The Michael Knowles Show - Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey Is Not What I Expected

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Starting point is 00:01:55 His king is coming back. No, he's not. I saw Christopher Nolan's DEI Odyssey and I am, I feel as though I've been on an odyssey of my own and trying to make sense of this movie. I'd say don't try to understand and just feel it. The top takeaway, everyone was thinking that this thing was going to be a DEI train wreck with radical leftism for all sorts of other reasons, even though Christopher Nolan is kind of conservative and made the Dark Night, is a conservative movie. And so I knew going in the movie was going to be quite good. I knew it was

Starting point is 00:02:41 going to be quite good because Christopher Nolan is probably the greatest director of his generation. He's up there. And this is what really makes me a man of sorrows and troubles. So it makes me like Odysseus. I've been on this journey making sense of the movie because the thing that's most annoying is that Christopher Nolan is so good that he can get away with a lot of this stuff. all the DEI stuff that you thought was in there, it really is in there. And in some ways the meaning of it is even worse than you thought it might be. But it's still a pretty good movie, and I would encourage you to go see it. Because he's that good.

Starting point is 00:03:25 So what is actually going on here? Right off the top, let's go to the supposedly wokenest aspect of it from the beginning, that Ellen Page is playing a man, this trans-identifying guy is playing a man, and not just a man, but Achilles, the greatest warrior ever. You've got this, like, diminutive trans woman playing Achilles. That's crazy, right? She's not really playing Achilles. She's playing this character Synon, which tells you a lot about what Christopher Nolan's

Starting point is 00:03:52 doing here in the movie. Now, part of the reason maybe there was that rumor that she was playing Achilles is that Sinon does not really appear in the Odyssey. Sinon doesn't appear in Homer's Odyssey. He doesn't appear in Homer's Iliad. He appears in Virgil's Aeneid. and he appears in Dante's Divine Comedy, and he appears in Shakespeare even.

Starting point is 00:04:14 But Sinon is this figure from the Trojan War, who's not in the source material here. And so you realize Nolan is leaning into a tradition that is not only circumscribed by Homer's text. Okay. And the role that he gives to Sinon in his movie is, in part, the role held by Achilles, because there's this famous scene in the poem,

Starting point is 00:04:36 the Odyssey, where Odysseus goes down to Hades and he speaks to Achilles. And that is replaced in this movie with Sinon. And so right off the bat, that's like the woken thing, right? You have this tranny guy playing a character that's not even actually in the original poem. However, there's a little trickery here. And I think this is the theme, cleverness, deception, trickery. That's the whole theme, not just of the poem, but of even how we should be thinking about this movie. Because Sinon is a figure of deceit. Sinon tricks the Trojans into letting the Trojan horse into the city, which ends up destroying the city. Sinon in Dante's Divine Comedy is put down in one of the deepest parts of

Starting point is 00:05:17 hell with the fraudsters, almost at the very bottom of hell with the fraudsters, because he uses his words for deceit, and he peddles falsehoods. So you say, hold on, wait, you cast the trans identifying actress. You cast the woman who insists publicly that she's a man as the, the fraudster, wow, that's pretty deep. There's clearly some meaning to that. It also shows you that Nolan is approaching this from a broader Western tradition. So he's reading the Homer poem through Virgil and through Dante. Okay. We know that he relies on the Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey, which is annoying. It's a more recent translation. I think it's from 2017. I confess, I actually have not read the Wilson translation, but my classicist friends assure me it's very, very bad, and it disenchanced

Starting point is 00:06:10 the world, but it's pretty feminist. And you see the feminism in the second bit of DEI casting here, which is Lupita Nyango. Lupita Nyango is Helen of Troy. Lupita Nyango is not Greek. She's not as Helen as typically presented, sort of fair-skinned or blonde. She's quite black. and this off the bat is a kind of shocking casting. But I actually think the racial aspect of it is less significant than the sexual aspect of it. In other words, there is race grievance DEI stuff and we all have to pretend that Helen of Troy is black now.

