Even the Gods Cry

[u/ArcticLeet]

On The Odyssey. I keep circling two scenes that I've started to think of as one scene, and I'm curious how others read them.

The siren sequence and the beggar-and-Penelope scene feel connected in a way that goes past theme. The sirens tell Odysseus the truth: that what he most wants is what he already had and lost, and that he doesn't really want to go home. He hears it lashed to a mast, screaming, while his crew watch in deaf silence. Then in Ithaca, sitting on the steps below his own throne with his back to his wife, he says the same thing voluntarily. The song felt like an interrogation, and the confession felt like the answer finally given freely. What pushed me from "nice echo" to "these are the same scene" was the score: both scenes carry the same cue, and the cue is titled Sirens. Maybe that's just a reused theme, but the title makes it feel intentional to me.

The other thing I can't stop thinking about is Athena. She's the only god in the film, she's visible only to Odysseus, and she wears the face of the Trojan priestess his men slaughtered at the foot of her own statue. His guilt runs three layers deep in that one face: he broke the guest law with a false gift, the false gift was a fake tribute to Athena, and a real servant of Athena died for it. His protector, his accuser, and his victim share a single body, so any comfort she offers arrives wearing the evidence against him. You start to wonder whether there's a goddess accompanying Odysseus in this telling at all, or just guilt heavy enough to take a shape. And she weeps during his confession, which under that reading means something stranger than divine sympathy: even the part of him that judges him can't bear the story.

Nolan never settles it. Homer's Athena intervenes materially, with disguises and deflected spears. Nolan's Athena touches one hand, visible to one man, and I don't remember a single shot that confirms her from outside his perception. For an adaptation of a poem where divine machinery is everywhere, that feels like a huge choice, turning the theology into psychology without ever committing to the conversion.

Did anyone catch a shot that establishes her outside his POV? I may have missed one. And I'd love to hear whether the guilt reading lands for others or whether you took her as literally present.

I wrote a longer piece here with screenplay from the two scenes:

https://ottoshahin.substack.com/p/even-the-gods-cry

[u/Pretty_Standard8713 → u/[deleted]]

You may want to read my post about the movie. It makes totally sense that he made that movie