Marathon

A new not-cast, and I review the Odyssey (Nolan, 2026)

Raghu and I are working through the Odyssey, in the Wilson and Fagles translations respectively, and we’re making something we are not really keen to call a podcast about it. We’re discussing four books at a time; you can listen to us discussing books 1-8 on the first two episodes of First We Read.

In a lunatic sideline I took the opportunity to also work through the filmography of Christopher Nolan, of which I’d seen very little. Here are my reactions, in order of viewing.

OPPENHEIMER, 2023. Interesting to encounter Nolan’s alter-ego straight out of the gate, which I only realised in retrospect. The figure of Oppenheimer himself is a familiar Nolan instrument, the hero who is troubled, but not impious enough to be an anti-hero. To his justifications of conscience, we are expected to yield the place of conscience itself. But the film’s moral centre and its most attractive performance is Robert Downey Jr. playing Lewis Strauss, the bureaucrat who wants to never be wrong and will hedge any bet he can in order to be right, or at least plausible. This man will never indict himself by picking a side in a moral quandary. His position is a consequence of his certainty, rather than his doubt. He is a liberal who understands why his opponents on both right and left see him as a glib functionary. He feels no need to respond or clarify. To him, the world is as good as it gets.

INTERSTELLAR, 2014. Made me miss a whole range of silly Hollywood space movies from the years just before this landed: Gravity, the two messy Tom Cruise vehicles, even Prometheus, the product of Ridley Scott’s destructive self-confidence. I am beginning to see Nolan’s sentimentality as a challenge to the naïveté of Scott and Steven Spielberg. Will he ever be able to doff his hat to David Lean, much less with the self-love that Scott exhibits in Prometheus? Mr Christopher Nolan! The trick is not minding that it hurts! As a native of internet fandoms the time-loop reveal didn’t blow my mind, a purely subjective reaction. I didn’t dislike Interstellar as much as I dislike Arrival, which I find an unsatisfactory flattening of the Ted Chiang story, in addition to being primitively Sinophobic. I was moved by the theme of familial love in Story of Your Life, bored by it in Arrival, and in Interstellar it made me want to sign up to a family abolition movement.

These two films have made it clear to me that Nolan is massively effective at gathering momentum in the third act, better than many other blockbuster-makers. His thematic interest in “time” is shallow, but there are real, positive consequences to his obsession with pace, which is the only thing that matters in cinema. This is his saving grace. Why then do his first acts do such little work in service of the third? People can make great movies in ninety minutes.

BATMAN BEGINS, 2005. Made me forgive Iron Man for its sins almost instantly. That was a costume party, already looking ahead to the sunlit phase of the War on Terror under Obama. In mood, colour and menace, this conveys the suffocation of that time very faithfully. A remarkable anticipation of the zeitgeist of the plutocrat-funded, billionaire-worshipping manosphere, driven by feeling contempt for inferiors, duty as victimhood, nihilism as a condition of masculinity, etc. etc. Some might foretell the future to forestall it, or at least in forewarning. Nolan has no more interest in such possibilities than, say, Tony Blair.

DUNKIRK, 2017. I was expecting a little more formal excitement. The aerial defence storyline resolved beautifully, in a way that even wartime audiences in the 1940s might thrill to. It seems very interesting that in 2017, when the battle against white nationalism in the US still seemed poised to go either way, Nolan was making the choice never to identify the opposing fighters as Nazis. I went with it as a choice to represent the worm’s-eye-view, abstracting the soldiers into every man in every war. But then the last sequence is literally a dramatisation of “We shall fight on the beaches.” So we derive the enormous satisfaction of Churchillian jingoism without the minimal inconvenience of acknowledging the context of its production?

Anyway, finally! Four movies in, a performance that manages not only to carry off Nolan’s witless and leaden dialogue but to invest it with a semblance of rhythm and deliberation. It only took Mark Rylance.

