Like the Christian Gospels, American shooting and crying stories are fundamentally about sin, redemption, and forgiveness. Stop-Loss does not condone Brandon killing a family in their own home (the sin), but it suggests that crying makes up for the shooting (the redemption). You are expected to forgive Brandon by the end of the film. Brandon doesn’t reach out of their surviving relatives and apologize, or do much of anything to support refugees in the Middle East, but he does suffer, and you are expected to agree that his suffering makes up for the murder, that his tears exonerate him.
Odysseus is repeatedly described as a “veteran” by both himself and others in Christopher Nolan’s 2026 adaptation of The Odyssey. No such word exists in Attic Greek. There is a word for men who are absent or else too sick to fight (ἀπόμαχος); there is a word for old men (γέρων), who would not have been expected to fight anymore (see, for examples in the art of the time, Nestor in The Iliad). But there is no one-to-one translation for the English word “veteran” for the simple reason that the Ancient Greeks had no such concept. City-states went to war every couple of years, meaning no one could ever fully move beyond it. War was not something you sign up for, leave, go do Over There, and hopefully come back from. Virtually all men fought in wars, which meant soldiers were not a minority — they were not special.
...The Odyssey (2026) brings the American tradition of shooting and crying to Troy. Odysseus the veteran cannot fully come back home from the war until he has made peace with the crime he committed overseas. Smuggling soldiers into enemy territory via wooden horse might not constitute a war crime by today’s standards, but Nolan frames this strategy as a violation of “Zeus’ law”.
...Anne Carson calls the Odyssey a “postwar epic”. Crying after shooting is simply what a postwar epic looks like in America. In that way, Nolan truly has adapted Homer; Nolan has imported his own cultural situation into the myth.
Just as The Aeneid used Homeric archetypes to express Roman national identity, The Odyssey (2026) shows Americans how we view ourselves: we love our home; we love our family; we come from multiple races, but most of us are white; we are world-weary; we did something wrong far away, but our memories are foggy, and it’s best not to dwell too much on our victims; our hands are perpetually innocent, and stained with fresh blood.
Odysseus at the VA: How Christopher Nolan Americanized The Odyssey
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