After watching Christopher Nolan's take on "The Odyssey," Father Dwight Longenecker remembered a comment Steven Spielberg made in a movie commentary while discussing how viewers react to symbolism in cinema.
The legendary director, a progressive Jew, was responding to comments that prominent crosses in the "Saving Private Ryan" cemetery scenes suggested that the hero was a Christ figure who suffered to save a lost soul. Spielberg replied: "I'm always fascinated to learn about the things people see in my pictures that I never knew about."
Now, faithful movie lovers are debating whether Nolan's Catholic background soaked into his version of Homer's pagan epic. For example, how did an arrogant, brilliant pagan Greek warrior develop a strong sense
of guilt about his mistakes?
"Nolan is coming from a Catholic background and 2,000 years of Western Christian tradition," said Longenecker, a former journalist and documentary screenwriter who leads Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic Church in Greenville, South Carolina. A former Anglican priest, he converted to Catholicism with his wife and four children.
"He cannot help but bring, quote, 'Christian sensibilities' into his understanding of the story, even though he may not have done it explicitly," he explained via Zoom. Guilt is a human emotion, "part of what C.S. Lewis called the 'Tao,' a universal sense of morality, the universal sense of right and wrong."
Nolan addressed this issue with political philosopher Zhuge Yiyang, known by their podcaster name Zhongshu, during an interview originally posted on China's Bilibili video platform. Another question: How did the doctrine of atonement for sin get into this movie? Nolan said his film stressed what he called "Zeus' Law," the ideal of "mutual respect – that I treat you the way I want to be treated."
Nolan added: "I think in a way we may be bringing our more modern sensibility to that. Insofar as [atonement is] there, it's not a deliberate attempt to Christianize it, but it's an outgrowth … of burrowing in on this philosophical idea of what happens when you break Zeus' Law."
The problem is that this approach radically changes Homer's poem, argues author Martin Shaw, a mythographer, storyteller and visiting scholar of divinity at Cambridge University. After years of studying pagan-adjacent mythologies, he converted to Orthodox Christianity.
Shaw called Nolan's film "visually sumptuous," but "emotionally vacuous."
"I didn't care. … I didn't weep," Shaw told "Symbolic World" podcaster Jonathan Pageau. "This is a strange thing for a Christian to say, but I had an instinct that they'd robbed it of its essential pagan-ness, and I think that was a mistake. … I think it was an awful thing to do.
"I mean, I'd love (for) Odysseus to have a conversion experience on the beach, but it's not in the story. What is in the story is humor, sex, wonderful language and a world ensouled with gods and goddesses."
For Longenecker, the key is that Nolan's movie does contain themes that – with good cause – resonate with Christian believers.
Driving home from the theater with one of his sons, he said, they discussed that, when editing Homer's story, the director chose to retain highly symbolic scenes. To be blunt, it's possible to find the "seven deadly sins" of ancient Christianity.
"You could say the Cyclops symbolized the deadly sin of pride. He was gigantic, omnipotent but alone in his darkened cave – surrounded by dumb sheep, his followers. With only one eye he was limited to the singular vision only of himself," wrote Longenecker in his Substack essay, "Nolan's Odyssey, Creativity, Mimetic Desire, and the Seven Deadly Sins."
Gluttony? The sailors gorge themselves before Circe turns them into pigs. The sin of wrath appears in the land of Lamos as the crew is attacked by the furious Laestrygonians – cannibalistic giants.
"On the island of Thrinacia the crew yield to the temptation of greed when they steal Helio's cattle," wrote Longenecker. "The sirens typify the temptation to lust while the lotus eaters symbolize sloth." Envy is woven into scene after scene, with Troy and beyond.
In the interview, Longenecker concluded: "Homer didn't intend to write the seven deadly sins into it, and Nolan didn't either. But it's OK for a Christian to say, 'Actually, these congruities, I see these connections with something that is deeper within the human heart.'"
Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Homer, Nolan and the seven deadly sins | Terry Mattingly
