{"id":532,"date":"2026-07-17T23:09:31","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T23:09:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=532"},"modified":"2026-07-17T23:09:31","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T23:09:31","slug":"christopher-nolan-hollywoods-last-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=532","title":{"rendered":"Christopher Nolan: Hollywood’s last hero"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Christopher Nolan has described the Homeric source material of his new film of The Odyssey<\/em> as \u201cfoundational\u201d for his work. On the surface, it\u2019s a banal comment, too vague to either prove or deny. Yet a closer look at Nolan\u2019s previous films gives the claim genuine validity \u2014 almost to the degree of rendering this latest movie a meta-commentary, and in thematic terms at least representing a large-scale restatement of his artistic philosophy. Nolan was briefly attached to direct Troy<\/em>, a version of the other poem attributed to Homer, the Trojan War epic The Iliad<\/em>, eventually overseen by Wolfgang Peterson. But the fragmented story of the solitary male wanderer, mining his cunning and resilience to get back to his family, is an altogether closer fit for Nolan\u2019s habits and obsessions.<\/p>\n

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In part, The Odyssey<\/em> is pertinent to Nolan because, unlike many writer-directors, he is devoted to classical storytelling devices, and the poem offers a paradigmatic \u2014 and literal \u2014 instance of what Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces<\/em> (1949), called the \u201cmonomyth\u201d or \u201chero\u2019s journey\u201d. This is a concept rooted in psychoanalysis and ethnography, and one keenly embraced by Hollywood screenwriters. Nolan has specialized in genre films, but his plots always double as a vehicle for ideas about personal conduct, with the individual challenged to prevail over forces both internal (guilt, fear, anxiety, confusion) and external (malice, violence, corruption) and, beyond these, the volatility of material reality and the hostility of the universe. As Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) tells Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in Batman Begins<\/em> (2005), \u201cit\u2019s what you do that defines you\u201d. Nolan\u2019s concern with subjective experience in films like Memento<\/em> (2000) and Inception<\/em> (2010) has drawn comparisons to phenomenology, but there are echoes of epic poetry in his exploration, via his discursive dialogue, of revenge and justice, understanding and feeling. He has also displayed a taste for mythological allusion: the maze designer in Inception<\/em> is named Ariadne.<\/p>\n

Typically, though, the Nolan character is a man, associated with a familiar role \u2014 detective, pilot, soldier, spy \u2014 and drawn in abstract or elemental terms. His short Larceny<\/em> (1996) and micro-budget debut Following<\/em> (1998) concerned characters called \u201cThe Man\u201d and \u201cThe Young Man\u201d. In Interstellar<\/em> (2014), the astronaut abandoned in space is named \u201cMann\u201d. The British soldier in Dunkirk<\/em> (2017) is known only as Tommy (i.e. a British soldier). In Tenet<\/em> (2020), John David Washington plays \u201cThe Protagonist\u201d. Bruce Wayne, in the final installment of the Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises<\/em> (2012), explains: \u201cthe idea was to be a symbol.\u201d The longtime Observer<\/em> film critic Philip French, considering Bruce\u2019s reclusive period of anguished withdrawal in the same film, likened his predicament to that of the injured archer Philoctetes, who Odysseus entices from exile to help defeat the Trojans \u2014 a figure mentioned in The Iliad<\/em> and treated at length by the Greek tragedians, and explored in Edmund Wilson\u2019s once-famous essay on trauma and action, \u201cThe Wound and the Bow\u201d.<\/p>\n

Nolan\u2019s most recent film, Oppenheimer<\/em> (2023), provides a concrete portrait of a historical figure and, in using his name as the title, forgoes the classical reference used in the source biography, American Prometheus<\/em>. But there\u2019s little doubt of the broader dimensions. Oppenheimer\u2019s adversary, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), argues that the physicist stands by his conduct at Los Alamos \u201cbecause it made him the most important man who ever lived\u201d. Nolan\u2019s own career has taken on fairly outsize dimensions. He is the last 20th-century Hollywood auteur, a heroic holdout who has defied the hegemony of digital (by shooting on film), streaming (his reason for leaving Warner Brothers), Covid (with the summer 2020 release of Tenet<\/em>), and Barbie<\/em> (bringing out Oppenheimer<\/em> on the same day).<\/p>\n

