I watched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey with my daughter this week, It was the first time I had been in a movie theatre in a couple years since we saw the Bob Dylan biop A Complete Unknown. My daughter and I have read The Odyssey together since she was little. It has long been one of my favorites – the story of a man lost in the world, trying to find his way home. The movie is not always faithful to the Odyssey in plot events, but it is faithful in spirit and quite moving. I think it is going to win Best Picture at the next Academy Awards.
In Nolan’s Odyssey, Odysseus is not just lost on his way back from the 10-year Trojan war, but he is spiritually lost. It was his idea to build the Trojan horse; the large wooden horse left outside the gates of Troy. The Trojans, deceived into believing it is a gift from the gods, wheel the horse into their impregnable city. At night, Odysseus and his men, who are hidden inside the massive horse, creep out, slay the guards and then open gates of the city, letting in the Greek army horde. What follows is violent plundering, rape and destruction of the city. Odysseus is broken by the devastation that he feels responsible for. In this movie, the war between the Romans and the Greeks is not really about the Greek general Agamemnon trying to get back his beautiful wife Helen (“the face that launched 1000 ships”) who fell in love with the Roman Paris and was stolen away, but about Agamemnon’s greed to take over the Roman trade routes. It is not an honorable cause to fight for. The result is horrible war and loss.
Odysseus feels responsible not just for the dead in the war, but the loss of all his men on their difficult journey home. After escaping from the Cyclops who holds them prisoners in his cave, he taunts the monster after blinding him with a heated spear. In the book, he boasts to the monster that it was Odysseus of Ithaca who did this to him. In the movie, he just shoots him with an arrow after they have snuck out, further enraging the beast, and causing the monster to destroy two of his three ships, along with their crews. It is Odysseus’s hubris, his overweening pride, that is the true cause of the destruction. Since the cyclops is a son of Poseidon, the sea god, he and his men are cursed and only Odysseus survives the horrific sea storm to finally make his way home after twenty years away. Back in Ithaca, he battles the suitors who have besieged his wife and home. After triumphing over them, he leaves Ithaca to travel toward the sun and the land of the dead where he will apologize to his men for failing them.
A story for the ages, but a story for all of us who go out into the world, trying to do our best, but not always achieving it, striving in the end to find our way home and make peace with our lives.
I’ve been a paramedic for over thirty years. Before I became one, I wandered the world myself, and eventually in my late thirties, found my place in this field of emergency medicine. I sometimes think of all the patients I’ve had and the ones I could not save. I’ve tried to do my best, which wasn’t always good enough. I like nothing more than at the end of a shift to return to my house and family. In Homer’s original Odyssey, war is glorified, in this modern one, it is not. EMS gets glorified by some, but we are not gods, just regular people doing our best, taking care of those in need and then getting home ourselves.
I worked on Friday with my old partner Jerry, both of us are in our sixties and both have worked the road over thirty years. We talked about those we worked with who are no longer with us, those who died before their time, never making it home. He told me of one medic, whose passing I had always wondered about. He confirmed it was a suicide. Another suicide among too many.
Many years ago I wrote a novel about paramedics in Hartford, based loosely on Homer’s The Iliad (the prequel to the Odyssey), the story about the great warrior Achilles, who fought in the Trojan war and died as a young man on the field of battle The lead character in my novel Mortal Men, Troy Johnson is modeled after Achilles.
Mortal Men is available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions.
Paramedic Troy Johnson battles trauma and sickness on the streets of Hartford, Connecticut. When a fellow medic is shot to death responding to a 911 call, a grief-stricken Troy vows to avenge the death, while struggling to come to grips with his own mortality. Mortal Men examines the ancient bonding between friends and partners who count on each other to make it safely home. Written by veteran paramedic Peter Canning, author of the acclaimed Paramedic: On the Front Lines of Medicine and Rescue 471: A Paramedic’s Stories, Mortal Men provides a rare view into the real-life world of street medicine and into the lives of the men and women who fight its battles.