The Great Shame of a Great Man
The Passion of Christopher Nolan
“Being a man today, it’s like arriving late to the party. It’s not even opportunism — the patriarchy is a smoking heap of rubble.”
Linea Maja Ernst, Waist Deep
Spoilers for The Odyssey (2026), Oppenheimer, Interstellar, Inception, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Prestige.
Content warning and trigger warning for mentions of SA and war crimes.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that when you’re an auteur, pieces of you will seep out across your work. I mentioned this offhand when discussing Mindy Kaling’s new show, NSFW (which I really liked!) featuring a few of her trademark Mindy-isms: rapid fire referential pop culture jokes, an improbable amount of swirling, exceedingly confident young people terrorizing one another, one shockingly unconventional-looking actor. You know when something is created by Shonda Rhimes, or Tina Fey, or Adam Sandler, or Tyler Perry. People have fixations and kinks, subjects they ruminate on, process, and attempt to exorcize through their work.
We’re living through a reckoning when it comes to men, manhood, masculinity, and the patriarchy. Last year, headlines were dominated by reports about how men weren’t reading, men weren’t writing, white men were being shut out of the arts, men were suffering.
This year, a man who rendered himself sterile by injecting himself with testosterone at sixteen has become a cultural mainstay, a dark fascination with looksmaxxing continues online, and we received two separate dives into the manosphere via a documentary and a forthcoming book. They say modern men are ill— and people are racing to provide a diagnosis.
As an artist, Christopher Nolan has always been concerned with the specific alchemy of great men. His great men come in all flavors— morose, calculating, brilliant, furious, devastated. More than anything, his great men are haunted— doubled over in grief and shame, inhibited by guilt. Before, in Nolan’s early work, his authorial fixations thrummed in the background. Identity, memory, time, masculinity, family, longing— all present and accounted for again and again. In his last two films, they’re positively screaming.
I know you think a 3,000 year old story can’t be spoiled but if you still haven’t seen Nolan’s, this is your jumping off point. You’ve been warned!
We all know the story of The Odyssey— a great man wins a great war through trickery, angers the Gods, and ends up lost for decades before making his way home. Nolan strips most of the magic away, leaving us with a deeply human story of longing and suffering, but ultimately shows his hand at the end of the movie: Odysseus longs to return to his family, yes, but the Odysseus returning to Ithaca is a changed man. He’s been warped by the horrors of war, the horrors he’s seen, the horrors he allowed his men to commit.
In The Odyssey, the evils of war are told slantwise: breaking Zeus’s law becomes facing off against a mythical Cyclops, being outmatched by more proficient soldiers becomes being destroyed by giants with unbreakable armor. In the sequence I was most excited for as a Circe-head (read it, it’s incredible), the soldiers ominously pay a visit to a single woman living alone on an island. Later, surrounded by pigs, she tells Odysseus that manhood is the true disguise. Underneath the armor, they’re beasts.
In a devastating sequence at the end of the film, we see the outcome of the Trojan Horse being wheeled into Troy: the Greeks bring fire and brimstone to the city, burning it to the ground, killing innocents, and brutalizing women. The twist, if there is one, is that the dangerous men we’ve been hearing about for the entire movie have been the Greeks all along— the men coming in from the sea to assault women, steal food, and burn villages to the ground were Odysseus’s men. Penelope was preparing for a horror she had unknowingly been praying for all along.
The Fall of Troy sequence is illuminating, but also revelatory: Nolan was once again playing with the themes of a great man being brought low by his own actions, living with the guilt for the rest of his life, replaying the horrific sequence he wrought on innocent people. As I watched, I thought immediately of Oppenheimer— another story of a great man haunted by his invention, punished by society, mourning a family he didn’t have but was too busy to truly commit to.
