The Desolation of Nolan IV
I’m feeling that there is a bit more to be said. As I said in III, the single word that for me most describes Nolan’s Odyssey is SHAME. And from that shame, come many secondary effects. There is a perspective in Feminist/Left culture that it’s no longer okay for stories to speak to boys and to men. Homer’s Odyssey was at its heart a man’s hero’s journey with life-lessons about what it took for a boy to become a man. Homer’s Odysseus was a flawed human, and that worked against him, but his desire to come home overcame that.
Nolan’s Odysseus is merely a broken man, and it’s strange that in Nolan’s world Odysseus’ triumphs are the very things that he must atone for.
In the poem, Odysseus only goes to fight at Troy because of a solemn oath he made along with many other men to protect Helen. Because of Helen’s beauty, many Greek princess & kings sought her out, and Odysseus, fearing bloodshed, advocated for the oath to bind the suitors into protecting Helen (allowing her to make the choice though I think it may have been her father, Tyndareus. who made the choice as that was a common practice when high-stakes politics were involved but Helen may have been able to influence her father’s decision) without triggering war. Helen married King Menelaus of Sparta. When she left with Paris of Troy, by oath, which bound Odysseus to Menelaus as one of the suitors, he had to fight for her return. Helen, aware of this oath, knowingly sets in motion a war that must follow her departure to Troy. Helen, more than any character in the Odyssey, is the instigator. Paris, though culpable, did not agree to the oath. But he would have understood the consequences.
So like so much in modern culture, there is a refusal to hold women accountable. Just look at Lindsay Clancy who killed her 3 children (3, 5 and 8months) yet for thousands of people on TikTok, she’s the ultimate victim; people have held rallies dressed in pink, have raised a million dollars for her parents, and have blamed the husband even though she admitted to doing it. I’m not saying there can’t be zero compassion—she may have had post mortem, it is quite real, and Lindsay is a perpetrator.
Women and men are light and they are dark. To believe otherwise is to pretend that women are not human. It’s one reason why the girlbosses / Mary-Sues fall so flat because these characters are not allowed to be anything more than superficially human. Because being human is messy. It can be dark. It can be scary.
Because there has been such a widespread attack on IPs that were focused on boys/men (Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, Dr Who, Lord of the Rings, etc.), there seems to be a concerted effort to erase boys and their stories from the collective conscience.
Nolan disregards the poem in all of its important forms—so why is he otherwise telling this story? Shame projection yes, but I find it telling the foundational story for the hero’s journey drew his attention. He himself said, “the end of the poem is grim and so misogynistic, I had to exclude some of that material” because the female servants were killed as traitors for sleeping with rival suitors. So again, no accountability. Compassion without boundaries. Women do no wrong. It’s misogynistic to kill traitors if they are women (keeping in mind, a lot more men suffered that fate). And why are you doing a film on a story that offends you so?
The killings are brutal, emotional, and it again shows Odysseus and Telemachus to be complicated—heroic and dark, and that darkness can be viewed as a necessary part of the human condition to maintain order. One doesn’t have to agree with it—one can be outraged by it—it is what it is—thought-provoking (what could have been done differently to enforce accountability) and emotional even if a form of justice.
In Nolan’s Odyssey, the first several chapters of the poem that feature Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, are removed. In the film, Telemachus does meet the king of Sparta but its stripped down and tells us nothing about who Telemachus is or what he’s trying to become. In the poem, Athena acts a guide for Telemachus because Odysseus is absent. Given the modern cultures disregard for fathers, I think the poem’s message is relevant—that boys need their father’s guidance, and that a woman can step in as a surrogate. But even as Athena does so in the poem, its to help Telemachus gain the knowledge, wisdom and experience he needs to be king, and he gets that from older men. The modern culture also dismisses the knowledge of the older generations and so again I think the poem stands as a reminder of how human societies used to work and perhaps to reflect.
Athena also serves to show Telemachus’ character. In the poem, she appears in disguise but Telemachus extends to her hospitality (Xena) in contrast to the suitors. The movie does have a stand-in with a beggar but it doesn’t have the same weight, and the beggar cannot act as the equivalent of the poem’s Athena (she is actively trying to teach Telemachus the lessons of becoming a man, something the beggar cannot do). Again, this is a worthwhile lesson for the modern culture where boys have in many ways been written off (along with their fathers).
The only thing in the film that Telemachus gets from the Spartan king is a “you have to lead, son” line and a half-ass swordplay lesson. And now he’s ready to be king? Nolan clearly didn’t have much interest in any of the characters except Odysseus as a broken man. In the poem, Telemachus went through a journey to ready himself to be king but in the end Odysseus returned as king—in the film, Odysseus sails off in the sunset leaving his son as king to deal with the civilization collapse that he (Odysseus) caused (in Nolan’s film). But there’s nothing in the film to suggest how Telemachus has the stature or ability to be king. Meaning, Nolan shortcut Telemachus’ journey in the film but made him king anyway. And he has Odysseus the father once again abandoning his son to deal with the mess that in Nolan’s context has led to civilization collapse.
