The Real “Woke” Politics of Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’

Christopher Nolan’s newest film, The Odyssey has Black actors and a trans man. More troublingly for the anti-woke crowd, it understands how civilizations truly collapse.

Before Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey reached theaters this past weekend, the internet’s most tireless cultural border guards had already completed their review.

The “woke” verdict was predictable. The movie contains Black people in ancient Greece. Elliot Page had been cast as…someone. Travis Scott plays a bard. Lupita Nyong’o, rather scandalously, had been asked to portray the most beautiful woman in the world, probably because she is one of the most beautiful women in the world. But you see, she does fail to resemble Diane Kruger in Troy. Therefore, western civilization has fallen. Again.

The actual movie was almost beside the point.

For years, the anti-woke entertainment industry has perfected a wonderfully frictionless business model. 1.) Identify a blockbuster containing anyone besides a straight white man. 2.) Announce that audiences have rejected it. 3.)  Release 38 videos per hour explaining why the movie will fail. 4.) Should the film succeed, simply move on to the next thumbnail. Memory is the enemy of content and all that.

Well, Nolan’s The Odyssey presented an especially funny opportunity because betting against Christopher Nolan after Oppenheimer resembles betting against Poseidon in a swimming contest. Nolan could release three hours of Matt Damon examining municipal bonds in 70mm IMAX and still sell out Thursday previews.

And yet a subsection of the right-wing media ecosystem decided that the director of The Dark Knight, Inception, and Oppenheimer had finally flown too close to the woke sun. What makes this crusade particularly stupid is that the film really is “woke.” At least according to the word’s long-deceased original meaning. Its progressive politics simply have little to do with the casting decisions that generated weeks of preemptive outrage.

See, Nolan’s Odyssey is woke because it asks a genuinely dangerous question: What happens when the men who claim to defend civilization become indistinguishable from the barbarians they fear. That is slightly more challenging material than counting minorities in the trailer.

Civilization’s original sin.

Nolan’s central invention is to transform the Trojan Horse from Odysseus’s greatest triumph into his civilization’s original sin. In Homer’s original text, Odysseus feels grief over the men he loses during his journey, but he hardly spends the poem conducting a restorative-justice seminar about the sack of Troy.

No, he belongs to a heroic culture that regards conquest, plunder, enslavement, and spectacular violence as regrettable mainly when they happen to the wrong team. The movie, however, gives him a more modern conscience. Here, Odysseus returns from Troy haunted by the trick that ended the war. The Greeks offered the horse as a gift, exploiting the sacred custom of xenia. Also known as Zeus’s law in the film, xenia is the system of hospitality, reciprocal protection, and guest-friendship overseen by Zeus.

As we see in the movie, the Trojans accept the offering without fear. Odysseus then responds by crawling out of it at night and turning their city into a barbecue. And Nolan treats this as more than a clever military maneuver. It’s the moment when a foundational social contract becomes yet another weapon.

Nolan’s Bronze Age atomic bomb.

Hospitality only works when people can believe that a guest arrives in good faith. That a gift is actually a gift. That opening the door will not result in an army emerging from the living-room ottoman. Once Odysseus demonstrates how easily trust can be exploited, every future stranger becomes a potential invader.

The Trojan Horse is therefore Nolan’s Bronze Age atomic bomb. It’s an ingenious solution that permanently enlarges humanity’s capacity for self-destruction. This is why the movie keeps invoking the mysterious “people from the sea,” marauding outsiders blamed for spreading lawlessness across the region. They sound like the perfect ancient equivalent of every foreign menace blamed for a society’s crime, disorder, decadence, falling birth rate, high grocery prices, and disappointing Netflix recommendations.

The sea people are coming, they claim. They respect no borders. They honor no customs. And they take what belongs to others. Except Nolan gradually reveals that Odysseus and his men have been behaving exactly the same way as these fear-mongering rumors insist. The monsters are calling from inside the horse.

