Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey Is Not What I Expected
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
14
sentences flagged
Toxicity
7
sentences flagged
Hate speech
16
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode, Howard Mackler talks about the new movie, The Dark Knight Rises, starring Amy Poehler and Christopher Nolan. He also talks about why he thinks it s one of the best movies of the last decade.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
I'm Howard Mackler. I spent my career building companies that help businesses solve problems.
00:00:04.840
Now I built SuperShore because I think business insurance is broken. Some brokers hand you a
00:00:09.860
policy, collect their commission, and disappear until renewal. Your business runs all year,
00:00:14.600
and so do the gaps and the risks. For companies with 25 or more employees,
00:00:18.980
whether you're the owner, CFO, or HR manager, SuperShore is built for you. We're licensed in
00:00:24.560
all 50 states, covering business insurance and employee benefits, with year-round support for
00:00:29.460
you and your team. You can go to supersure.com and use the fine print facts tool, which translates
00:00:35.060
your current policy into plain English, so you see what's common and what's not. The business
00:00:39.880
value calculator helps you estimate what your company is worth, so you know what actually
00:00:44.920
needs protecting. Go to supersure.com. All your policies in one place. Go to supersure.com.
00:00:51.660
That's supersure.com. You can thank me later. Paid for by Supersure Insurance Agency, LLC,
00:00:56.580
a licensed insurance agency. There is a principle at work in Medicare that should bother you. The
00:01:00.740
people advising you on your plan are often incentivized to recommend what pays you the most,
00:01:04.620
not what fits you the best. Most people make this decision once and never revisit it, even though
00:01:08.640
plans change every single year. Millions are locked into coverage that no longer makes sense for them.
00:01:12.960
They don't even know it. Chapter is structured differently. They're independent, the only
00:01:16.600
Medicare advisors that compare every plan nationwide. Not a selection, every plan. They look at your
00:01:21.580
doctors, your prescriptions, your priorities, and they tell you the truth. If you're on the right
00:01:24.880
plan, they will say so. If you're not, they'll help you switch. No pressure, no sales pitch.
00:01:29.180
People who have found new plans through Chapter have saved over $1,100 a year on average. Go to
00:01:34.460
dailywire.com slash chapter. It's free. It takes under 20 minutes. You'll walk away actually knowing
00:01:39.120
whether your plan fits your life, which is more than the system was designed to give you.
0.98
00:01:47.460
Black twin Helen of Troy, transgender Achilles, or not Achilles, but kind of Achilles,
0.78
00:02:12.820
I feel as though I've been on an Odyssey of my own
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.
00:02:47.780
And this is what really makes me a man of sorrows and trouble.
00:02:54.080
I've been on this journey making sense of the movie
00:03:05.840
All the DEI stuff that you thought was in there,
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
00:04:52.920
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
00:05:12.880
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
00:08:44.100
translation go to good ranchers.com use code noles k-n-w-l-e-s one thing that i really missed
00:09:19.760
is this where we're at on the show we're just doing cheap stupid nonsense this is so
0.99
00:09:27.620
degrading in every way but you know what's not degrading good ranchers good ranchers will
0.99
00:09:32.660
upgrade your meals absolutely delicious the very best that you are going to get chicken pork beef
00:09:40.000
all the rest of it this july start a plan get free meat with every order plus 50 off your first
00:09:44.520
order with code knolls canada view l-e-s just visit good ranchers.com use code knolls canada
00:09:48.720
WLAS at checkout, free meat with every order, and $50 off when you start a plan.
00:09:52.920
GoodRanchers.com, American Meat, delivered.
0.82
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.
00:10:16.760
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.
00:11:16.700
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.
00:11:28.040
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.
00:15:19.200
I don't really see how you read it any other way.
00:15:24.240
which is about how great a Republican president was,
00:15:32.700
rather than just maintain his throne in Ithaca,
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.
00:16:06.980
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.
00:19:07.980
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
00:19:51.320
To get it through to make this movie, which is good and which is very beautiful 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.