Colin Dickey at The American Scholar:
If there is a striking (and, for some, unexpected) aspect to Matt Damon’s portrayal of Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, it is his explicit embodiment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Hardly the unflappable mythical hero many of us remember, Damon’s Odysseus is haunted by what he’s seen in war, and haunted by his own culpability.
Of all the Homeric translators and commentators over the millennia, Nolan seems most explicitly in dialogue with Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who discovered the therapeutic value of reading The Iliad with Vietnam veterans. Through his clinical practice, Shay came to believe that Homer’s Achilles is suffering from all the symptoms of complex PTSD as we now recognize it. But unlike the American military, Greek culture had numerous cultural means of treating this trauma that have since been either lost or actively suppressed.
more here.
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