What's at stake with The Odyssey (2026) by Christopher Nolan

[00:00:00]With Christopher Nolan's Odyssey movie coming very soon, there's a lot of expectation, a lot of uh noise being made about it, positive and negative. Some people are wondering, is it going to be woke? Is it not going to be woke? We have signs that it might be.

[00:00:17]And at the same time, the story is so strong that that story is so compelling that I have to admit that I'm looking forward to seeing how he does it because he's such a great director. But I think the fact that this story is coming towards us, the fact that the Odyssey is kind of appearing on our cultural horizon right now, the fact that everybody is buzzing around it and talking about it, is a sign of a bigger question.

[00:00:53]This is Jonathan Pageau. [music] Welcome to The Symbolic World.

[00:01:00]>> [music] [music] >> You know, since World War II, we've seen stories about revolution, we've seen stories about how authority must be questioned, about how authority must be challenged, about how hierarchy and empire and fathers and structures are usually tyrannical and have to be uh skirted or disobeyed, and ultimately the revolution is part of it. But see, the story about the Odyssey is really a story of a return of the father.

[00:01:38]It is a story that exists in other guises. You know, one of the reasons I think why The Lord of the Rings trilogy succeeded so well is because it represented this image of the return of the father, the return of the king.

[00:01:55]There are so many versions of this. Of course, the story of Robin Hood is ultimately about that, which is that when the world turns upside down, as the hero must act like a criminal, all we can do is wait for the return of the king, the restoration of a proper order. And of course, that is what the Odyssey is about. The story is about a father returning home after war, going through all these challenges. But one of the things that's going on is that in his home, all these men are there to try to take his wife from him. All these suitors are there to try to kill his son, so that he doesn't inherit, and take his wife. And so, you have this image of all these strangers that are in his home, that are trying to eat his food, take his things, and ultimately take his woman. And the father is coming back to restore order, and also to exact revenge on the people who are trying to take everything away from him. And so, it's a very It's a very deep story. And like I said, you know, at the end of the story of Robin Hood, when everything is topsy-turvy, of course, the story of Robin Hood ends with the return of King Richard. We always have to remember that. But why is it that this story hasn't been told for so long? And why is it that when it does, it excites people?

[00:03:16]Was because since, really, not exactly since World War II, but right after World War II, we had a bunch of cultural phenomena, which was in some ways the restoration of the father for a very short time, for maybe about 10 years or so, where you had shows like Leave It to Beaver, like uh Father Knows Best, and these different images of of a traditional family with a father and a mother and the children.

[00:03:41]But very soon, all right, already starting in the 1960s, you start to see that be challenged, and you start to see what I call the post-World War II story emerge and become stronger and stronger.

[00:03:56]And what happens in the cultural phenomena is that you will see gradually the father first try to hold on to authority, ultimately be challenged and then ultimately be represented as a bungling idiot that can only be made fun of.

[00:04:16]Now, there are many versions of this, but I think the biggest one and in some ways the most important one in the United States was this TV show called All in the Family, the classic Archie Bunker, the old man who sits on his couch and is a representative of an older age. He's racist, he's sexist, you know, he he tries to be the father in the family, but ultimately the children are leading a revolution and the children represent the future of his authority and his position being, you know, taken away from him. Now, you know, this is a pretty mild version, but then you will see these versions continue to increase if you think of, you know, shows like The Flintstones that start a pattern, especially in animation, you see this. With The Flintstones start a pattern, of course, of Fred Flintstone as a kind of irresponsible, uh, loudmouth, selfish, uh, man.

[00:05:12]Uh, but then that structure gets taken and then gets increased. You see that happen in the show Married with Children where now the father is just a complete and he's just the butt of the joke. This, of course, happens in The Simpsons where the father is always doing crazy things and, you know, is completely irresponsible and, of course, the mother is the one that really is the voice of reason and holds it together.

