Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is the blockbuster that launched a million takes. The interpretations crowd my social media feed like Agamemnon’s assembled ships at Aulis. They keen in my ears like the Sirens’ seductive voices. They … OK, look, I’m just saying people have a lot of opinions about the biggest movie of the year.
And for good reason, because Nolan’s film is perfectly calibrated for the contemporary culture war. First, because its source material is a story that everybody wants to claim: woke and anti-woke, masculinists and feminists, film bros and classicists, professional defenders of Western civilization and its would-be revisers and subverters. Other classics are similarly claimed and counterclaimed, but not everyone wants ownership of “The Iliad” (too male), Jane Austen (too female), the Greek tragedies (too depressing), the New Testament (too Christian) or the plays of Shakespeare (too hard to follow the dialogue). But in life as in Homer’s epic, everyone wants a piece of Odysseus.
Then, having plucked the ripest fruit, Nolan proceeded to serve it in the blandest form. Gone is the sex and sensuality, the warring deities, the hero’s outsize ego and charisma. In their place is a story that’s very American, with tropes familiar from war movies and westerns, dialogue that belongs in a contemporary Y.A. novel and a moralism that’s at once extremely didactic and extremely general. “Civilization collapses when you violate Zeus’ law” is the teaching of Nolan’s story, and while you could imagine that Zeus’ law is some arcane instruction requiring the castration of a black heifer on the highest peak on the darkest night, it turns out to just be the golden rule applied to houseguests, dogs and Trojans.
This is a critique, but it’s also a key to the film’s cultural cachet. If you just want to like “The Odyssey,” if you just want to have a good time at the movie, the bland version still has all the good stuff — the Trojan horse! the Cyclops! a bloody homecoming! — stitched together by a director with a gift for propulsion and spectacle. If you have a great enough story, you can reduce the spice level and still satisfy millions of customers with the meal.
Then if you want to claim “The Odyssey” for your own worldview, to insist that the dominant movie of the summer is speaking directly to your concerns, the banal didacticism of Nolan’s script is unusually amenable to personalized interpretations.
I can give you a plausible reading of the movie in which its portrayal of the Bronze Age collapse is an allegory for the crisis of the liberal international order (Nolan the multicultural liberal, lamenting the cruelty of Trumpism). Or a reading in which Odysseus’ guilt over the sack of Troy is fundamentally Christian and the monsters belong to a world that awaits us if Christianity fails (Nolan the lapsed Catholic, unable to shake his religious upbringing). Or, for that matter, a populist reading in which Odysseus returns home from a hubristic Middle Eastern war to find guests abusing his hospitality who need to be cleared out (Nolan the British Burkean offering an allegory of a Europe unable to cope with immigration).
I assume the first reading is closest to the directorial intentions. But the material is thin and therefore supple, ready to be shaped by ideological desire.
Finally, if you want to critique and hate the movie (and under algorithmically driven conditions, haters are hype artists, too), the same rule applies: The banality can be interpreted for maximal dislike. Part of the fun of the “Odyssey” wars is seeing that happen in all kinds of different ways, with an original anti-woke critique of the movie, fixated on colorblind casting, giving way to left-tilting academic takedowns and then bespoke right-wing critiques riding in their wake. (Four thousand-plus words from the best-selling translator Emily Wilson in the London Review of Books on a movie she dismisses as “an entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours,” then the pseudonymous online reactionary Bronze Age Pervert responding with 6,000-odd words on a movie he calls “undeserving of a serious intellectual, ideological or aesthetic review.”)
And here I am doing much the same thing, accusing Nolan of banality and then devoting all my column inches to his cultural achievement. So let’s give the man his due: He grasped that what this moment demanded was an adaptation of one of Western civilization’s foundational texts, reworked around the widely shared assumption that Western civilization might be finished or foredoomed, in a style that allowed everyone, fans and haters alike, to blame whatever crime or curse or group of malefactors (including Hollywood directors!) they held responsible for the doom already.
His reward will be a billion dollars in box office, a blank check for next time, and the absolute power to determine what we’ll all be arguing about in the summer of 2029.
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