The Elevated Fanboy Cult of Christopher Nolan
That Christopher Nolan would hit a home run with “The Odyssey” was as predictable as Odysseus’s return to Ithaca. What’s maybe a little more surprising is that he has hit a grand slam. The movie earned a staggering $124 million its opening weekend, with its IMAX showings sold out for the rest of the millennium (or close enough to it). Internationally, the film was Nolan’s biggest opening to date. Yet those numbers don’t tell the full story. This past week, Christopher Nolan has seemed like James Cameron the week “Titanic” opened — a filmmaker who’s conducting the entire planet. “The Odyssey” has become “Barbenheimer” all by itself. With rare exceptions, an army of critics (and even academic historians!) has been raving, shoring up the artistic credibility of Nolan’s three-hour Homerian epic. “The Odyssey” now looks destined to be a major player (maybe the major player) in the awards race. The film’s staggering success guarantees that Nolan, more than ever, can call the shots to make any movie he wants, leading the industry in any direction he favors.
Nolan has now scaled that peak of populist mystique shared by only a few directors in movie history: Spielberg, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Tarantino. A Christopher Nolan film is inevitably an Event, and that extends to the way we watch it. The audience — our anticipation and excitement, the afterglow of our response — is woven into the Event. In that sense, every Nolan film is a self-fulfilling prophecy — not a masterpiece, necessarily, but a work so singular in its vision that it creates the big-swing aura of a masterpiece, each with its own world-building majesty. Whether or not any given Nolan film totally “works” is, in a way, almost irrelevant. He’s making head trips for the masses, and so every Nolan film automatically qualifies as his new Ultimate Trip.
Thus, “Dunkirk” wasn’t just another big-scale war film. It was the Time-Bending Spectacle of WWII as God’s-Eye Diorama. “Inception,” when you get into the nitty-gritty of its sci-fi details, isn’t a movie that completely makes sense, but that hardly mattered, because it was the High-Flying Action Dreamscape That If You Watch It Three Times Stoned May Look Logical. As for “Tenet”…well, no one quite defends “Tenet.” That was the one that went too far through the looking glass of its own Nolan-ness.
The director who Nolan most closely resembles, and at times feels like the heir to, is Steven Spielberg. Both became superstar filmmakers by branding themselves as blockbuster wizards of escapism and fantasy, which they execute with a finesse that turns escapism into art. But both also maintain a virtuosic relationship with reality. You could say that “Oppenheimer” was to Nolan what “Schindler’s List” was to Spielberg: a cathartic plunge into the abyss of history.
Yet if you contrast Nolan with Spielberg, it’s remarkable how differently their films have been received. Spielberg, by any account, has made his share of duds (“1941,” “Hook,” “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skill,” “The BFG”) and forgettable chaff (“Always,” “The Terminal,” “Ready Player One”), as well as effective movies that few pretended were great (“Empire of the Sun,” “Minority Report,” “The War of the Worlds,” “West Side Story”). He’s a genius, but Spielberg’s films are scrutinized, debated, and far from universally acclaimed.
Nolan has a different vibe around him. Even as grandly scattershot a Nolan film as “Interstellar” gets fawned over with a kind of hindsight glow. As a filmmaker, Nolan is revered as a popcorn visionary, a head-tripping puzzle master, and the mod version of a David Lean classicist. He’s also the movie mensch who looks and dresses like an impeccably groomed 1960s British matinee idol as he stands up for the holy cause of cinema: movies viewed in theaters, movies lionized as something that should loom large. What this all adds up to is that Nolan, in his cherished way, has become a one-man movie cult.
It’s all tied to how Nolan taps into — and is, in a way, the incarnation of — Elevated Fanboy Culture. Fanboy enthusiasm, which you can probably date back to the day “Star Wars” opened in 1977, is movie fandom that lives in search of thrills, shocks, excitement, and one quality above all: awesomeness. What is awesomeness? The fanboy (or fangirl) knows it when he or she sees it — in a Marvel movie, a Zack Snyder movie, a hip horror movie. It’s that moment that makes your jaw drop, your eyes widen, your head explode. It’s the quintessence of movie escapism — escapism purified and heightened into cinematic crack cocaine. That’s why the fanboy addiction to awesomeness is, in many ways, the enemy of movie art. For if all you’re seeking from movies is awesomeness, you might be numb to anything more quietly dramatic or subtle or spiritual.
The paradox of Elevated Fanboy Culture that surrounds Christopher Nolan is that the members of his cult regard themselves as connoisseurs of artistic things. They are not comic-book zombies; they’re on a higher tier. Yet in more ways than not, they’re seeking a version of the fanboy rush: a cinema that will blow their minds. And Nolan, feeding off that appetite, has become the thinking person’s fanboy demigod.
