Last week I watched Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Odyssey and a re-release of Ross McElwee’s 1985 documentary, Sherman’s March, which abruptly shifts from retracing the effects of the final civil war battles to the director’s own floundering love life against the backdrop of an American south afraid of a Soviet nuclear strike. There was a strange resonance between Odysseus, General Sherman, and McElwee as these pained men inflict destruction on others in a society rapidly changing around them.

Homer’s epic poem may be the archetype for the hero’s journey but it is a bit sad to see this very masculine and self-oriented blueprint still be relevant 2700 years later. The philosopher (and WW2 refugee) Simone Weil had an interesting take on Homer’s other poem in her essay “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force” where the synopsis (according to Wikipedia) is

The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad, is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.

In a way, Sherman’s March shows the interior stakes of this. He continually barges into these women’s lives and expects to be loved while rarely showing thoughtfulness or interest beyond a sort of infatuation. It takes on the character of conquest rather than encounter. While McElwee is sinking deeper into depression a date shows him her family’s fallout shelter, another shows him a right-wing separatist compound, another ex is burnt out from a decade of anti-nuclear activism and is moving across the country. With the Weil reframing, you can see how it is force itself as the motivating force animating these fearful sorts of reactions.

I thoroughly enjoyed both movies but found myself wondering if it is different types of myths that I wish for or if Simone Weil was right and we the reason these stories persist is that we are forever at the mercy of force whether we want to think about it or not.