OK, alright, before you break out your pitchforks, hear me out.

This editorial isn’t about Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster, record-setting, box-office busting, three-hour epic recounting of The Odyssey.

I am not here to spoon-feed you the same old boring, predictable, low-energy hot takes that “woke casting ruined the movie!” and “this movie is gonna flop for sure!”

I’m not even here to provide you with the significantly hotter (and actually accurate) take that the worst actor in the movie by far was Robert Pattinson, whose mustache-twirling hammery in the climactic “slay-the-suitors” scene was truly cringe-inducing.

I’m not here to talk about practical effects vs. CGI or ponder the future of films shot on IMAX or opine on why it took three months for the film to finally open in Japan.

No. Today I’m here to discuss something infinitely more important: the death of God and the possibility of His surprising rebirth.

Interested? Let’s go.

FROM SHAW’S CAESAR TO CORBETT’S NAPOLEON

I remember it like it was yesterday. Spring 1997. I was writing my final exams before graduating from high school. Today was the English exam. The tests were handed out and I began working my way through the questions.

I came to a passage from a play that I was asked to read, summarize and answer some questions about. As soon as I began reading the passage, my mind was blown. It was a scene from George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, so I was expecting something stiff, formal and Shakespearean. You know, the type of eloquent literary language we’ve been taught to expect when we read dialogue placed in the mouth of some important historical personage by some great dramatist.

But if I was expecting a lofty soliloquy in iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets, that was decidedly not what I got. Instead, Shaw’s Caesar sounded like a modern man. His speech was dynamic. Exciting, even. In Shaw’s hands, this long-dead Roman exuded a type of energy that instantly made me understand why his men would have been willing to follow him onto the battlefield. Surely, this was the type of man who could command an army and conquer the known world!

And, just like that, my sense of what a literary representation of history could be was drastically altered. Of course it’s ridiculous to expect Caesar to be talking like a Shakespearean character. Caesar didn’t even speak English. Any English an author puts in Caesar’s mouth, whether King James Bible-worthy rhetoric or today’s crude vernacular, is a choice the author is making.

…Or at least that’s the way I remember it. I definitely recall reading such a passage in my high school English final exam, but, checking the text of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, I fail to find whatever passage struck me like a thunderbolt lo those many decades ago. (Maybe it was Caesar’s introduction in Act I?)

Whatever the case, I read something in that passage that made me reconsider how a writer can bring ancient figures to life. I know this because it inspired me to write a short story of my own.

Behold, the dramatic scene from the young James Corbett’s masterpiece, “Napoleon at Jaffa,” in which the famed General Bonaparte visits the plague victims from the 1799 siege of Ottoman-controlled Jaffa!

Desgenette rushed forward. “Sir, don’t—”

The General lifted his left hand, index finger extended in a gesture of warning, as he began to finger Valency’s buboes with his bare hand. Valency lay absolutely still, uncertain of what to do next, but the glaze which had formerly clouded his eyes had disappeared. “Sir, not even the attendants dare touch me. Not even the other sick.”

Bonaparte dismissed the statement with a flick of his gloveless hand. “Only because they are feeble in mind, rigidly clinging to the belief that the fever can harm them. That is the true enemy here, Carabinier Valency: that belief. Believe not and you shall be made whole. And don’t forget that.”

“Yes, sir!” snapped Valency, a bit of colour returning to his cheeks, formerly ghostly white. “The disease is all in the mind, sir!”

“Exactly.” Napoleon reached over, layed [sic] a hand on Valency’s forehead. “As long as you realize that, you’ll be out of here within hours.”

A smile shot across Valency’s face. “Yes, sir.”

Etc., etc.

If you’re really keen to read that entire piece of literary juvenilia, I’ll link it up as one of the Recommended Reading suggestions in this weekend’s Subscriber Newsletter. But I warn you, it’s not great. (”Finger Valency’s buboes,” indeed!)

Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that our representations of history are always that: representations. The formulas and cliches we employ to make those representations suitably “old-timey” to our eyes and ears are mere conventions, and sometimes shattering those conventions is a more fruitful way to bring the past to life—to make something understandable to us in a way that the formal and stilted rhetoric required by convention never could.

This was the beginning of an important insight. But the true importance of that insight was not revealed to me until a few years later, when I first read Nietzsche.

BACK TO NIETZSCHE

If you ask the average man or woman on the street to tell you what they know about Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, chances are they will look at you like you’re crazy and steer clear of you.

