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

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00:01:47.460 Black twin Helen of Troy, transgender Achilles, or not Achilles, but kind of Achilles, 0.78

00:01:54.880 Ithaca's king is coming back 0.92

00:01:59.360 no he's not

00:02:00.540 I saw

00:02:07.020 Christopher Nolan's

00:02:08.420 DEI Odyssey

00:02:09.900 and

00:02:10.960 I am

00:02:12.820 I feel as though I've been on an Odyssey of my own

00:02:15.960 and trying to make sense of this movie

00:02:17.440 I'd say

00:02:19.980 don't try to understand it, just feel it

00:02:21.880 the top takeaway

00:02:23.400 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 Knight, which is a conservative movie.

00:02:35.640 And so I knew going in the movie was going to be quite good.

00:02:41.380 I knew it was going to be quite good because Christopher Nolan is probably the greatest director of his generation.

00:02:46.620 He's up there.

00:02:47.780 And this is what really makes me a man of sorrows and trouble.

00:02:52.520 So it makes me like Odysseus.

00:02:54.080 I've been on this journey making sense of the movie

00:02:55.700 because the thing that's most annoying

00:02:59.160 is that Christopher Nolan is so good

00:03:02.620 that he can get away with a lot of this stuff.

00:03:05.840 All the DEI stuff that you thought was in there,

00:03:08.260 it really is in there.

00:03:09.820 And in some ways, the meaning of it

00:03:11.480 is even worse than you thought it might be.

00:03:15.260 But it's still a pretty good movie,

00:03:16.920 and I would encourage you to go see it.

00:03:22.520 because he's that good so what is actually going on here right off the top let's go to the the

00:03:30.200 supposedly wokest aspect of it from the beginning that ellen page is playing a man this trans

00:03:36.160 identifying guy is playing a man and not just a man but achilles the greatest warrior ever you've

00:03:41.900 got this like diminutive trans woman playing achilles that's crazy right she's not really 0.58

00:03:48.180 playing achilles she's playing this character sin on which tells you a lot about what christopher

00:03:52.500 Nolan's doing here in the movie. Now, part of the reason maybe there was that rumor that she was

00:03:56.680 playing Achilles is that Sinon does not really appear in the Odyssey. Sinon doesn't appear in

00:04:01.780 Homer's Odyssey. He doesn't appear in Homer's Iliad. He appears in Virgil's Aeneid, and he

00:04:08.060 appears in Dante's Divine Comedy, and he appears in Shakespeare even. But Sinon is this figure from

00:04:16.940 the Trojan War who's not in the source material here. And so you realize Nolan is leaning into a

00:04:21.840 tradition that is not only circumscribed by Homer's text. Okay. And the role that he gives to

00:04:29.580 Sinon in his movie is in part the role held by Achilles, because there's this famous scene in

00:04:35.840 the poem, The Odyssey, where Odysseus goes down to Hades and he speaks to Achilles, and that is

00:04:40.840 replaced in this movie with Sinon. And so right off the bat, that's like the wokest thing, right?

00:04:46.240 You have this tranny guy playing a character that's not even actually in the original poem. 0.99

00:04:50.180 However, there's a little trickery here. 0.97

00:04:52.920 And I think this is the theme, cleverness, deception, trickery.

00:04:56.320 That's the whole theme, not just of the poem, but of even how we should be thinking about

00:05:01.600 this movie, because Sinon is a figure of deceit.

00:05:07.200 Sinon tricks the Trojans into letting the Trojan horse into the city, which ends up

00:05:11.660 destroying the city.

00:05:12.880 Sinon, in Dante's Divine Comedy, is put down in one of the deepest parts of hell with the

00:05:18.200 fraudsters, almost at the very bottom of hell with the fraudsters, because he uses his words

00:05:23.900 for deceit and he peddles falsehoods. So you say, hold on, wait, you cast the trans-identifying 0.93

00:05:30.180 actress? You cast the woman who insists publicly that she's a man as the fraudster? Wow, that's 0.63

00:05:38.940 pretty deep. There's clearly some meaning to that. It also shows you that Nolan is approaching this

00:05:45.300 from a broader Western tradition. So he's reading the Homer poem through Virgil and through Dante.

00:05:52.360 Okay. We know that he relies on the Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey, which is annoying.

00:05:59.460 It's a more recent translation. I think it's from 2017. I confess, I actually have not read the

00:06:04.400 Wilson translation, but my classicist friends assure me it's very, very bad. And it disenchants

00:06:10.840 the world, but it's pretty feminist. And you see the feminism in the second bit of DEI casting here, 1.00

00:06:18.000 which is Lupita Nyong'o. Lupita Nyong'o is Helen of Troy. Lupita Nyong'o is not Greek. 1.00

00:06:25.760 She's not as Helen is typically presented, sort of fair-skinned or blonde. She's quite black.

