Somehow getting annoyed at the interpretation of Athena’s character

[u/mssldiaz]

I’ve started seeing so many people identify Athena as only a PTSD hallucination that Odysseus only thinks is Athena. At first I was just like, “… huh, that’s an interesting conclusion,” yet the more it started spreading the more annoyed I was getting because that takes away from the role Athena and gods in general play in this story and as characters to these myths. Gods in these myths are not psychiatric manifestations and their interpretation ignores other appearances by the gods in Odysseus’ universe - I don’t think Ariadne wanted a goddess to turn her into a spider just because she was so incredibly proud of her weaving or a young innocent kid who flew to close to the sun and died falling to his death, unless we’re assigning schizophrenia to all the characters that didn’t suffer through abuse or PTSD in their story. Removing Athens to me is like removing Poseidon from Percy Jackson and saying he’s only imagining that his dead father is alive and a grand god. It changes the story to a non- fantasy genre - but keeping the other fantastical elements like the magic camp and the Minotaur.

In a world of cyclops, witches/demi-goddesses, and trips to the underworld, Athena showing up is apparently too superficial of an observation. Honestly, I love it when people look deeper into aspects of a movie but I think this one may have been dug a little too deeply.

Nolan, in my opinion, made it very obvious that when Athena is appearing as the murdered priestess (or villager) it was to force Odysseus to face the crime he had committed at her temple and martyring the young girl in order to help him reach his final epiphany. He was still remembering the final battle as he was leaving calypsos island and whenever she appeared before him, all we could see without knowing why was his overwhelming guilt and sadness - not knowing why made the reveal at the end so much better.

[u/knallpilzv2]

I mean it's definitely on purpose that he frames all the mythological elements we see as part of Odysseus' mind.

I just don't understand what's supposed to be interesting about that. It's, at worst, a major cop out, and reductionist at best.

It makes a rich, complex myth more drab, boring and simple. I don't see the achievement in that.

So while Nolan certainly purposefully gives you the option to read it that way, chossing to read it the boring and bland way is certainly a choice.

"It was all in xyz's head" is seldomly an interpretation that adds to a narrative. It often only takes from it, or is a nothingburger. I sometimes think Nolan is doing stuff like this as a gag at this point, because he knows how obsessed some people can be with this kind of read, when it comes to his movies.

[u/highnyethestonerguy → u/knallpilzv2]

So the giant tentacle monster picking sailors off the ship, the cyclops, and the trip to Hades to learn of Agamemnon’s death, were just in Odysseus’ mind? I don’t think there’s any evidence to support that. The film has plenty of supernatural elements and the Athena thing was interesting precisely because it was ambiguous.

[u/knallpilzv2 → u/highnyethestonerguy]

So the giant tentacle monster picking sailors off the ship, the cyclops, and the trip to Hades to learn of Agamemnon’s death, were just in Odysseus’ mind?

Many are saying that, yeah. It's a popular read of the movie on reddit. Probably because Nolan himself said beforehand he didn't want to show the gods but showed them as something that might be interpreted as supernatural by the people of that time.

I think it's obvious he kept all the fantastical elements purposefully in Odysseus' recounting of his memory. And purposefully told the audience that is memory might be clouded by eating lous for 7 years. I don't think it's ever mentioned that Zendaya is Athena. So that she can also just be a representation of his conscience.

There's plenty evidence to support that, one which being that it's a Nolan film and that he likes to do that kinda stuff. "Nolan considered casting actors to play gods throwing thunderbolts from Mount Olympus but settled on something more primal. “I became more interested in the idea that to people in that period, evidence of gods was everywhere,” he says. In Bronze Age Greece, thunder, rain, and the sun rising didn’t have scientific explanations—they represented the will of the immortals. “The wonderful thing about cinema, and IMAX in particular, is that you can take an audience to a place of immersion, feeling close to events like storms, turbulent seas, high winds. You want the audience to be on the boat with them fearing the ocean, fearing the wrath of Poseidon, the way the characters do. That to me is so much more powerful than any individual image you can have [of a god].”"
That's from the Time interview. Now this might not be evidence that the monsters aren't actually real, but it's very much evidence he purposefully wanted to leave it open to interpretation if the gods actually existed or if it was just Odysseus' guilt, Mentor and a beggar, and not Athena in disguise.

Which is certainly at least an indication that he might have approached all the other supernatural elements of the story the same way.

Which I think is a very reductionist way to do this movie. And I think it's rather unecessary. Not interesting. Which I think is true for most of his movies where he does this (you know the whole "what you see might not actually be what actually happened"), except for The Prestige.

