BS Summary: This article contains 29 faulty reasoning types, including Overconfidence Bias, Appeal to Authority, and Biased Writer Voice, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 16% saturation with 397 hits. Analysis detected 2,867 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,482 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 46% and a BS Rank of 42% (10,086 of 17,190 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 58.70% of the article peer group.
Christopher Nolan has described the Homeric source material of his new film of The Odyssey as “foundational” for his work.
On the surface, it’s a banal comment, too vague to either prove or deny.
Yet a closer look at Nolan’s previous films gives the claim genuine validity — almost to the degree of rendering this latest movie a meta-commentary, and in thematic terms at least representing a large-scale restatement of his artistic philosophy.
Nolan was briefly attached to direct Troy , a version of the other poem attributed to Homer, the Trojan War epic The Iliad , eventually overseen by Wolfgang Peterson.
But the fragmented story of the solitary male wanderer, mining his cunning and resilience to get back to his family, is an altogether closer fit for Nolan’s habits and obsessions.
In part, The Odyssey is pertinent to Nolan because, unlike many writer-directors, he is devoted to classical storytelling devices, and the poem offers a paradigmatic — and literal — instance of what Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), called the “monomyth” or “hero’s journey”.
This is a concept rooted in psychoanalysis and ethnography, and one keenly embraced by Hollywood screenwriters.
Nolan has specialized in genre films, but his plots always double as a vehicle for ideas about personal conduct, with the individual challenged to prevail over forces both internal (guilt, fear, anxiety, confusion) and external (malice, violence, corruption) and, beyond these, the volatility of material reality and the hostility of the universe.
As Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) tells Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in Batman Begins (2005), “it’s what you do that defines you”.
Nolan’s concern with subjective experience in films like Memento (2000) and Inception (2010) has drawn comparisons to phenomenology, but there are echoes of epic poetry in his exploration, via his discursive dialogue, of revenge and justice, understanding and feeling.
He has also displayed a taste for mythological allusion: the maze designer in Inception is named Ariadne.
Nolan’s Batman films are all about one-on-one conversations.
(Batman Begins/IMDB)
Typically, though, the Nolan character is a man, associated with a familiar role — detective, pilot, soldier, spy — and drawn in abstract or elemental terms.
His short Larceny (1996) and micro-budget debut Following (1998) concerned characters called “The Man” and “The Young Man”.
In Interstellar (2014), the astronaut abandoned in space is named “Mann”.
The British soldier in Dunkirk (2017) is known only as Tommy (i.e. a British soldier).
In Tenet (2020), John David Washington plays “The Protagonist”.
Bruce Wayne, in the final installment of the Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises (2012), explains: “the idea was to be a symbol.”
The longtime Observer film critic Philip French, considering Bruce’s reclusive period of anguished withdrawal in the same film, likened his predicament to that of the injured archer Philoctetes, who Odysseus entices from exile to help defeat the Trojans — a figure mentioned in The Iliad and treated at length by the Greek tragedians, and explored in Edmund Wilson’s once-famous essay on trauma and action, “The Wound and the Bow”.
Nolan’s most recent film, Oppenheimer (2023), provides a concrete portrait of a historical figure and, in using his name as the title, forgoes the classical reference used in the source biography, American Prometheus .
But there’s little doubt of the broader dimensions.
Oppenheimer’s adversary, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), argues that the physicist stands by his conduct at Los Alamos “because it made him the most important man who ever lived”.
Nolan’s own career has taken on fairly outsize dimensions.
He is the last 20th-century Hollywood auteur, a heroic holdout who has defied the hegemony of digital (by shooting on film), streaming (his reason for leaving Warner Brothers), Covid (with the summer 2020 release of Tenet ), and Barbie (bringing out Oppenheimer on the same day).
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His work isn’t shy of invoking a Great Man tradition or its trappings, whether in his use of paintings like Rothko and Bacon and Picasso and Goya; quotations from Dickens and Robert Frost; or borrowings from Kubrick, David Lean, Michael Mann, Akira Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, and, perhaps above all, the James Bond films, evident in the action and settings of Batman Begins , Inception and Tenet .
When Nolan browsed the DVD library of the distributor Criterion, for an online video, his first three choices were Stephen Frears’s The Hit , a thriller about “the dynamics between desperate men”; 12 Angry Men ; and Terrence Malick’s war film The Thin Red Line .
(The Young Man in Following has pictures on his wall of Jack Nicholson doing his murderous grin in The Shining and the suited robbers in Reservoir Dogs .)