Starting point is 00:06:48 But that's actually less significant to the storytelling than what her casting says about the feminist line because Lupita Younger actually plays two parts. She plays Helen of Troy, most beautiful woman in the world, the face that launched a thousand ships, and Clytemnestra, who is the wife of Agamemnon. So Helen is the wife of Menelaus, Clytemnestra is the wife of Agamemnon, and they're supposedly, you know, their sisters. But in Christopher Nolan's telling, unlike in Homer's telling, they're twins. Well, I haven't heard anyone else make this point yet,

Starting point is 00:07:23 but what does that tell you? If Helen of Troy is the twin of Clytemnnezzan, then it means that Helen does not uniquely launch a thousand ships. I think my friend Spencer Claven, genius classicist and Homer Scholar, he may have mentioned something. I might have seen somewhere, he mentioned something about the strangeness of the twin decision, but just to take that point further, what that tells you is this is a real feminist reading of the poem, that it was not just that Helen's beauty launched the Trojan war, actually Helen's beauty was merely used as a scapegoat for the ambitions of men.

Starting point is 00:08:03 That's really what it's about. And you see that feminism come out in the end, too, in one of the final scenes. This is not really a spoiler, but Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, who's been away now for 20 years, she's trying to fend off all of the suitors and, you know, try to preserve Odysseus's kingdom. She has this kind of feminist outburst in Nolan's movie, where she says, Yeah, well, of course we need a king. Why can't we have a queen? You know, why can't I all this experience? I'm a great political leader.

Starting point is 00:08:31 Why can't I be the queen? And you just think this is so contrary to Penelope's character and contrary to the ancient world. That's a real modern update. And it goes in line with the feminism of picking this translation. Go to good ranchers.com. Use code Knowles, KNAWLAS. One thing that I really missed when I was on vacation,

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Starting point is 00:09:48 Use code Noles. Canada WLAS. Check out free meat with every order and $50 off when you start a plan. Good Ranchers.com. American Meat delivered. Okay, so then you get the Helen twin thing. People are complaining because they say Lupita Nyango, who's a nice-looking lady and she's a very good actress,

Starting point is 00:10:05 but they're saying she's not the most beautiful woman in the world. But actually, the casting her as Clytemnester and Helen drives home the point that, no, no, well, Helen is not even the most beautiful woman in the world. It doesn't matter how beautiful Helen is. This war was brought about because of these men and their ambitions, because they're brutal sort of warlords. Okay. So on the one hand, you have this real ramping up of the machismo,

Starting point is 00:10:26 of guys like Agamemnon and all the rest. But what of Odysseus? Odysseus, they make less of a man in this movie. Christopher Nolan makes less of a man in this movie. Actually, the way Nolan frames the movie is that he's on this island trapped with Calypso, who in the poem is holding Odysseus captive and he's trying to get away from her.

Starting point is 00:10:46 And in another episode, all of the men, all of Odysseus's fellow sailors, are eating the lotus flower, which is this drug that makes them forget about their homes and their desire to go home. Well, in Nolan's movie, he smashes it all together. And crucially, Odysseus eats the lotus. He does the drugs.

Starting point is 00:11:04 In the poem, Odysseus has such discipline, is such a hero, is a man of such resolve. He's the one who does not eat the drug. But in Nolan's movie, he's kind of weak, too. And he's weak, and he's uncertain of himself, and he doesn't want to go home. In fact, this is one of the most, this is a little bit of a spoiler. maybe I'll save it for the end. But there is a big change that Nolan makes here, which is that Nolan insists that Odysseus hears the song of the sirens,

Starting point is 00:11:38 the song that leads the sailors to their death. And not only does he hear it as in the poem, but he then tells us what the sirens are singing. We'll get to that momentarily, because it tells you about this character of Ulysses. I mentioned earlier that Nolan is reading Odysseus through Virgil and through Dante, as well as through this feminist translator, Emily Wilson.

