Christopher Nolan responds to rightwing bigots' backlash to his film "The Odyssey"

[Syne]

Somewhere on the press tour for “The Odyssey,” director Christopher Nolan appeared with Jimmy Fallon and watched his cast play Cyclops beer pong. Then he went to Beijing, sat down with a political philosophy Ph.D. student named Zhong Shu, and was asked a series of questions about his interpretation of Homer and whether he was a “bard for a civilization at dusk.”

The viral Beijing interview was so much more than a well-read academic finally giving Nolan an intellectual challenge. It was a snapshot of the new story “arms race” that’s been quietly brewing between the U.S. and China — a narrative cold war where each civilization is grappling with its relationship to the guiding stories of the past in an effort to determine which culture will lead the world in the future.
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“We turn greatness into privileges and we demand apologies for it. That’s a fact of Hollywood,” Zhong stated before asking Nolan if he agreed. Nolan told the young Chinese intellectual that, in a democratic age committed to equality, storytellers have to manage the audience’s built-in resistance to greatness. Do we have to apologize for that greatness? “And the answer is yes, we do,” he said, or the audience rejects it. He did not demur or deflect. He wasn’t defensive. He described it the way an engineer describes a load-bearing wall: This is simply how the mechanism works in our culture today.

The West’s most prominent living filmmaker calmly conceded that his civilization can no longer receive a story about greatness unless greatness acknowledges wrongdoing first. This admission — delivered in Beijing to an educated Chinese classicist who came prepared with provocations from our own civilization’s foundational myths and stories — revealed a deeper civilizational conflict over what guiding story and set of values are most suited to lead the world. How we relate to Homer, the stories of the Bible, Dante, and even our modern mythological heroes such as Superman matters, and the Chinese know this. The line of inquiry in that interview was not incidental.
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- https://www.dailywire.com/news/china-is-...ch+Overlay

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[...] https://www.dailywire.com/news/china-is-...ch+Overlay

She asked whether the gods in the film were merely projections of the human psyche and if Nolan had intentionally “Christianized” Homer in any way. She challenged Nolan on whether a story that originally celebrated Odysseus as a cunning, noble king had to be refitted into a story that demands greatness and must repent.

Hollywood's Western guilt trip is derived from the neo-Marxism of literary intellectuals, not Christianity. He doesn't seem to have answered her whether it was his Catholic upbringing behind this or just conforming to the entertainment industry's views. Or maybe he did indirectly. This sounds as much like establishment rote as being evasive about religious redemption: “And the answer is yes, we do,” he said, or the audience rejects it."

[Syne]

The mythical "modern audience."

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Here's a response or reaction to the review below: Why have Emily Wilson and other scholars been so dismissive?
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An Uncomplicated Man (Emily Wilson review)
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n14/...icated-man

EXCERPTS: . . . The Homeric epic was already an adaptation. The poem used a relatively new technology – the written alphabet – to rework existing mythical traditions [...] Adaptations needn’t and shouldn’t follow the original with anything like the exactitude of a translation. Some of the best radically transform or resist the source material...

[...] It’s a challenge to represent deities on film without veering into Clash of the Titans silliness, so Nolan may have been sensible to leave them out. Even Zendaya’s underwritten Athena turns out to be a vulnerable victim of war, or perhaps a projection of Odysseus’ conscience...

[...] The costumes, armour, boats and architecture are a mishmash, which is in keeping with Homer’s poem – itself drawn from many generations of storytelling and incorporating bits and pieces from different eras, dialects and traditions...

[...] But writing dialogue is not one of Nolan’s talents. The language is relentlessly expository, humourless and flat...

[...] As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem: ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script. Sadly, Damon’s Odysseus isn’t complicated or wily or artful.

One of Odysseus’ funniest (and most famous) tricks in Homer is to tell Polyphemus that his name is ‘No Man’. When the blinded giant screams for help from his neighbours, the other Cyclopes are reassured to learn that ‘No Man’ is hurting him. In the movie Odysseus doesn’t have to outwit Polyphemus because the Cyclops is a puppet who has no wits. Nolan’s grunting one-eyed giant is referred to as ‘it’, barely speaks, doesn’t get drunk and has neither neighbours nor a favourite sheep.

Perhaps more surprising from the director of Oppenheimer, Damon’s lummoxy Odysseus also seems to lack technological intelligence (polymēchania). He does not build a marriage bed out of a tree growing in his house (it would be a waste of effort, since he so rarely seems to sleep or have sex). The raft on which he escapes from Calypso is cobbled together from a few bits of driftwood (in contrast to the elaborate wood-chopping and shipbuilding in Homer).

We don’t see the design or construction of the Trojan Horse; instead, a kitsch, poorly designed horse (with no wheels) appears on the windswept beach as if dumped there by drone. The difficulties of transporting large, unwieldy objects over difficult terrain must have been on the director’s mind as he lugged his IMAX cameras through the film’s many challenging locations.