That’s one reason why “The Odyssey,” a sprawling, back-breaking, reach-for-the-ancient-stars attempt to wrestle Homer’s epic saga of Odysseus into some sort of cinematic shape, has been bathed in the Nolan Glow. Is “The Odyssey” actually a good movie? It has its moments, but in contrast to the majority of my critical colleagues, I found it patchy and diffuse, and too remote to hook into. To me, the movie felt thrown together. Yet several friends have told me that they dig the film simply because it’s so different from everything else, because it’s so committed to its roughhewn vision and has the courage of its hand-made hallucinatory weirdness. In other words: It’s Nolan’s One-of-a-Kind Mythological Head Trip That Dares to Be Audaciously Forbidding.
For the record, I think Christopher Nolan, at his greatest, is a miraculous filmmaker. The two Nolan films that, for me, are true masterpieces are “The Dark Knight,” which heightened the comic-book movie into hypnotic operatic noir, and “Oppenheimer,” which found its drama in staying remarkably true to the creation of the nuclear bomb and the struggle (and human failings) of the man who envisioned it. That said, I have often found myself less than entranced with Nolan World, and with the way that it’s reflexively deemed to be a great escape, even when it’s a deeply flawed one.
Back in 2000, I was a fan of “Memento,” even though it’s an eccentrically from-the-neck-up experience; it’s a movie you have to work to watch (which, as it turned out, was a very Nolan thing). Nolan then entered the studio system by making “Insomnia,” a remake of a nifty little 1997 Norwegian thriller, and in the grip of the film’s devious compact gamesmanship I thought it was clear where Nolan was headed as a director. I was sure he’d be a canny mainstream craftsman. It’s tempting to imagine an alternate universe in which he took that route, becoming the kind of brilliant conventional filmmaker Hollywood could use a lot more of. Most viewers would probably say they’re glad he didn’t, in the same way they’re glad the Stanley Kubrick of “Paths of Glory” and “Spartacus” didn’t go on making Hollywood movies and turned instead to building Visionary Kubrick Monoliths.
But Nolan’s track record, to me, is problematic in a way that Kubrick’s isn’t. I’m second to none in my reverence for “The Dark Knight,” and “The Prestige” is trap-door clever in a fun way, but I’ve never been able to come to grips with “Inception,” or to say that I really enjoy it. I thought “The Dark Knight Rises” was grandiose with self-importance, and the fact that Tom Hardy’s Bane was so muffled that you couldn’t understand him remains a head-scratching perversity. “Interstellar,” to my mind, was a movie that wanted to be “2001: A Space Odyssey” and a Hallmark special at the same time. And “Dunkirk,” which I found at once intriguing and forbidding, was stymied by something quite apart from its overly fussy head-game structure — it was a war movie too decorous in its violence, one that felt like it was made by a polite British gentleman. (I’d bet that neither Spielberg nor Nolan has ever been in a fistfight, but Spielberg directed one of the most brutal combat films ever made, while Nolan, in his combat epic, didn’t get his hands dirty.) So no, I’m not in the Christopher Nolan cult.
If every Nolan film is an act of world-building, “The Odyssey” comes at us with an even loftier weight of purpose. It’s the movie that’s going to tell the story of our world, all by dramatizing the Greek myth and legend that, let’s be honest, is a book a lot of us had to force our way through at an English instructor’s gunpoint in high school. You could call Homer’s “Odyssey” the very first movie; you could also say that it lacks…relatability. Yet this all now feeds into the way Nolan is making a showy spectacle of his own ambition. In her 1977 review of Bernardo Bertolucci’s “1900,” Pauline Kael wrote, “At a certain point in their careers — generally right after an enormous popular success — most great movie directors go mad on the potentialities of movies. They leap over their previous work into a dimension beyond the well-crafted dramatic narrative; they make a huge, visionary epic in which they attempt to alter the perceptions of people around the world. Generally, they shoot this epic in what they believe is a state of super-enlightenment. They believe that with this film they’re literally going to bring mankind the word.” I think that feels like an accurate assessment of Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” and why the movie is more smoke than fire.
Will the audience come with Nolan this time? My instinct says yes…and no. “The Odyssey” is already a big enough phemonenon to more than justify its existence, and there’s every chance that it could sweep the Oscars. The Nolan bros are doing backflips over it. Yet I wonder how many viewers will experience the film the way I did: as a semi-interesting, high-and-mighty slog. I’m sorry, but “The Odyssey” is no “Oppenheimer,” and no “Gladiator” either. Nolan doesn’t need my advice, but if I were offering it, the first thing I’d say is: It might be time to take a break from historical epics. But what I’d really like to say is: Try something smaller for a change. Now that he’s ascended to the Mount Olympus of cinema, he might start considering the idea that less could be more. “The Odyssey” makes me wish that Christopher Nolan would come down off the peak of his own legend. He might seem even more of a wizard if he stopped trying to use movies to transcend what movies are.
