Take our Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Test

Find a therapist to heal from trauma.

Christopher Nolan's new film, Odyssey, is a tale of trauma. There’s a lot a filmmaker can do with Homer’s classic story, and the director has chosen to highlight the costs and consequences of trauma.

In brief, the movie focuses on the hero Odysseus, who is trying to return home from his fateful conquest of Troy. In Homer’s epic, the hero has been spurned by the God Poseidon for blinding his son, the cyclops named Polyphemus. In the film, this does happen, though as Nolan tells it, Poseidon’s curse pales before the curse Odysseus sets upon himself. In creating the famous wooden horse that allows his Greek cohorts to sneak into the city of Troy, he has violated “Zeus’s law.” This is the law of treating others as you would be treated, of applying civility and hospitality to strangers.

In Odysseus’s case, giving the “gift” of the horse was an act that took unfair advantage of the law of Zeus. The Trojans had assumed the Greeks were following the rules of civility. But the opposite was true. And this assumption cost them everything.

A Metaphor for Trauma

In the film, we witness the Greeks climb out of the horse and open........

© Psychology Today