The Possibilities of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey

Re-enchantment? Technocracy? Creaturely hubris?

“Odysseus and Polyphemus” by Arnold Böcklin, 1896.

NOTE: regular readers will note that I have been absent since October. Once again, a combination of constant family illnesses and other commitments drastically squeezed my writing time over the past couple of months.

My writing remains something that fits around these other commitments, but I am incredibly grateful for your patience and continued support of The New Albion as I try to build it up to a point where I can afford to spend more time on writing. I anticipate a return to regular posting in the New Year!

---

Film fans everywhere got a surprise gift over Christmas: the announcement of Christopher Nolan’s next film project, an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey.

Surveying reactions online, it seems there’s no small amount of surprise at this. Certainly there’s a fittingness in possibly the twentieth century’s greatest director taking on one of history’s greatest works of literature. If anyone is up to it in terms of sheer filmmaking chops it’s surely Nolan. But surprise persists, for a couple of reasons.

First, despite being the preeminent bankable begetter of blockbusters, Nolan is a textbook auteur, famously uncompromising in all his projects. It therefore seems odd to some that he would take on a text as well-known as the Odyssey. However, I think this side of Nolan is slightly over egged. Despite the originality of high-concept films like Memento, Inception, and Tenet, let’s not forget that Nolan was catapulted to mega-stardom by three movies about Batman, one of the most famous bits of intellectual property in the world; that Oppenheimer is explicitly based on a 2005 biography; and that The Prestige adapted Robert Priest’s novel of the same name. Nolan, then, is no stranger to working with pre-existing material.

The bigger surprise though, after a little reflection, is that Nolan has never yet really tackled anything resembling fantasy. The Homeric world of gods, goddesses, nymphs, and sirens seems somewhat off-piste for him. To take one example from a Christian film critic:

Regular readers will know that I am a Nolan fan. A few years back, I wrote a kind of overview of his work for Mere Orthodoxy, arguing (with some help from T.S. Eliot) that Nolan’s frequent obsession with time is a synecdoche for a broader concern: creaturely limits, and the struggle to overcome them.

A snippet:

Like Eliot, Nolan uses time as a shorthand for the broad struggle against creatureliness – a struggle which unites many of his protagonists.

This, I would argue, is where we find the depths in Nolan’s cinematic trickery: his directorial battle against time is the means by which he explores his characters’ struggles against creatureliness in its variegated forms. Some are crushed by the struggle. Others embrace it, with the resignation of the unconverted Eliot at the start of “Ash Wednesday”. More latterly, some have (allegedly) overcome it.

I wrote this in 2020, just after Tenet came out. When Oppenheimer took the world by storm in 2023, I felt my theory held up, and wrote about it here at The New Albion:

Oppenheimer, we might say, is all “Waste Land” and no “Ash Wednesday”—all materiality and no transcendence, all rose and no fire. One of the greatest minds of the twentieth century boiled reality down to its defiant paradoxes, and with no way of putting it all back together again unleashed hell on earth for over 200,000 civilians. And why not? Those civilians were mostly empty space, anyway.

The most representative line for Nolan’s view of reality across the whole of his corpus is, I think, from The Prestige, when we’re told by a magician that, really, the world is “simple and miserable, solid all the way through.” Yet by the time the credits rolled on Oppenheimer, I detected in Nolan a newfound dissatisfaction with this assessment:

I was pleasantly surprised by Oppenehimer (as I took it) presenting the shortcomings of an intense materialism. Arguably Nolan’s most repellent trait is the technocratic streak he has developed over the last decade: his characters overcome inherent creaturely limits through technology (Interstellar being the clearest example). But Oppenheimer shows us the dead end of the atomised technocracy: if we reduce men to atoms, what prevents us from reducing them to ash?

And now, here we are at the outset of 2025 with Nolan set to make his first foray into the fantastical. It’s possible that he may give us an adaptation drained of the supernatural, where the gods are illusions and monsters are phantasms of the id, but a fairly reliable source of movie news leaks on Twitter tells us that Nolan intends to keep the fantastical elements. And, to be honest, I find it hard to imagine he’d do otherwise.

If the wildly speculative narrative I have projected onto Nolan’s filmography is correct then, adapting the Odyssey makes total sense for Nolan. Quite possibly, we are witnessing an arch-technocratic-materialist finally having his head turned by a whiff of the heady incense of the supernatural.

This would all track very nicely with the widespread turn toward “enchantment” what we have seen of late. For those of us who labour in the mines of The Discourse, talk about modern disenchantment and re-enchantment is almost old hat at this point. Max Weber, borrowing from Friedrich Schiller, coined the term “disenchantment” a century ago to describe the effect of modernity upon the Western world as it lost its sense of the divine. Charles Taylor’s 2007 book A Secular Age gave the idea a newfound popularity, and it has been nearly ubiquitous among the Anglophone intelligentsia (especially of the religious and conservative variety) for the past decade and a half. Often, Roman Catholics try to pin the blame for disenchantment on the Reformation (Brad Gregory’s 2012 book The Unintended Reformation is the chief culprit here). As an aside, my main employer, The Davenant Institute, has done a lot to refute this incredibly shaky bit of anti-Protestant polemics (see this piece from my former colleague Onsi Kamel, for example).