00:06:30.800 And this off the bat is a kind of shocking casting. But I actually think the racial aspect 0.78

00:06:36.880 of it is less significant than the sexual aspect of it. In other words, there is race grievance

00:06:44.880 DEI stuff, and we all have to pretend that Helen of Troy is black now, but that's actually less 0.56

00:06:49.920 significant to the storytelling than what her casting says about the feminist line, because 0.99

00:06:57.140 Lupita Nyong'o actually plays two parts. She plays Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the 0.96

00:07:00.980 world, the face that launched a thousand ships, and Clytemnestra, who is the wife of Agamemnon.

00:07:09.060 So Helen is the wife of Menelaus, Clytemnestra is the wife of Agamemnon, and they're supposedly,

00:07:15.160 you know, they're sisters. But in Christopher Nolan's telling, unlike in Homer's telling,

00:07:20.100 they're twins. Well, I haven't heard anyone else make this point yet, but what does that tell you?

00:07:24.820 If Helen of Troy is the twin of Clytemnestra, then it means that Helen does not uniquely launch a thousand ships.

00:07:35.000 I think my friend Spencer Clavin, genius classicist and Homer scholar, he may have mentioned something.

00:07:41.420 I might have seen somewhere he mentioned something about the strangeness of the twin decision.

00:07:46.580 But just to take that point further, what that tells you is this is a real feminist reading of the poem.

00:07:52.440 that it was not just that Helen's beauty launched the Trojan War. Actually, Helen's beauty was

00:08:00.180 merely used as a scapegoat for the ambitions of men. That's really what it's about. And you see 0.99

00:08:04.940 that feminism come out in the end, too, in one of the final scenes. This is not really a spoiler, 0.83

00:08:09.880 but Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, who's been away now for 20 years, she's trying to fend off

00:08:15.180 all of the suitors and, you know, try to preserve Odysseus's kingdom. She has this kind of feminist

00:08:22.100 outburst in nolan's movie where she says yeah well of course we need a king why can't we have

00:08:27.640 a queen you know why can't i all this experience i'm a great political leader why can't i be the

00:08:32.220 queen and and you just think this is so contrary to penelope's character and contrary to the ancient 0.98

00:08:38.880 world that's a real modern update and it it goes in line with the feminism of picking this

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00:09:56.640 Okay, so then you get the Helen Twin thing. 0.99

00:10:00.180 People are complaining because they say Lupita Nyong'o, who's a nice-looking lady and she's a very good actress,

00:10:05.160 but they're saying she's not the most beautiful woman in the world.

00:10:07.200 But actually, casting her as Clyde Amnestra in Helen drives home the point that,

00:10:12.100 no, no, well, Helen is not even the most beautiful woman in the world.

00:10:15.280 It doesn't matter how beautiful Helen is.

00:10:16.760 this war was brought about because of these men and their ambitions, because they're brutal sort

00:10:21.220 of warlords. Okay. So on the one hand, you have this real ramping up of the machismo of guys like

00:10:27.220 Agamemnon and all the rest. But what of Odysseus? Odysseus, they make less of a man in this movie.

00:10:32.700 Christopher Nolan makes less of a man in this movie. Actually, the way that Nolan frames the

00:10:37.780 movie is that he's on this island trapped with Calypso, who in the poem is holding Odysseus

00:10:43.720 captive and he's trying to get away from her. And in another episode, all of the men, all of

00:10:50.600 Odysseus's fellow sailors are eating the lotus flower, which is this drug that makes them forget

00:10:54.860 about their homes and their desire to go home. Well, in Nolan's movie, he smashes it all together.

00:10:59.760 And crucially, Odysseus eats the lotus. He does the drugs. In the poem, Odysseus has such

00:11:07.100 discipline, is such a hero, is a man of such resolve. He's the one who does not eat the drug.

00:11:12.160 But in Nolan's movie, he's kind of weak, too.

00:11:16.700 And he's weak, and he's uncertain of himself, and he doesn't want to go home.

00:11:23.800 In fact, this is one of the most—this is a little bit of a spoiler.

00:11:26.940 Maybe I'll save it for the end.

00:11:28.040 But there is a big change that Nolan makes here, which is that Nolan insists that Odysseus hears the song of the sirens, the song that leads the sailors to their death.

00:11:40.440 And not only does he hear it, as in the poem, but he then tells us what the sirens are singing.

00:11:46.360 We'll get to that momentarily because it tells you about this character of Ulysses.

00:11:49.580 I mentioned earlier that Nolan is reading Odysseus through Virgil and through Dante,

00:11:55.520 as well as through this feminist translator, Emily Wilson.

