Deciphering Christopher Nolan’s conservative siren song in The Odyssey

Every three years or so, critics, the commentariat and the terminally online converge on the latest Christopher Nolan film to rehash the tired argument as to whether he is ‘woke’ or not. But if we want to talk politics about these films, that misses the more interesting opportunity to given a glimpse behind the curtain, and understand the hopes, fears and tactics of society’s dominant class – in an increasingly uncertain moment for their once assured system of rule.

There’s an old joke among socialists, that if you want an unfiltered picture of what capital thinks, you should read the Financial Times. It’s a publication where the ruling class speaks to itself – not where it is working to convince the rest of us that we should be fighting among ourselves with assorted dog whistles – so the publication’s conservatism tends to paint a (generally) more authentic portrait of what the wealthy and powerful are actually concerned with. Much less about immigrants, single-mothers, or the trans community; much more about maintaining access to the corridors of power, and minimising taxation.

A lot of debate around Christopher Nolan’s films falls into the same trap. Living in an environment where most of us have already found ourselves completely alienated from the levers of power; where we have been all but entirely disenfranchised by a ‘democratic’ system that leaves us to choose between semi-skimmed or full-fat capitalism; one of the most common coping reflexes is to petty squabbles in the cultural sphere. We argue endlessly about who is or isn’t a progressive filmmaker, and treat each other’s virtues – if you like X, who is a reactionary artist, you are a failed political actor – and Nolan’s work repeatedly gets dragged down this niche Twitter tunnel. But chewing over the tired question as to whether or not he is progressive/woke (moving goalposts, which can easily accommodate an eternal rightward shift of the Overton window) completely overlooks the most interesting element of his work.

As arguably the originator of what Mark Kermode coined as the ‘art-house blockbuster’, Nolan uses the establishment machinery of Hollywood to tell stories about ruling class fears. He deploys the liminal space of cinema to conjure up visceral nightmares, and to explore the theological and ideological contradictions which the remaining conservatives who aren’t high on their own supply (see presently the Fox News anchors who are genuinely mystified as to how Iran is still fighting against the US and Israel, when President Trump said that their defences had been utterly destroyed) know could still see bring their way of life to an end.

The Dark Knight trilogy was by far the best adaptation of Batman to ever grace the silver screen, because it used Bruce Wayne – a tortured billionaire, whose bank balance has grown fat thanks to the contradictions that see the rest of Gotham city living in poverty, desperate to keep the city from collapsing – as a means to explore these concepts. Certainly, there are moments where mass movements hinting at class awareness are demonised – depicted as a feral horde clawing and tearing at Batman, or as aloof mercenaries conflating the destruction of capitalism with the destruction of the world – in a way you might expect to see in tabloid coverage. But while those sequences might get the blood pumping, Nolan’s vision of Gotham is always more effectively pulled apart by the actions and lies of its wealthy and powerful – even when they ‘mean well’. Bruce Wayne’s hording of vigilante equipment eventually presents his foes with an armoury. Covering up the corruption of public officials because of their potential for ‘hope’ papers over the cracks in a failed state machinery, which is therefore unable to ward off the attack, and brings the city to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Oppenheimer similarly goes to great lengths to tell a story about a team of scientists and military generals, who are desperate to defeat totalitarianism by any means. To defend the old order of international relations, by ending the war with a demonstration of a weapon unparalleled by their enemies. But the old order was only under threat in the first place thanks to its inherent, remaining contradictions – and so under the guise of moving to safeguard that order, the film’s protagonist is convinced to sow the seeds of its ultimate destruction. In so many of Nolan’s movies, there may be hints at a rising external force which threatens the sanctity of the norms of an incumbent ruling class – but ultimately, the call is coming from inside the house. The rot comes from within. Capitalism creates its own grave-diggers.