The pigs of Western civilization.

The Circe sequence makes the metaphor difficult to miss, though some commentators have heroically managed it. Odysseus’s soldiers arrive at the home of a woman living alone and request food. “Request” may be generous. After all, the men a company of armored killers who’ve spent years burning cities, stealing provisions, and treating the eastern Mediterranean like an especially hostile all-inclusive resort.

Circe promptly turns these men into pigs. And a conservative reading of the scene might conclude that Nolan regards human beings as innately greedy and corrupt. That interpretation has the advantage of converting a specific indictment of violent men into a vague lament about human nature. Which would mean nobody in particular has to feel implicated. No one has to feel male or white guilt.

The film, however, surrounds the pigs with other men Circe has transformed into other animals. Odysseus’s men become pigs because piggishness describes them. They arrive at her doorstep hungry, entitled, and armed. They expect hospitality while carrying the unmistakable implication that refusal will produce consequences. If pigs represent their gluttony, we can presume Nolan implies the lion was a person Circe transformed because of pride, and other deadly sins.

How society destroys trust.

In other words, these men have become the sea people everyone keeps warning them about. And this is the political center of Nolan’s film. A civilization rarely recognizes its own descent into barbarism because it continues using the language of order. Of honor and self-defense, long after its conduct has become indistinguishable from pillage.

Odysseus’s men still imagine themselves as Greeks, warriors, victors, and representatives of civilization. The people they encounter probably have a different genre classification in mind. The film never argues that foreigners destroy social trust. Instead, the film posits that a society destroys trust by violating its own principles and then blaming foreigners for the resulting collapse.

You might even call that relevant.

Every accusation is a homecoming.

This same pattern awaits Odysseus in Ithaca. While he’s been away exporting Greek values at spearpoint, Penelope and Telemachus have become prisoners of the suitors occupying their home. The men eat their food, drain the kingdom’s resources, threaten its heir, and hide their coercion beneath the protections of hospitality.

Key point is that they’re not actually outsiders. They belong to Odysseus’s own society. Which means they understand the rules. And that’s exactly what makes their abuse of them so narratively effective.

Penelope can’t simply throw them out because the suitors possess enough collective power to murder Telemachus, seize the palace, and describe the resulting coup as a peaceful transfer of power. So Ithaca maintains a brittle stability by feeding them and pretending the arrangement remains civilized.

Where the conservative interpretation misses.

To put it more simply, the suitors are the domestic version of the Trojan Horse. They’re parasites sheltered by the very customs they’re actively destroying. Once again, the threat to civilization comes from the men most confident that civilization belongs to them.

This is where conservative interpretations of the film tend to run aground. They recognize Nolan’s interest in natural law, social cohesion, and the consequences of moral transgression. But then they assume these themes must naturally support conservative politics.

The problem is that the film’s moral order keeps being violated by the so-called heroes of the West. Odysseus breaks Zeus’s law at Troy. His men abuse it abroad. The suitors exploit it at home. Meanwhile, unseen foreigners receive blame for the low-trust world these powerful Greek men have created.

The violence doesn’t stay in one place.

In modern America, the right constantly warns about social decay while supporting the forces most responsible for producing it. They defund public institutions and weaken labor protections. A handful of oligarchs concentrate all the wealth unto themselves, including the current president.

Meanwhile, communities have become economically precarious. Many people blame immigrants because many of them don’t know their neighbors anymore, let alone trust them.

Society strips the commons for parts. Trust collapses. Every interaction becomes transactional. The people who engineered the demolition survey the rubble and announce that diversity must’ve done it. Not too unlike how Odysseus returns home to the same crisis he helped unleash abroad. The violence didn’t stay in Troy. It never does.

Historically accurate giants.

Of course, none of this means The Odyssey is above criticism. Our very own film editor, Jon Winkler, had plenty of thoughtful critiques of the film, as laid out here.