But on the off chance they do know anything at all about Nietzsche, it’s probably his famous dictum, “God is dead,” which they’ll confidently repeat to you.

Or they’ll tell you he was a proto-Nazi.

That’s unfortunate, because both these popular conceits about Nietzsche are wrong. Or, at the very least, woefully incomplete.

For those who don’t know the actual context of Nietzsche’s infamous “God is dead” pronouncement, its most profound exposition comes in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, in which he writes “The Parable of the Madman“.

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchres of God?”

I hope you can appreciate now that the catchphrase “God is dead” does not do justice to this parable and its significance.

For one, Nietzsche does not say “God is dead” himself. Instead, he puts those words in the mouth of a madman who is roundly mocked by his interlocutors. For another, he doesn’t present this phrase as some grandiloquent statement about the triumph of modern man over his Bronze Age superstitions, as a Richard Dawkins or a Sam Harris no doubt would.

At the risk of greatly oversimplifying one of the most important and profound thinkers of the past 1,000 years, I’ll merely observe that Nietzsche’s intent here is not to make some trite point about the triumph of atheism. On the contrary, he is lamenting that we have killed God Himself and we hardly even realize it. He is acknowledging that, in this post-Enligtenment age, our Christian faith—along with everything that was built upon it, including our morality—is collapsing. Our civilization has become unmoored from its foundations, and we are but dimly aware that it has happened, let alone that we have done this to ourselves. That is what Nietzsche is telling us in this parable.

Realizing the gravity of our situation, then, is our first task. Our current era of enlightened rationalism is not some triumphant achievement to be uncritically celebrated but, rather, a profound burden to be borne and overcome. We have committed deicide, yet we have not found the water to clean ourselves, nor have we engaged in the festivals or invented the sacred games that will atone for this, the greatest sin.

Nietzsche, of course, had his own ideas about how exactly we can move past this death of God and into a new age. Since I’ve already vastly oversimplified a thinker who should most certainly not be oversimplified, I’ll refrain from summarizing Nietzsche’s moral and political philosophy here.

But I will say this: rather than the “revaluation of all values” that Nietzsche aims at, I propose something altogether humbler and perhaps even achievable: a rebirth of the belief in God.

NOLAN’S ODYSSEY

The first thing you’ll notice about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is that the famed filmmaker is not engaging in a faithful adaptation of Homer’s work. Instead, he’s crafting a modern secular mythos from the bones of that ancient tale.

I say it’s the first thing you’ll notice about Nolan’s movie because it’s literally the first thing that appears on screen. Even before a single frame of footage is projected, the viewer is confronted by a title card reading: “A time of apparent magic….”

Nolan himself specifically cites Star Wars’ opening formula—”A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”—as the inspiration for his own intertitular introduction. “That immediately told me how to watch [’Star Wars’],” he explained in conversation with filmmaker Park Chan-Wook about his own reason for including the opening title card in his new movie. “It put me in the right frame of mind to receive the imagery.”

But if “A time of apparent magic…” is meant to put the viewer in the proper frame of mind to accept what’s about to unfold, then what apparently magical tale are we being prepared to accept?

Contrary to expectation, Nolan is not preparing the audience to lose itself in the tale of Homer’s Odyssey. Rather, he is preparing the audience to lose itself in Nolan’s Odyssey, which is a different thing altogether. You see, Nolan has managed to transform this tale from a Bronze Age pagan epic into a post-Enlightenment secular Christian morality play.

As writer/director of this new take on the classic story, Nolan accomplishes this transformation by emphasizing the ancient Greek tradition of xenia (referred to in the film as “Zeus’ Law”) and implying its equivalence to The Golden Rule. In Nolan’s film, Odysseus’ ploy to end the Trojan War—deceiving the Trojans into accepting the Trojan Horse—is no mere military strategem. The deception, relying on the Trojans’ obligation to accept the Greek gift and to bring it in through the gates of Troy, is the weaponization of Zeus’ Law. It signifies the breaking of man’s sacred bond with the divine and, ultimately, the “collapse of our Bronze Age civilization” (as Anne Hathaway’s Penelope spells out for the audience in one of those lines of Hollywood dialogue that carry all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the face).

Homer’s Odyssey is the tale of a warrior hero being bandied about by the gods. It tells how Odysseus, with the sanction of Zeus and the protection of Athena, eventually returns home and restores order to his kingdom.