Starting point is 00:11:58 Part of that is even adding parts to the story. In the poem, Odysseus comes back to Troy, kills all the suitors, and reclaims his kingdom, and it's all good. In Dante, for instance, Dante puts Ulysses, Odysseus down with the counselors of fraud because he comes back to Ithaca, he reclaims his kingdom, but he doesn't want to be at home. He wants to go to sea. He is the symbol of curiosity, of transgressing the proper limits of human not.

Starting point is 00:12:25 knowledge. He's always a symbol of cleverness, of trickery, of deception. He makes this brilliant speech, you know, in the Iliad, which is, he's really considered the symbol of crafty, effective rhetoric. So, in, Nolan goes with Dante. Nolan says, no, he does want to go on, but he kind of, he kind of weakens him a little in that, in, in Dante's version, Ulysses leaves Odysseus, same person, leaves home again to just go adventuring and discovering, experiencing more parts of the world. He's got like millennialitis or something. But in Nolan's telling, spoiler, he takes his wife with him and imposes an exile on himself. And this gets us down now to the real core of the movie. And here you're going to start getting some spoilers. At the heart of the movie is

Starting point is 00:13:12 Ulysses' sin, Odysseus's sin of violating the law of Zeus. This is totally contrary to the poem. almost totally. Odysseus does in the poem violate the law of Zeus and irritate the gods sometimes, but it's not the central point, and it has nothing to do with what Odysseus did in the Trojan War. But in Nolan's telling, the law of Zeus, the key law of Zeus, is to be hospitable to people, to be civil with people, not to violate their trust, to welcome the stranger.

Starting point is 00:13:49 You're seeing a lot of modern political themes. respect for institutions, standards and norms, all the rest of that. And in the poem, the law of Zeus really is being hospitable to people, and the gods do get angry when that law is violated. But crucially, in the movie, Nolan states that Odysseus feels this immense guilt the whole time because of the trick, because he comes up with the idea for the Trojan horse, and it breaks the standard and norm of a way to make peace between peoples, and it destroys civilization, it ends the Bronze Age.

Starting point is 00:14:24 Like this is, he has just torn down everything. Irreparably destroyed the standards and norms of politics. And that itself is a violation of the law of Zeus. That is nowhere found in the poem. In the poem and in the usual tradition, the Trojan horse is just a clever trick of war. And in fact, the initial violation of the law of Zeus was when Paris, the Trojan,

Starting point is 00:14:49 is staying with Manilaeus, the Greek, and then abducts his wife Helen. That's the violation that justifies the Trojan War. So then the Greeks are the good guys and the Trojans are the bad guys. Here, you have this Odysseus who is totally racked with guilt because he violated the law of standards and norms and civility and welcoming the strangers. It seems to me, this is shots at Trump.

Starting point is 00:15:15 This is shots at Trump on immigration and the way he talks and the political order. I don't really see how you read it any other. way. And I know it's weird coming from Nolan, because Nolan made the Dark Night, which is about how great a Republican president was, George W. Bush. But that's what I'm, that's what I'm reading here. And then, so, so then Odysseus, rather than just maintain his throne in Ithaca, he just exiles himself with his wife. So it's not quite the Dante thing of I'm going to be an adventure and try to keep exploring and pursuing my curiosity, which is not a virtue. And it's not the original, which is he stays in his king of Ithaca. It's this weird kind of hallmark middle

Starting point is 00:15:51 where he goes off with his wife and drags her to the ends of the earth to pursue lands westward or whatever. Now the idea of the lands going westward also is really coming from the Aeneid, the idea that the power, the authority of the empire, moves westward. This is the translatio imperie. Dante attacks Constantine later on because Constantine reverses the order of the movement of the empire, that the power of the empire is always moving westward. Constantine pushes it back east with the fall of the west. And so here he's picking up on this theme that the empire moves westward.

