Christopher Nolan Filled The Odyssey With References to His Own Films

6 min readUniversalI'll admit I hadn't read any of the sixty-odd translations of Homer's Odyssey before catching Christopher Nolan's adaptation—the one where Batman murders his own daughter, sacks an ancient city with an army of marauding warriors, then comes home only to be murdered by his philandering wife and shipped off to hell. I had no idea The Dark Knight’s origin story went back so far.I’m kidding, of course, but the fact that Agamemnon, the mysterious, faceless leader of the invasion of Troy, looked so much like Batman wasn’t lost on many viewers of Nolan’s epic. The angular cowl-like helmet that covered all by the bottom of his face; the long black cape; the sculpted torso armor; the gravelly voice.Nolan has defended Agamemnon’s armor, saying that the Mycenaeans may have used “blackened bronze” to display wealth and power. “You take bronze, you add more gold and silver to it and then use sulfur” he told Time. “With Agamemnon, Ellen [Mirojnick], our costume designer, is trying to communicate how elevated he is relative to everyone else.”Well, I think Nolan knew perfectly well what he was doing, and that Agamemnon’s Caped-Crusader cosplay was the plan all along. It’s quite clearly an overt reference to The Dark Knight, which he directed in 2008.Come to think of it, a closer inspection of Nolan's The Odyssey reveals a whole nest of Easter eggs, sly nods, and outright steals from his back catalogue. Whether the following are by design or a Freudian slip, I can't say. But here are the parallels I spotted in The Odyssey.UniversalYou either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain...Agamemnon is The Dark KnightCovered above—this is the most obvious of the lot. It is inconceivable to me that Nolan didn’t intend for his Agamemnon (Bennie Safdie) to serve Caped-Crusader chic with his murky, hell-bound warmonger. He could’ve torn through the gates of Troy in a Batmobile and it wouldn't have felt any weirder. Though it certainly kept the anachronism police busy. (In their defense, they’ve got a lot going on right now.)Interstellar and Penelope’s privacy screenIn a broader sense, you might say Cooper's relativistic time loss from his daughter's life directly mirrors Odysseus missing basically the whole of Telemachus's childhood—both men went on faraway missions only to get stuck, forcing them to find creative but circuitous ways home.But the more visual reference to Interstellar is Penelope's privacy screen—the one she retreats behind to keep the invading suitors at bay. Watching helplessly through its lattice as events unfold beyond her control, she's like Cooper watching Murph through the shelves of the tesseract until he finds a way to nudge dust into a message that saves Earth.There's a subtler echo here if you squint: both films turn on secretly manipulating time. Cooper patiently nudges dust in the room until years compress into hours to finally spell out a message. Penelope runs the trick in reverse, unpicking her weaving each night to reset the clock on her deadline to remarry. It’s probably a stretch to call it intentional—but both are acts of resistance against the inevitability of time.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal PicturesAnne Hathaway is no stranger to the Nolan-verse, having starred as Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises.Inception and Penelope’s hairpinBefore Odysseus leaves for Troy, Penelope gives him a golden hairpin in the shape of the goddess Athena. It's to remember her by, and to remind him of his promise to return home. This isn't in Homer's Odyssey.It made me think of the talisman in Inception—Cobb's spinning top, which he keeps close throughout the film as a private test for reality. Spin it, and if it topples, he's awake; if it spins forever, he's still dreaming. Odysseus's golden pin performs a version of the same trick—a private token he can hold onto as proof that home is real, not just a story he's been telling himself to survive.So, when Calypso finally gives him back the pin, he is snapped out of her spell and reminded of his true reality and the promise he made to get home to his family.Dunkirk and endless waiting on beachesThere's a lot of waiting on beaches in Nolan's The Odyssey, which is, of course, what Dunkirk is entirely about. The film opens with the Greek armies camped on the sand outside the walls of Troy, stuck there for years before they work out that the way in is inside a wooden horse. Later, as they flee the Laestrygonian giants, Odysseus's men don't make it back to the ships are shown floating in the shallows, the lapping shoreline turned blood-soaked. It’s very Dunkirk-adjacent imagery.And later still—perhaps the closest echo of Dunkirk—Odysseus and his men are stranded on the sun god's island, desperate and starving, unable to leave the beach until the winds finally change. In Dunkirk, Harry Styles and the lads are also stuck on the beach, desperate and starving, waiting for the British boats to arrive.Nolan clearly finds something in the beach itself: a strip of land that's neither the battlefield behind it nor the home in front, just a place to be stuck, to wait.Oppenheimer and “What have I just done?”There's no direct scene-for-scene lift here, more a shared expression, a vibe. There's a now-famous shot toward the end of the Battle of Troy, as Odysseus falls bewildered onto some steps and gazes in horror at the flames of the civilization he's just destroyed—like he's never seen a massacre before—and his eyes say: what in God's name have I just done?You see the very same look in the eyes of Cillian Murphy in the opening scene of Oppenheimer. He’s standing outside a university building seeing through his mind’s eye the terrible destructive power of the atom bomb he has just created.Both men are the architects of terrible destruction, pushed to do these terrible things in the name of hubris and duty—convinced, right up until the flames rage, that it had to be done. Only afterward are they forced to reckon with what that actually meant.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal PicturesThe beaches of Troy gave us Dunkirk flashbacks, too.The Prestige and Elpenor's ringIn The Odyssey, Eurylochus (Himesh Patel) takes a ring from Elpenor's finger, a dead comrade whose body they leave behind in the Cyclops's cave. It becomes a symbol of all the friends he's lost, a recurring reference throughout the film. At one point he thrusts it into Odysseus's hand, as a symbol of the burden of losing so many men. This is not in Homer's Odyssey either.In some ways, you might say it mirrors Angier's dead wife's wedding ring in The Prestige—Anglier is, spoiler alert, a magician who clones himself nightly for his signature trick, and has every clone wear his wife's ring as a way of holding onto her memory. But where Angier's ring is tied to one specific grief, Odysseus's becomes something bigger: a reminder of every man he's lost along the way.Memento and amnesiaCalypso's lotus flowers wipe Odysseus's memory of the war, his men, and eventually his wife and son, and he can only piece his memory of his men back together through painstaking storytelling, while his memory of Penelope is restored specifically by touching an object from his past—likely that same hairpin.This is in Homer's Odyssey, but it's structurally very close to Memento, where Leonard can't form new memories and has to reconstruct who he is using external physical anchors—photos, notes, tattoos—because his own mind won't hold onto anything.The Dark Knight and Helen Two-FaceWhy, really, does Nolan choose to give Helen (Lupita Nyong'o) scars on one side of her face? It's not in Homer's version. Nolan’s insinuation is that Paris, who kidnapped her in the first place, ruined her looks before she could be taken back by Menelaus. You don’t see these scars until Menelaus turns her head for Telemachus, and quotes Christopher Marlowe’s (not Homer’s) famous words, “The face that launched a thousand ships.”Well, I don't know about you but that moment smelled pungently of the hospital scene in The Dark Knight, where Commissioner Gordon visits Harvey Dent in the burn ward and finds him with his ruined side turned away, out of sight—until Harvey slowly rotates his head to reveal the damage in full. Same slow shock reveal, same single ruined left side, same instinct to hold back the horror for as long as possible before making you look.