His work isn\u2019t shy of invoking a Great Man tradition or its trappings, whether in his use of paintings like Rothko and Bacon and Picasso and Goya; quotations from Dickens and Robert Frost; or borrowings from Kubrick, David Lean, Michael Mann, Akira Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, and, perhaps above all, the James Bond films, evident in the action and settings of Batman Begins<\/em>, Inception<\/em> and Tenet<\/em>. When Nolan browsed the DVD library of the distributor Criterion, for an online video, his first three choices were Stephen Frears\u2019s The Hit<\/em>, a thriller about \u201cthe dynamics between desperate men\u201d; 12 Angry Men<\/em>; and Terrence Malick\u2019s war film The Thin Red Line<\/em>. (The Young Man in Following<\/em> has pictures on his wall of Jack Nicholson doing his murderous grin in The Shining<\/em> and the suited robbers in Reservoir Dogs<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

The emphasis in his work is on what it means to be a man \u2014 what men are, could be, should be. This strain is especially evident in the Batman films, with \u201cdecent men\u201d on the one hand, and on the other, men who \u201cjust want to watch the world burn\u201d. (The only time the word \u201cwomen\u201d is mentioned in the trilogy is in reference to Catwoman breaking out of \u201cwomen\u2019s correctional\u201d.)<\/p>\n

Odysseus, like Oppenheimer, diverges from Nolan\u2019s past protagonists in one central way. For the most part, the Nolan character is a bachelor or widower. The wives or potential future wives kill themselves, die by accident or illness, or are murdered. Odysseus, of course, has a wife. But even though Penelope is waiting in Ithaca, and Mrs Oppenheimer was often by her husband\u2019s side in Los Alamos and Washington (he tells her they \u201cwalked through fire together\u201d), isolation nonetheless remains unavoidable.<\/p>\n

One option is to hit the road \u2014 not in search of company, but of purpose. The Young Man\u2019s peregrinations are fairly short \u2014 from his flat off Tottenham Court Road to Soho or Covent Garden, where he falls in with a conman and burglar. (The first flat they rob has a shelf full of travel literature and picaresque narratives: Chatwin, Raban, Don Quixote<\/em>.) Bruce Wayne, an \u201cunemployed twentysomething\u201d of a different sort, heads further afield: to a monastery in the Himalayas, where he learns he is \u201ctruly lost\u201d and shown \u201ca path\u201d. Angier (Hugh Jackman), the magician in the Victorian fantasy The Prestige<\/em> (2006), makes the long pilgrimage to see Nikola Tesla in Colorado Springs, what he calls \u201ca search for answers\u201d. Cooper, in Interstellar<\/em>, shoots off to the stars to find a new home for humanity. \u201cWe\u2019re explorers, Rom,\u201d he tells another crew member. \u201cThis is our boat.\u201d Leonard, the memory-challenged former insurance investigator in Memento<\/em>, drives around Los Angeles on the hunt for the man who killed his wife, or so he has tricked himself into believing. The Protagonist, for his part, is consigned to endless Bond-like globe-trotting. Resilience is key. Nolan has said that the final moments of Interstellar<\/em> were \u201cdirectly nourished\u201d by the ending of Tennyson\u2019s poem \u201cUlysses\u201d (otherwise known as Odysseus): \u201cstrong in will \/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.\u201d<\/p>\n

The governing aim is the restoration of order. Leonard resists the idea that there was \u201cno reason\u201d for his wife\u2019s death, \u201cno conspiracy\u201d, and so invents one. As he says in voiceover: \u201cI have to believe that my actions still have meaning.\u201d Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose job in Inception<\/em> is \u201cto navigate other people\u2019s minds\u201d, must purge his guilt for his wife\u2019s death to stop her invading his dreams \u2014 plaguing him when he\u2019s at work. The Protagonist has been assigned to undo the reversal of entropy. Nolan\u2019s Batman wants to overhaul a city ruled by criminality and further threatened by the Joker, a self-described \u201cagent of chaos\u201d. Nolan\u2019s work is a tribute to the power of rationality, a vision of cool-headedness that encompasses an Odyssey<\/em>-like array of ingenious tricks and stratagems. As Bruce Wayne says, \u201ctheatricality and deception are powerful weapons\u201d. From the Young Man, Leonard, and Wayne, to the dream \u201cextractor\u201d Cobb, the scientist Brand (Michael Caine) in Interstellar<\/em>, who sends a Nasa team on a suicide mission; the French soldier who leaves Dunkirk in an English uniform; the Protagonist going undercover as an art buyer \u2014 Nolan\u2019s characters lie or conceal sometimes out of self-interest, and sometimes for a higher purpose, occasionally both at once. Something similar could be said of his disjointed structures which, like his fondness for tilted camera angles, are designed both to bring pleasure and reveal underlying truth or connections. Nolan has been keen to present this tendency not as obscurantist or avant-garde but something like the opposite: \u201cYou go back to The Odyssey<\/em>, it\u2019s never been the case that you\u2019re supposed to tell a story from beginning to end.\u201d<\/p>\n