Men are supposed to be examples to their sons. That’s a core morality of the poem that Nolan disregards. Odysseus abandons his son. The exchange between Telemachus and the Spartan king references the son of Agamemnon (Orestes) avenging his father’s death, which in the poem makes sense because his wife killed him in a palace coup, but in Nolan’s film Agamemnon is killed by his wife because he sacrificed their daughter which leaves it very unclear whether Orestes avenging his father’s death is in fact justice that should be modeled. And how is Telemachus supposed to look up to a father, and learn from him, when Nolan has it that Odysseus should be ashamed of all that he has done and who he is, and that he must repent. There is nothing there for Telemachus to learn; the lesson, as such, is that he should do nothing or prepare to be ashamed and to repent. Absolutely, Telemachus should not accept the kingship as that would put him above others, and that very act in Nolan’s worldview is a sin.
So Nolan leaves the son with the very crime that he has dumped upon Odysseus.
How tiresome. Nolan might as well have switched out Odysseus for himself in the Calypso scenes—at least that would have had some honesty.
Nolan has turned the hero into a villain. Because great men are in Nolan’s context by definition villains. In Nolan’s words, “we want to view people as equal” which is Marxist language to say anyone who aspires to greatness must be degraded to maintain “equality”. No one can be better than the lowest common denominator. Everyone must be the weakest link. In Nolan’s words, “do we have to apologize for greatness, yes we do.” No one who has worked hard in life, who has struggles to better themselves, to be the best version of they can be, should respect the message of this film or its messenger.
In the poem, Helen helps Odysseus because in the poem she’s not an embittered witch. Helen, along with her husband, tell Telemachus who is father was to give him a roadmap on who he needed to become. But Nolan insists all women are victims so in the film she’s just bitter.
Even in small ways, the film fails.
I’ve pointed out how because Nolan has mangled the poem, it no longer makes sense. Nolan as a storyteller is not in Homer’s league. But the issue would occur in any well-written story. Another example is Eumaeus (a slave in the poem but more of a servant in the film) overhears that the suitors plan to kill Telemachus when he returns from a trip. The suitors discover this. Yet Eumaeus is somehow left alive. He’s old. There are a lot of ways to kill him that would not arouse undo suspicion. And the suitors are already planning to kill Telemachus, so why would they be hesitant about killing a slave/servant? Nor does Eumaeus tell Penelope, which he should do (and he says in the film, “I answer to my mistress” which implies he’s loyal). So it’s all rather pointless. Also, I may have said this before but use an older actor to play an older character unless there’s an overarching reason not to—the makeup is ok, but I tell it’s makeup—where’s the “authentic”?
Some have praised the film’s structure though on this point Nolan is actually following the poem’s narrative structure though he of course changes it—in the poem, Odysseus washes up on an island Scheria where at a great feast Odysseus recounts who he is and what he has been going through before sailing off to Ithica. In the film, Odysseus washed up on an island where Calypso happened to be. She is not a goddess, and Nolan never bothers say who she is—except as a plot device who asks for the next memory (the film is about Nolan, you see). Then their final scene is a confusing mess where she says she has fallen in love with him, yet she knew he always wanted to go home, but that’s not what Odysseus said earlier in his memory flashbacks, and his desire to go home at that point in the film is because Calypso withdrew the drugs—it’s coming across as a story that has not been thought through. And oddly, Odysseus was on the island 7 years, eating lotus leaves, but he looks to be in amazing shape and so again the film (Nolan) isn’t thinking much about the consequences of the decision to tell a story very different from the story he is pretending to tell.
In the China podcast interview (referenced in III), Nolan was asked “should Odysseus be asked to repent of his human pride.”
In a word response that I touched on in III, he finishes off by saying that “hubris is tragic, because it’s irreversible essentially.” And that’s Nolan looking into the mirror. He subverted Homer’s poem, a foundational western civilization text, ignored its themes, characters, moral lessons, virtues, beliefs, and treated the poem with a profound disrespect could only come from unchained pride.
I’m not clear if Nolan is Odysseus or Zeus but I suspect he carries in his inner world that he is both. Nolan did not tell us the Odyssey—he told us a story about himself. And that would be okay if he didn’t appropriate someone else’s story to tell his own.
I may at some point reorganize the four blogs. There is still more to say but I really must move on. I am exhausted thinking about the tragedy of Nolan’s film.
