Can We Finally Admit Christopher Nolan Leans Right (and Still Makes Good Movies)?

The following story is co-published with Freddie deBoer’s Substack .

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.

The Odysseus of the Odyssey is forever bragging about his accomplishments.

I am of course no expert in ancient Greece, not its history or its mythology. But to me – to me! – representing Odysseus as a war-weary, regret-haunted veteran amounts to smuggling in a conflicted modern psychology the poem doesn’t possess and a moral vocabulary ancient Greece didn’t use. What I remember from my undergrad world lit courses is the argument of people like ER Dodds, who held that ancient Greek culture was fundamentally a shame culture organized around competitive excellence , rather than a guilt culture organized around what we now call conscience. The crucial question for the ancient Greeks wasn’t “Was this killing wrong?” but rather “Did this killing increase or decrease my honor?” Odysseus’s basic identity in Homer’s epics, his whole entire thing, is his effectiveness at getting what he wants – his martial skills, his trickery, his polymetis , the cunning that allowed the Greeks to burn Troy. All of that is fundamental to his self-conception and he carries none of it with guilt. The Odysseus of the Odyssey is forever bragging about his accomplishments, after all. He taunts the Cyclops after blinding him, shouting his own name to claim credit, and he’s clearly enjoying himself. Haunted regret over the loss of life, an inability to move on from the horrors of war, PTSD – these things just aren’t in the Odyssey ! To be clear, I’m not opposed in principle to including them in a modern retelling, and for me the problem isn’t that doing so violates the original text. The problem, with Nolan’s The Odyssey , is that it makes the story conventional, predictable, and kind of dull. That’s my opinion.

The Odyssey has often been defined, in modern telling, as the story of a man who just wants to go home. Setting aside the abundant complications there – even Nolan’s Odysseus is a man who’s perfectly happy boning Calypso for the better part of a decade before returning to Ithaca – “wanting to go home,” for Odysseus, is a claim on one’s rightful place, not a repudiation of the war or the warrior nature. The movie kind of tries to eat its cake and have it too here; in both the epic and the movie, the slaughter of the suitors is presented as the triumphant reassertion of order. Odysseus feels no remorse about that because remorse is not a relevant emotion for the situation – by killing the suitors, Odysseus has recovered what was already his. In the movie, 360 no-scoping dozens of dudes is fine because conventional Hollywood morality says it’s fine. Well, in the epic poem, that’s also true of the whole war against Troy. Paris stole Helen, this was an unthinkable insult to the honor of Menelaus and the Greeks, so they went and killed all the Trojans and took back the wife and neither Odysseus nor any other Greeks felt particularly bad about it. There’s nothing in the original Greek of the notion that war is always hell and that we should weep for the murdered innocents – including “Athena,” the beheaded Trojan woman who appears to be the inspiration for Odysseus’s PTSD flashbacks in the Nolan story. But Nolan apparently felt Odysseus needed an arc and that was the arc he chose.

I think a lot of this impulse ultimately stems from the work of Jonathan Shay, who was a practicing psychiatrist who worked for the VA hospital system and was influential in legitimizing the modern PTSD diagnosis. Shay worked with a lot of Vietnam veterans and was moved as a doctor to generate public support for their treatment. In the Odyssey he found a vocabulary for doing so, one deeply embedded in the Western tradition. (His most influential book was titled Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming .) That’s all well and good when it comes to getting the system to recognize the legitimacy of PTSD as a diagnosis and to inspire sympathy for Vietnam vets, who really needed it. But while the regretful Odysseus may be a genuinely valuable symbol, he is definitely a modern creation, on built out of Christian assumptions about sin and redemption and romantic, therapeutic assumptions about the psychic cost of violence. None of that’s in the text of the Odyssey. Homer’s hero is not a broken man concealing his wounds from the world but a functionally alien figure for whom the emotional wounds, in our modern sense, do not exist.

The movie kind of tries to eat its cake and have it too.

And, again! That’s not why I think the movie is a lot worse in its second half! Not because it’s a violation of the text. My problem is that in the act of violating the text to meet modern narrative arc conventions , the movie gets a lot more stale and less effective. Because we’ve seen that movie a thousand times.

In fairness, The Big Picture guest Chris Ryan explicitly mentions the question of whether modern audiences are able to put themselves in the mindset of a semi-divine and ancient character like Odysseus. I just wish they had used that as a jumping off point to consider how much more conventional the film’s later parts are compared to the first half, and whether that conventionality makes the movie worse. But I think they’re having too good of a time to want to wrestle with that complication. Which brings me to the cute part: I think Christopher Nolan’s movies have, in a certain sense, been subject to a version of the same process: Nolan’s movies contain a lot of themes that I would call politically conservative. Maybe small-c conservative, perhaps not conventionally American culture war conservative, but certainly suggesting certain right-wing sensibilities. I have no idea if Nolan is actually a conservative; the rumor for forever has been that he’s a Tory, but I don’t care about that. I care that his work often suggests (a certain version of ) conservative sympathies. That’s part of what makes him interesting, to my mind, but the movie reviewer class, the film discourse class, the cinephiles… they’re a dominantly progressive group, and they like Christopher Nolan, so they want to read the right-leaning valences out of his work. So here’s Sean Fennessey, host of the Big Picture, from the episode I mentioned:

