Having seen the movie and now rereading the poem, I have been thinking about Odysseus.
Like many of you, I recently returned to The Odyssey, prompted by the 2026 film and by that pleasant compulsion, familiar to readers of this newsletter, to go back to the source after watching the film. Adaptations send us to their sources, where we discover what was omitted or softened for consumers of Hollywood narratives.
One of the great male heroes, Odysseus is brave, cunning, eloquent, resilient, and longs for home with an intensity that has survived nearly three thousand years. He wants to return home to Ithaca and his household. He yearns for Penelope.
He also sleeps with other women, well, goddesses and witches in Calypso and Circe
In Homer’s poem, Odysseus becomes the lover of Circe and spends years in the bed of Calypso. The two episodes differ. The daughter of a god, Calypso holds the power to detain Odysseus for years; Circe first encounters him as a supernatural adversary. Those complications deserve acknowledgment, as do the radically unequal standards governing the behavior of husbands and wives in ancient Greek marriage.
Penelope, meanwhile, remains at home, surrounded by men who eat her food, occupy her house, pressure her to remarry, insult her son, and presume that her husband is dead. She holds them off through intelligence, patience, and her habit of unraveling her handiwork. Odysseus is permitted adventures while Penelope embodies constancy. His infidelities are treated almost as weather encountered on the voyage. Her fidelity is the moral architecture, almost the definition, of the home to which he hopes to return.
As a devoted husband, I find this asymmetry dispiriting. Marriage has taught me that fidelity is an active habit of the heart: the daily, repeated choice to recognize one particular person as home.
Odysseus spends the whole poem trying to get home, but he is remarkably casual about violating what home means.
That thought sent me looking for a certain kind of man in the movies: not merely a loving husband, and not merely a man who performs some grand gesture after having behaved badly, but a man whose loyalty survives opportunity, distance, fear, vanity, grief, or temptation. Popular stories give us no shortage of faithless husbands. Adultery is an efficient plot device; fidelity is more difficult to dramatize. A man who simply keeps his vows may be admirable in life, but his constant love for his wife seems not to interest screenwriters.
And yet devoted husbands do appear on film.
Consider Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II. No one would mistake Vito for a universal moral model. His ascent is inseparable from violence, intimidation, and the construction of a criminal dynasty. Yet the film gives him a strangely illuminating moment when Genco Abbandando takes Vito to see the beautiful young actress he admires. He asks his friend what he thinks of her. Vito calls her beautiful—for Genco. “For me,” he says, “there is only my wife.” With those words, we find evidence of a violent man who nevertheless observes a moral code.
Then there is John McClane in Die Hard 2. While waiting for Holly at the airport, he receives unmistakable attention from another woman, an airport employee who facilitates a fax that provides the investigating McClane some information about the film’s villains. She propositions him, but he deflects with “Just the fax, ma’am.” The joke depends upon his unfashionably solid devotion to his wife Holly.
Aragorn, in The Lord of the Rings, offers the nobler and more courtly version. For much of the story, he is not yet Arwen’s husband, but his commitment to her has already taken on the character of a vow. The royal heroine Éowyn is brave, beautiful, admirable, and nearby, while Arwen is far away, separated from him by distance, destiny, and the unnerving complications that arise when one’s future father-in-law is an Elf who is thousands of years old.
Aragorn’s treatment of Éowyn shows us his character. He does not exploit her affection or enjoy it as proof of his own desirability. He is tender to her without being false. He can recognize the worth of another woman without behaving as if admiration must become possession.
George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life plays a version of Odysseus who never gets to leave Ithaca. He spends much of the film in Bedford Falls believing that life has passed him by. His marriage to Mary must bear the weight of financial anxiety, disappointed ambition, domestic chaos (including painful piano practice sessions), and despair.
The Bailey marriage is moving because it is made from the ordinary materials of most successful marriages: a drafty house, children underfoot, bills, interruptions, old frustrations, and affection tested by exhaustion. George’s crisis reveals how densely his life has been woven into Mary’s.
If George and Mary show devotion under pressure, Gomez and Morticia Addams show devotion as delight. Gomez is not resigned to marriage. He is thrilled by it. Years into the relationship, he behaves as though he has only just discovered Morticia and cannot believe his luck. I know just how he feels.
The Pixar film The Incredibles borrows the visual grammar of an affair. Bob Parr sneaks out. He lies about where he has been. He changes his body and becomes energized by a secret life. There is even a glamorous woman associated with that life. Helen has ample reason to fear the familiar betrayal, even though Bob’s devotion for his wife and his children never falters. Plus, the four of them get to work together.
Like George Bailey, Carl Fredricksen in Up postpones his grand adventures. Ellie blesses his next chapter even if she doesn’t get to join him, and his actions reflect his enduring appreciation of her early encouragement and fearlessness. His security in their love proposels him back into life and into our hearts.
Perhaps only Chuck Noland’s separation from his beloved is as definitive as Carl Frederickson’s. Stripped of society, routine, and any assurance that he will ever return, the hero of Castaway holds onto Kelly as part of his connection to the human world. Like Odysseus, Noland is stuck on an island, and I would like to believe that they both imagined their beloveds when they closed their eyes.
The film also teaches us that loyalty may endure in one person while circumstances force another life to change. Chuck’s devotion is therefore not rewarded in the neat way we might desire – he kills no suitors — but it is nevertheless admirable. Also, it helps keep him alive. The promise of home remains powerful even when home cannot be restored exactly as it was.
These men are not interchangeable, and some are imperfect fits. Aragorn and Noland spend much or all of their stories unmarried. Carl is a widower. And Vito is a faithful husband engaged in underhanded dealings with nearly every civic virtue.
I do wish male fidelity were treated not as dullness, weakness, or the absence of plot, but as a form of courage. The husband who keeps faith recognizes that not every appetite deserves a story.
Men who battle neither monsters nor talking Doberman Pinschers nor shipwrecks can still be heroes. As someone known for making my way faithfully home to my wife Kate, I know which story I would rather inhabit.
I hope you can join us for the pub quiz tonight. Here are the hints: Ancient structures, anatomical terms, anagrams, archaeological surveys, bands, bird names, botanical terms, counties, chemical structures, entertainers, controversial singles, data centers, economic anxieties, educational programs, European governments, fertilizer labels, floral structures, franchise sales, gender terms, generational labels, genres, geometric curves, geometric terms, governors, historical dramas, inflation rankings, invented species, judicial careers, literary allusions, abbreviations, military raids, musical terms, national parks, nautical terms, organ layers, ownership groups, personal identities, pigments, plant nutrients, prolific writers, bands, record performances, sales rankings, sailors, sequel titles, slogans, solo careers, speculative novels, spirals, surgical preparations, team names, throws, wartime leaders, weekend rankings, wildlife populations, current events, and, purportedly, Shakespeare.
- Find below three questions from last week:
Books and Authors. Ann Patchett’s newest novel is her best reviewed. Its title is also the name of the horse on the cover and the last name of an American painter whose first name was James and whose middle name was McNeill. Name the novel. Whistler
- Sports. Both Luis García Jr., who was recently acquired ahead of the trade deadline, and George Lombard, the fifth-youngest player to make his Major League debut, hit home runs in their debuts with the same AL baseball team this week. Name the team. The New York Yankees
- Shakespeare. The 1999 high-school comedy film 10 Things I Hate About You and the 2003 romantic comedy Deliver Us from Eva are loosely based on which problematic Shakespeare play? The Taming of the Shrew