Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is a Sign of the Times

Since I wrote my totally-completely-absolutely-justified-I-would-not-take-back-a-single-world denunciation of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer three years ago, a number of people have told me I was wrong and tried to argue with me about it. I, meanwhile, have been waiting for an apology.

Is Christopher Nolan's Odyssey a personal apology to me for having made Oppenheimer? Did the British-American filmmaker whose movies have made over $6 billion over the past three decades read my blog review of Oppenheimer, feel its profound truth, and attempt to personally make up for it to me by making a Classics-derived film about the importance of trust and inter-personal bonds?

I doubt it! Nonetheless, this is what I've been asking myself ironically ever since I first heard of the project however many years ago it was announced. Meanwhile, a friend paid for my ticket so I could see it in theaters and report back on my thoughts. 

Well, after seeing all three hours of Nolan's take on Homer's take on the story of a man trying to get home, though I can't praise the movie that much, I can mostly accept the apology. 

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is not a great adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey, or a great Hollywood epic, or even a great film; it is, however, a film that captures our times, and in the process tells one very important truth.

Everlasting Life: Annihilation, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, Stalin and the Bomb, The Unconsoled

"You can combine up to a certain point; you can distort up to a certain point; after that you lose the identity; and with that you lose everything. [...] A thing that has changed entirely has not changed at all. It has no bridge of crisis. It can remember no change. If you wake up tomorrow and you simply are Mrs. Dope, an old woman who lets lodgings at Broadstairs—well, I don’t doubt Mrs. Dope is a saner and happier person than you are. But in what way have you progressed? What part of you is better? Don’t you see this prime fact of identity is the limit set on all living things?”

“No,” said Phillip, with suppressed but sudden violence, “I deny that any limit is set upon living things.”

-G.K. Chesterton, The Flying Inn (1914)

We live in a time where more and more people want to stop existing. Considered historically, this is a surprisingly common desire--and a key to understanding many things present and past otherwise incomprehensible.

Last year, numerous otherwise normal people online, and an even greater number of abnormal people online, and also many people working for the United States Federal Government, embraced a twenty-year-old meme in which Werner Herzog narrates a single pilgrim penguin inexplicably leaving its colony and heading out into the frozen tundra to die alone in the cold. While for the old-fashioned pessimistic humanist Herzog this was supposed to once again point out the inhumanity and cruelty of the natural world which humans must transcend through reason, for innumerable people in America today this nihilistic story about an individual seeking death through isolation was instead seen as inspirational, even aspirational. Numerous otherwise sane people started talking about "Being the Penguin" as though lonely death by exposure and starvation was a desirable goal--and perhaps, for them, it was. Whatever Americans are in 2026, we certainly are not normal.

Still, if Americans are abnormal, they remain human; and our passion for death can in fact be understood in the light of universal human nature, via the concept and pragmatic, ethical reality of transcendence, which understood properly is as foundational to human action as food and drink is to human bodily life.

If, as Aristotle says, the soul is in a sense all things, at least by way of relation and telos, then the soul quite naturally and necessarily wants to transcend itself. If, as Aquinas says, man is ordered towards God as to an end that transcends his reason, then man quite naturally and necessarily desires to transcend himself. 

Transcendence, though, is a confusing concept. In the most basic sense, one thing transcends another when it has something in common with it, but also goes beyond it. In the proper Thomistic-metaphysical sense, one thing transcends a group of other things when it contains all their perfections in a higher, simpler, and more eminent way. Either way, though, a puzzle emerges: for what could it possibly mean for a thing to transcend itself?

One rather simple answer to that question might be that a thing transcends itself when it ceases to be itself, and becomes something else. If today I am Nathan Israel Smolin, and tomorrow I cease to be Nathan Israel Smolin and become Captain Bob "Captain Peabody" Peabody, a blue clayman veteran of the Second World War and also a blogger, there can be no doubt that I have transcended Nathan Israel Smolin in at least some sense. As Captain Peabody I can certainly reflect with satisfaction that I have left behind all the difficulties and limitations of Nathan-Israel-Smolin-hood; as well as in the concomitant fact that as Captain Peabody I will evince perfections and have experiences that Nathan Israel Smolin could never have had. And if it is the case that Nathan Israel Smolin must and will inevitably die, a transformation into Captain Peabody could well extend my life, and an indefinite series of such transformations extend it indefinitely, and so constitute a kind of eternal life beyond the span of human years.

For all that, though, there are (at least) two reasons that such a transformation does not constitute transcendence in either its metaphysical or ethical senses. The first is the simple fact that in gaining the perfections and advantages and experiences and memories and indefinable spark of being a blue clayman with a large apparent-rocket-launcher attached to the right side of my body I will have at the same time lost the indefinable spark of being Nathan Israel Smolin. Or, put another way, I will not have transcended or moved beyond the entire category of human (and clayman) personalities in such a way as to contain all the perfections of them in a supereminent way; rather, I will simply have moved from one member of that category to another. Or, put in the most fundamental way of all, I will not have found eternal life, but died.