The most obvious new spin that Nolan brings to the source material is a subplot based on a story from the Aeneid, describing the way the Trojans were tricked into taking the Trojan Horse (an invention of ‘cruel Ulysses’) into the city, thanks to the machinations of a Greek double agent called Sinon (his name means ‘harmful’). In contrast to the relatively positive representation of cunning intelligence in Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil makes Ulysses cruel and predatory; Sinon is his deceitful accomplice.

In Nolan’s movie, Sinon is played by Elliot Page, and far from being a bad guy he’s the film’s moral centre. He is recruited to the Trojan War as a plucky youngster, thanks to the evil machinations of a teenage draft-dodger, Antinous (played in adulthood by a charismatically slimy Robert Pattinson). The main emotional arc of the film concerns Odysseus’ belated realisation that he is complicit in Sinon’s exploitation because he failed to tell him the truth about the Trojan Horse plot. Once he recovers his memory, Odysseus is racked by guilt.

The film doesn’t address the moral dilemmas raised by its own narrative invention, such as why it matters so much whether Batman told the whole truth to valiant Robin, given that he would be killed instantly either way - or why the sinless Sinon wants in on the scheme, if the sack of Troy was as bad as the movie wants to suggest.

Odysseus’ lie to Sinon doesn’t start the Trojan War, and the Trojans would presumably have taken the horse into the city anyway - as they do in Homer’s Odyssey. This muddled subplot is foisted on the film in order to make Nolan’s relentlessly didactic point about the contemporary Anglophone world: that the lies and xenophobia of the war on terror and Brexit began a cultural decline that is now destroying the values ‘we’ hold most dear.

Nolan’s other major addition to Homer’s narrative is the repeated reference to threats to ‘our civilisation’ from ‘the sea peoples’ - a now debunked 19th-century theory about maritime tribes who were thought to have attacked Egypt around 1200 bce and to have also been responsible for the roughly coeval collapse of Mycenaean Greek culture...

[...] Zeus’ law is a version of archaic Greek xenia: the idealised relationships between strangers, hosts and guests, who must treat one another with mutual respect, thereby forming multi-generational bonds between unrelated families. In the film, xenia is filtered through contemporary American ideas about the importance of philanthropic charity: wealthy people should be gracious towards the poor and hungry in their midst (without necessarily doing anything to mitigate their poverty).

Many of the film’s implicit values directly contradict those of Homer’s poem. Deception, warmongering, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abusing women and yearning for honour - all perfectly fine in the world of Homer - are, in this version, very bad. This is not in itself a problem, but it is a problem if the film’s own values and vision don’t hang together, and if the characters’ motivations don’t make sense on their own terms.

In Nolan’s Odyssey, slaughtering people with the help of trickery, technology and weapons is presented as bad when the Greeks are killing the Trojans, who have violated xenia, but good when Odysseus is killing the suitors, who have violated xenia. Taking something ostensibly abandoned by Odysseus and his comrades is natural and forgivable when the Trojans lay claim to the horse, but unnatural and unforgivable when the suitors lay claim to Odysseus’ palace, food, wine and wife. Strangers in Ithaca are to be treated with gracious kindness, as possible gods in disguise; but strangers in foreign lands are usually monstrous, to be blinded, robbed and slaughtered... (MORE - missing details)

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COMMENT: So above, Wilson seems to opt that Nolan's guilt trip stems from "super-progressive" influences rather than Christian: "This muddled subplot is foisted on the film in order to make Nolan’s relentlessly didactic point about the contemporary Anglophone world: that the lies and xenophobia of the war on terror and Brexit began a cultural decline that is now destroying the values ‘we’ hold most dear." (Rather than the reverse interpretation of an influx of medieval values undermining those of the West.)

But not a smoking gun that such is the source of his angst. If the case, one might still torturously go the route that most Enlightenment and post-French-Revolution ideologies are actually just mimicking aspects of Christianity (including replacing heaven with the quest for socioeconomic utopia on Earth). However, that's an interpretation that both late 19th-century collectivists and the neo-Marxist offshoots of today would recoil in horror at ever admitting. Though the deists and "cultural Christians" among classic liberals were more open about that. And ultimately, it's questionable that Nolan could be that nuanced about the history of that school of thought, IF he was subscribing to it.

Max Stirner: Political liberalism, like everything religious, counts on respect, humanity, the loving virtues. That’s why it lives in endless annoyance. Because in practice people respect nothing, and every day the small possessions get bought up again by the bigger owners, and the “free people” become day-laborers. [...] Proudhon, like the communists, fights against egoism. That is why they are continuations and consequences of the Christian principle, the principle of love, of sacrifice for something universal, something alien. [...] Since they’re enemies of egoism, they are therefore Christians, or more generally, religious people, believers in ghosts, dependents, servants of whatever universal (God, society, etc.). --The Ego and His Own .... [NOTE: IOW, they still invent abstract principles and ideas that they demand humans obey or conform to, but without personifying those concepts as theists in general did.]