The Odyssey · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the one image the whole campaign was built on: a single man in a horizontal frame so wide it holds a whole sea behind him without cutting away. That was the first thing Universal released of The Odyssey — Matt Damon as Odysseus, alone — and before a scene has screened it is already the film's argument. The frame is 15-perforation IMAX, the largest image commercial cinema has, and Nolan's wager is old and simple: you read the size of a man's world not by editing but by how small he sits inside a shot that refuses to look away. Almost everything we can honestly say about this film concerns its making. But the making is the meaning here, more than usual, because the format is the reading.

Deleuze would recognize what that frame is doing. In the movement-image — his name for the classical cinema of situation and act — a character sees a predicament and does something to change it; the cut serves the deed. The grandest version he calls the large-form action-image: a whole world-situation bears down until a man acts once, decisively, and transforms it. The Odyssey is the founding shape of exactly this. It is a nostos, a homecoming built entirely from delay — ten years of exile as the pressing situation, the return to Ithaca and the killing of the suitors as the single transforming act that snaps the world back into place. Homer gave narrative art its first fully loaded sensory-motor circuit, and Nolan is filming it at the largest scale anyone has attempted.

The encompassing situation has its own Deleuzian name — the synsign, the milieu that calls forth action. In this film it is the sea, and behind the sea the wrath of Poseidon; a hostile whole that keeps generating the trials Odysseus must out-think. And the way that whole gets photographed is where the lineage becomes concrete. Lawrence of Arabia taught the 70mm grammar Nolan borrows directly: stage a lone figure against unbroken landscape so scale is read through the frame, not assembled by cutting. Deleuze calls the resulting rhythm respiration-space — the film breathing between the vast openness of the milieu and the taut line of the man moving across it. Van Hoytema, shooting close and handheld even inside the giant format, is built to hold both at once: the sea enormous, the body intimate.

Then there is the problem the dossier is right to flag as genuinely open, and it is a beautifully Deleuzian one. Nolan photographs what is physically there; he builds sets and weather rather than synthesizing them. But the Odyssey is populated by gods. A Cyclops you can construct. Poseidon you cannot — he is not in any adjacent space you could pan to. Deleuze separates the relative out-of-field (there is always more sea just past the edge) from the absolute out-of-field: a force that belongs to no locatable space at all, a presence beyond the frame that the frame can only be haunted by. Divine antagonism is the absolute out-of-field made into a plot. The real technical question of this production — how a filmmaker devoted to the present and the practical renders an antagonist who by definition cannot be present — is, in Deleuze's terms, how you photograph the absolute out-of-field. The largest image ever shot may turn out to be about what it can't contain. That is also what the IMAX frame reaches for at its best: the Open, the sense that the set gives onto a larger changing whole, the reach that 2001 made its actual subject and that Nolan has chased ever since — scale and duration as the thing itself, not the backdrop to it.

And here the film hangs between Deleuze's two regimes. Homer's poem is the origin of in medias res: it begins late and recovers the monsters as tales Odysseus tells after the fact. That structure is not action; it is memory. Deleuze's recollection-image is precisely this — a former present summoned back, a man who has stopped acting in order to narrate. Jennifer Lame, who braided Oppenheimer's timelines, is the editor you hire if you mean to keep that nesting. Whether Nolan does is not yet known, and it is the whole game. Keep the retrospection and Odysseus becomes a seer, telling his way home as much as sailing it, and the movement-image tips toward the time-image. Linearize it and it stays a voyage, action resolving action. Homer built the ambiguity in twenty-seven centuries ago; the open question of 2026 is only whether the most action-committed director alive will honor it.

What this does to film as an art is less a rupture than a wager placed at maximum stakes. Against a decade of digital fabrication, Nolan pushes photochemical IMAX to its endpoint and stakes the oldest story in the canon on the claim that the largest analog image, projected in a real room, is the right vessel for it — the practical-spectacle argument he inherits from Ben-Hur and Spartacus, aimed now at myth itself. Next time the frame gives you one man against the whole sea, watch how the size is doing the storytelling. Then ask the question the film is quietly built on: is this a man acting his way home, or remembering it?