Clearing away the conservative obsession with Christopher Nolan
Like the proverbial “fog of war,” blockbuster movies generate a fog of hype that accounts for the continuing buzz over Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
This phee-nom repeats the embarrassment of “Barbenheimer” in 2023 when two paltry films, Barbie and Oppenheimer, bamboozled the public, creating nonsense talk — nonsense because those films were lame presentations of, respectively, juvenile feminist fantasy and the Bomb (a phantom biopic encouraging America’s guilt and shame over winning WWII — just as Nolan’s Odysseus suffers over his battle victories during the Trojan War).
In the fog of hype, many people have difficulty seeing a film in cinematic terms and, instead, fall for giving unwarranted importance to high-pressure advertising.
Hype for The Odyssey combines the box-office power of James Cameron’s Titanic with the artistic ambition of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, especially for those who can remember 1979 when the counterculture desired a grand summation of the Vietnam War experience. Millennials will have to make do with Coppola’s attempt in Megalopolis to similarly explain the societal breakdown of the anti-Trump era. (The box-office flop of Megalopolis ironically matches the collapse of the Biden presidency.)
Nolan’s Odyssey appeals to cultural PTSD. He uses Homer’s epic as a metaphor for the West’s inner turmoil, his nihilistic attempt to reset social and culture standards. He trivializes Western history and mythology as a generational cinematic event.
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The language of The Odyssey reviews matches the advertising strategy. It’s all hype. We already suffered a similar exasperating juggernaut with “Barbenheimer.” Now Hollywood marketing has become more pervasive by commanding the practice of “first reactions,” initiating word-of-mouth hype. This commercial trance (a Hollywood and journalism hustle) resembles what political pundits call “astroturf,” the fabrication of actual “grassroots” opinion. Universal Studios privileged early social media commentary before The Odyssey even opened — nudging the public to build false expectations, both positive and negative. This miscegenation of reviewers and industry insiders began with the lugubrious Oppenheimer; its dismal “drama” took advantage of conservative and liberal perspectives on history, government, class, and character. Nolan’s trickery made what we thought we knew about the subject less exciting than anyone had imagined. But few would admit it.
Thanks to the fog of hype, conservative pundits, such as Daily Wire scold Matt Walsh, anticipated that Nolan had cast trans actress Elliot Page (an alumni from Nolan’s Inception) in the role of Greek warrior Achilles. It turns out that Page played the character Sinon, transliterated from Virgil’s epic Latin poem The Aeneid. The misidentification continues Oppenheimer’s cynical conception of history, good reason to distrust Nolan’s “psychiatrized” vision, as The Odyssey translator Emily Wilson called it.
The crusade against the wokeness of The Odyssey finds conservatives trapped between their distrust of Hollywood liberal product and their adolescent allegiance to Nolan’s comic-book godhead status. At this rare moment of almost fanatical cynicism, they’re not cynical enough. A different reflex appeared when The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro posted a counterintuitive defense of the film. His folderol about Nolan’s notion of “sin” climaxed with his calling the movie “a large-scale win for civilizational values.”
Shapiro isn’t a film critic, so I’ve no need to argue his points that are based outside aesthetic response. But conservative pundits who engaged in hate-watching The Odyssey chose the worst way to examine or analyze any movie or to combat leftist Hollywood. Shapiro may as well be one of those Academy members who pretended that One Battle After Another was not a left-wing movie. Conservatives made a terrible compromise with Nolan’s Oppenheimer, and Shapiro repeats that mistake now.
Unsurprisingly, the fog of hype leads to FOMO (fear of missing out); even conservatives may long to be on the “winning” team. But it’s a self-defeating condition. Kowtowing before the grandiosity of Nolan’s $250 million budget is the same as unsophisticated reviewers praising Nolan’s “majestic” running time and epic pretense — just as kids praise Dune, Wicked, Dune 2, Wicked: For Good, Dune 3, etc.
We haven’t progressed from the 1950s when a big-screen presentation of Around the World in 80 Days sold its Todd–AO gimmick — a high-resolution 70 mm widescreen process developed by producer Mike Todd and United Artists in partnership with American Optical to compete with Cinerama, which was the IMAX-style novelty-exhibition format at time.
Like Around the World in 80 Days, The Odyssey boasts a famous cast to sell its big-tech and big-paycheck filmmaking. Nolan’s roster of Millennial celebrity-stars gives him a deep bench of promoters — Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Tom Holland, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, although they don’t quite match the 80 Days roster of Marlene Dietrich, Sinatra, David Niven, Shirley MacLaine, Cantinflas, etc. They’re sent out like political party consultants to hype the film in perpetuity (or at least to extend the media’s regular news cycle). Add political punditry, and it hides the film’s essential insignificance.
Hysteria over Nolan befogs good taste; it obscures the inherent conservative detachment from pop culture. Conservatives must rid themselves from this credulous reflex before we can see The Odyssey for what it really is. As with most bipartisan agreement and intimidation, this fog of hype has embarrassing consequences.
