Blockbuster filmmaker puts Western civilization at dusk.
For the press-junket interview that Universal Pictures arranged during the Chinese premiere of The Odyssey in Beijing on July 30, director Christopher Nolan answered softball questions from Brandeis University lecturer Yiyang Zhuge. She referred to Nolan as “a bard for a civilization at dusk,” and he played along, setting off yet another round of media hype to make film culture dumber than the day before.
Rarely has film culture had an occasion like The Odyssey that shakes the apathy of the usual moviegoing slump — a particular post-Covid lockdown problem — while stirring widespread clueless commentary. Social media shills praise Zhuge for how she “could manage to be so intelligent, humorous, and probing” but overlook the fact that she was invited to the premiere and given an interview slot with Nolan at the China National Film Museum that coincided with Nolan’s birthday. I have called this naïveté “The Fog of Hype” that impresses journalists who are ignorant of the way film promotion works.
But the Zhuge interview exceeds media complicity by rousing fascination in academics who think The Odyssey has elevated cultural discourse. The joke is on us because such fawning is an embarrassment. American “experts” are intimidated by Zhuge’s résumé as a candidate for a Ph.D. in political theory at Boston College, an instructor/lecturer at Brandeis University, and a translator of classical texts, including the first Greek-to-Chinese version of Plutarch’s Moralia. When she calls Nolan “a bard,” it proves that the learned Zhuge has absolutely zero command over pop culture, although her political philosophy/great-books podcast on China’s video-sharing Bilibili platform is approved — like all Chinese media — by the CCP.
Nolan participated in this public-intellectual charade, confusing art, creativity, history, and scholarship just to sell a stupid movie to the very fans he then proceeds to insult. There’s never before been an interview like this, and it deserves close examination.
Posing as a polite but naïve academic drudge, Zhuge begins:
Filmmakers are bards of the modern age, just as the Greeks know of Odysseus, Achilles, Agamemnon because of Homer’s narrative, we know of Batman, the Joker, and Oppenheimer because of your narratives. And Homer tells stories of the distant past. You too. The Trojan war happened . . . a long time ago. But Homer’s time was a time of rise. It was a time of civilizational rise. The Greeks were prospering as a culture — the economy, the books, the thinking. Everything is on the rise for a couple of hundred years, really until the fifth century b.c. So Homer’s tone was celebratory, it was victorious — he celebrates a victory of the war — and your tone is emphatically not. . . . Does that say something about our age? Are you a bard for a civilization at dusk?
Nolan falls into her CCP trap: “For me it comes out of having worked on Oppenheimer before this, which is very much a film about the end of the world, about the collapse of civilization ultimately. So yeah, I definitely carried that sensibility into this adaptation.”
This is Zhuge’s scoop. She gets Nolan to admit that his British “Ban the bomb” birthright — the unforgiving, anti-American, communist dissatisfaction with any concession made to their pacifist protest — is what led to his attempt in Oppenheimer to undermine Western history and culture.
Zhuge catches on to this cynicism, asking, “The concept of atonement [by Odysseus] doesn’t exist in Greek culture. It doesn’t exist in the Greek language. It doesn’t exist in Homer’s Odyssey. It exists in your Odyssey. . . . Did you Christianize The Odyssey? . . . Why did atonement become important for the coming of catastrophe?”
Nolan agrees, “Yeah.” Then she appeals to his ego: “We live in an age that demands apology from greatness. . . . And I’m wondering if, as one of the greatest storytellers of our age, how do you approach greatness? Is it still a story of apology and that demands repentance and reflection and self-criticism?”
He responds by mangling Spielberg’s sentimental jive about storytelling: “Well, I think that when you’re talking about storytelling, you’re always in conversation with the expectations of the audience. So it really is an energy that’s brought from your audience, as well as an energy that’s put forward from the story itself.”
Either this guy knows he’s a hack or, Confucius say, he doesn’t understand Zhuge’s Mandarin-English:
So when you are characterizing somebody — and the trite version of this, or the criticism that’s often leveled at movies in general is, “Oh, the character has to be made sympathetic.” So the character is manipulated in different ways or changed in different ways. And that’s a fundamental flaw of film criticism in a way, or storytelling criticism, because to be able to identify the mechanism does not invalidate the mechanism. That’s a real problem in criticism today.
Has Nolan internalized the blather of Ebert and Siskel? He goes on:
People have this idea: “Because I can understand why the story affects me the way it is, therefore it didn’t work.” That’s not how storytelling works. So when we create a heroic figure, in a story, as storytellers, we have to be mindful of the energy that the audience brings to that story and the interaction between our intention and the way the audience receives that. And the fact that that mechanism is identifiable to people doesn’t invalidate it.
He’s really talking about manipulating and exploiting a gullible audience — the Marvel crowd, the crowd he created with his nihilistic Batman trilogy.
And he gets worse: “Part of that mechanism is saying, ‘Are we going to treat greatness as an absolute, or coming from a democratic — coming from a more idealized, philosophical state that we live in in today’s world where we want to view people as equal?” Is he dodging politics or partisanship? “Do we have to apologize for that greatness? And the answer is ‘Yes, we do’ or the audience rejects the greatness.”
In putting on Great Artist, Philosopher King airs, Nolan winds up delivering a Kamala Harris word salad. The Zhuge interview resembles a CCP hostage video — a slap in the face to American culture and to film criticism, which is already mostly imbecilic. (Come back, Camille Paglia and Rona Barett!) How sad that pseudo academics, philology professors, bioethicists, and even some conservatives are awed by this, as they were with Oppenheimer. Nolan’s failure becomes their failure, hastening Western civilization’s twilight.
