The Desolation of Nolan III
I’ve been reflecting on why I have a charge with the Nolan’s desecration of the Odyssey (the overall focus of this blog).
Some of his comes a place inside of me where there isn’t language. A root reaction is that it feels like he transformed order into disorder (something beautiful into something ugly) to satiate his empty soul. He crossed moral boundaries. In my spiritual framework, he committed a sin
He showed a lack of respect to Homer and the many translations and adaptions that followed over the millennia. He created in essence a lie, claiming the title of Odyssey of which he treated as something to pillage. He used language dishonestly, claiming the mantle of authenticity for a film about a Greek poem without any Greeks, with many who were obviously not Greek, inauthentic drama (as one example, the Mediterranean tide is about 8 inches, it’s almost an island lake, so the we’re drowning scene with the Trojan Horse would not happen and then of course the Greeks were expert sailors and were extremely familiar with the tides/waters of that area having been there TEN YEARS), the Viking ship, the lack of gods and goddesses in an epic myth, turning characters into someone they are not, distorting history (Sea Peoples inclusion) from a lack of creativity, and so on. While acting so smug and superior as he does it.
Instead of a story about a man’s heroic journey, the cost of pride, the emptiness of gold at the cost of the lives of comrades (the emptiness that often must be born even in victory), resilience, humility, the yearning to return home, cunning and craft, we get a man who is broken, and weak and requires a woman (Calypso) to fix him as Nolan’s Odysseus munches lotus flowers on a grim, bleak beach.
The era of Homer was an age of civilization rise, and the Odyssey reflected that. Homer’s Odyssey is aspirational, it’s celebratory even as it questioned in places the cost of war. Nolan’s is a cement block tied around your feet (if male) as he tosses you into the river. And he pins the Bronze Age collapse on the Trojan Horse (seriously, what an idiot).
Nolan “Catholized” the Odyssey in terms of ethics but stripped out the faith, leaving it hollow. He pinned civilization collapse on Odysseus, linked the Trojan Horse to Original Sin, inserted into Odysseus a kind of regret for the war that simply didn’t exist during that era (Achilles walked away proudly in the Hell scene when Odysseus told him that his son had acquitted himself well with glory and spoils in the war). The poem acknowledges that there is a cost. But there is no concept of atonement or anything along that line. If any character expresses regret, it’s King Menelaus (Sparta), husband to Helen who though fabulously wealthy wonders (in the poem) if the gold was worth the lives of comrades.
Helen is divine—daughter of Zeus—she is no ordinary woman. As her husband, King Menelaus is guaranteed the Fields of Elysium when he dies. In the film, he is portrayed as a disgruntled wife-beater to the point of disfiguring Helen’s face (to further Helen as a victim in Nolan’s version instead of the instigator that she was in starting the war along with Paris—even within the logic of Nolan’s film, she is at fault because 1) she betrayed her marriage & husband 2) in an act that often led to war when kings were involved and she did so knowing the consequences.) The actual King Menlaus in the poem, even if quite angry with Helen for leaving him, would take care as to how he treated the daughter of Zues and he would not put at risk his eternity. It’s one of the many secondary consequences for removing the gods and goddesses, because the ancient Greeks were a people of faith and they behaved and made choices based on those beliefs. To take away the divine is to take away a part of who the characters were (long before Christians came along, the peoples of Europe were spiritual—it’s the faithless Nolans of the world who have forgotten what it means to be human/or what it used to mean to be human).
A lot of focus has been on race-swapping Helen, a calculated choice to frame dislike for the movie as racist, but those kinds of casting choices are widespread to the point of being a parody. Menelaus in the poem is “golden-haired” and is described as such multiple times. Nolan’s? Bald! Of course he is. There’s also this way in which characters, like Menelaus, start off by reeling off their bio; it’s boring, it’s not how people talk, and it shows a lack of creative effort.
Again, Nolan had no interest in adapting the Odyssey. His disregard is so complete that it becomes appropriation—using the title and character names from Homer’s poem without any interest in the story being told or who the characters are. Nolan could have told his modern Nam’ take in a way that retains ethics if he 1) acknowledged that it was a re-imagining and not an adaption 2) did not claim the title of the poem 3) did not use the character names given how radically different his are from the poem.
Homer’s Odyssey is in part a morality tale aimed at boys and men. Nolan strips that away to wallow in toxic feminism and his white/English guilt at the glory of the English Empire.
On the latter point, I think this comes out clearly with Circe when she takes on the mantle of victimhood on behalf of others she’s never met. It’s fake virtue that Nolan shows as something to be sympathetic of because that’s one of his shadows. He probably shields his shadow from his conscious self with this idea that he’s being compassionate (his ilk equate compassion to those with less power as good and those that withhold as bad without regard to boundary setting or objective data). In other words, he masks his self-hatred/guilt/shame under the guise of compassion and other “virtues” that must be performative in order to get external validation for what his true self understands to be fake (and against his own interests). Just because someone has less power, in whatever context, DOES NOT MAKE THEM BETTER. Less power is not a virtue. The person who can’t run around the block is not better than an Olympic marathon runner. If anything, the marathon runner has accrued virtue by pushing himself/herself to greatness.