Starting point is 00:16:25 And there he is relating the movie not just to modern society, but to the modern hegemon, to the modern empire, which is America, seeing us as the inheritors of this imperial authority. Okay. He changes some other things in there that are not quite as big of a deal. We get to the end and, you know, there's a happy ending. my question here. I'm just trying to figure out why would Nolan do this? Is Nolan a big lip? Apparently he's buddies with Ellen Page. Maybe he just really wanted to put Ellen Page in the movie. I don't know. Maybe he's not as conservative as I thought. He's an artist, so he's probably not even that self-conscious. It's up to the critics to read what the artists are doing. Sometimes the artists aren't totally aware of it. But early on when all the DEI casting was coming out, I wondered. I said, is Nolan just trying to get an Oscar? You know, there are requirements. There are DEI diversity requirements to get an Oscar. and the diversity is so over the top in Nolan. I mean, the idea that Helen of Troy is this black woman is not, it's like no knock on black women, but it's Helen of Troy is not a black woman.

Starting point is 00:17:29 And you pick like a real, like the blackest black woman you ever saw. She's very pretty, but that's like really weird. The idea that the character that would have been Ulysses in the, sorry, that would have been Achilles in the original, the greatest warrior ever, is this scrawny kind of messed up transatlantic. woman who thinks she's a man. That's like really on the nose, DEI casting. And then you just look at the feast scenes and the suitors, and it's, it's, you know, I don't know, some, some,

Starting point is 00:17:59 um, um, D.EI film or, you know, some diversity training from a corporation in the mid 2000s. Like it's really, really on the nose. And it makes me wonder if this, this essential character of Odysseus in the poem, but especially in the Latin tradition that Nolan is explicitly reading this through. The inclusion of Sin and alone would tell you that. If the DEI stuff is not Nolan

Starting point is 00:18:30 doing his own kind of Odysseus here, Odysseus is a trickster. That's not fair to say. Because it cheapens Odysseus too much. Odysseus wields his rhetoric in very morally dubious ways. so much so that in Dante, he is the symbol of the counselors of fraud. This is the, he's curious, he's deceptive, he's an angler, he wields rhetoric in ways that are

Starting point is 00:19:02 very effective, though not, they have a dubious relationship to the truth. And I wonder, is Nolan not expressing that in his filmmaking? If Odysseus, if Odysseus himself were to make this movie in the big two six and he wanted to get his Oscar and or even if he didn't want to, Nolan already has an Oscar, but even if he wanted to kind of make a statement about filmmaking in 2026, it seems to me Odysseus himself would have made the very same choice as Christopher Nolan makes. He would have used all sorts of angles, pulled all sorts of levers. Oh, yeah. Of course we need a tranny. Of course Helen Troy has to be black. And a twin. She doesn't even need to be... Her beauty doesn't even matter. Oh, yes, of course. To get it through to make this movie, which is good and which is very beautiful in many ways and very moving in many ways. I hope I'm not reading too much into it, but Nolan's a genius. So in a way, I almost don't care if I'm reading too much into it because I think the read is very plausible and it helps me to make sense of how this great director could... not just transgress, Odysseus transgresses, could not just transgress in minor kind of odd ways,

Starting point is 00:20:19 oh, Christopher, do we really need a tranny? But could transgress in such overt ways? Could a great filmmaker like Nolan do that without there being any meaning to it? No, I think not. And so is this, is, is, is the movie Nolan's own Odyssean deception on his path back home to return to his Oscars. In any case, you'll probably go see the movie. It drives me a little crazy that it involved so much ideological suffering and trials. But then again, that's the story of the fall. Okay. I'm Michael Knowles. It's the Michael Knowles show. I'll see you next time.

The Michael Knowles Show - Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey Is Not What I Expected

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