Although Very Online Christian nerds like me may feel the disenchantment/enchantment question has been done to death at this point, the Trickle Down Effect is real. In my experience, it takes a decade or so for ideas to move “down a rung” on the intellectual ladder. For example, the Incredibly Evil queer theorist Judith Butler wrote her seminal tome Gender Trouble in 1990; in the early 2000s, her ideas were the stuff of postgraduate seminars; when I started my English degree in 2011 they permeated the undergrad curriculum; and now in 2025 even your nan might know what “genderqueer” and “polycule” mean.

Much the same seems to have happened with the idea of enchantment. Case in point, one of the big books of 2024 was Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age (note the Charles Taylor nod in the subtitle). Rod (who I will disclose is something of a friend, and who allowed me to see a draft of his book when I interviewed him a while back) has been saying for years that the categories of enchantment and disenchantment were going to go mainstream. And, with his characteristic canary in the cultural coalmine knack, he was right. Rod is a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, and so as a Reformed Protestant I’m not on board with all of his recommendations for “re-enchanting” one’s life, nor his analysis of how disenchantment happened (which pins a lot of blame on the Reformation, as mentioned earlier). However, Rod’s overall thesis is one that I agree with: that disenchantment (if it’s even really possible) is unsustainable because it is spiritually exhausting for both individuals and societies, and so after a century of trying it out people are now looking for re-enchantment.

Rod’s not the only one banging this drum, as followers of The Discourse will know. In his corner too you’ll find Justin Brierly’s Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle With God and his Daily Wire Bible series, and a steady stream of high-profile conversions among public intellectuals and celebrities, to take just a few examples.

A fantastical Christopher Nolan Odyssey, then, could be yet another sign of the turn toward re-enchantment. Not because it is fantasy per se (we can’t get enough of that in our culture), but because it’s Nolan of all people—a huge director whose past work was solidly materialist and technocratic.

Who knows though. This would be a very neat bit of narrative making. I am very cautious about pushing things into the “re-enchantment” narrative. For one thing, this may be an instance of something that Rod Dreher warns about frequently: a turn to bad kinds of enchantment. Re-enchantment sadly doesn’t simply mean people returning to Christianity, but in many instances to paganism in various forms. I don’t want to pick on Nolan for the movie he’s not making, but conservative Christian film fans often justifiably ask these days why we aren’t seeing more adaptations of stories from the heights of Christendom, or of biblical stories. We could have had Nolan’s Elijah or Nolan’s Charlemagne, but alas, few filmmakers seem interested in taking pre-disenchantment Christian stories on their own terms (though Robert Eggers, who has just finished his script for his long-planned medieval epic The Knight may prove to be up to the task). If Nolan’s Odyssey does fit into the re-enchantment narrative, it may be on the side that is more interested in what we could informally call “bad juju” than in real spiritual transcendence. And of course, there’s the point to be made that, from the Christian perspective, Greek mythology is not really transcendent anyway, since its gods are no gods at all. They are dead idols, and their stories are so often simply the projections of human foibles onto the divine.

Another possibility is that Nolan’s Odyssey continues to play into his big theme of creaturely constraints. This would of course chime incredibly well with Greek mythology, in which man’s hubris is ever his downfall against the gods. I noted in my Mere Orthodoxy piece that the protagonists in the first half of Nolan’s career are generally crushed by their attempts to transcend their creatureliness; more latterly however, they’ve been able to overcome them via technology (though Oppenheimer, remember, is likened to Prometheus who, though he wins a technological victory over the gods is doomed to pay its price forevermore). Odysseus would surely be in the former category of Nolan heroes—no matter how hard he tries, “the man of twists and turns” is “driven time and again off course”. It is the clemency of the gods, not the wiles of man, that finally sees him home.

Odysseus’ struggle is, in its Nolanesque way, one against time: twenty years he spends away from Ithaca, ten at Troy and ten at sea. The Odyssey, famously, is a non-linear narrative, one of Nolan’s favourite tricks, and it’s easy to imagine him having a lot of fun with this, juxtaposing the younger Odysseus with the older as he tries and fails to get home. Talking like this, one can see a likeness between Odysseus and Matthew McConaughey’s Coop in Interstellar. In fact, consider Robert Fagles’ translation of the opening of the Odyssey with Coop in mind:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.

Of course, there’s yet another possibility: that Nolan rewrites the story, with Odysseus becoming like one of his more recent protagonists and overcoming his creaturely limits. In Interstellar, man raises himself from the dust and evolves into a five-dimensional being; in Tenet time itself is conquered; in Oppenheimer the atom is split. Perhaps Nolan’s Odysseus will have one more twist and turn than Homer’s and pull himself to Ithaca by his own bootstraps, Zeus and Poseidon be damned.

Or all this could be wildly off base, and we could get something else entirely. These are just (what I hope are) some informed speculations. Whatever we get, it will without doubt be worth the watch and, I am convinced, culturally important. I mean come on: it’s Christopher flipping Nolan. And sorry, I really should be saying Sir Christopher Nolan now.