In the second place comes the difficulty pointed out by G.K. Chesterton (via the honorable Dorian Wimpole) above, that in ceasing to be Nathan Israel Smolin I have in the proper sense simply ceased to be. Human personality and personhood, it turns out, is not simply an accidental relation added to a kind of quasi-physical substance; as rational beings, our personhood defines and constitutes each one of us in toto, body and soul. Even if (arguendum) in the transformation from Smolin to Peabody and from flesh to clay every single atom currently present in my body were kept and none discarded, the mere fact of altering my personal and rational identity from that of a human being from Alabama to a clayman from Claymatia would involve my destruction. For a transformation to be an improvement, let alone a true form of transcendence, something of the original must be preserved and survive the transition.

As I have pointed out before in this space, America has over the past fifty years been obsessed with the concept and term of identity as no other in history--even while showing little or no understanding of what identity actually is. 

If personhood and personality and therefore identity is for rational beings (as both Aristotle and Aquinas new) fundamentally defined and even constituted by relation, we could quite easily predict that the pervasive isolation and atomization of our society would result in an obsessive fixation on identity. People always become obsessively fixated on important things they are in the process of losing. And if at times our society has seemed to show a kind of naive utopian optimism about identity as such--assuming as an article of faith that every asserted or imagined or even merely vaguely felt identity was ipso facto good and just and necessary for happiness and compatible with every other identity--we can also recognize in this identitarianist optimism the kind of avoidant magical thinking present in nearly every psychological experience of loss.

Still, if there is a primal terror that makes us cling to our identities against the world, if there is an animalistic rage that makes us use them as weapons, if there is an avoidant naiveté that makes us accept any and every identity merely as a shield against the infinite dark, there is nonetheless no denying that there is also, deeply rooted in us, a desire to transcend our identities, chosen or unchosen, shallow or deep; and that this desire can quite easily be twisted into an unslakable thirst for annihilation.

In the remaining paragraphs of this essay, then, I will be tracing this human thirst for annihilation through a number of different fictional stories and historical accounts, in all of which we will be attempting to understand the human proclivity for self-destruction not through the lenses of ethics or metaphysics, but via psychology and narrative and history. By understanding these accounts, we will, hopefully, come closer to understanding ourselves and our society--and in so doing, hopefully learn to counter the thirst for death wherever it is found in America, in others, and in ourselves.

Short Story: The Date

I was sitting in the cafe by the window, working on an academic article for the Journal of Ancient History, when I saw them.

It was a man and a woman, both young, though not too young–not college-aged, or immediately post-grad. The man could have been a few years older, or that may just have been the way he was dressed; buttoned up, as they used to say, to his chin, with a coat over it. Not a “formal” suit coat, but similar. More casual. He was not wearing a tie. She, on the other hand, was dressed in something more like what a college student might wear for a first date. Tight pants, a low-cut blouse with straps, both in bright colors. Nice shoes, but not high-heeled. 

They came in together, but slightly awkwardly, as if they had only just met outside the restaurant. He did not hold the door, but he looked for a moment as if he might. After a brief hesitation, he led the way to a table by the window. It was a good table–the best in the house for a view of the park outside, as I knew well, but not one I ever took. The glare from the sun as you get towards the late afternoon makes it too hard for me to see the screen of my laptop.

Despite leading the way to the table, the man waited for the woman to sit down first. She had already pulled out her phone and was scanning the QR code on the table for the menu. After a moment, he did the same. The next few minutes were spent in silence, and I returned to a difficult passage about Late Imperial rituals of power. I’m not sure how long afterwards (I always lose track of time when writing) it was when the woman finally spoke.

“Have you been here before?” 

The man must have shook his head, but I didn’t see it. “So why did you tell me to meet you here?” the woman asked, a new note in her voice.

I looked over to see the man shrug. He was thin–too thin, I thought, and a little uncomfortable in his own body. He raised one hand in a meaningless gesture. “Well, it’s near where you said you worked. I was going to be driving out here all this way anyway, so I didn’t want you to have to go far.” His voice was oddly flat, and he didn’t meet her eyes.

Her voice now held an unmistakable undercurrent of tension; it might have been anger or some other suppressed emotion. “And you didn’t think to ask me where I’d like to go? You know I live just around the corner.” She had blonde hair and those odd little bangs. She was wearing flesh-colored lipgloss.

He looked down at his phone, scrolling through the menu again. “Well…” he ventured. “You told me to pick the place. Since you said I’d be driving farther. I thought…”

“Well,” she said, “obviously I assumed you’d pick a place you’d been to before. Or at least because the food was something you liked.” 

He didn’t respond; he was looking down at his phone still. 

She looked vaguely in my direction; I turned back to my laptop. “Picking an interesting or exotic restaurant would have shown personality. Or picking a safer restaurant you’d been to before would have shown that you cared about me having a nice time. Or you could have responded by asking me to pick a restaurant since you knew I knew the area better and wanted to show you valued my preferences. And because of the dietary restrictions I listed on my profile.” Her voice now was not angry, but unfocused, like someone reading off a Powerpoint slide. I glanced back at her face; she was looking right at me. I turned quickly back again to my laptop screen, and tried hard to focus on Ambrose of Milan’s meeting with Magnus Maximus rather than the one in front of me. It was difficult. 

The man sighed. “The Monte Cristo Sandwich looks good.” I glanced over to see him looking around vaguely for the waiter, one hand raised awkwardly again.