Christopher Nolan's Odyssey

Research and Sense-Making
, , ,
1

Lately in the WhatsApp channel, there has been a lot of lively interest in the critical reception of Christopher Nolan’s recent Odyssey film. This post is mean to provide a convenient summary of that long-running thread.

This reviewer saw the same film I did (spoilers!)

MH: Excellent video. Makes me want to see the movie.

I’ve long held the view Trump is a Trojan Horse. Hope I can make the meeting this afternoon. Layers and layers…

DJ: I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I’ve noticed the Trojan Horse archetype manifesting in various ways in macro culture. AI bubble and all that.

RB: My initial impression in the theatre matched the reviewer - “OMG, this is really a film about the metacrisis!” Since then I have consumed many opinions about the film. It’s ersatz Christian. It’s neo-conservative. It’s woke. It’s Hollywood, not Homer. Where are the Greeks? Where are the British accents with gravitas (because of course all ancients spoke like Shakespearean stage actors!) It’s anachronistic (so was the original Homer, BTW). Beyond that, Bronze Age collapse and early Axial Age are my jam anyway, so I hope to air all this out later today!

RB: Also, this from Jeremy Johnson this morning. What Julian Jayes and Jean Gebser had to say about the Odyssey was very much on my mind while viewing the Nolan film last week. Much Ado About The Odyssey - by Jeremy D Johnson

MB: In regards to the Nolan/Odyssey discussion.
By Damien Walker if someone knows him
(Yes the title is very clickbaity)

MH: [being pedantic about the thumbnail]

The Greeks and the Romans had a deeply patriarchal, if slightly different than modern Western, notion of sexuality (more restrictive than the societies around them, probably). It was (cisgender male) tops who got to be “men”, regardless of the bottom’s gender. In fact, some of the Greek philosophers advocated a preference for men… not because they were queer theorists, but because they hated women so much, they thought it was ideal to cut them out of everything if you could.

Critically, this is still a strict hierarchical gender system that distributes violence downward and labor (especially sexual labor) upward. The nuances of its purity standards for “real” cisgender men who had the right to rule may have been slightly different, but the labor-exploited, violence-absorbing feminized underclass is pretty much the same (+ legal slavery).

Jokes to make contemporary white nationalists uncomfortable? Absolutely. Reactionaries always underestimate how much societies have changed (and how much dis-continuity there is between us and Ancient Greece). But if we’re looking for a kinder and freer society :eyes: I would not look there

NG: The West sure loves its self-image of superior, cultured civilization sprouting up ex-nihilo in ancient Greece amongst a sea of barbarians to invent philosophy, arts, and all human sophistication.

RB: The ancient Greeks themselves had that self-image! Our problem of the moment is the loudest voices banging the drum for “Western Civilization” are not themselves especially civilized, would not recognize a Western Civ. curriculum if it ran over their golf carts, and would struggle to offer an informed opinion, for example, on Matthew Arnold’s Hellenism and Hebraism. “Jesus” for that crowd is a sort of barbarian war-god who demands the slaughter of innocents as blood sacrifice to gain wealth and power. That sort of attitude was in fact quite common in the West - during the European Dark Ages. One of my favorite books is Norbert Elias The Civilizing Process. Perhaps we are currently witnessing the Decivilizing Process!

DJ: [2:57 AM, 8/1/2026] +49 15565 968904: Plato and Herodotus seemed to think highly of the Egyptians and their wisdom. But I’m sure it’s a complicated question.
[2:59 AM, 8/1/2026] +49 15565 968904: But I do fully agree that those who bloviate most about ‚Western Civilization‘ are often the most ignorant

MH: “This is how societies and nation states and patriarchies legitimize themselves. I mean, the Greeks were comparing themselves to Babylonians.

They didn’t fucking know anything that was going on in Babylon. That culture had died a thousand years ago and Greeks were like, no, they totally did all this awesome stuff and we kind of inherited that. And it’s totally weird.

I do love how every quote unquote great civilization is always like, and in the past, there was this great culture and we have lost our way and we must go back there. And even the fucking post-colonialist and feminist do is like, oh, our lost pre-colonial gender expansive matriarchy is like, motherfuckers, stop trying to crawl back into the womb. I want to see one goddamn hegemony be like, the past we came from was dog shit and we’re going to do better.”

From Cracked Ivory: Spotlight: Interview with Maria Ying, Author of “The Hades Calculus”, Jan 21, 2026

RB: From a Jungian standpoint, the “golden age” was very much in utero! Nostalgia, if unpacked through analysis, is the longing to go back there. That journey, of course, cannot be taken, so we have to project something else. The happy tribal days of hunting mastodon on the frozen steppe or some such. My preference is just to peer into the Void. We have nothing to lose by doing that, nothing we are not going to lose anyway. Nothing can tell us the most about the next Something!

DJ: This seems like a bit of a false dilemma. Does it have to be either wholesale disavowal of past cultures as dogshit, or uninformed desire to return to a romanticized past that never was?

RB: Here is a make something or another great again guy. He says Nolan’s “supporters” wrongly think Nolan’s Odyssey interpretation was Christian or conservative. I have seen those kinds of critical interpretations - but they were not exactly IMO supportive! This critique thinks Nolan did not Christianize the story nearly enough (and somehow that sort of Christianization would be been extremely faithful to the original Homer).

