Christopher Nolan’s 2020 film Tenet – a journey backwards, forwards and laterally through time – was no triumph by the director’s own exacting standards. It was too much of a head-scratcher for the populist entertainer’s traditional audience and lost Warner Bros at least $50m. Nolan touted his next project to sceptical ears: who was going to watch a sprawling biopic about a physicist with an obscure name and a penchant for quoting the Bhagavad Gita?
As it turned out, a lot of people. Taking nearly $1bn at the box office, Oppenheimer was 2023’s third-highest grossing film and swept the awards circuit. Its visionary director, having abandoned Warner for Universal, was vindicated. Among a mass of repetitive superhero franchise slop, Oppenheimer and the Promethean story of the atom bomb was what the world wanted. Now the auteur sits at the very height of his power, with more freedom than ever to make whatever he wants. And Nolan has decided on the perilously ambitious adaptation of the 24-book epic poem The Odyssey. Why this, and why now?
The Odyssey is an episodic tale of Odysseus’s long journey home – to Ithaca, his wife, father, son and dog – after the Trojan War. The Odyssey, as told once by the bards and now by the translator, is perspective-shifting and unravels through extended flashback. Nolan has long traded in stories with such distorted chronology: in Inception, time expands and contracts with a whiplash effect; in Dunkirk, three timelines run concurrently; in Interstellar an astronaut’s children age faster than he does.
A return to the classics in 2026 (when the film is slated for release) is a timely gambit for this unusually political director. Nolan is no product of the online right; his political sensibility is more traditionally conservative. But to the reactionary, the classical world represents a total moral inversion of the liberal ethos of the 21st century. Vitality and virility were celebrated virtues: Achilles’ rage and brute strength led him to defeat foreign actors. In the online right’s simplistic rendering of the past, minorities existed only to have wars waged against them; the pristine whiteness of the extant sculpture of the time (no matter that they were once painted in vibrant colours) provides an aesthetic allure. The warfare was corporeal, uncorrupted by AI and machines (Achilles was ultimately felled by an arrow to his heel).
For the online right – with Jordan Peterson and the internet personality Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) as their standard bearers, Nietzsche their ultimate lodestar – the classical world is not a mythical realm or a part of history, but a halcyon utopia to be replicated. (“Bronze Age Mindset”, BAP’s 2018 pamphlet, is particularly concerned with the tyrannical virtue of the ancient Greeks.) As the right claws back cultural power after the turbo-liberalism of the 2010s – and fiercely defends the classics from perceived attempts to corrupt them through decolonisation – Nolan has picked an opportune moment to ride the zeitgeist down from Mount Olympus.
But Nolan is no mere opportunist, and Odysseus is the perfect vehicle for him to express his neuroses. As Will Lloyd observed in these pages at the time of Oppenheimer’s release, “Every Christopher Nolan movie is about the torture of a man like Christopher Nolan”: solitary, languid, rational, sober. Who better than Odysseus – wily, determined and never, ever rash – to be tortured next? (And there is plenty of opportunity in the source material: Odysseus is held as a sex-slave by Calypso for years and taunted by the sinister allure of the Sirens; Odysseus’s exit pursued by Cyclops may be proof of his cunning, but would have been a rather miserable experience nonetheless.) The opening word of the Iliad is “rage”, and Achilles wins because he is stronger than Hector, but The Odyssey is a story in which considered and deliberate thinking prevails over animalistic instincts.
Lloyd also observed that Nolan’s heroes are “consumed by” the societies they seek to control. J Robert Oppenheimer only reckons with his cosmos-destroying weapon at the film’s denouement; Inception’s Dom Cobb cannot comprehend the death – or not – of his wife at the hands of the dream-invading technology; the young men of Dunkirk are thwarted, drowned on the Maginot Line.
If Nolan’s greatest desire is to remind his protagonists that they are subjects vulnerable to larger forces, then the classics provide a ready-made framework for him to do so. The Odyssey, for all Odysseus’s smarts and deception, is a manifesto: mortal agency is always sublimated to the power of the gods (just as humans pay fealty to the atomic bomb, or the power of the Nazis). The gods gathering on Mount Olympus to discuss Odysseus’s fate is a golden opportunity for Nolan’s agitprop: proof that there is a higher order that exceeds the comprehension and capabilities of man; that hubris is the true original sin.
The increasing cultural power of the online right, and its obsession with the distant past, might make Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey a well-timed project. Its Homeric ideals of glory, agency and heroism will be devoured by them as vindication of their political project. The director, whose work is consumed by the distorting of reality and time, has found a perfect subject. Odysseus might be smart, but now it is only Nolan who can play god, in the most anticipated performance of his life.
[See also: Megalopolis’s bad history]
This article appears in the 15 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Disruptors