In this sense, the auteur can most usefully be categorised an honest conservative – at least in the sense he is honest with himself – accepted as the ideological bard of his age, trusted with endless studio resources, because he can both reap huge returns, and because he speaks to concerns which still resonate with capital. Christopher Nolan is cinema’s equivalent of the Financial Times. And so, if you want to see what’s in the ruling class’ zeitgeist, what gives those people sleepless nights, Nolan’s films are the place to go.

The journey begins

That brings me to The Odyssey – the latest box office juggernaut to ensure that Hollywood continues to give Nolan that carte blanche, as it surges towards returning its $250 million budget twice over. And of course, again, discussion has turned to whether the film is woke, or problematic – with both camps among the terminally online looking for ways to show a supremely successful piece of mythology-making is actually bad. All of these terms are endlessly amorphous, and this pantomime debate just reinforces the rather depressing reality that most people are essentially acknowledging they have no political agency in daily life – beyond the policing of cultural consumption in their own echo-chambers.

A lot of that talk has been about what people think the film should be, rather than what it is. As an adaptation of Homer’s epic poem of the same name, there has been a great deal of focus on how faithful it may or may not be – including details around the colour of some characters’ hair; whether there would have been certain ethnicities present around the Aegean at the time; or how much sex there isn’t.

One such hinge point, the casting of Elliot Page, presented the opportunity for click-baiters to produce endless speculation that a trans actor was supposedly playing the great warrior Achilles (who would be more aptly named Sir Not-appearing-in-this-film). Page – who is absolutely fine, and absolutely playing a different character, named Sinon (who is actually lifted from Virgil’s Aeneid – itself a fresh perspective on Homer’s The Odyssey, eight centuries later). To be clear, it is absolutely right to justify Page’s casting for this role, and to oppose the explicit transphobia tied up in what the critics had to say. But beyond that dialogue, it needs to be said that the character of Sinon serves several key roles in Nolan’s own version of the tale.

First, Sinon’s presence in something named The Odyssey, rather than Aeneid, points specifically to the fact that this is already a story which has been written, and re-written, to adapt it for the sensibilities and dominant ideological norms of people across Europe for thousands of years already. Homer’s version itself is a fantastical reimagining of a war which, historians roughly agree, happened; but which took place hundreds of years before Homer’s own time, and was likely so bitter and costly, that it had already undergone a kind of ideological reframing, as the only way people telling the tale could metabolise the conflict, and continue living in a society with all the same contradictions and conflicts that led to it still intact.

Getting hung up on what is or isn’t faithful (or ridiculously, realistic) is to utterly miss the point – this adaptation is faithful in the sense it sees itself as part of that tradition of endless reframing. And so, what matters most for Nolan here (besides telling a story that moves people, obviously), is how he can use this format to talk about his own historical moment.

So, what is it that Nolan’s screenplay has to say about that?

Perhaps the chief theme, underpinning all of the events, is about a slipping of masks. Following Matt Damon’s war-weary Odysseus to Troy – the city his legendary cunning will ultimately help to destroy – we see a moment of nightmarish clarity emerge, where the darkness underpinning his world suddenly becomes real to him. As is traditional for this kind of pseudo-historical fare, there are plenty of allusions to the exceptionalism of Ancient Greece. The city states across the land have grown rich and powerful, establishing order and peace, as well as a public voice – a prototype of what will later be understood as democracy. But unlike 300 – a genuinely fascistic adaptation of Sparta, deployed to justify imperial wars against an Eastern Other – The Odyssey is at least willing to ask a key question of this apparently foundational epoch: justice and equality for who?

We see multiple times there are slaves here – sometimes euphemistically referred to as servants, other times belittled with their actual station as property. Alongside this, there are women – queens even – who find they have a similar lot as something to be owned, rather than someone with rights and agency (here I think the ‘liberal’ critique of the film falls down – as one of major mark against it has been that Penelope now is “more sexist” than even in Homer’s version millennia ago. But as a reflection of how women are being policed out of the economic and business elite in the modern era, this serves Nolan’s allegory, even if it is a ‘regression’ on the original’). Black bodies are also identified by rulers as expendable capital to throw at ‘the gods’ for favour, or to illustrate their apparent ruthlessness going into war. King Agamemnon slaughters his own daughter – of mixed heritage, with her mother being Clytemnestra (the twin sister of Helen – both of whom are played by Lupita Nyong’o).