RB: n this video, Christopher Nolan speaks for himself. Among other things, on the question of the “Christianization” of the guilt of Odysseus, Nolan points out this may just be how the audience is wired to process what the film portrays. It’s a sort of neo-Kantian point: audiences bring a priori narrative framing to film, and filmmakers not only have to strategize how to film an idea, but also how the audience is likely to receive the idea. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa4I8Ch2TRo

MH: The Odyssey as tech criticism - by Brian Merchant

MH: An excellent cultural analysis

2

Somehow I don’t want to use whatsapp since it belongs to meta and all the other negative entailoing effects. Do you have a bridge from whatsapp to matrix or other open platforms?

3

I agree with you 100%! This forum used to be a lot livelier. Then a few months ago I found out all the regulars were mostly messaging each other on WhatsApp. I very much prefer a computer screen to a phone screen, so I joined the WhatsApp group just to stay in the loop, but did not use it much. Then I found out how to bind WhatsApp to computers also. Then I got involved with the WhatsApp conversation. I hate the idea that Meta is monetizing “Life Itself” and “Second Renaissance” traffic But I’m holding my nose and participating there to build relationships with the people who evidently prefer that channel.

4

People are mostly mobile addict + some other issues. Yes a Laptop is more cumbersome, for good reasons: you put it away when you are - finished - you are not all day in - always on mode.

There are many reason for many things. But as I hinted in my digital development spaces post. I think there is potential to develop the digital tools used - here - to improve patterns of communication.

Communication has multiple levels, in larger groups it creates a “vibe” or zeitgeist.

Thank you for confirming my impression that the forum is “dead” people are mostly burned out, bored out. So either they are completly offline, which can also work or talking to LLMs..

Mobile touch screen devices combined with Social Media Sites like Instagram (endless doom scrool) are a certain recipe for Reciprocal Narrowing

We do not want to be overwhelmed:

There are alternatives:

5

I listened a bit into this:

but now discovered that pageau goes deeper into this:

he is pretty good in tracking meta tribes or zeitgeist transformations.

6

I feel like this is one of those all too common manufactured topics. The papers (and whoever is behind) “invent” a controversy and say - this is the one everyone should be outraged about. Then the good old FOMO kicks in and people line up to state their opinions (because, of course, no risk expressing opinions about something that doesn’t matter - but lt’s pretend we’re doing something important!) Manufactured outrage, permitted sandbox to exppress outrage about supposedly “controversial” - totally un-controversial and irrelevant non-event. :partying_face:. Meanwhile, the producers are rubbing their hands in glee…

1 Like
7

In an interview about what he was trying to do with the film, Nolan points out that no matter what the film maker has in mind, the audiences are going to bring their own frameworks to the experience. A lot of the reaction to the film tell us more about what is going on the heads of the different reviewers that anything specific to the film itself. That interests me also. To me, this film is a bit of a Rorschach test.

8

There are roughly 10k feature films made in a year. For us to pick one and collectively start talking about it - someone needs to turn off the lights globally and shine a laser beam on that particular one.

9

Given Christopher Nolan’s track record (“Oppenheimer”, for example), it’s not that remarkable this one would attract attention. Not to mention the cast, the production budget, and the pre-release marketing campaign. It would be a difficult film not to notice!

10

Here is some application of Nolans’ work (and Homer’s work, and all the critical theory around all of it) to a local project I am working on.

My problem is to define “Cascadian” identity. “Cascadian” is a regional identity. We’re looking for “Cascadian”: local cooperative movement :: Basque: Mondragon.

Unlike “Basque”, however, “Cascadian” is not really an ethnicity. The core ethnos is indigenous tribes, who are very much going concerns, but which are demographically a small percentage of overall regional population. “White” is probably the largest demographic slice, but there is very significant Black, Asian, Latino, Pacific Islander, and other global presence as well. So a “blood and soil” sort of regional identity needs to draw “blood” from the entire planet, to fit onto soil (and very importantly - waters) that are regionally specific.

In looking at local indigenous theology (the people who were here first and have the longest history with the place), they hold that the “salmon people” swim upstream every year to sacrifice themselves for the human people and all the other plant, bird, and animal people. The self-sacrifice of the salmon people is really the key to all the rest of it.

In thinking about this - and about Nolan’s film - I ask myself, why was the local indigenous life of abundant fish and forest overrun by global forces? The answer beginning to take shape for me is, it must be because the land itself invited the world in! In Homeric terms, the land and the water, the fish and forest, were practicing “xenia”. Providing hospitality. The local “potlatch” tradition is another version of that. Also, like Homer’s Achaeans (as interpreted by Nolan), the world peoples who showed up for the hospitality have in many cases overstayed their welcome and not been the best of guests. Time to restore the balance!

My sense of “Cascadian” identity, is the true Cascadian understands the balanced nature of gift-giving and gift-taking, and practices this in harmony with local cycles, looking to the fish and the forest, the waters and the winds, in the first instance. You can tell a Cascadian by how that that person relates to the fish and to all the waters that give life to the fish. As to the skin color of such Cascadians, as with Nolan’s “diversity casting”, I don’t much care! Cascadian is as Cascadian does. What that person’s family did to journey to this place is interesting, but it’s not the most fundamental question.