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But whatever the quirks of the telling, the trials of a solitary hero provides the spine. In Nolan\u2019s Batman trilogy, the enemy is collective in nature: the League of Shadows; \u201corganized crime\u201d; the mob rule unleashed by the Joker (who also boasts that he brought \u201cGotham\u2019s white knight\u201d down to \u201cour level\u201d). The countervailing collective forces \u2014 civil society, \u201cthe structures\u201d, \u201cthe rules\u201d \u2014 are powerless, and so Batman must serve as a one-man exponent of liberal harmony. Though Bruce Wayne, orphan-turned-bachelor, doesn\u2019t work alone, his abettors are fellow outliers; Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) is the rare uncorrupted Gotham cop, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) the only executive at Wayne Enterprises with integrity. When Gordon asks, \u201cyou\u2019re just one man?\u201d Batman replies, \u201cnow we\u2019re two.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s the limit. There\u2019s a striking convention in the Batman films whereby the central character, in both his civilian and masked-vigilante modes, is almost never shown talking to more than one person at a time. The trilogy alternates between vast action set-pieces and a series of t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eates involving Wayne and one of a dozen others. Again and again, scenes are constructed so that a potential third wheel withdraws, or else the interloper on a two-man exchange pops in for the briefest of interludes, to deliver an update or bulletin, or Batman scarpers more or less mid-sentence (\u201che does that,\u201d Gordon reassures the other bystander). The parting shot offered by Michael Keaton\u2019s Wayne in his first appearance in Tim Burton\u2019s Batman<\/em> (1989) \u2014 \u201cWill you two excuse me?\u201d \u2014 is something that Nolan\u2019s version is virtually unable to utter across a trio of lengthy films.<\/p>\n

Notable in this context is that The Dark Knight Rises<\/em> ends with a shot of the young police officer John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) on the verge of becoming \u201cRobin\u201d \u2014 and on unusual terms. It\u2019s a role he will take up as a kind of successor, by inheriting the contents of the Batcave. In Nolan\u2019s world, even the traditional sidekick must act alone. A partnership of that kind cannot exist even as an off-screen, post-credits possibility.<\/p>\n

Camaraderie or a sense of community proves persistently elusive. The Young Man describes the experience of fixing on a person in a crowd: \u201call of a sudden that person isn\u2019t part of the crowd anymore. They become an individual, just like that.\u201d When Leonard tells someone, \u201cIt\u2019s great that you\u2019re helping like this\u201d, she replies, \u201cI\u2019m helping you because you helped me\u201d. The first thing we learn about the magicians in The Prestige<\/em> is that Borden (Bale) is on trial for the murder of Angier. A flashback depicting on-stage collaboration soon gives way to their shared manager, Cutter (Caine), pitting them against each other with a test.<\/p>\n

It might be said that Batman, orphan-turned-bachelor, is bound to be a lonely soul; Memento<\/em> inhabits the Darwinian landscape of film noir; The Prestige<\/em> adapts a novel \u2014 by Christopher Priest \u2014 about one-upmanship. But Nolan\u2019s individualist leanings emerge in surprising contexts. There\u2019s a moment near the beginning of Inception<\/em>, notionally a film about teamwork, when Cobb advises his colleagues, \u201cevery man for himself\u201d. The entire story then hinges on Cobb\u2019s ability to return to his children in the United States \u2014 all of the corporate subterfuge, the dreams-within-dreams, exists as backdrop for a man to find what he calls \u201ca way home\u201d. Cobb\u2019s first name is \u201cDom\u201d (a play on \u201cdomicile\u201d).<\/p>\n