In fact, the two pivotal sequences of the movies are shot similarly: Matt Damon and Cillian Murphy’s faces glowing in close-up, slowly contorting in horror at what they’ve done. As an image, it’s quite effective, and the later verbalization of the guilt and shame are almost unneeded. In fact, most of the last hour of Oppenheimer is spent with Murphy’s shell-shocked Oppenheimer, clearly reeling from the destruction of his professional life, in addition to the destruction he unleashed due to his invention.
Both Oppenheimer and Odysseus were singular men, visionaries who were ultimately tormented by their decisions. Guilt and shame serve as powerful motivators, both longing does as well. In Interstellar, Nolan’s masterpiece, we see his fascinations pop up again: time and its effects, memory, family, fatherhood, greatness, guilt.
Matthew McConaughey stars as Cooper, a former NASA pilot and the only man alive who can man the Endurance operation in order to find both hospitable life outside of a ravaged Earth and rescue the man (Matt Damn, natch) who attempted the mission before him. Cooper is forced to leave his family in order to save humanity, and the decision becomes his raison d’etre for the rest of the movie. Narrative trickery abounds, but you can see why the story of The Odyssey appealed to him: Cooper traverses worlds, galaxies, and universes while dreaming of seeing his children again. In the film’s most impactful moment (and one that makes me cry like a baby every time I see it), Cooper receives a message from his grown up daughter, Murphy, played by Jessica Chastain. He watches the woman he left behind as a child (time works differently near a black hole, okay) grieve him in real time, and the video makes him sob violently, full body heaves that express the weight of all the years they’ve lost.
Themes of shame and reunion, longing, suffering, and the weight of manhood pop up again in Inception. My personal favorite of Nolan’s films, I’ve seen it over a dozen times (quarantine was tough, okay). There’s even a nod to Greek mythology in Elliot Page’s character’s name, Ariadne— a princess who helps Theseus escape from the Minotaur. Dom Cobb is a thief and the only man capable of implanting memories in his targets successfully— a skill that ultimately led to the death of his wife. Mal (Marion Cotillard) literally haunts Cobb, stalking his dreams and ruining his heists by actively murdering those she finds in the dreams.
Dom is great, but— you’ll never believe this— suffers tremendously due to his guilt. His dreamscapes are terrorized by a shade, his guilt quite literally chasing him throughout various heists. The narrative thrust of the film becomes clear once he takes on One Final Job in order to be able to return to the United States and see his children once more. The film toys with the idea of fatherhood and guilt explicitly through Cillian Murphy’s character, Fischer, being made to believe that his domineering, absent father wanted nothing more than for him to be a great man on his own. Fischer Senior ignored his son for two decades, but Cobb is able to convince him that his father simply wanted him to stand on his own— a dark manipulation that ultimately frees Fischer from his daddy issues and allows him to heal.
I don’t need to draw parallels between Nolan’s obsessions and Batman. They’re too obvious. A man driven mad by survivor’s guilt, yearning for the family he’ll never have again? Please.
In The Dark Knight, Nolan is interested in a terrible invention, but this time, it’s not Bruce Wayne’s— it’s Lucius Fox’s. Fox (Morgan Freeman) invents a horribly invasive technology that allows Batman to scan all of the cellphone towers at once to create a map in order to find the Joker, and it’s not lost on me that Nolan included the scenes of Fox looking despondent after Batman uses the technology. The Prestige traffics in some of these themes as well, specifically guilt and horror at an invention wreaking havoc on the world, and what it means to be a successful man driven to extremes by ambition.
Nolan is not perfect. He does, unfortunately, love a Dead Wife (Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar). His heroes are all straight, all white. In Tenet, Elizabeth Debicki at least gets to glower, but his concerns clearly lie in the realm of men, manhood, and redemptive arcs for suffering men. It does seem that he loves symmetry and is also a bit of a romantic: In The Odyssey, Odysseus and Penelope (Anne Hathaway) sail away together at the end of the film. In The Dark Knight Rises, Bruce Wayne vanishes and is later seen in Italy canoodling with Selina Kyle/Catwoman (funnily enough, also played by Anne Hathaway). It’s intimated that Cooper is going to go find Anne Hathaway’s Amelia Brand at the end of Interstellar after reuniting with Murphy (now played by Ellen Burstyn).
