our being, from ancient times until our AI-infested lives. She shows how “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological,” as Heidegger put it.
The second example is the royal couple’s marital bed, which Nolan unfortunately does not include, just as many other ingenious female interventions in Homer. In the poem, unlike the film, Penelope is informed that a man who claims to be her husband has killed the suitors and purged the house. He has changed beyond recognition, but even if he looked the same, he could be an impostor. Unlike the people of Troy, she is harder to deceive. She wants to ascertain, beyond reasonable doubt, that the gods really gave her the gift of her husband or if the man is a kind of Trojan Horse that brings in a foreign soldier into her bed. In the film, she is convinced by the romantic image of an Athena pin he held on to for twenty years. In the poem, Penelope needs to cut deeper into the past to the moment of the creation of their union. It is interesting how she tells him, after a rather lengthy series of scenes, that she fears he could be just another good spinner of tales, a smooth talker. This is quite ironic, as that in itself is Odysseus’ hallmark. She asks Eurycleia to “move the sturdy bedstead out of our bridal chamber—that room the master built with his own hands” (Book 23, Robert Fagles’ translation). This is, of course, impossible as the bed is made out of a living olive tree.
The bed is a great example of the art of technology, as, in Odysseus’s words, “a hallmark lies in its construction.” It almost works as an authentication screen that checks if he’s a robot. The bedmaking combines the male and the female, or maybe it is more feminine in that it is about creation and procreation, birth and growth, rather than destruction. The bed is the opposite of the Horse, which was made of the remnant of warships. Aside from the fact that Homer provides a lengthy description of its making––from choosing the place, the olive tree, stating the techniques––the main point is that home is built around the bed. The most important thing is not the object itself but Penelope’s need to check if the essence of her husband is intact. The notion of essence is emphasised when Odysseus cries, “Woman—your words, they cut me to the core!”
The bed captures the essence of home.
Everything I analyse in relation to The Odyssey makes me think with Heidegger, but also through my Islamic heritage, that the greatest threat to humanity is humanity. It is precisely because we exalt ourselves “to the posture of lord of the earth” and create the impression “that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion, in turn, gives rise to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself. … In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence.”
This illusion is like the Trojan Horse itself. In the story, the Horse is posited as the device that ends the war, just as the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki are posited as the ultimate devices that ended a world war, but this is far from the truth. Spectacular as they are, the narratives of the Fat Man and Little Boy that devastated Japan have been mere justification for such hubris. This is what The Odyssey shows.
Nolan is not Trojan malware. My title was but a device. The film, however, divorced from the creator’s intentions, could be, just like the epic poem. As an interpretation of an interpretation of an interpretation, it is an adaptation to our time like any other version of the story throughout history. It feels like not just resistance to the digital but resistance to the threat of AI. As such, it shows we are approaching the question of technology the wrong way.
As a writer, I may claim, and I believe I can prove, that AI cannot make art, but the fact that we feel that threat to what we think is our essence, that we are creatures of poiesis, means that we forget that, as Heidegger wrote: “Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called techne. And the poiesis of the fine arts also was called techne.”
In other words, the particular view of technology we have developed, the view that becomes clear through the discourse on Nolan’s film, the view that AI seems to be shaking, is that technology is the opposite of nature, of art, and the opposite of us. The advent of AI feels like a Trojan Horse. AI plunders everything. We can hardly read and see anything without asking if it IS or was at least touched (up) by AI. AI has made us infinitely suspicious of the idea of true art and true home. Home has either become a myth, or new technology has exposed that it has always been one. It made it harder to deny. But even if it is a myth, at least let it be a work of art.
AI seems to have brought about the ultimate disenchantment. What we believed was unique to us is being uncannily mimicked (mimesis rather than poiesis) by a technology we don’t fully understand, even though it comes from us. It feels, more than anything else, like a proper alien, a non-human intelligence like Athena and Zeus and Circe and Calypso. It strips away our preciousness, exposes our vulnerabilities, and forces us to think about what makes us distinct from a language model.
AI, even as a mere idea, is revealing so much. It is exposing this nagging feeling that the gift of Prometheus was really a big Trojan loan that comes to claim the final payment. Or rather, it was one with the greatest interest, impossible to pay off in principle. We never read the fine print. Terms and conditions still apply. As Heidegger said, “Only a god can save us.”
Faith seems to be a unique authenticator, often overlooked. A leap of faith produces art. Art is taking a chance, a gamble, having trust. For what is Penelope’s shroud but an act of faith? Faith in God, too, is a form of art. It is also a form of technology. With a strong faith in God, the threat AI poses to our creativity might be nullified. I believe that. It’s complicated. Home is.