Oppenheimer does what he can to frame himself as a team player. Talking of the atomic bomb, he demurs, \u201cit was hardly my invention\u201d. But the film suggests that at the very least he was primus inter pares<\/em>. (Nolan has compared his role to that of a film director.) The riposte \u201cit was you on the cover of Time<\/em>\u201d could be extended: it is him on the film\u2019s poster, it is his face in close-up intercut with a shot of the globe with which the film ends. We are left in little doubt that the Great Man is the one who matters, who stands apart and above \u2014 the known quantity, the household name. The film accords disproportionate attention to a tiny cameo for Albert Einstein. And when Strauss\u2019s candidacy for secretary of commerce is rejected by the Senate, his aide, checking his notes, chooses to mention just one of the 48 Democrats who voted against him: \u201cKennedy, John F. Kennedy.\u201d As Nolan put it, \u201can individual\u2019s relatable.\u201d<\/p>\n

An apparent difference between the two films Nolan has made about the Second World War is that whereas Oppenheimer<\/em> is candidly concerned with individual agency, Dunkirk<\/em> portrays a mission involving hundreds of thousands. Nolan said he didn\u2019t want \u201cgenerals pushing things around maps, I didn\u2019t want Churchill\u201d. But the alternative emphasis \u2014 what he called the \u201ccollective experience of that historical event\u201d \u2014 struggles to gain purchase. The film begins with a shot from behind of six soldiers walking down a residential street. Within 90 seconds, five of them are dead and we are left with Tommy. When he encounters French soldiers at the perimeter, he is immediately told \u201cbon voyage\u201d. Nolan divides the history of the evacuation into three narratives \u2014 Tommy\u2019s journey, the tribulations of an airman running low on fuel (Tom Hardy), and the marginally more clubbable story of a civilian sailor who sets out from Weymouth to help the effort. And having resisted the Great Man route, the film ends with Tommy reading aloud Churchill\u2019s \u201cfight them on the beaches\u201d speech.<\/p>\n

The seemingly irresistible lure of the lone-struggle dynamic was evident in Nolan\u2019s comments. He insisted that the film was \u201cnot about individual heroics\u201d \u2014 but almost immediately afterwards, he identified the elements \u201cwhose universal significance we wanted to tap\u201d as \u201cthe individual instinct for survival\u201d and \u201cthe desperation to get home\u201d. He added, \u201cYou get into kind of Homeric territory with this stuff\u201d \u2014 and not because Dunkirk<\/em> was a war movie.<\/p>\n

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Christopher Nolan has described the Homeric source material of his new film of The Odyssey as \u201cfoundational\u201d for his work. On the surface, it\u2019s a banal comment, too vague to either prove or deny. Yet a closer look at Nolan\u2019s previous films gives the claim genuine validity \u2014 almost to the degree of rendering this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":531,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"yoast_head":"\nChristopher Nolan: Hollywood's last hero - \u0421ity Flow Journal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=532\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Christopher Nolan: Hollywood's last hero - \u0421ity Flow Journal\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Christopher Nolan has described the Homeric source material of his new film of The Odyssey as \u201cfoundational\u201d for his work. 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On the surface, it\u2019s a banal comment, too vague to either prove or deny. Yet a closer look at Nolan\u2019s previous films gives the claim genuine validity \u2014 almost to the degree of rendering this […]","og_url":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=532","og_site_name":"\u0421ity Flow Journal","article_published_time":"2026-07-17T23:09:31+00:00","author":"admin","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"admin","Est. reading time":"12 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=532#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=532"},"author":{"name":"admin","@id":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/#\/schema\/person\/eb5442f0ad6aa87f0eddf619a8d0abc4"},"headline":"Christopher Nolan: Hollywood’s last hero","datePublished":"2026-07-17T23:09:31+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=532"},"wordCount":2438,"commentCount":0,"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=532#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/65cd89373bd2fec08099fcc40dd88fda.webp","articleSection":["Interesting"],"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=532#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=532","url":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=532","name":"Christopher Nolan: Hollywood's last hero - 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