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Nikolaos Mavridis, a researcher at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki specializing in comparative American and Eurasian political theory, explains to To Vima how Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” functions as a sweeping cinematic narrative about U.S. hegemony at a time when globalization is in crisis.

“Nolan gives us the American Odysseus — the Puritan-liberal Odysseus.”

Odysseus is a figure that has provided many cultures with material for constructing their own myths of identity. Where, culturally, would you place the project of this Anglo-American director?

In Christopher Nolan’s film, we see a quintessentially “American” Odysseus — in other words, a “Protestant,” “Puritan” Odysseus. America’s distinctive form of liberalism has its roots in Puritanism, in the sense that it emphasizes individual morality and hard work, combining religiosity with democracy. Nolan’s Odysseus believes in personal will and in salvation through his own deeds. The Puritan hero wants no one’s assistance — neither God’s favor nor the help of the human community. Through his own strength, he solves the riddle of nature, which is bound up with time and death, as well as the problem of the self.

It is worth noting that just as the United States is a hegemonic power that, in a sense, encompasses Western civilization as a whole, Nolan’s Odysseus also absorbs previous versions of the hero — from the Roman Catholic modernist Odysseuses of James Joyce and T.S. Eliot to the earlier Latin traditions of Dante, Virgil and Ovid. There is a distinctive kind of totalizing quality to Nolan’s ideology, in the sense that the film reaches into everything: politics, culture, gender, race and sexual relations.

Within this all-encompassing vision, Nolan structures his narrative around three axes. First, Homer’s relationship with the era he describes: the Bronze Age. Second, Homer’s relationship with his own time: the Iron Age. And third, our own era — the age of rare earths and artificial intelligence — in which the contemporary American has assumed the task of leading a West in crisis. With this thread as his guide through the Homeric labyrinth, Nolan arrives at the diagnosis that the world Homer describes bears a striking resemblance to our own.

How Is the Bronze Age Like the Age of Artificial Intelligence?

What are the similarities?

Nolan confronts us with the threat of a wholesale collapse of our civilization, much as Bronze Age civilization itself collapsed. Relevant works include Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed [Princeton University Press, 2021] and the broader research of archaeologist Louise Hitchcock. Hitchcock reads the Bronze Age as a proto-capitalist era with its own form of multipolarity, including the Mycenaean, Hittite, Assyro-Babylonian and Egyptian empires, which competed for copper from Cyprus and tin from the region of present-day Afghanistan. Troy, meanwhile, was a kind of contemporary “choke point” for gold and grain arriving from the Black Sea.

The temptation to compare the Bronze Age with today’s multipolar world is strong: powers such as the United States, the European Union, China and Russia compete for rare earths, while new choke points such as the Strait of Hormuz or Bab el-Mandeb in the Red Sea have become the Troys of our time. For the Mycenaeans, Troy was the most important choke point because their power rested on gold. Losing control of the gold routes would have meant the collapse of the palatial system.

‘The Odyssey’ as a ‘Night Sea Journey’ Into the Unconscious

How does Nolan bring Odysseus into our own time?

The Protestant reception of Odysseus serves as an intermediary. Consider John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), the literary epic of the Puritans that has been described as a “Protestant Odyssey,” as well as John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Nolan also draws on 20th-century Roman Catholic modernists.

From the poet T.S. Eliot, he takes the interpretation that the blinding of the Cyclops is also a form of blindness experienced by Odysseus himself. According to this reading, Polyphemus’ eye is a solar symbol, as is the ram through which Odysseus escapes. Odysseus enters a state of symbolic blindness, which is why, during the Nekyia — his journey to the underworld — he encounters the blind prophet Tiresias, who becomes the voice of his conscience.

Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, but he also receives guidance from the blind seer Tiresias. Between those two moments lies a journey of his own blind descent. Joseph Campbell uses the expression “night sea journey” to describe T.S. Eliot’s interpretation of The Odyssey: Odysseus blinds the sun and enters his own consciousness, becoming blind himself. It is a descent into the unconscious. Without these works, we cannot understand the interiority of Nolan’s hero — particularly given that Nolan himself studied English literature at University College London.

Western Interpretations of Odysseus Adopted by Nolan

Can you summarize the main literary interpretations of Odysseus that the film draws upon?

Rome shifted Odysseus’ orientation from the past toward the future. The aim was to establish Rome’s political order with its sights set on the future promised by the Roman imperium. While Homer’s description of Achilles’ shield depicts a city of the present and past, at war and at peace, the corresponding passage in Virgil’s Aeneid opens onto Rome’s future and ultimately depicts infinity — just as Nolan turns toward the infinite future of the West.