Nolan’s Odyssey, on the other hand, is about a man who, torn by guilt over his having deceived and subsequently slaughtered the Trojans, is driven half-mad. He hallucinates conversations with Athena and quite possibly misremembers fantastic tales about a cyclops and a witch who can turn men into pigs and other “apparent” magical events. Ultimately, it’s the story of Odysseus self-sabotaging his return home for years on end and eventually coming back to abdicate his throne and atone for his violation of the moral order.

In other words, these are two fundamentally different stories.

So, what was Nolan’s mindset in this task? Why did he Christianize The Odyssey? Is his work a commentary on the collapse of our own civilization?

Obviously, such questions would never be put to a director by the vapid, glad-handing, smoke-blowing empty suits of the Hollywood press junket circuit. That’s exactly why it took someone completely detached from that world to actually put these questions to Nolan.

There is much to say about Nolan’s Odyssey and the way it transforms its source material. But for our purposes today, it’s sufficient to conclude that Nolan’s Odyssey is a failure. Specifically, Nolan fails not because he—like Shaw and Corbett before him—has transformed an ancient tale of classical heroes into something more modern, but because he has failed to learn the lesson of Nietzsche’s parable.

From the opening title card informing us that we are entering a world of “apparent” magic—which, Nolan is keen to confirm, is a commentary on how primitive, Bronze Age man uses superstition to make sense of the natural world—Nolan creates a thoroughly secular Christian morality play.

Indeed, there is a secular explanation for every apparently fantastic event in Nolan’s film. His Athena is likely a figment of Odysseus’ imagination. His depictions of the cyclops and Circe and the rock monster are all tales told in flashback, and thus likely further exaggerations of Odysseus’ disturbed mind. In the end, Athena does not transform Odysseus into a frail old beggar, as she does in Homer’s tale. Matt Damon merely grows a grey beard and wears a hood low over his face. In other words, there’s nothing actually divine in Nolan’s film.

But, as Nietzsche would no doubt admonish, this is like performing a Church service in the sepulcher of God—with the congregation trying not to notice the deity’s decomposing corpse behind the altar. Try as they might, neither Nolan nor anyone else can reconstruct Christian morality on a secular basis. Even the Dawkinses and Harrises of the world cannot derive the ought of moral imperative from the is of mere atoms and molecules bouncing around a random, godless universe.

So, yes, ultimately Nolan’s film fails to construct a compelling modern myth. His attempt to smuggle Christian morality through the back door of modern Enlightenment-era rationalism does not suffice.

But it does point a potential way forward.

NEW MYTHS FOR OLD CYNICS

For those who haven’t figured it out yet, the problem we face today is not a conspiracy of a few bad men and women. Our biggest threat isn’t this or that false flag event or a corrupt monetary system or a rogue military-industrial contractor.

No, the threat we face is something infinitely worse: the unraveling of the fabric of our civilization. The unmooring of our moral universe. The death of God.

As a result, we will not be saved by yet another documentary about how the Twin Towers blew up or by yet another expose about who really killed JFK—valuable as these things may be for establishing an accurate historical record.

No, what we really need is what we may least expect: a sandal-shod man emerging from the wilderness to share his vision for how we can put the world back together. Or a Penelope who can reweave the tapestry of our beliefs into a garment that rests comfortably on our modern shoulders. Or a madman smashing his lantern in the marketplace, berating us for our act of deicide.

In times past, these things would have taken the form of epic tales recounted by bards. Or of holy texts copied out by scribes. Or of political pamphlets pumped out by printing presses. But we no longer live in such times. In our time of apparent un-magic, this story, this modern myth that reconstructs the world for us, will take the form of some other popular entertainment. A video game, perhaps. Or a film.

No, Nolan’s Odyssey is not the tale to set the world aright. But someone, somewhere, is working on the story that will.

Alas, I fear that my words will fall on deaf ears. I imagine now that the most insightful feedback I will receive here will be the observation that George Bernard Shaw was a foul Fabian socialist and eugenicist (as if I hadn’t taught that fact) or that Hollywood is bad (as if I hadn’t demonstrated that already). Perhaps my Sisyphean penance is not to roll the rock back up the hill for the rest of eternity but to forever be casting these pearls of sagacity before Circe’s swine. Woe is me!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to finger some buboes.

Do you appreciate this type of essay? Then you’ll love The Corbett Report Subscriber newsletter, which contains my weekly editorial as well as recommended reading, viewing and listening.

If you’re a Corbett Report member, you can sign in to corbettreport.com and read the newsletter today.

Not a member yet? Sign up today to access the newsletter and support this work.

Are you already a member and don’t know how to sign in to the website? Contact me HERE and I’ll be happy to help you get logged in!