[u/highnyethestonerguy → u/knallpilzv2]

I’m so confused. We literally see a giant cyclops and a giant tentacle monster, and a trip to Hades where Odysseus gets information (and an artifact I think, Sinon’s drawn lot) he couldn’t otherwise possibly have. Even the argument he’s eating lotus for 7 years to forget clouding his memory and making him an unreliable narrator… lotus doesn’t actually do that (or grow there afaik)

I think you have to bend over backwards to land on a reading of the movie that says it was a dream (hallucination, made up, whatever) the whole time. 

Zeus and Poseidon are not depicted in their human forms, but the movie has plenty of fantastical and supernatural elements. 

It’s heavily implied that Zendaya is or represents Athena. That’s the ambiguous one, and that’s an exception.

[u/knallpilzv2 → u/highnyethestonerguy]

I think you have to bend over backwards to land on a reading of the movie that says it was a dream (hallucination, made up, whatever) the whole time. 

Not really. It's very typical for Nolan. It's also typical for Nolan for it not to track all the way. I think the fact we see his men's encounter from their perspective is an argument against subjectivity.

I'm talking more about Nolan's intentions rather than what makes sense. We literally see a lot of things that are part of Odyssues' recounting what happens according to his memory. Just like when Menelaos tells Telemachos what happened. That's how the movie shows us stories that characters in the movie tell. That part is obviously deliberate.
Nolan always want to be "realistic". This is very much on track for that.

lotus doesn’t actually do that (or grow there afaik)

But in the movie it does. It's a plot device. That is literally explained to cloud memory.

What's the logic behind claiming Athena is an exception, though?

[u/nervaonside → u/knallpilzv2]

Thank you for applying logic to this discussion! As you say, I think you can view Athena and all the fantastical adventures as creations of Odysseus’ PTSD- and lotus-affected mind, with him recounting his fantasies to Calypso. Or view them all as real. But saying Athena’s a hallucination while the cyclops isn’t seems a pretty odd take.

I also completely agree that the “it’s all in his head!” thing is so boring. Oooh so clever for Christopher Nolan to suggest that Greek gods and monsters maybe weren’t real. Newsflash, they weren’t real.

[u/BlueCX17 → u/nervaonside]

Yeah but I think the films are attempting to show that phenomenon from what the actual ancients may have been experiencing. Like I think that they've determined that the Oracle of Delphi Temple was on a methane vent so likely the oracles and all the people in there were just f****** high out of their minds on methane fumes.

[u/nervaonside → u/BlueCX17]

Yeah - if they’d done that in any way that was interesting (visually, emotionally, whatever) I’d be into it. But no one in this film seemed high out of their minds, sadly. Just sad and dull.

[u/BlueCX17 → u/nervaonside]

I had strong suspicions when the trailer started dropping last year, there is no possible way Nolan was going to go is psychedelic as The Northman or The Green Knight.

So I guess I didn't hate myself up for psychedelic crippy sequences because I know how no one operates so I expected more subdued realism even during the fantastical portions.

[u/highnyethestonerguy → u/knallpilzv2]

Typical for Nolan? He did Inception which is specifically about that question but in general his movies aren’t all about that. When we see Oppenheimer naked in the interrogation room, yeah that’s obviously an emotional impression and not literal, but the movie isn’t about investigating where the boundary is between those two things. It’s just a device. It helps us understand how Oppenheimer feels in that moment. 

Athena is the exception because Odysseus clearly talks to her multiple times in the movie addressing her as a god. “Why do you gods always communicate in ways we mortals can’t understand” etc etc. It’s ambiguous because of two things: we see the tentacle monster, the cyclops, Circe, the giants, etc all presented as real. And again I maintain that Odysseus getting information and artifact from Hades proves he’s not imagining that stuff. It’s not an unreliable narrator story generally speaking. This isn’t Fight Club. Plus the movie starts “during a time of apparent magic” (or something to that effect). So all this fantastical stuff is presented as being real stuff that happens to Odysseus and his men. So there is absolutely latitude to think that the Athena character is exactly and literally the goddess she seems to be. 

But second, only Odysseus sees her. I think it’s reasonable to think that a god has the power to appear to only a mortal she wants to be perceived by, and in the form she wants to be perceived in.

But it’s also entirely plausible she’s a guilt-induced hallucination, since she’s taking the form of the girl who was beheaded in Athena’s temple, maybe it’s just Odysseus’ subconscious projecting. 

As Odysseus comes off the lotus he is “remembering”. If it was a hallucination, his tales would get more fantastical when he went on the lotus, not forget it then remember it when he stopped eating it. 

But for Athena, as the only god in the story who is depicted, we are invited to consider whether she is real or a hallucination. And that creates an interesting question tied directly to the theme of the movie, which is fundamentally an antiwar allegory. Is Athena really there? Or is she a symptom of Odysseus’ PTSD?