Dante Alighieri, in the 14th century, belongs to the Virgilian tradition, with Virgil himself taking Dante by the hand and guiding him. From Dante, Nolan draws the idea of a frozen Hades, which is why the Nekyia sequence was filmed in Iceland.

Ancient Greek and medieval tradition rejected Odysseus; it was only in modernity that his stature was elevated. In tragic and lyric poetry, Odysseus is the schemer, the hated figure, the opposite of Achilles. Roman tradition founded its political system on Aeneas without rehabilitating Odysseus.

The exceptions were Stoic philosophers such as Epictetus and Seneca, who saw Odysseus as a model of perseverance, acceptance of divine providence and endurance in the face of adversity. Their interpretation, however, did not prevail. Nor did the Roman Catholic tradition rehabilitate Odysseus, as we see in Dante’s condemnation of him. To find an established positive image of Odysseus, we essentially have to reach the Protestants of the 16th and 17th centuries, including John Bunyan’s “Protestant Odyssey.”

At the beginning of modernity, Odysseus was regarded as a Machiavellian-style realist, albeit in the altered sense of a man who confronts nature and his fellow human beings without illusions or conventions. In Troilus and Cressida, William Shakespeare sees Odysseus as a Machiavellian political being who represents a necessary evil.

It is above all in early Protestant modernity that Odysseus is elevated as a producer, a man of the productive economy. After all, Protestants — particularly Calvinists and Puritans — were those who most strongly elevated the accumulation of wealth into a matter of spiritual significance.

This is where the great transition takes place. Initially, Odysseus is the “trickster”: a swindler, prankster, liar, corrupter and seducer. Gradually, precisely because of these negative qualities, Odysseus is transformed into the great positive figure on whom modern bourgeois civilization would be based. He is the man who struggles against nature in order to tame and transform it.

Even his character as a “trickster” now reveals a tension between animal nature and the mechanical element. This is why Odysseus experienced a new wave of reinterpretations during the modernist era of the 20th century and now again in the 21st, when what is at stake is the posthuman — the hybrid of nature and machine.

How Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ Differs From Homer’s Original

How do you assess the differences between the film and its Homeric model?

In Nolan’s Nekyia, Agamemnon hands the scepter to Odysseus. But what happens in the final scene? The killing of the suitors would have inaugurated an endless civil war between the king and the aristocratic families. In Homer’s epic, Athena intervenes as a deus ex machina to save the situation.

In Nolan’s godless Puritan epic, Odysseus instead goes into self-imposed exile so that the family line can continue through Telemachus.

The difference in the archery scene is also interesting. In Homer’s epic, there is metaphysical assistance, since the arrow would normally follow a parabolic trajectory rather than the straight line required by the arrangement of the axes. In Nolan’s film, by contrast, the axes themselves form a parabolic curve, meaning that no divine intervention is required, only a human feat performed within the laws of nature.

The altered ending is also distinctly modern. The Puritan never rests at a final destination; his life is a continuous journey, never an arrival. He must fight constantly, in a state of anxiety, to perfect his being, with the universal human as his ultimate horizon.

That is why Nolan excludes Phaeacia: it represents an “end of History” where every problem has been solved. Trees bear fruit forever, ships never sink, and there are no slaves or hierarchies. The psyche of the Puritan hero cannot rest in a Promised Land that has already been attained.

Odysseus and Batman

There are self-referential, intertextual allusions in Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” such as the talisman reminiscent of “Inception” and Charybdis’ whirlpool recalling a scene from “Interstellar.” Do you see a connection between Odysseus and Batman?

Between Batman and Odysseus came Todd Phillips’ Joker, which embodies the unemployed hero of the modern precariat. Phillips deconstructed Batman — the aristocratic knight who stands above the law and is part neoconservative, part neoliberal.

Now, in The Odyssey, Nolan presents the Batman archetype in the form of Agamemnon as a failed and outdated model of individualism. He has lost the golden glow of the king and is reduced to a faceless, naked individuality — nothing more than shadow and dust.

Nolan accepts Phillips’ critique and, through Agamemnon, presents the dark side of Batman: the subordination of bourgeois civilization to a form of individuality that stands above the law, in which enrichment and private interest take precedence over institutions in a self-destructive way.

Batman is no longer the hero of our age. He gives way to Odysseus.