For starters, Nolan’s Mediterranean frequently possesses the visual warmth of a parking garage in Glasgow. A film shot around some of the most naturally colorful landscapes on Earth somehow looks coated in the familiar Prestige Gray of Important Cinema. The sea is gray. The rocks are gray. Troy is duotone. Human memory itself appears to have undergone color correction.

For a $250 million epic, the movie can also feel oddly underpopulated. The legendary war that launched a thousand ships sometimes resembles a moderately successful Renaissance fair. Obviously, Nolan and his team pulled off an extraordinary cinematic feat by making this an all-IMAX feature. But that pioneering does have its glaring logistical drawbacks, which Nolan himself will probably be the first to point out.

Nolan also removes or radically revises huge portions of Homer’s poem, including the famous “Nobody” trick during the Cyclops encounter. He also cuts much of the divine machinery, as well as several major characters and episodes. The adaptation emphasizes remorse, trauma, and moral consequence over the original poem’s celebration of cunning.

Inconvenient terrain.

These are all interesting subjects for disagreement. Complaining that ancient Mediterranean societies contain people with different skin tones, however, is far less interesting. Particularly when Homer’s poem itself refers admiringly to Ethiopians and imagines the gods traveling to feast among them.

Hence the broader casting panic relies on a version of historical accuracy in which everybody near Greece must look like they graduated from the same British drama school. Apparently Cyclopes, witches, giants, divine visions, and men turned into livestock require suspension of disbelief, while a Black woman near the Aegean constitutes documentary fraud.

Ancient Greece is especially inconvenient terrain for reactionaries because its actual history stubbornly refuses to resemble a Heritage Foundation brochure. The Mediterranean was a network of migration, commerce, conquest, intermarriage, and cultural exchange. People moved around. Empires touched. Africa was not located on another planet.

Nor does Elliot Page’s presence represent a uniquely modern violation of ancient Greek sensibilities. The film never positions the character as transgender, to be clear. But even if it did, anyone who believes transgender identity would’ve constituted the most sexually or socially disorienting feature of Greek mythology may wish to spend five unsupervised minutes reading about Zeus.

The barbarians won the argument.

The funniest outcome of the anti-woke campaign against The Odyssey is that conservatives have accidentally reenacted the film’s thesis. They saw outsiders where the movie saw people. They treated the presence of Black and trans performers as evidence that something foreign had invaded a treasured foundation of Western culture. And they blamed the imagined intruders for degrading the canon before anyone had even seen the finished work.

Then the movie finally came out and turned out to be about that very idea. That civilizations begin collapsing precisely when they become incapable of extending humanity to strangers. Perfect.

The point of xenia is not simply that guests should behave well. Hosts also carry obligations. The stranger at the door might be vulnerable. Travelers might need food. The person who appears foreign might be protected by the highest law in the cosmos.

The ethical genius of hospitality is that it asks people to behave decently before they possess complete information about one another. Reactionary politics demands the opposite. It trains people to regard unfamiliarity as evidence of danger, difference as provocation, and compassion as a loophole the enemy will exploit.

The world in the end.

Nolan’s film understands that this fear eventually becomes self-fulfilling. Once everyone assumes every stranger is a Trojan Horse, hospitality disappears completely. Once hospitality disappears, every voyage becomes an invasion. Every guest becomes a threat. Every community retreats behind its walls until somebody devises a clever way to get inside.

Odysseus wins the Trojan War by proving trust is for suckers. He then spends the rest of the movie sailing through the world that lesson created. These are the real “woke” politics of The Odyssey.

Not the racial composition of the cast, not Elliot Page, and not Travis Scott acting in a scene for about two minutes. It’s the suggestion that Western civilization’s greatest enemies may be the men who praise it most loudly while violating every principle required to keep it alive.

The Odyssey is now playing in theaters. Watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of Melinda Sue Gordon and Universal Pictures.