I’ve seen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey twice already. Every American should see it at least once. For its entertainment value alone, this film is worth occupying a seat for three hours: It’s packed with thrills and chills.
Nolan stays mostly faithful to Homer’s ancient tale of Odysseus’ harrowing ordeal as he tries to return to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Our hero encounters voracious monsters, seductive lovers, and vengeful gods on a 20-year journey that tests the loyalty and love of Penelope, his beleaguered queen. Cloistered in their castle overlooking Ithaca, she struggles to fend off a pack of lustful (and gluttonous) suitors wrestling each other to win the hand of the not-yet-widowed Penelope. Young Telemachus, her only son and heir to Ithaca’s domain, stands helplessly by as they take advantage of Penelope’s hospitality, even as they deviously plot to wrangle Penelope into bed and take the place of the long-gone Odysseus.
Critics praise The Odyssey as a cinematic masterpiece, a triumph of A-list casting, dramatic storytelling literally as old as time itself.
Sadly, Nolan’s blockbuster has provoked a partisan firestorm. A vocal pool of far-right critics despise the diversity in Nolan’s casting: It’s too “woke”—too many non-white actors. And the first “man” shown on the screen is transgender—perish the thought! Elon Musk writes on X: “Nolan is a far-left, anti-white racist!”
Tragically, The Odyssey has taken us straight back into the ongoing culture war, dividing Americans on ideological lines. Allow me to stoke this conflagration even more.
It’s an important film, with an impact on our culture that is arguably as significant as—just as one example, The China Syndrome (1975). That Jane Fonda-Jack Lemmon classic centered on a meltdown at a nuclear plant strongly resembling Diablo Canyon. The film met the moment: Just a few years later, Three-Mile Island had a partial meltdown that ignited the largest demonstrations against nuclear power in American history right in our own backyard.
As doubtful as it sounds, it is possible that an epic poem recorded almost 3,000 years ago offers a radically new standard for our lives, but only if we pick up the clues that Christopher Nolan has planted like Easter eggs throughout The Odyssey.
Could we dare to hope that this blockbuster movie could mend our polarized politics?
As doubtful as it sounds, it is possible that an epic poem recorded almost 3,000 years ago offers a radically new standard for our lives, but only if we pick up the clues that Christopher Nolan has planted like Easter eggs throughout The Odyssey.
In his telling, “Zeus’ Law” is the command that formed the very foundation of civilization in ancient Greece. I counted at least two dozen times that this command is invoked in The Odyssey, by at least 11 different characters.
Zeus was king of all the gods on Mount Olympus, god of the sky, of lightning and thunder, and of justice and law. He demanded that all Greeks provide hospitality to travelers, to immigrants, to anyone entering into your household because they may indeed be a god disguised as a mortal. Emily Wilson, the scholar whose translation of the epic poem is credited by Nolan, writes this about Zeus: “One of (his) standard titles was ‘God of Strangers.’ He is the god … who is invoked to defend the rights of guests or of hosts.”
Respect for the stranger, opening doors to people of all races, religions, and creeds—therein lies the core of our pluralistic democracy; it is the beating heart of our commitment to human rights, advanced through international collaboration in the decades following World War II.
Fast forward and we see all around us the disintegration of those ethical standards:
• ICE agents bearing no identifying insignia brazenly kidnap innocent immigrants and murder citizens on the street with impunity.
• Private contractors detain these immigrant “strangers” in concentration camps, depriving them of medical care, decent food or water, and basic human dignity.
• Border Patrol agents turn back desperate families seeking asylum.
• ICE is now targeting Syrian and Haitian immigrants who have been legally building productive communities in the U.S. over decades, providing needed services in hospitality, caregiving, health care, and other professions.
How can it be that we have sunk so low that we cruelly and casually cast out these worthy aspirants to American citizenship? How do we tolerate this corruption of our traditional practice of hospitality to strangers, borrowed from the Ancient Greeks and prescribed by the sacred texts of all Christians, Jews, and Muslims?
We have strayed far from that proud trajectory led by the U.S. in the afterglow of World War II, the path of democracy, of respect for human rights and moral leadership in the world. Our nation carefully crafted tools of diplomacy, free trade, and alliances that protected the “Free World.”
We’re seeing a chilling vision of civilizational decline, driven by a fear of barbarians at the gate—those “people from the sea” in The Odyssey.
In The Odyssey, Nolan is steering us away from the dreaded sirens calling us to drown. We should all “lash ourselves to the mast,” take a seat in the Downtown Cinema and hear only the hints that he’s embedded within this film, shouting at us now from this epic poem across three millennia. ∆
John Ashbaugh might even go to see The Odyssey again if someone asks him for a date. Write a response for publication and email it to letters@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Education Today 2026.
Many societies have a social mandate to extend hospitality to guests and sometimes to strangers, but all societies have a similar reaction to invasion. The difference between the two are in the numbers. Few societies, past and present, are happy about being overrun with desperately poor and needy people who will burden the host society.
Hmmm…. Isn’t Donegan an Irish surname?
True, but in the 1800’s we had a lot more open land and resources like water, and we didn’t provide everyone who showed up with expensive benefits.
The same goes for the waves of immigrants in the early 1900s, thanks to John’s generation, all our factories have been shipped overseas. These were that factories that provided the work that employed immigrants. Until our economy recovers, keep everyone but STEM majors out.
