The Odyssey is so conservative, I am half surprised it wasn’t written by Jacob Rees-Mogg

Christopher Nolan is in a tight spot: The Odyssey, which opened at $264.1 million, will be pelted with Oscars come March 2027. Best director, best picture, best actor (Matt Damon) at a conservative minimum. And the critics – bar one contrary view in the London Review of Books – can’t get enough. So what’s the problem?Nolan has been increasing the scale and ambition of his projects throughout his career – naturally, I suppose. From the story of an insurance investigator with memory loss in Memento, to the sprawling but still technically confined Gotham City in The Dark Knight trilogy, and then into the infinite layers of the human psyche in Inception. By the time we get to Interstellar the universe is boundless. Not content with expanding just the physical ambitions of his films, Nolan turned to stories and people of a much grander scale. Oppenheimer is about one of the most consequential – perhaps the most consequential – men in history. And finally he turns his attention to the Odyssey – it is hard to think of a single bigger, more famous, more recognised, more vaunted story than that. So where does he go from here? By my calculations, to maintain the pace and trajectory of his career, he can only do the Bible next. It will suit this conservative director, whose rendition of the Odyssey is already biblical propaganda. Homer’s version of the universe is one organised by meddling, nasty, shrill, mischievous, funny and ultimately amoral gods. They lash out, exorcise petty grievances through mortal humans and are guided by no obvious ethical framework. Sin and redemption are foreign concepts. This is not just an incidental fact of the original story, it is the entire point, or the motivating thesis. READ MOREThere is no way that Nolan did not know this about the world’s most studied text. So why, then, does his rendition impart a totally opposite message? The moral ambivalence of the gods is absent, the gods themselves are almost all physically absent. Instead this is a story about one man suffering the consequences of his own immoral behaviour, or rather, atoning for his sins. That’s not the Odyssey that was composed somewhere around 800 BC. How could it be? Christian morality hadn’t been invented yet. “Without rules, human beings are nasty and brutish,” one critic observed of Nolan’s cinematic universe in 2023 – in Interstellar, the masses are presented as laughable rubes; in Batman they are lawless gangsters. And now, three years on from the insight, Nolan has said it again. The suitors without the singular autocratic rule of Odysseus become exactly that: nasty and brutish. This is an arch-Conservative interpretation of the world and I am half surprised it wasn’t written by Jacob Rees-Mogg. It’s an interesting time for a film like this to come along – right wing, but not always screaming in your face about it. We have been told that the left’s grasp on the culture is all but total. And sure, the anxiety is somewhat warranted: progressives have marched intrepidly into the academe only to chase dissenting opinion out. Hollywood actors often spiel bland, vaguely liberal orthodoxies (“I think it is the obligation of the people that have created and perpetuate and benefit from a system of oppression to be the ones that dismantle it,” said Joaquin Phoenix at the Baftas in 2020). But the biggest film of the year is a Christian morality play inflected with conservative instincts – snuck into the culture, Trojan-horse style, in the shape of Odysseus. That doesn’t look like left-wing capture to me. Plenty has been said about the “vibe shift” – somewhere around the 2010s, everyone became terribly pious and the left became obsessed with moral admonishment. Private citizens were “cancelled” and public figures “deplatformed”. Then, after reaching a crescendo in 2020, something snapped and the pendulum swung back hard the other way. And now Joe Rogan – the world’s most popular podcaster – is broadcasting interviews with Rupert Lowe of Restore Britain to his 21 million followers on YouTube. Many people love Elon Musk and can’t help but find Donald Trump funny. So goes the story anyway. [ What is The Odyssey? The 3,000-year-old questionOpens in new window ]Might I suggest that there is something all-the-more banal going on? Maybe the world in toto was never so extremely and intolerably woke; nor is it now so morally louche, so far on the other end of the spectrum. Instead, has the majority not always been somewhere in between? Have we overstated the cultural reach of both movements? The left owns the culture! No, the right really owns the culture! Neither, actually. Good art is only really good when it can surprise, and defy expectations, say something new or at least unusual. I think Nolan has done that with his Christian reinterpretation of the Odyssey – one that is conservatively coded, yes, but is subtle in its mission. The problem with the extremities of the left and the extremities of the right is that they are actually both very boring. Good art might come from somewhere in the middle.