I did not walk into Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey intending to pick holes. If there was zero sexual chemistry between Odysseus and Circe, who was I to say that’s not how it went in the poem? I was most likely thinking of a feminist retelling (Madeline Miller’s novel Circe), rather than Homer, anyway.
Nevertheless, even allowing for metaphor and whatnot, even factoring in that Circe’s passion for Odysseus is (almost?) definitely a rumination on the double standards of godliness, in which the guy gods are allowed to sleep with whichever mortals they please, but the lady ones are not supposed to (I don’t think?), I am sure something happened.
Just on the balance of probabilities, I am also sure that something happened with Calypso on the beach; all that elaborate nymph-craft, all that gaslighting and coercive control and anguish-minimisation. Why would she do it if not to keep him for sex? It’s not as though she needed a warrior; she didn’t even need any DIY done.
The siren song, meanwhile, I had stored as a harmonic iteration of sexual longing. If it had instead, as in the film, been the plangent call of something unnamable that had been irrevocably lost (innocence? The past?), would you really have needed a siren? You’d have been better off with a male voice choir.
Absent all these shagging adventures keeping Odysseus away from his missus, it’s a bit of a mystery why it takes him so long to get home. Enter his trauma. He explains carefully – in one of the best, most understated monologues Matt Damon has given – that all the bloodshed had made it impossible for him to return home, feeling that he is neither returning as himself, nor capable of inhabiting his home as the brutalised man he has become without sullying it.
Totally understandable; I’d lose my sangfroid if I ever had to get inside a horse with no facilities. But this leaves us with a fresh conundrum: if he’s so damn traumatised, ending his journey with a mass suitor-killing event is a little counter-productive – one might even say rum.
I understand why Odysseus has to be faithful to Penelope; these are the exigencies of modernity. But de-sexing the classics is harder than it looks.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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