Homer, ICE and the irresistible urge to make everything about Trump
There is something magnificently American about watching The Odyssey, a story involving cyclopes, witches, cannibalistic giants, divine vengeance, mass slaughter, adultery and a chap taking ten years to get home from work, and concluding that its central message is: be nicer to illegal immigrants.
John Ashbaugh has managed it.
Apparently the great lesson of Homer is “Zeus’ Law”, the obligation of hospitality towards strangers. From this perfectly interesting observation we are whisked, with rather more haste than Odysseus ever managed, to ICE agents “kidnapping innocent immigrants”, “murdering citizens” and incarcerating people in “concentration camps”.
Good heavens. And we haven’t even reached the Cyclops.
The difficulty is that xenia, the Greek tradition of hospitality, was not quite the 13th-century BC equivalent of an ACLU immigration leaflet. It imposed obligations on guests as well as hosts. The stranger was welcomed, fed and protected. In return he was expected to behave himself, respect his host and, crucially, not take over the house.
Indeed, a fairly substantial portion of The Odyssey concerns a group of uninvited men who enter somebody else’s home, consume his resources, refuse to leave and behave increasingly badly.
Odysseus’s eventual solution to this breakdown in hospitality is not, as I recall, a pathway to citizenship.
This does not mean that ICE is therefore Odysseus or that illegal immigrants are Penelope’s suitors. That would be equally silly. It means that forcing a 3,000-year-old epic poem into the cramped trousers of contemporary American politics tells us rather more about the person doing the forcing than it does about Homer.
There is also something wonderfully selective about invoking ancient Greek civilization as an exemplar of progressive pluralism. The Greeks gave us philosophy, democracy and tragedy. They also gave us slavery, endemic warfare, spectacular misogyny and political arrangements under which almost everyone reading this newspaper would have been excluded from voting.
History is terribly accommodating when you are allowed to choose only the bits you like.
Perhaps that is the more useful lesson of The Odyssey. Civilizations depend upon hospitality, certainly. But also upon reciprocity, boundaries, duties and the expectation that both host and stranger obey the rules.
Otherwise you haven’t got Zeus’ Law.
You’ve simply got people eating all your food while insisting Homer says you’re not allowed to ask them to leave.
Clive is a columnist and broadcaster. He freely admits to using artificial intelligence to penetrate the author’s formidable veil of sanctimonious self-righteousness. Odysseus had Athena. Clive has AI.
Well put.
Thank you John Ashbaugh for this excellent analysis of Christopher Nolan’s movie, The Odyssey, and how it is so relevant in America in 2026.
And for shining a spotlight on the Meaning of the Greek God Zeus, “the God of Strangers.”
That was an attitude and attribute that most Americans emulated since the end of
WW II.
Under Putin’s, I mean Trump’s, “Project 2025,” America has strayed into a closer association with the extreme right-wing of Trump’s hero Hitler, the leader of the Third Reich in the 1930s Germany.
As you said, “We’re seeing a chilling vision of civilizational decline, driven by a fear of barbarians at the gate—those “people from the sea” in The Odyssey.”
It is even looking like 1930s Germany here in SLO County and America.
ICE is an extension of the Trump Regime’s criminality.
They are a criminal enterprise and crime syndicate.
The ICE Terrorism is much like Trump’s illegal war in Iran.
With ICE, Trump has illegally declared war on America, with his ICE gestapo committing Human Rights Violations right here in SLO County and across America.
Sheriff Parkinson must stop being complicit with ICE in kidnapping community members from SLO County, and sending them to ICE dark sites, like the Private nazi Concentration Camp in Adelanto, CA.
ICE, Trump and the Sheriff make SLO County and America look and feel like a 3rd World Dictatorship.
America is now viewed by the World as a pariah, with a despotic dictator, and his Secret Police ICE, attacking Our Own People!
Do We want our Sheriff complicit with ICE, Destroying our Democratic Republic? No!
We want SLO County to be remembered as being on the right side, the humane side,
of history.
Thanks John, for the combination of your great movie review, and a history lesson.
So is Ukraine guilty of violating Zeus’ mandate to extend a welcome and hospitality to the Russian “guests” who have entered their country?
Boy you’re reaching aren’t you? Ukraine sure cannot trust Putin’s puppet and “useful idiot” Trump.
Keep reaching. Sounds like you would like it much better living in Russia.
Reaching? Both involve massive waves of uninvited and unwanted entrants. How do you distinguish “guest” from “invader”?
End NATO. NATO’s push to enjoin Ukraine in its web provoked Russia to end Zylenski’s Nazi regime. The only people who benefit from this debacle are American weapons manufacturers.
Thank you, Scott – compliments are always welcome.
ICE is a scourge on our community, and on the nation. That entire agency needs to be significantly overhauled when a new Administration comes to power, and it will and I hope not LATER than 1/20/29. Everyone who was hired by the Trump Administration should be fired, and where those thugs have committed crimes, they should be prosecuted.
Thanks John. I agree, and hope that ICE and the Trump regime will be held accountable for their crimes against Americans, and the whole world.
1/20/29 would be a good start date for America to conduct trials like Nuremberg trials, after the end of WW II. It will be necessary to heal America.
The Whole of our American Democratic Republic will need to be overhauled from top to bottom, as the malignancy of the maga has infected ever Agency, at every level, of the Federal Government and of our Justice System.
I agree – it’s not just ICE, it’s all of Homeland Security, Energy, Interior, Agriculture, Transportation, EPA, VA, Commerce, Treasury, State – and especially Justice! (Check out John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight from last night on YouTube)