These actions hint at what is to come – the slipping of Odysseus’ fantasy of a just society, amid the brutal reality the war forces him to confront. After a decade of stalemate, desperate for home, he countenances something he once would have found unthinkable: exploiting the customs of the age, which we are told involve unconditional respect around places of worship, hospitality, and gift-giving. Presenting the famous wooden horse as a supposed victory present, a band of Greeks find themselves ‘taken in’ by the Trojans. After night falls, bursting from the belly of the beast, they sack the city, slaughtering those who accepted their supposed surrender, and violating a treaty made under false pretences – slaughtering everyone, including a priestess of Athena, in the process.

The rest of the journey shifts into fantasy – and is left for us to take literally, or figuratively, without beating us over the head with that choice (unlike the mawkish Life of Pi). Either the gods recognise that Odysseus has committed a hideous wrong, and every nightmarish event that befalls him after is punishment. Or everything is a metaphoric representation of what war made him realise of himself.

The fact when ‘Athena’ visits him to speak, she takes on the form of the priestess he saw executed during Troy’s destruction, works just as well for either option. Meanwhile, the film’s excellent horror segments can also be read either way. In the cyclops’ cave, the creature mimics Goya’s famous hideous Saturn devouring his son painting – itself created in the midst of a war where human life of supposed countrymen and equals was treated as expendable fuel for Spain’s imperial war machine. Seeing this easily blind-sided beast consuming the flesh of the soldiers could be a reflection of how a traumatised, wandering Odysseus, sees himself. It could be real. Or the two could overlap (hence Odysseus’ arrow is directed at the beast he is projecting his own shortcomings on, even as his surviving men escape). And in the segment with Circe – a moment of body-horror worthy of Kronenburg, when Odysseus’ men have their flesh and bone reworked like clay, to embody pigs – we perhaps see a moment where Ithaca’s king is in dialogue with himself; calling on some phantom witch to reverse her spell, while he resists the urge to blame his men for their own demise thanks to the simple, bestial traits of those beneath him in society.

The biggest part of this dialogue, though, is not the guilt relating to his men – but of the forces he has unleashed, by demonstrating in gargantuan terms, how little the social conventions of his day actually matter. By so exposing the failings of the international law of the time as weak, malleable, capable of being rewritten eternally to preserve the hierarchy of the time, Odysseus has guaranteed that there will be blowback of the worst kind. The war will cease to be an externalised, outsourced conflict – and it will follow him home.

The rules he relied upon to keep his family safe have disintegrated. And while on his long journey home, he routinely hears of new hostile actors, looking to make the most of this – the people from the sea. A nifty bastardisation of the sea people – raiders who genuinely did exist during the late bronze age – sees Nolan’s script flag up some big existential crisis, as arriving from outside. But by the end of his journey, Odysseus’ story of wit and heroism has spread far and wide (a story which, if you aren’t on the ‘winning side’ sound horrific and barbaric), and arrived everywhere before he and his dwindling crew – people from the sea – can land their ships anywhere…

Again, Nolan’s conservatism seems to rather earnestly be warning that the greatest threat to any order, is its own ruling class. And given that the film was created in the midst of the genocide in Gaza – where the United States and Israel dispatched with all pretences to adhering to international law – that makes a lot of sense. It is not especially radical to suggest the actions in Gaza, the purposeful starvation, the striking of schools and hospitals and refugee camps, presented this kind of risk to those who failed to challenge it. The idea that the violation of human rights on such a scale, in plain sight, would embolden other such action closer to home, can also be posed from a point of simply wanting to conserve the way things were. And as the violence escalates and draws nearer, the certainty of that old order dissipates.