The emphasis in his work is on what it means to be a man — what men are, could be, should be.
This strain is especially evident in the Batman films, with “decent men” on the one hand, and on the other, men who “just want to watch the world burn”.
(The only time the word “women” is mentioned in the trilogy is in reference to Catwoman breaking out of “women’s correctional”.)
Several Nolan films borrow from James Bond.
(Inception/IMDB)
Odysseus, like Oppenheimer, diverges from Nolan’s past protagonists in one central way.
For the most part, the Nolan character is a bachelor or widower.
The wives or potential future wives kill themselves, die by accident or illness, or are murdered.
Odysseus, of course, has a wife.
But even though Penelope is waiting in Ithaca, and Mrs Oppenheimer was often by her husband’s side in Los Alamos and Washington (he tells her they “walked through fire together”), isolation nonetheless remains unavoidable.
One option is to hit the road — not in search of company, but of purpose.
The Young Man’s peregrinations are fairly short — from his flat off Tottenham Court Road to Soho or Covent Garden, where he falls in with a conman and burglar.
(The first flat they rob has a shelf full of travel literature and picaresque narratives: Chatwin, Raban, Don Quixote .)
Bruce Wayne, an “unemployed twentysomething” of a different sort, heads further afield: to a monastery in the Himalayas, where he learns he is “truly lost” and shown “a path”.
Angier (Hugh Jackman), the magician in the Victorian fantasy The Prestige (2006), makes the long pilgrimage to see Nikola Tesla in Colorado Springs, what he calls “a search for answers”.
Cooper, in Interstellar , shoots off to the stars to find a new home for humanity.
“We’re explorers, Rom,” he tells another crew member.
“This is our boat.”
Leonard, the memory-challenged former insurance investigator in Memento , drives around Los Angeles on the hunt for the man who killed his wife, or so he has tricked himself into believing.
The Protagonist, for his part, is consigned to endless Bond-like globe-trotting.
Resilience is key.
Nolan has said that the final moments of Interstellar were “directly nourished” by the ending of Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” (otherwise known as Odysseus): “strong in will /To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
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The governing aim is the restoration of order.
Leonard resists the idea that there was “no reason” for his wife’s death, “no conspiracy”, and so invents one.
As he says in voiceover: “I have to believe that my actions still have meaning.”
Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose job in Inception is “to navigate other people’s minds”, must purge his guilt for his wife’s death to stop her invading his dreams — plaguing him when he’s at work.
The Protagonist has been assigned to undo the reversal of entropy.
Nolan’s Batman wants to overhaul a city ruled by criminality and further threatened by the Joker, a self-described “agent of chaos”.
Nolan’s work is a tribute to the power of rationality, a vision of cool-headedness that encompasses an Odyssey -like array of ingenious tricks and stratagems.
As Bruce Wayne says, “theatricality and deception are powerful weapons”.
From the Young Man, Leonard, and Wayne, to the dream “extractor” Cobb, the scientist Brand (Michael Caine) in Interstellar , who sends a Nasa team on a suicide mission; the French soldier who leaves Dunkirk in an English uniform; the Protagonist going undercover as an art buyer — Nolan’s characters lie or conceal sometimes out of self-interest, and sometimes for a higher purpose, occasionally both at once.
Something similar could be said of his disjointed structures which, like his fondness for tilted camera angles, are designed both to bring pleasure and reveal underlying truth or connections.
Nolan has been keen to present this tendency not as obscurantist or avant-garde but something like the opposite: “You go back to The Odyssey , it’s never been the case that you’re supposed to tell a story from beginning to end.”
“It’s never been the case that you’re supposed to tell a story from beginning to end.”
(Interstellar/IMDB)
But whatever the quirks of the telling, the trials of a solitary hero provides the spine.
In Nolan’s Batman trilogy, the enemy is collective in nature: the League of Shadows; “organized crime”; the mob rule unleashed by the Joker (who also boasts that he brought “Gotham’s white knight” down to “our level”).
The countervailing collective forces — civil society, “the structures”, “the rules” — are powerless, and so Batman must serve as a one-man exponent of liberal harmony.
Though Bruce Wayne, orphan-turned-bachelor, doesn’t work alone, his abettors are fellow outliers; Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) is the rare uncorrupted Gotham cop, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) the only executive at Wayne Enterprises with integrity.
When Gordon asks, “you’re just one man?”
Batman replies, “now we’re two.”
But that’s the limit.