‘We Are the Sea Peoples’

How do you interpret the reference to the “Sea Peoples”?

The key lies in a reflexive interpretation. Although the Achaean attack on the choke point called Troy is portrayed as victorious, it ultimately causes the complete breakdown of the Mycenaean system, as local societies were sacrificed to the supply chain required by an enormous army and collapsed from within.

This development is reflected in the literature of the Nostoi, or “Returns,” of which The Odyssey is an offshoot. The Nostoi portray epic heroes returning home only to encounter complete socioeconomic collapse. Their homes have fallen apart, and these once-glorious warriors are forced to become ordinary people who must make a living.

One way out is to raid whatever remains of what had previously been a wealthy, “globalized” world. An economy of plunder emerges.

This is the meaning of the film’s line, “We are the Sea Peoples”: the glorious warrior-kings are transformed into pirates and looters. Nolan, of course, brings this concern into the present day, identifying parallels with our own world.

From the Bronze Age to the Age of Rare Earths

What are those parallels?

What copper and gold were then, rare earths are today. We remain hostages to geography, because rare earths are embedded in vast networks and supply chains.

The question is whether we, too, may have to pass through a “dark” period, just as the “Dark Ages” came between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Back then, there was a transition from the “globalization” of the Bronze Age — which depended on extensive international networks stretching from the Mediterranean and Cyprus for copper, to the Black Sea for timber and grain, and Central Asia for tin — to the more localized Iron Age, because iron could be found almost everywhere.

Today, there is a tension between globalization and localization. On the one hand, the transition to artificial intelligence reduces the need for the cheap labor on which the global networks of multinational corporations were built. The age of AI could potentially bring companies “home.”

But behind the software is hardware, and hardware requires rare earths, 40% of the world’s reserves of which are located in China. The challenge of our age, then, is “digital iron”: finding materials available within local societies that could play the role rare earths play today.

During the current crisis of globalization, we may pass through a “dark” period similar to the “Dark Ages” between the “proto-globalization” of the Bronze Age and the new local equilibrium of Homer’s Iron Age. Nolan is crafting precisely these grand narratives of a West in crisis.

Building on modernist interpretations of Odysseus, Nolan creates a hero with an inner life. From the encounter with the Cicones onward, we see a disoriented fleet advancing through plunder, while external events are filtered through Odysseus’ internal psychological experience.

Penelope confesses to Telemachus her fear that Odysseus will return as a pirate and destroy his own palace. This internalization of Odysseus’ journey is connected to Eliot’s modernist interpretation: with the burning of Polyphemus’ eye, we enter the hero’s inner journey, as the sun descends into the dark unconscious.

Nolan thus creates the Puritan hero who does not seek divine assistance, but instead wages his struggle with God within himself.

American Cinema Has Replaced the Novel

How is this struggle with God portrayed cinematically?

The Greek Odysseus is bound by external time, which is determined by the places he encounters on his journey. The modern Puritan Odysseus possesses an internal sense of time, visible in flashbacks associated with a quest for catharsis.

In the Nekyia, beneath the Icelandic twilight of a sun that gives no warmth, the nocturnal journey through consciousness and guilt is completed. Agamemnon essentially tells Odysseus that all the gold and copper they regarded as the source and shield of their power ultimately became the burden beneath which they collapsed.

Agamemnon’s command is that Odysseus return to Ithaca not as an unscathed king seeking to restore an undamaged past, but as an unknown man, allowing another political figure to take charge of the new era.

Nolan’s version of the Sirens’ song points precisely to the impossibility of recovering lost time and childhood innocence. The Homeric logic is that the Mycenaean king of the Bronze Age must be replaced by a new political entity that will shape the aristocratic city-state.

Similarly, Nolan presents the modern American hero as a universal human being capable of creatively absorbing earlier phases of the West — the Roman, Latin, Roman Catholic and modernist versions of Odysseus, for example — just as the United States remains at the forefront of the West’s pursuit of a form of human universality.

The artistic vehicle for this universality is American cinema — not tragedy, the modern or modernist novel, or an older European cinema bound to the novel.

American cinema of the Nolan variety is based on the epic rather than the novel. It combines an internal narrative with a movement beyond interiority, as seen in the final return to Ithaca.

Christopher Nolan, however, does not offer a “happy ending.” The United States may still be regarded as the leading force in the West’s pursuit of universality, with no obvious successor on the horizon, but it occupies that position in a world that is collapsing — one in which what awaits us may above all be a post-apocalyptic condition.