The Original Travel Writer

Christopher Nolan just spent $250 million proving Homer invented every story I’ve ever told you

Some Mild Spoilers Ahead Darlings. And before we start, some thoughts if you care to know this: my advice is read the poem and see the movie, appreciate them separately.

I recently sat in an IMAX theater outside of Madrid Centro watching sexier than ever Matt Damon get thrown around the Mediterranean by gods with grudges, and somewhere between the sirens and the cyclops I had an unglamorous, perhaps even slightly embarrassing realization: every single travel story I have ever written for you, every one, is a rerun of something. Homer did it first. Homer did it centuries before I discovered that my super hard mattress in my Rishikesh ashram could also, apparently, be a plot device.

I guess I should back up a tad.

Christopher Nolan has wanted to make The Odyssey for over twenty years, which, I did the math, not that I am even Math-boy but hey here we go, is roughly twice as long as it took Odysseus himself to get home from Troy. The man shot this thing across seven countries: Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland, Iceland, Western Sahara, Malta. Seven. Many people get twitchy planning a long weekend with two connections (I am sorry Michael), and here’s Nolan hauling Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya and Charlize Theron (oh she plays Calypso, the sea nymph who keeps Odysseus stranded on her island for seven years, and I loved my fellow countryman/woman/person more than ever here) across half the ancient world’s greatest hits, shooting the whole thing on IMAX 70mm film because apparently regular scale wasn’t going to cut it for a story this enormous. Some journeys just don’t fit in a normal frame - oh boy, I know the feeling.

But here’s the part that’s been sitting with me since the credits rolled. This isn’t just a movie about a guy trying to get home, it’s sort of the movie, the first one, the template that every wanderer-narrator, myself very much included, has been unconsciously plagiarizing ever since.

Think about it for a second.

Every travel essay I’ve ever sent you, Malibu, Bali, wherever I’ve dragged you along with me for years, follows the exact shape of a story a blind poet supposedly composed for people who couldn’t even read, three thousand years before anyone invented the concept of a wellness retreat. You leave home. Something enormous and out of your control keeps you from getting back easily (for Odysseus, furious sea gods; for me, usually a flight delay and my own inability to sit still). You meet people who try to keep you exactly where you are, permanently, because where you are is seductive, and honestly Calypso keeping Odysseus on her island for seven years isn’t that structurally different from a beautiful hotel talking you into staying four more days you never planned for. You come home a completely different person than the one who left, and the house doesn’t quite fit you the same way anymore. That’s not just Homer, that’s Lord of the Rings, that’s Life of Pi, that’s every road-trip movie, every gap-year memoir, every one of my own newsletters where I go somewhere to “find myself” and come back mildly insufferable about miso eggplant or some little store where they just make ribbons.

We’re all just doing Homer’s outline with better lighting, is what I’m saying.

I don’t say this to be cynical about it, by the way, quite the opposite actually. I find it sort of thrilling. There’s something enormous about realizing that the oldest travel story in the Western world might also be the truest one, and that nobody, not James Joyce with Ulysses, not Nolan with a quarter-billion-dollar budget and actual boats on actual open water, has really managed to improve on the basic architecture of it. We’ve just been adding better “special effects” along the way. Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion monsters, and now Nolan’s practical creatures shot in-camera because he apparently doesn’t believe in CGI the way I don’t believe in packing too much. Same skeleton, just different skin.

What Nolan actually seems to understand, and this might be the smartest thing about the whole shebang, is that nobody remembers the Odyssey for its monsters anyway. You remember Penelope. Sitting at home for a decade, unraveling a tapestry every night so she doesn’t have to remarry, aging in real time while her husband is off having entire adventures he’ll later get to narrate like they were things that happened to him rather than choices he kept making. Every travel story has a Penelope in it somewhere, some version of home, or a person in it, that keeps existing without you while you’re off collecting material. I think about that every time I leave. I think about it a little more, honestly, every time I come back and the version of home I return to isn’t quite the one I left.

*And this week, actually, as I stayed back and my own Odysseus ventured out into the world, all of this got a lot clearer to me. If we have coffee in the next few weeks in France, where you’ll find me, we can unpack it more.

So here’s my actual pitch, filed under things I did not expect to believe on a random Tuesday: go see this movie, not really for the cyclops, though he looked genuinely great, but for the reminder that you and I, doing this little ritual every so often, me going somewhere, you reading about it after, are taking part in the oldest human habit there is. Someone leaves, someone waits, someone comes back different. Homer just wrote it down first because someone had to, and the rest of us have been filling in the location details ever since.

Anyway. Ithaca’s looking a little more like everywhere, once you notice the pattern.

Oh, and thanks for this, Jason. The Odyssey is in theaters now, shot entirely in IMAX 70mm, worth seeing on the biggest screen you can find, if only to feel appropriately small in front of it.