00:11:58.180 Part of that is even adding parts to the story.

00:12:00.960 In the poem, Odysseus comes back to Troy, kills all the suitors, and reclaims his kingdom, and it's all good.

00:12:08.660 In Dante, for instance, Dante puts Ulysses, Odysseus down with the counselors of fraud

00:12:15.000 because he comes back to Ithaca, he reclaims his kingdom, but he doesn't want to be at home.

00:12:20.120 He wants to go to sea. He's the symbol of curiosity, of transgressing the proper limits

00:12:24.940 of human knowledge. He's always a symbol of cleverness, of trickery, of deception. He makes

00:12:30.840 this brilliant speech, you know, in the Iliad, which is, he's really considered the symbol of

00:12:36.200 crafty, effective rhetoric. So Nolan goes with Dante. Nolan says, no, he does want to go on,

00:12:43.180 but he kind of weakens him a little in that in Dante's version, Odysseus, same person,

00:12:49.880 leaves home again to just go adventuring and discovering, experiencing more parts of the

00:12:55.240 world. He's got like millennial-itis or something. But in Nolan's telling, spoiler, he takes his wife

00:13:01.180 with him and imposes an exile on himself. And this gets us down now to the real core of the

00:13:06.480 movie. And here you're going to start getting some spoilers. At the heart of the movie is

00:13:12.640 Ulysses' sin, Odysseus' sin of violating the law of Zeus. This is totally contrary to the poem.

00:13:24.380 Almost totally. Odysseus does in the poem violate the law of Zeus and irritate the gods sometimes,

00:13:29.000 but it's not the central point, and it has nothing to do with what Odysseus did in the Trojan War.

00:13:34.580 But in Nolan's telling, the law of Zeus, the key law of Zeus, is to be hospitable to people,

00:13:42.940 to be civil with people, not to violate their trust, to welcome the stranger. You're seeing a

00:13:49.820 lot of modern political themes, respect for institutions, standards and norms, all the rest

00:13:57.220 of that. And in the poem, the law of Zeus really is being hospitable to people, and the gods do

00:14:02.980 get angry when that law is violated. But crucially, in the movie, Nolan states that Odysseus feels

00:14:11.660 this immense guilt the whole time because of the trick, because he comes up with the idea for the

00:14:15.560 Trojan horse, and it breaks the standard and norm of a way to make peace between peoples, and it

00:14:22.040 destroys civilization. It ends the Bronze Age. He has just torn down everything, irreparably 0.85

00:14:28.820 destroyed the standards and norms of politics. And that itself is a violation of the law of Zeus.

00:14:33.920 That is nowhere found in the poem. In the poem and in the usual tradition,

00:14:39.640 the Trojan horse is just a clever trick of war. And in fact, the initial violation of the law of

00:14:45.840 Zeus, was when Paris, the Trojan, is staying with Menelaus, the Greek, and then abducts his wife,

00:14:52.480 Helen. That's the violation that justifies the Trojan War. So then the Greeks are the good guys

00:14:57.740 and the Trojans are the bad guys. Here, you have this Odysseus who is totally wracked with guilt

00:15:05.460 because he violated the law of standards and norms and civility in welcoming the strangers.

00:15:11.760 It seems to me, this is shots at Trump.

00:15:15.140 This is shots at Trump on immigration

00:15:16.580 and the way he talks and the political order.

00:15:19.200 I don't really see how you read it any other way.

00:15:21.660 And I know it's weird coming from Nolan

00:15:22.840 because Nolan made the Dark Knight,

00:15:24.240 which is about how great a Republican president was,

00:15:26.280 George W. Bush.

00:15:27.420 But that's what I'm reading here.

00:15:30.840 And then, so then Odysseus,

00:15:32.700 rather than just maintain his throne in Ithaca,

00:15:35.140 he just exiles himself with his wife.

00:15:37.620 So it's not quite the Dante thing

00:15:39.040 of I'm gonna be an adventurer

00:15:40.060 and try to keep exploring and pursuing my curiosity, which is not a virtue.

00:15:44.900 And it's not the original, which is he stays and is king of Ithaca.

00:15:48.520 It's this weird kind of hallmark middle ground where he goes off with his wife

00:15:52.660 and drags her to the ends of the earth to pursue lands westward or whatever.

00:15:56.780 Now, the idea of the lands going westward also is really coming from the Aeneid,

00:16:00.880 the idea that the power, the authority of the empire moves westward.

00:16:04.740 This is the Translatio Imperii.

00:16:06.980 Dante attacks Constantine later on because Constantine reverses the order of the movement

00:16:13.360 of the empire, that the power of the empire is always moving westward. Constantine pushes it

00:16:17.200 back east with the fall of the west. And so here he's picking up on this theme that the empire

00:16:24.160 moves westward. And there he is relating the movie not just to modern society, but to the modern

00:16:31.180 hegemon to the modern empire, which is America, seeing us as the inheritors of this imperial

00:16:37.200 authority. Okay. He changes some other things in there that are not quite as big of a deal.