A culture that does not celebrate greatness is destined to fall.
A culture that does not appreciate beauty and order falls into shadow.
What’s fascinating to me is that this mindset comes across as a new religion (rooted in feeling-based moralism) without the divine. Why do you need God when you are already morally superior, enlightened, and know better than anyone else? People like Nolan, who have forsaken God, are trying to fill the hole in their soul by performative virtue under a disordered mindset that thinks self-rejection/hatred is anything other than self-imposed darkness. In their zeal to validate their new order, compassion has been weaponized to coerce moral agreement much in the way that religion used to enforce its moral authority. The greater culture is swamped by such messaging to such a degree that even most religions have adjusted themselves to mirror that moral framework.
Lagash, a city-state in Sumer, created a “proto-empire” and it did so through war, sacking cities, slavery and so on…the template for civilization building was brutal from the beginning. That does not mean that we should not reflect on history, and learn from it, but those who are hobbled by doing so will be supplanted by those who are not. No people who have survived to this day have ancestors who do not have a long list of dark deeds to their name. Get over yourself, Nolan, get over this need for self-flagellation (it will not lead to repentance for whatever sins you think you carry), and love who you are.
Nolan as much as admitted in an interview with a podcaster from China that Western audiences are no longer willing to tolerate heroes (which may be true for the disordered Western minds of which there are many) so in effect the character of Odysseus must be degraded (a reflection of the Uglification movement in beauty standards which derives from the same impulse). When asked “If Odysseus should really repent for his pride or if pride is valid thing for a great man to have”, Nolan responded, “repentance wouldn’t matter either way because the damage is done.” Nolan could not even properly comprehend the question of if he did was unwilling to directly answer because the concept of a man earning his pride is beyond him. Nolan is a man empty of faith, of self-love, and he has become sterile to the human condition. There is a place for that kind of mindset, but the Odyssey wasn’t it.
In the Chinese podcast interview, Nolan dodged questions (inability to look into a mirror), and in his disjointed dialogue (using a bunch of words but not actually answering) he made an attempt to connect Zues Law with the Sea Peoples and civilization collapse. I commented on this before, but briefly, the Greeks had no concept of Nolan’s Law. Xenia was about hospitality. Nolan is projecting his modern values (and his guilt/shame) on to Homer’s Greeks. If the Greeks had been like Nolan, none of us would be here. I also find it humorous that Nolan hangs his version of the story on Zeus Law while at the same time stripping the divine from the story because any weight to Zeus Law would come from the divine. Meaning, if there is no God, there are no “cosmic” consequences to behavior and so within Nolan’s context there can be no impact to the Trojan Horse (which again, equating that to civilization collapse/Original Sin is laughable).
There has been some comment on the Dr Who Cybermen-esque Laestrygonians (that’s a mouthful!). I’m not a big fan of the armor though I consider that minor—the deeper problem is Nolan’s Laestrygonians like so much of the movie have been changed from their fundamental nature (again). In Nolan’s version, they are included as a plot beat to justify the moniker of “adaption.” In the poem, they are a fierce tribe of man-eating giants. They devour his scouts, and hurl boulders onto Odysseus’ fleet anchored in a harbor, sinking 11 of 12 ships. It is a dark moment showing the fragility of human existence. And Odysseus at this point has only himself and his crew. This plot beat contains cannibalism, and so did the Cyclops scene, so I get that Nolan would want to eliminate that part of the scene. But he could have included in the scene minus the scout-devouring. Showing giants hurling boulders into the harbor would have been a dramatic scene. Nolan cuts that for “realism” but Nolan’s grounded “realism” isn’t realistic—as presented in the movie, the Laestrygonians are just hanging out in full body armor, ready to attack anyone who happens on to their island? (with an alarm triggered by a LITTLE GIRL left alone in the woods in armor who starts screaming—the whole set up makes no sense and it isn’t human—and his Laestrygonians are human). No. The movie strips out the essential character of the Laestrygonians without bothering to give them a new story that makes sense. I have a feeling it was included because Nolan subverted so much of the poem and here he could say, well, I killed off the crew just like in the poem. But it still needs to work within the framework of his narrative. And the poem is much more grandiose—this is an Odessey!
I’ve commented on the lack of gods and goddesses, and it’s not just them that are absent but Odysseus’s faith in them (projecting, are we Nolan?). He displays a cynical attitude toward the divine, using the term “your gods” to describe the religious beliefs of his crew in a way that’s detached if not derisive. Yet Zeus Law is somehow the governing thread that makes Nolan’s story happen. The divine is absent, Odysseus the “hero” is faithless, but he nonetheless causes civilization collapse for violating the rules of the divine that neither he nor Nolan believes exist? No. This is the problem with pillaging the works of others that are not understood or disrespected or both. It doesn’t work for anyone who pauses a moment to think about it, which is why this movie will not have cultural impact. The movies that matter hold up in our minds, in our hearts, and in our conversations.
Few will watch this film in the future. It is already being forgotten. For me, these blogs are part of my process to discharge my anger at the desolation celebrated by so many, and to move on.
