Imposing Modern Progressive Morality On The Odyssey... and On Christopher Nolan
Nolan's film portrays Odysseus as a figure of conventional contemporary morals in much the same way cinephiles erase the conservatism from Nolan's work
There are, I suppose, spoilers for The Odyssey in this post, but they are of a rather abstract kind or about an epic poem that’s thousands of years old.
This morning as I took my daily walk with my son I was listening to the latest episode of The Big Picture, the Ringer’s colossus of a movies podcast, and it crystallized some of the thoughts I’ve had banging around in my head about The Odyssey and its reception. I saw the film on Saturday with my wife and enjoyed it, and like many its massive success has made me feel more optimistic about the future of movies. What’s really struck me about The Discourse on the film is a kind of symbolic mirroring between the film and its creator: the movie suffers in its second half by imposing a conventional modern Christian morality onto an ancient text that sprang from an alien pagan mindset, in a way that’s redolent of how the cinephile world sands the right-wing impulses from Nolan’s work.
Let me start by emphasizing: I liked the movie. Three out of five stars, for me. It was a big fun beautiful epic with gorgeous locations and gorgeous art design. The sound was incredible. The craft elements that you look for in a Christopher Nolan movie were all there, in spades. The Circe scene was dynamite. I thought the final fight against the suitors was a bit of a letdown and that the score got inexplicably bad in the last half hour or so, but in most ways the story that’s told is told very well. My biggest issue, what makes it a three star movie instead of something higher, lies in the film’s biggest narrative and thematic decision: imprinting an arc of war-weariness and regret onto Odysseus. The first half or so of the movie keeps Odysseus’s motivations at arm’s length, psychologically and emotionally, in a way that I found satisfying given the source material; with a tale this old, I want the protagonist and his impulses to feel inscrutable. In the second half, Nolan imposes a conventional “war is hell” storyline onto the film and its protagonist, which I found very safe and frankly a little trite. I think it’s a good example of projecting a fundamentally modern, Christian morality onto a story that is enticing in part because it comes from an alien and premodern culture, and to the detriment of the movie as a work of art.
Which reminds me, in an odd sense, of the way Nolan’s films are often discussed. I concede that the following comparison is, in a sense, too cute, but I think I’m putting my finger on something real. What’s really interesting is that there’s a similar impulse that you can see in that episode of The Big Picture which is very common in the (deeply progressive) world of film reviews and commentary: the urge to impose progressive assumptions on Nolan’s filmography, which to me demonstrates a lot of fundamentally conservative instincts.