00:16:44.480 We get to the end and, you know, there's a happy ending. My question here, I'm just trying to figure

00:16:49.680 out why would Nolan do this? Is Nolan a big lip? Apparently he's buddies with Ellen Page. Maybe he

00:16:54.100 just really wanted to put Ellen Page in the movie. I don't know. Maybe he's not as conservative as I

00:16:58.100 thought, he's an artist, so he's probably not even that self-conscious. You know, it's up to the

00:17:01.300 critics to read what the artists are doing. Sometimes the artists aren't totally aware of it.

00:17:05.920 But early on, when all the DEI casting was coming out, I wondered, I said, is Nolan just trying to

00:17:11.280 get an Oscar? You know, there are requirements. There are DEI diversity requirements to get an

00:17:17.060 Oscar. And the diversity is so over the top in Nolan. I mean, the idea that Helen of Troy is

00:17:25.100 this black woman is not, it's like no knock on black women, but it's just Helen of Troy is not

00:17:29.160 a black woman. And you pick like a real, like the blackest black woman you ever saw. She's very 0.98

00:17:33.360 pretty, but that's like really weird. The idea that the character that would have been Ulysses

00:17:39.420 in the, sorry, that would have been Achilles in the original, the greatest warrior ever, 1.00

00:17:42.660 is this scrawny, kind of messed up trans woman who thinks she's a man. That's like really on 1.00

00:17:50.420 the nose, DEI casting. And then you just look at the feast scenes and the suitors, and it's,

00:17:55.140 it's, you know, I don't know, some, some DEI film, or, you know, some diversity training from a

00:18:03.440 corporation in the mid-2000s. Like, it's really, really on the nose. And it makes me wonder if this,

00:18:11.340 this essential character of Odysseus in the poem, but especially in the Latin tradition

00:18:19.960 that Nolan is explicitly reading this through. The inclusion of sin and alone would tell you that.

00:18:26.940 If the DEI stuff is not Nolan doing his own kind of Odysseus here, Odysseus is a trickster.

00:18:36.480 Odysseus, that's not fair to say, because it cheapens Odysseus too much.

00:18:40.520 Odysseus wields his rhetoric in very morally dubious ways.

00:18:47.180 So much so that in Dante, he is the symbol of the counselors of fraud.

00:18:52.980 This is the, he's curious, he's deceptive, he's an angler,

00:19:00.360 he wields rhetoric in ways that are very effective, though not.

00:19:04.820 They have a dubious relationship to the truth.

00:19:07.980 And I wonder, is Nolan not expressing that in his filmmaking?

00:19:13.540 If Odysseus, if Odysseus himself were to make this movie in the big two six,

00:19:19.820 and he wanted to get his Oscar, or even if he didn't want to,

00:19:23.180 Nolan already has an Oscar, but even if he wanted to kind of make a statement

00:19:26.940 about filmmaking in 2026, it seems to me Odysseus himself

00:19:31.820 would have made the very same choice as Christopher Nolan makes.

00:19:34.820 he would have used all sorts of angles, pulled all sorts of levers.

00:19:41.640 Oh, yeah. Of course we need a tranny. Of course Helen Troy has to be black. 1.00

00:19:45.500 And a twin. She doesn't even need to be—her beauty doesn't even matter. 1.00

00:19:48.960 Oh, yes, of course.

00:19:51.320 To get it through to make this movie, which is good and which is very beautiful in many ways,

00:19:55.740 and very moving in many ways.

00:19:57.320 I hope I'm not reading too much into it, but Nolan's a genius.

00:20:00.120 So, in a way, I almost don't care if I'm reading too much into it,

00:20:04.160 because I think the read is very plausible and it helps me to make sense of how this great director

00:20:10.780 could not just transgress, Odysseus transgresses, could not just transgress in minor kind of odd

00:20:18.600 ways. Oh, Christopher, do we really need a tranny? But could transgress in such overt ways. 1.00

00:20:25.740 Could a great filmmaker like Nolan do that without there being any meaning to it? No,

00:20:30.760 I think not. And so is this, is, is the movie Nolan's own Odyssean deception on his path back

00:20:38.340 home to return to his Oscars? In any case, you'll probably go see the movie. It drives me a little

00:20:42.880 crazy that it involved so much ideological suffering and trials. But then again, that's

00:20:49.660 the story of the poem. Okay. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. See you next time.

00:21:00.760 Thank you.

The Michael Knowles Show - July 17, 2026

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey Is Not What I Expected

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