THE DARK KNIGHT, 2008. Taken aback by how enjoyable this was. It confirms every suspicion I had about how it shaped the language and self-image of the men in my life and evidently men the world over. For good reason: it’s real schlocky fun, sincerely maximalist, in love with its universe, while remaining quite distinct from the trim, A/B-tested harmony of the first run of Marvel Studios hits. I had a huge crush on Heath Ledger as a teenager, so I couldn’t stand to watch this when it came out. It’s now sweetly painful to see him on screen so self-assured, so full of fun, so physically commanding. A performance for the ages in the comic book movie genre and perhaps beyond.

MEMENTO, 2000. “Do I lie to myself to be happy?” The essence of the Nolan machista and the theme of all his movies. Ingenious, high-spirited, boyish. Guy Pearce has more rizz than any Nolan protagonist I’ve ever seen — including Al Pacino. Maybe because the film itself is closer to a rizzler era of Hollywood than the later work.

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, 2012. I can see why this would mean a lot if you cared about this brand. A stacked, busy movie that’s better paced than it seems. I liked it when they broke Batman’s back.

THE ODYSSEY, 2026. What am I supposed to say? I had a nice evening at the movies and a good dinner afterwards. I admired the invention of the common soldier — a boy whose spirit might have haunted the beach at Dunkirk — who holds the threads of Ithaca’s fate in his hands; a prosaic little nod to Alice Oswald in an Emily Wilson PR blitz.

I re-examined some of my assumptions about the affinities between Nolan’s work and the text and found them very funny in hindsight. All the technical dazzlement of Homer, the flashbacks, misdirections, lies and fights that Nolan seems to like so much, are so much less complicated in the movie than they are in the text. I could question why an object as unique as the Odyssey had to become cannon fodder in a movie about the same thing Nolan’s films are all about, with the same emotional appeal that all Hollywood movies deliver. If I, like millions around the world, say: We admire you for setting the world on fire! We pity you for feeling bad about it! — will we get a movie about literally anything else?

But as with so much in Hollywood there is no need for questions. The answers are in plain sight. The innovation of Christopher Nolan is that they can be whatever answers you want. That is why he is telling you that the world is as good as it gets. You made it that way.

THE PRESTIGE, 2006. Slick, would feel slight in 2026 were it not recognisably an expression of the underlying logic of the men who currently rule our world: empiricist, but only in appearance. The long trick is to lull you into believing that the film is a rationalist exercise when it is really selling you on the fantastic and irreplicable. It is a trick deployed fully by Nolan’s fans in Silicon Valley today. Seems a bit ungrateful of them to throw loud tantrums about Nolan because his approach to colour-blind casting allows them to open up a new front in the US-led culture war. But on balance, it has turned out to be very profitable for Nolan.

One refreshing departure from the rest of his corpus: the men are freely unlikeable, with no need for tortured noble excuses.

TENET, 2020. Nice to encounter the only man in the entire filmography approaching anything like sexual confidence, Denzil Smith. This movie was fine when it was moving on pure vibes, unsatisfying when we got a heavy-handed Spielbergian payoff, the film’s reasoning for why people from the future might try to erase the past. There is a hard question somewhere in this material. Can we build a future with no reference to the past? No signposts or bulwarks but also no baggage? What if we could control path dependency at scale? Unfortunately the most interesting answers to these questions are material, moral and spiritual, not to be found in the low-stakes world of Nolan’s make-believe.

I watched Insomnia and Inception when they came out, so I didn’t revisit them, and I’m not going to watch Following. Tenet was a fitting way to end this tortured filmathon: the most straightforward expression of Nolan’s basic theme and method, the hedged bet. Other filmmakers retreat to allegory and fable when they find it unsafe or uninteresting to address the world directly. Nolan cuts the cord between the direct address and the allegory, not to defamiliarise it but to mystify it. It’s a great way to appeal to varied and competing groups of inegalitarians. But even though I live a life online, I am also a moviegoer, and I cannot forget what I have learned to think and know within the world of the theatre, within the logic of cinema.

First We Read is available on many podcast platforms. I also had the pleasure of reading S03 of the constitutional history podcast, Friend of the Court, with Raghu. I hope you’ll join us on this little cruise. See you on the opean sea.