There’s a striking convention in the Batman films whereby the central character, in both his civilian and masked-vigilante modes, is almost never shown talking to more than one person at a time.
The trilogy alternates between vast action set-pieces and a series of tête-à-têtes involving Wayne and one of a dozen others.
Again and again, scenes are constructed so that a potential third wheel withdraws, or else the interloper on a two-man exchange pops in for the briefest of interludes, to deliver an update or bulletin, or Batman scarpers more or less mid-sentence (“he does that,” Gordon reassures the other bystander).
The parting shot offered by Michael Keaton’s Wayne in his first appearance in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) — “Will you two excuse me?” — is something that Nolan’s version is virtually unable to utter across a trio of lengthy films.
Notable in this context is that The Dark Knight Rises ends with a shot of the young police officer John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) on the verge of becoming “Robin” — and on unusual terms.
It’s a role he will take up as a kind of successor, by inheriting the contents of the Batcave.
In Nolan’s world, even the traditional sidekick must act alone.
A partnership of that kind cannot exist even as an off-screen, post-credits possibility.
“In Nolan’s world, even the traditional sidekick must act alone.”
Camaraderie or a sense of community proves persistently elusive.
The Young Man describes the experience of fixing on a person in a crowd: “all of a sudden that person isn’t part of the crowd anymore.
They become an individual, just like that.”
When Leonard tells someone, “It’s great that you’re helping like this”, she replies, “I’m helping you because you helped me”.
The first thing we learn about the magicians in The Prestige is that Borden (Bale) is on trial for the murder of Angier.
A flashback depicting on-stage collaboration soon gives way to their shared manager, Cutter (Caine), pitting them against each other with a test.
It might be said that Batman, orphan-turned-bachelor, is bound to be a lonely soul; Memento inhabits the Darwinian landscape of film noir; The Prestige adapts a novel — by Christopher Priest — about one-upmanship.
But Nolan’s individualist leanings emerge in surprising contexts.
There’s a moment near the beginning of Inception , notionally a film about teamwork, when Cobb advises his colleagues, “every man for himself”.
The entire story then hinges on Cobb’s ability to return to his children in the United States — all of the corporate subterfuge, the dreams-within-dreams, exists as backdrop for a man to find what he calls “a way home”.
Cobb’s first name is “Dom” (a play on “domicile”).
Even ‘Dunkirk’ can’t resist the Great Man theory.
(IMDB/Dunkirk)
Oppenheimer does what he can to frame himself as a team player.
Talking of the atomic bomb, he demurs, “it was hardly my invention”.
But the film suggests that at the very least he was primus inter pares .
(Nolan has compared his role to that of a film director.)
The riposte “it was you on the cover of Time ” could be extended: it is him on the film’s poster, it is his face in close-up intercut with a shot of the globe with which the film ends.
We are left in little doubt that the Great Man is the one who matters, who stands apart and above — the known quantity, the household name.
The film accords disproportionate attention to a tiny cameo for Albert Einstein.
And when Strauss’s candidacy for secretary of commerce is rejected by the Senate, his aide, checking his notes, chooses to mention just one of the 48 Democrats who voted against him: “Kennedy, John F.
Kennedy.”
As Nolan put it, “an individual’s relatable.”
An apparent difference between the two films Nolan has made about the Second World War is that whereas Oppenheimer is candidly concerned with individual agency, Dunkirk portrays a mission involving hundreds of thousands.
Nolan said he didn’t want “generals pushing things around maps, I didn’t want Churchill”.
But the alternative emphasis — what he called the “collective experience of that historical event” — struggles to gain purchase.
The film begins with a shot from behind of six soldiers walking down a residential street.
Within 90 seconds, five of them are dead and we are left with Tommy.
When he encounters French soldiers at the perimeter, he is immediately told “bon voyage”.
Nolan divides the history of the evacuation into three narratives — Tommy’s journey, the tribulations of an airman running low on fuel (Tom Hardy), and the marginally more clubbable story of a civilian sailor who sets out from Weymouth to help the effort.
And having resisted the Great Man route, the film ends with Tommy reading aloud Churchill’s “fight them on the beaches” speech.
The seemingly irresistible lure of the lone-struggle dynamic was evident in Nolan’s comments.
He insisted that the film was “not about individual heroics” — but almost immediately afterwards, he identified the elements “whose universal significance we wanted to tap” as “the individual instinct for survival” and “the desperation to get home”.
He added, “You get into kind of Homeric territory with this stuff” — and not because Dunkirk was a war movie.
Analysis
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