Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a Conservative Christian Masterpiece
And that’s why MAGA hates it
There are many themes in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, but — the cavils of Elon Musk and the Critical Drinker notwithstanding — wokeness isn’t one of them. On the contrary, in an age when most right-wing movies are unwatchable (think God’s Not Dead or Citizen Vigilante), The Odyssey tells an engaging story with compelling conservative and Christian themes.
In fact, I’d argue that the strength of those themes, and not the superficial complaints about Nolan’s colorblind casting, is what has paradoxically caused most of the right-wing backlash to the film. Let me explain.
Let go, let the gods
Nolan’s fans know that the idea of “objective reality” often looms large in his films. Memento and Inception both highlight the hubris of individuals who think they can grasp it through their solitary efforts alone.
Memento’s Leonard fails because he puts his trust in fallible methods. He refuses to consider how he might be deluding himself, and in his brief moments of clarity he even recognizes that the path of vengeance he’s set himself on requires self-delusion. If he resolved the tension at the center of his being by carrying out his revenge, his life would lose its meaning.
By contrast, Inception’s Cobb avoids this fate by choosing to go home. As film critic Tom van der Linden has argued, the knowing nods between the characters in the penultimate airport scene convey this basic truth: we may never know the true nature of reality, but we can choose to build a shared reality with others.
The spinning top at the end, then, isn’t an invitation to debate whether the final scene is real or a dream. Its ambiguity tells us that what we’re after isn’t an answer but a decision. Cobb’s catharsis ultimately comes not from knowing what is real, but by taking a “leap of faith.”
Those same words appear in The Odyssey as well, and as in Inception, they come at the end of a redemptive arc that first passes through trauma, guilt, and regret. But it’s also these emotions, and the meaning of the film’s final scenes, that I think has most offended right-wing audiences.
Crooked timber
More on that in a bit. But first: what is the object of Odysseus’ — and Nolan’s — leap of faith? Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy strongly hints at it, but The Odyssey makes it explicit.
One concept that comes up again and again in The Odyssey is “Zeus’ law.” Also known as xenia, this was a basic tenet of hospitality that prevailed across the Greek world. Travelers must be fed and sheltered, and in return guests were required to respect their hosts. In a civilization that spanned the archipelagos of the Mediterranean basin, where trade and commerce often took people far from home, Zeus’ law helped ensure peaceful relations between far-flung Greek settlements.
That practical explanation is a bit of post hoc social psychology on my part. To the Greeks — and as several characters remind us over the course of the film — xenia is required because we can never know when a stranger is really one of the gods in disguise. In an interview with New York Times’ Melena Ryzik, Nolan said that xenia was a version of the Golden Rule, the idea that you should treat others as you wish to be treated.
And it’s precisely this foundational rule that Odysseus believes he’s broken. By offering up the Trojan horse, by being taken into the city through deception, and then by slaughtering everyone inside, Odysseus believes he has orchestrated not just the fall of Troy but also civilization as a whole.
This is more than just post-traumatic stress, although the film strongly suggests he’s struggling with that too. Throughout, we are reminded of the threat posed by the “people from the sea.” History buffs will recognize the Sea Peoples credited with accelerating the collapse of most Bronze Age civilizations circa 1200 B.C.E. Without giving too much away, I’ll just say that for Odysseus, the Sea Peoples’ arrival represents what happens when we break the fundamental laws that bind humanity together.
In other words, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey espouses an essentially conservative position, in the Burkean or Hobbesian sense. Human society is a fragile thing, held together by critical institutions without which we descend into anarchy and chaos.
Moreover, those institutions have a recognizably Christian flavor. Nolan’s take on xenia isn’t just an obvious rebuke of contemporary anti-immigrant sentiment (though it is that). It’s also a beautiful anticipation of Matthew 25:40. Whatever you did to the least of my brothers, you did to me.
And so in Nolan’s Odysseus we have a man wracked with guilt, all too aware of his role in hastening civilization’s collapse. As he and Penelope sail off into the sunset, he says one day the poets will sing their tale. Why sing? she asks. Because, he says, no one will be left who could write it.
It’s a beautiful moment in the film because we feel the immense weight of what is being lost, but also a tinge of hope. As moderns we know that the end of the Bronze Age is coming. Odysseus is right about that. But we also know that centuries later a new civilization will flourish once more, first in Athens and later in Rome. And then another Dark Age will descend until the Renaissance revives ancient learning many centuries after that.
Here Nolan is delivering a warning. History can and will repeat itself if we continue to flout Zeus’ law. We are courting our own destruction if we continue to attack the institutions that have held our societies together since the Enlightenment. We are inviting chaos when we turn our backs on the rule of law and Christian love.
And it’s this message, far more than casting a Black Helen of Troy, that has really gotten the Right’s dander up.
Bronze-pilled
Why do I say that? Because contemporary Christian nationalism and right-wing populism, reduced to their essence, are characterized by a lack of faith in existing institutions and by the conviction that values like empathy and hospitality only invite exploitation and abuse.
The Right wants its Bronze Age heroes gleefully rejoicing in their righteous vengeance. For MAGA, Nolan’s real crime against Homer — and by extension against Western Civilization — was that he had the gall to turn Odysseus from a sly trickster who delighted in the destruction of his enemies, into a guilt-ridden anti-hero who laments the passing of a more humane, cosmopolitan age.
Nolan reimagines the Greeks as the villains, their war as a cynical power grab, and the sacking of Troy as a rupture of which events like January 6th are a distant echo. But from the neo-reactionary perspective at the core of the alt-right, Nolan’s reading of Homer is just so much beta-cuck drivel from another woke Hollywood director.
It’s nothing of the kind. That it could be mistaken for such only goes to show how far the Right has strayed both from Enlightenment-era conservativism and the Christianity of the Gospels. What MAGA ultimately finds so offensive about Nolan’s Odyssey is how it reminds them of the irreconcilable conflict between Jesus’ core teachings and the neo-pagan tribalism that his religion has become.
What is at stake in Nolan’s Odyssey, then, is nothing less than the meaning of the West’s cultural inheritance. For MAGA, Odysseus’ righteous slaughter of the suitors prefigures their own rebellion against “illegals,” “elites,” and everyone else who’s tried to take their country from them.
But Nolan’s retelling doesn’t just deprive them of the catharsis they hoped The Odyssey’s final scenes would offer. It forces them to confront the uncomfortable possibility that they are the barbarians after all.
Written by Dustin Arand
Lawyer turned stay-at-home dad. I write about philosophy, culture, and law. Author of the book “Truth Evolves”. Top writer in History, Culture, and Politics
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