new writing: christopher nolan's not quite heroes

at the nyt

I have a strained relationship with Christopher Nolan’s movies (it’s come up before). I love Interstellar and I like Tenet. I found Oppenheimer, with its dialogue explaining to me what was happening at all times, extremely tedious after the first forty minutes.¹ I hate The Prestige, which is sort of like Anna Biller’s The Love Witch in that it plays like a comedy skit from somebody who doesn’t know that’s funny and will get really upset if you laugh. I view Nolan and his career as basically a good thing—if only because he helped save Anne Hathaway’s—but I don’t always enjoy his movies or admire them.² Still, over the past couple weeks I ended up watching or rewatching a truly ridiculous amount of Nolan movies, partly because they ended up working weirdly well for my quasi–zombie state after a day spent in the archive, and I kind of miss them. I mean the movies are still there but I don’t think it’ll be the same. Like I don’t think it will will work if I just watch Tenet over and over.

The Odyssey has great moments and the last act of the movie really works, but, like Oppenheimer, it suffers from extremely clunky and sometimes bizarre dialogue.³ I found the casting of so many big names distracting in Oppenheimer and it stays distracting here. Circe was genuinely terrifying, and so was the Underworld, but every scene with Calypso brought the movie to a grinding halt. I would go see it again, and but my take on the first viewing was that it’s a little bloated, a little uneven, and there are way too many repetitions of the phrase “Zeus’s law.”⁴

However, what I have to share is not a review of The Odyssey. It’s about Christopher Nolan’s recurring heroic type, guys who create problems by running away and then decide by the end that what they really need to do is… run away a little harder:

[Christopher Nolan’s] heroes are often exceptional men who cause problems, then agonize over how to make amends. The fact that they are men is no accident. Their failures at both masculinity and intimacy are essential to understanding them. They aren’t good men, in the sense of upstanding members of the community who work toward building something better. And they aren’t bad men, which is to say violent parasites. Instead, they’re halfway heroes, charismatic but hollow people who deem love as something best shown by their absence because their presence proves to be too dangerous.

You can read it here.⁵

I think there’s maybe a more interesting wider conversation about when things are anachronistic (but it’s fine or even creatively good) and when things are anachronistic (and it’s bad), which might be happening elsewhere already, but I’ve been carefully averting my eyes from most Odyssey writing until this was done.⁶ I think there are moments of both types of anachronism in Nolan’s movie, and then there are also “accommodations” to “modern sensibilities” like “nobody’s getting raped during the sack of Troy” that I personally endorse because… well… I don’t wanna watch that.

I did read this piece by my friend Tim Markatos and enjoyed it.

Film Critic with a Classics Degree Sees The Odyssey

Also, friend of the newsletter bradley babendir has been doing a series on Nolan over at his newsletter, featuring fellow friend of the newsletter Tyler Malone on Batman.

some generational analysis (poem-specific)

Now Christopher Nolan is not reading this newsletter. But if he were I would totally have suggestions for things he could adapt next if he wants to do an adaptation and not an original story. For instance:

• The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)—it has time. It has science. It has running away. It has going back. It has the potential for lots of expository dialogue. It’s got it all. You should also hire me as a consultant because I have read one billion drafts of The Dispossessed (three). (Four if you count the finished book.)

• You might be thinking, but what about The Left Hand of Darkness? It’s nothing personal but I just don’t want to hear a Ludwig Göransson for that one. Or Hans Zimmer. No. Honestly it might sound crazy but I think something synthy would be nice for that. Susumu Hirasawa. That’s the vision.

• “The Ape’s Wife” (Caitlín R. Kiernan). Most of Kiernan’s stories are a bit too horny to be a good fit but they are also obsessed with time. This story was the least horny one I could think of but it is about King Kong (cool puppet opportunity) which could be a copyright problem. Oh wait—

• Agents of Dreamland mashed up with Black Helicopters (Caitlín R. Kiernan). These are like… Lovecraft X-Files novellas. Lots of time stuff. Potential for traumatizing past flashbacks. OK. Yeah do this one. It’s a trilogy but the first two are probably the most “you” (if you are Christopher Nolan). Additionally, you could put Cillian Murphy in this one as the grizzled older agent.

• The Fortunate Fall (Cameron Reed). In addition to the time stuff there’s a lot of augmented reality stuff, holographic stuff, that cyberpunk thing where you are like… swimming through “the Internet”….

• The Immortal King Rao (Vauhini Vara). I read this recently on the recommendation of advait and well you know it’s got the time stuff, it’s about a self-made genius who kinda destroys the world…. OK so this might just be Oppenheimer. Nevertheless.

Now do any of these address the “hero” thing—Dispossessed yes—everything else no.

By the way, at my theater, there was this whole ad for placing ads before movies to hype your local business or whatever. I was like, can anybody place an ad? Could I place an ad? Just be like, here be my preorder link (once there is one) as a QR code? How much does that sort of thing cost…?

1. I think it’s possible Interstellar unlocked something about Nolan’s work for me; I liked this Letterboxd review on The Dark Knight Rises which I think also captures my feelings about Nolan post–watching Interstellar:

I thought this was stupid when it came out, following on the heels of Inception which I also thought was stupid. It seemed like Nolan was making the dumbest smart movies in Hollywood. Thanks to his three most recent I’ve realized he’s a pure feelings director who happens to have a lot of “left-brained” preoccupations.

I think my ratings of Nolan films (sans Odyssey) are:

🥰 My Perfect Baby Angel 🥰: Interstellar
A Fun Time: Following, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Tenet
Good, Maybe Better, But Not In Any Sense Fun: Dunkirk
I Just Don’t Like It I Dunno: Memento
I Was Eating During This Movie’s One Really Gross Scene After Which I Admit I Was Unwilling To Give It My Full Attention In Case That Happened Again: Insomnia
I Hate It: Batman Begins, The Prestige, Oppenheimer

2. I feel like the Hathahate wave was maybe the last time people were kind of like… yeah there’s nothing “wrong” with this woman, she’s not some kind of evil fascist, we just find her annoying so we need her to die. Now I’d be reading posts about Anne Hathaway’s Toxic White Theater Kid Feminism: The Crypto Trad Wifery of the “Try Hard.”

3. This moment in Oppenheimer was when I kind of lost it.

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5. I do think Cobb in Inception is a big exception to this pattern, even if you think he’s still in a dream at the end. He wants to go home and raise his kids, and he does, and he chooses to stop questioning reality and accept where he is. The soldiers in Dunkirk are also sort of an exception, but that movie is an exception in several ways (for instance, not much dialogue). But I’m not trying to say this is every male hero in a Nolan movie, just… a type.

6. There’s probably some useful comparison to be made between the way Wuthering Heights departed from its material and The Odyssey does. Not by me. I’m not doing it. However, I did notice that the puppies that got killed in the book of Wuthering Heights (not the movie) somehow migrated over to The Odyssey. One puppy was going to get killed in a movie this year. The gods decreed this.