In 2025’s Notes on Being a Man, Scott Galloway dives into the “masculinity crisis” and advises men to find their purpose in life, positing that many modern men are rudderless and aimless due to both societal factors and a lack of overall driving force (which, formerly, had been the urge to provide for a family and impress potential partners). Jon Ronson posits something similar in the forthcoming The Castle, arguing that young men are drawn into the manosphere because they feel lost.
While Nolan is categorically not interested in the everyman— he’s specifically drawn to genius, ambition, greatness, mastery, and prowess— there are lessons to be learned. In interviews and reviews, it feels clear that Nolan is responding to a political moment where we’re taught that we’re the most important people in the world, that nothing else matters outside of our own ambitions and experiences. Tapping a well he’s tapped before to paint a portrait of grief, loss, and men haunted by their sins in this moment is interesting. What does it mean to be a great man today? What does it mean to respect others, to value human life, to honor those we’ve lost and respect those who have passed? What does it mean to be culpable? What does it mean to be responsible? Nolan’s wrestled with these questions for decades, and I have a feeling he’s not quite done yet.
TL; DR: Nolan Watchlist Sorted by Theme
Great Man’s Great Shame: The Odyssey, Oppenheimer, Inception, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Memento (kind of)
Taking the Long Way Home to Reunite with One’s Kids: The Odyssey, Interstellar, Inception
Platonic Relationships Between Men: Tenet, The Prestige
Frigid Rivalry: The Prestige, Oppenheimer
Time is Really Weird: Memento, Inception, Interstellar, Tenet
Not me being a Nolan stan? I was motivated to write this after watching The Odyssey (disclaimer: I went to the premiere and saw Nolan and Emma Thomas, his producing partner and wife, speak about the film). I liked it a lot and was absolutely blown away by the Zendaya sequence at the end, but ultimately I do think he’s hit on a lot of these themes in a stronger way before.
Links:
In ‘The Odyssey’ and ‘Oppenheimer,’ Nolan Knows Civilization Is at Stake
Hacks, Heal Thyselves: Graham Platner and the Undoing of the Operative Class
Sad Girl Summer Is Upon Us: Olivia Rodrigo, Gracie Abrams, and Phoebe Bridgers All Have the Blues
Charli’s new album deals with mortality, legacy, nihilism, seeking enjoyment through the horrors. Gracie and Olivia are anxious as hell (all of “Hit the Wall”, my head is full of poison and my heart is full of doubt). Phoebe is always sad but sometimes the songs end up on the wrong side of sleepy, but we’ll see what the album gives.
‘Books like this get people debating’: Why smash-hit tradwife satire Yesteryear is 2026’s most divisive book
Pixar Bears Brunt of Disney Studio Layoffs as Company Axes Several Hundred Staffers
Shameful. Toy Story just made a ton of money???
Apparently, Netflix Is Shocked That No One Is Watching Their Crap
Call Her Mommy: Gen-Z women are paying for, and parenting, their boyfriends.
HORRIFYING. Last year, everyone clowned the woman with the older boyfriend for her article where she clocked how many of her friends were parenting their partners (it’s mostly cis-straight women and cis straight men, let’s be real). I knew she was right but seeing this trickle down to Gen Z is scary!!
Mother Hubbard. I’m on the record as saying Lindsay Hubbard of Summer House is one of my favorite reality stars of all time. Pure dynamite.
May we all end our journeys by running off to an unknown land with Anne Hathaway
Alicia Vikander asking Dev Patel why he must be great and why being good isn’t enough in “The Green Knight” has been circling my brain since “The Odyssey” release. Excellent work as always!