The actions of the leaders who now try and put the toothpaste back in the tube in our modern era, are also a target of Nolan’s anxiety here. In the liberal-conservative sense, as a nod to our own time, the fate of Page’s character – the first body we see sacrificed to maintain this order – speaks to the way the trans community have been so rapidly thrown under the bus by establishment ‘progressives’, as well as ultimately how little this achieved for their conservative ends.

At the same time, Agamemnon is a savage caricature of the faux-warrior neo-con rising to try and reassert control through cruelty. He is presented initially as a towering, imperious figure, looming out of shadows and dust like a stalking lion, fixing his dispassionate gaze on prey. But as the film progresses, we are given greater insights into the man rather than the myth – and find that he is a tiny, snivelling little man, cowering in gigantic, impractical armour (the ancient equivalent of a cybertruck). A hybrid of Elon Musk and Pete Hegseth, he drags Greece into an unending war under false pretences – Helen is a useful excuse to seize lucrative trade routes – and then finds that fake-it-until-you-make-it is not a practical means of warfare. Decked out in a helmet with a spinal column dangling from its rear, he falls back on the belief his perceived cruelty and impunity makes him impervious to harm – but in actuality it hastens his demise, and the destruction of the order he presided over.

A siren’s call

This is about the collapse of the age of global neoliberal control – characterised by American dominance. This is about the end of the end of history. And that also means one of the things I was inclined to snark about most actually makes sense: all the characters in ‘Ancient Greece’ are doing American accents – even the ones who aren’t American. Many of them are also played by US actors who normally I dislike on the grounds of (if we are being generous) hypocritical takes on the geopolitical or social issues we have already touched upon here. Establishment liberals whose flexible customs and conventions ultimately just provide an acceptable mask for a system built on exploitation and murder – a mythology which enables the people their wealth and power is derived from to go on living, as though we aren’t all just one bad day away from the wrong end of a missile.

Considering it was in production two years before ICE began openly shooting people on US streets, or Donald Trump became embroiled in an unending war with Iran, its warnings crafted for the global elite seem prophetic. What does it leave for the rest of us though?

Again, I think it is important to know what the ruling class of any era is scared of, when it comes to taking it down. The most prevalent fear here is that the world might see the mask of the old order slip, and with that, the siren song of hegemonic thought – the promises of peace, liberty, equality made by murderers and thieves – might cease to hold any weight. And there is the fear that the ruling class stands squabbling, divided, weak – even in a moment when it looks to project strength and purpose through its foreign adventurism.

In The Odyssey’s conclusion, Nolan hints at what may come of this. The story feels upbeat, in spite of itself. Something resembling the old order is restored – but we know this way of life is ultimately doomed. Odysseus and Penelope even note their story will probably only be told in song for a while, because that will be how the future world “remembers those of us who could read”. But even so, they seem happy, as they sail forth in search of new horizons. Perhaps this is because they have shed their responsibilities, holding together a wretched system both of them have seen for all its cruelty at last. Perhaps – as they also hint – while civilisations do fall, new, improved ones will still rise. Or perhaps, this is Nolan’s own moment of winking to the audience.

After all, as important as we make Hollywood sound, he is still essentially outside the tent – he has no power of his own. He is head of a cultural institution that the modern ruling class increasingly hates. Maybe Nolan is not quite the honest conservative I also believed him to be. Maybe, just like Macchiavelli, writing The Prince when he was out of favour as a statesman purporting to advise a class that widely disliked him, the question is who he is really telling about this on-coming civilisational realignment. Is this really for the people who his conservatism might instinctively want to warn, to help them prevent a reshaping of the world they would see as apocalyptic? Or is it a cheat-sheet, filled with hints about the tricks of the trade used over millennia to justify and hone hierarchical rule, and normalise the bloody and exploitative world that necessitates – this time, written for the people who, in the long-run, might build something new, in its ashes?