The Odyssey's Sea

Calypso and the ontology of female desire

This essay contains spoilers for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.

The Odyssey is an extraordinary patriarchal film. Admittedly, this is a strange thing for me to say. How can a feminist find a patriarchal work great? Yet throughout the film, that was the thought running through my mind: this is compelling as a patriarchal story, not as a feminist one.

The paradox exists because, if I were to define feminism’s purpose in one sentence, I would say it is to recapture the world through female desire, values, and language. I draw on writers such as Alice Walker and Hélène Cixous, whose ideas – from womanism to écriture féminine – seek not merely to reclaim narratives but to reinvent them.

The Odyssey does not come near this. The film, like the poem, tells the story of a world, a people, and a man through a patriarchal lens. Homer’s epic is unapologetically a tale of male desire, male values, and male language. Rather than scanning it for feminist threads where none are intended, I prefer to take it on its own terms. Judged on those terms, it succeeds brilliantly.

By male and female desire, I do not primarily mean erotic desire but ontological desire. Nor do I mean that desire itself is gendered. The longing for justice, belonging or recognition is universal. But what justice, belonging or recognition has meant for men, historically, is hardly identical to what it has meant for women.

Recorded history is a record of male ontological desire. We are living inside the male mind, and every so often it produces something astonishing, such as The Odyssey. These epic tales also tell stories of women, albeit through male sensibilities; their love, fears, and wants.

The female performances are excellent, though. Zendaya’s Athena is understated, and Lupita Nyong’o is ravishing as Helen of Troy. She and Samantha Morton, as Circe, leave a lingering impression. Anne Hathaway’s Penelope is so convincingly empowered by her own disempowerment that one almost forgets that she remains subject to the absolute authority of men – her husband, her son, her suitors.

Still, while the women of the film have been allowed to reclaim some power, this reclamation works within a male story. The true empowerment lies in noticing the spaces between the lines, on the margins, and in the glitches of male history, where unconventional women have always dwelled.

This is why my favourite character is the one played by Charlize Theron – Calypso, the nymph who is typically portrayed as a lonely temptress living in isolation in Ogygia, her home in the middle of the sea.

I cannot help but interpret Calypso differently than as a lonely temptress. She is a woman who is both within and outside the story. She too is, of course, an invention of male ontological desire. Yet she remains fugitive: a lapsus in patriarchal storytelling, a trickster nymph who has escaped her own script. Calypso creates an enclave where she lives among lotus flowers, eats fresh fish, and weaves not only textiles, but a whole new narrative world. In Odysseus, she encounters a man whom she mistakenly perceives to have escaped the story – his story – too, and thus unsuccessfully plots towards keeping him eternally.

Her fugitive quality is most palpable in the scenes where life on Ogygia unfolds according to its own rhythm: slow, embodied, and wise. In one of her exchanges with Odysseus, she says, “Give up the fight, give up control, and live,” revealing her own philosophy and her awareness that Odysseus will never give up a world where he sits firmly on the throne.

Watching Calypso, I found myself thinking, too, of Yemoja, the Yoruba deity of the waters, because she also inhabits the sea as more than a setting – as a way of being in the world.

Calypso is always by the sea. Watching her, I read the sea as a figure for female ontological desire: ever-changing, ever-present, swelling and withdrawing according to a rhythm that belongs to no throne, no conquest and no linear history.

Except for Athena, who omnisciently appears everywhere, the scenes of the other female characters mostly take place in dark, cave-like environments that give patriarchy its spatial form. Whenever the patriarchal narrative reaches a crescendo, such as when Odysseus and his men encounter the Cyclops, or when they are interred in the Trojan horse, or when the suitors get violent and offensive in the dungeon, we are in the cavernous darkness. These spaces reverberate with roars of anguish and triumph, the encroaching territorialism, the swishing of slaughter, snorting and brawling and cackling. Moreover, these scenes are often accompanied by low camera angles that add to Odysseus’s übermensch portrayal, such as when Odysseus’s men unironically sheepishly follow him to chase a flock of sheep.

Conversely, the sea scenes are often shot at eye level or bird’s-eye view, conjuring a sense of longue durée, deep relationality, and otherness. That is especially the case in the portrayal of Calypso’s slow and private intimacy on her island of Ogygia. There, away from the drumbeat of masculine conquest, the polytropic sequences of Odysseus’s journey can reveal the petrichor of his conflicted interior world.

Calypso may be the only one living in solitude, but all the female characters are in isolation from each other, separated as it were by the sea. The exception is the sirens. They are plural – therefore dangerous. Patriarchal mythology can only imagine such a gathering as a catastrophe. Their voices are not dangerous because they tempt men into pleasure; they are dangerous because they inhabit another way of knowing. As Odysseus recounts, their song was “all the things you most can’t have and that the most you can’t have is what you already had and lost”.

Odysseus is both saved and destroyed by the siren song. In divergence from Homer’s original poem, where Odysseus returns to Ithaca, this Odysseus becomes one of the ‘people from the sea’. This transformation begins with the sirens’ voices and is deepened through Calypso.

Men do not know what it is like to be inscribed into history through the eyes of a fearful, scheming male gaze.

They do not know what it is to exist on the outside of history, where the peripheral is a source of strength.

Nor do they know what it is like to have the possibility of becoming free from that story.

It is not simply to be in the sea, or to be by the sea. It is to be the sea.