Since The Dark Knight , maybe even before that, probably since The Dark Knight , [Christopher Nolan] has always been a little bit more of like an elevated political, literate filmmaker where he’s kind of drawing like historical allusions, like using a Tale of Two Cities to do Dark Knight Rises , you know, stuff like that. You could critique him for ducking the smoke of saying what he means with his chest, but he won’t ever put his finger on it and say, this is what I meant by this…. Batman activating all cell phones as surveillance devices? Is that about, you know, like FISA ?

I certainly think that the theme of mass warrantless surveillance in The Dark Knight is colored by allusions to real-world American controversies, especially because that movie came out in 2008, the end of the George W. Bush era and a time when our government’s ceaseless invasions of our privacy was very much a part of the national mood. But we should be very clear: The Dark Knight is, if anything, in favor of this use of unrestrained state power! That act of mass surveillance is key to catching the Joker, and the movie arguably regards this as a perhaps regrettable decision but a necessary one – which is exactly the posture the Bush administration and its defenders took to the controversy, too. The Joker’s chaos-agent nature is often shown in imagery that’s inevitably reminiscent of terrorism, and the moral of the movie is deeply paternalistic: the public can’t be trusted. They can’t be trusted to accept the truth about Harvey Dent/Two Face, so Batman and Commissioner Gordon have to engage in the whole “noble lie” thing to preserve order. In general, the people of Gotham are represented as an unruly mass to be managed from above, and Batman as a kind of comforting myth, necessary to impose order on them. That’s all very right-coded.

The following Batman film, the relentlessly incoherent Dark Knight Rises , contains obvious allusions to Occupy Wall Street that can’t be honestly read as anything other than derogatory. Catwoman’s Robin Hood impulses are depicted as self-serving and chaotic; the people are shown to be a directionless mob, storming the homes of the rich to loot and holding “people’s courts” that have no sense of process or justice. The populist rule of Gotham is easily manipulated by a cynical vanguard, while Bruce Wayne (the richest man in town, who also dresses up in costume to impose vigilante justice) fights alongside the police to reestablish the old order. The Gotham PD deals with plenty of corruption in the first film, Batman Begins , but he and the police are ultimately represented as a fundamentally good and necessary force, necessary to counteract the fragility of civilization. In general the whole trilogy is an Ayn Rand-style great man premise where only a wealthy ubermensch can overcome the weakness of the people and the incompetence of their government. The notion of Batman as a fascist figure is an undergraduate humanities seminar cliche, but the cliche exists for a reason, and Nolan’s Bat-films lean way into that archetype.

Nolan’s movies contain a lot of themes that I would call politically conservative.

There’s plenty of other examples, some more obvious than others. Interstellar has often been discussed as an anti-environmentalist fable – the film suggests that the anti-growth impulses of the environmentalist movement are misguided, as the “stay on earth and conserve what we already have” mentality is treated as defeatist and clearly fails over the course of the film. What’s counterposed against that mindset is a pioneering, “next frontier” spirit, a celebration of expansionism and masculine ambition. The nuclear family is sacrosanct; the needs of the individual are celebrated in comparison to a cowardly collectivism. Dunkirk , too, has very clear and obvious right-leaning themes: the greatness of Britain and the necessity of British nationalism, the righteousness of a good war, an earnest and uncomplicated celebration of the defense of the homeland with zero of the judgment or ironic distance of most modern war films. There’s tons of patriotism in the story and no mention of the flatly imperial project the British armed forces had been up to in the preceding centuries. There’s other critiques that are a little less convincing, like Inception as a statement about the sanctity of individualism and private property; you can read a “return home to family and tradition” theme into it as well. More persuasively, there’s constant Great Man narratives in Nolan’s work, and his filmmaking itself has been represented as conservative in its techniques – classically framed, controlled, anti-improvisational….

Does any of this make me like Nolan’s work less? No. I’m not a huge fan, but that’s more an issue of dialogue, pacing, and my feeling that he’s far better at the craft of moviemaking than the art of moviemaking. And you can contest any of these readings as you’d like. My point is that I think the left-leaning film commentary community tends to minimize Nolan’s right-leaning themes because they want to love his work in an uncomplicated way. But of course art is more fun when our feelings are complicated.

I don’t think Nolan is an Elon Musk reply guy; I don’t even know if he’s politically right-wing in any conventional sense. But I do think that he’s a filmmaker with fundamentally conservative instincts, in a way that can be useful and generative, especially as a counterweight to his sometimes plodding and overdetermined thematic interests. But to appreciate those elements, we have to let him be himself – and I think his Odyssey would have been better had Odysseus been allowed to be his traditional, alien, unrepentant self.

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