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“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” That’s not just a quote from The Dark Knight; it’s the thesis of director Christopher Nolan’s entire filmography. From Batman to Oppenheimer, his characters grasp at power for reasons that seem defensible. But they live long enough to see the wreckage. Batman became a fugitive. Oppenheimer became death, the destroyer of worlds. And Odysseus? As film reviewer Georgia Coley writes, the hero of Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey is a tortured figure: a military genius who betrays the image of the divine in all people. That betrayal, Nolan suggests, kicks off the beginning of the end of the civilization Odysseus thought he was fighting for. Watching the film, I kept thinking of C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces: like Lewis, Nolan uses Greek myth to unpack Christian teaching from a slant angle, and what he unearths is an enthralling tragedy that casts a long, dark shadow over our present moment. The Odyssey isn’t the only foundational legend getting deconstructed out of Hollywood this month. Zachary Lee talks to filmmaker Michael Sarnoski about The Death of Robin Hood and why we keep needing new versions of an outlaw myth about who justice is actually for. Noah Berlatsky digs into the “Protestant myth” about bigotry rising out of the wreckage of Graham Platner’s Senate bid in Maine, and what it reveals about how white evangelicalism talks about its own prejudice. And Julian Tiburcio asks “Why These Nuns Set Their Land on Fire.” Spoiler alert: It’s a good thing.
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