As a British-American who has portrayed American dominance across space (Interstellar) and time (Tenet), Nolan both explores and exemplifies the “translation of Empire,” the shift in cultural and political dominance from Europe and especially Britain to America, which means the United States.
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Nolan is a didactic filmmaker—he always has something to teach us, and he is not afraid to do so in ways both subtle and heavy-handed. Heavy-handed, say, in the parallels between The Dark Knight Rises and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities—in case you missed them, Commissioner Gordon quotes from the most pathetic passage of that highly pathetic novel at the memorial for the not yet dead Bruce Wayne. Subtle, when the only two unanswered political statements in Oppenheimer are General Groves’s comment about Manhattan Project counterintelligence officer Boris Pash that “This is a man who’s killed communists with his own hands” and Republican E. O. Lawrence’s line about racial integration that “I want to vote for it, not talk about it.” Subtle, when in The Odyssey the wannabe warrior Sinon is played by the wannabe man, the former Ellen Page, and when the face that “launched a thousand ships” is played by the striking and (thanks to makeup) scarred Lupita Nyong’o, rather than a conventional beauty.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus is able to regain and maintain the throne of Ithaca after killing the suitors because Athena intervenes to protect him from their relations. In Nolan’s The Odyssey (note the definite article in the title; this is no Bram Stoker’s Dracula, boys and girls), Odysseus excludes Telemachus as much as possible from the actual killing and goes into exile with Penelope, to the west. Telemachus is left to rule Ithaca, hopefully with wisdom and with the manliness his father tried to keep him from exemplifying.
Unsubtly, The Odyssey is a film about the end of the world. As Nolan says in his interview with Zhong Shu (the podcaster and Ph.D. student Zhuge Yiyang): “I think for me, it partly comes out of having worked on Oppenheimer before this, which is very much a film about the end of the world, about the collapse of civilization ultimately. So, I think yeah, I definitely carried that sensibility into this adaptation of the Odyssey.”
The Odyssey is about the end of one world, Odysseus’s “world of palaces and trade and language.” It is also about the beginning of a new world, with the knowledge that world too will end when its peoples no longer sing their inherited songs with their tales of ancient crimes. The crime of the Trojans, according to Homer but barely alluded to in Nolan’s movie, was Paris’s abduction or seduction of Helen—and Troy’s refusal to yield her up to end the war. The crime of the Greeks, according to Nolan’s The Odyssey, was to abuse hospitality and reverence for the gods through the Trojan horse trick—conceived and executed by Odysseus himself: “one man’s trick to break Zeus’s law forever,” as he says.
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In Nolan, as well as in Homer, Odysseus is an exemplar of rationality. In Nolan, he is virtually as much a Promethean as his archetype, the American Prometheus Robert Oppenheimer. Knowing that his men are doomed by the gods to die, Nolan’s Odysseus claims, “I can still save them from the gods,” to which the blind prophet Tiresias says, “but not from themselves.” Odysseus’s men have a nature they cannot overcome, perhaps an ultimately bestial nature, disguised in human form, as Nolan’s witch Circe pronounces. Odysseus is the exemplary man, “A Man!” as both Homer and Nolan’s bard agree. For Nolan, as he says to Zhongshu, “the gods are real, but they are inside people.” Odysseus’s humanity is revealed in that he not only talks to Athena but also in that Athena talks to him.
But is what is within us ultimately under our control? Can Odysseus’s men help being beasts in human form? Can Odysseus do more than just manipulate religion? Calypso, played by the actual Hollywood goddess Charlize Theron, tells Odysseus, “You must give yourself to the storm, give yourself to Poseidon, take your punishment… Zeus won’t let him kill you….” In the movie, the raft brings Odysseus all the way to the shores of Ithaca. Is it possible to submit to gods if, like Nolan, but unlike his Greeks and Trojans, who have “common gods,” we think the gods are real but inside us?
Nolan offers an Odyssey that shows both the illusion and how it is worked. It is a tale from “a time of apparent magic,” and for nearly three hours it makes the magic appear and yet not be real. But can real lessons come from anthropogenic gods and fake miracles? At this moment in the translation of empire on a round globe from East to West, are we willing to take them from anywhere else?
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