[00:05:36]And then, of course, if you take from The Flintstones to The Simpsons, you know what the last version is is, of course, Family Guy where this gets taken to the very extreme where now the father is just a complete and utter idiot, you know, with almost no redeeming qualities, and he's constantly getting everyone in trouble and constantly doing all kinds of crazy stuff. And of course, the wife is the reasonable one, is the voice of reason. And so, you could see that, you know, since the 1960s, the image of the father has been reduced, reduced, reduced, and mocked, and turned into the butt of the joke. This is, of course, a you know, political move to towards feminism, but it also is a deeper narrative move, which is that if you have a story of revolution as the main story, if you have the story where patriarchy, where authority is bad, the Star Wars story, you know, where the father is the evil character, and the rebellion is trying to, you know, take the power away from the from the father that has been corrupted by the evil empire, you know. Luckily, at least in Star Wars, there's a redemptive arc for the father, but the structure is the same one, which is, you know, the father represents someone that has to be defeated, that has to be, you know, taken over.

[00:07:01]And, you know, this is the ancient pagan structure, right? It's the pagan of Hesiod's Theogony that I've talked talked about many times on the channel before, which is the pattern of castration as the pattern of continuity, that is, the mother that castrates the father ultimately in order, you know, for the children to be freed from his tyranny. And, you know, this this is the image that Freud ultimately uses in his own vision of the Oedipal complex as a representation of the ancient pagan vision.

[00:07:37]One of the important themes in ancient stories, and a theme that we desperately need today, is the theme of the return of the father. And this is of course why the Odyssey is back on the horizon of our storytelling, where Odysseus, after all his long exile, finally returns home. And so the place of the father and the importance of the father something that has been diminished for many decades, but is one that we have to remember and we have to celebrate once again. And in our recent fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood, I emphasize even more clearly than in the other stories, the return of the good hunter, the return of the good woodsman who is in this version the story of Little Red Riding Hood, who is able to deliver her and his entire family from the wolf who has tried to devour them, who has tried to infiltrate them, and who has tried to pretend that he was one of them. And so for Father's Day, we encourage you to come and get your version of Little Red Riding Hood.

[00:08:40]Of course, in the Christian world, you know, we have this vision of filiation.

[00:08:46]And you see that this notion that of course order can be beautiful, order can be powerful. And so of course, there's always a tension between the two, because it's true that order can be tyrannical, that fathers can be tyrannical. So it's normal that once in a while we see these stories where uh there is a resistance to tyranny. But we've definitely come to the end of that. We've come to the family guy end of this. And what we need right now is stories that show the return of the father and the return of the king. And like I said, that's one of the reasons why Lord of the Rings I think was so successful, cuz it ends with this return of the proper order and the return of the king to his kingdom.

[00:09:30]Now, the question we have now is is Christopher Nolan's Odyssey going to be that.

[00:09:39]First of all, I want to say that I think the fact that the story is being told hopefully transcends how it's going to be told. That is, the fact that this is the story that one of the big stories that is kind of appearing on our horizon shows us that there is a desire for that story. And whether the people making it see the desire for that story and now want to subvert it or whether this will play out properly is something that to be seen, but for sure the the desire for that story is there. And one of the things we've seen in media that's happened in the past, you know, just very few years.

[00:10:16]Uh you see this, of course, with Kevin Smith's He-Man uh season uh series, which is the attempt to suggest that we're going to show a return of the father, a return of the hero, a return of the king, but then subvert people's expectations or I do a bait and switch on people's desire for the return of the hero. In Kevin Smith's series, it was supposed to be a story about He-Man, but ultimately the story gets flipped and turned into basically a story about the female heroes and the female uh you know, and we've seen, of course, this gender swap happen all over the place, but the funniest one recently has been the bait and switch, which is I'm going to make you think that that's what the story is about and then I'm going to flip it upside down and turn it into something subversive. Now, the question is is that what Christopher Nolan is going to do in his Return of the Father story? Now, there are signs that this might happen and, you know, these kinds of things I usually don't want to talk about so much on the channel, but I think it's important to mention it.

[00:11:22]One of the big controversies, of course, about uh the movie is the fact that an African woman is being cast as Helen.

[00:11:31]And, you know, this is being cast in terms of race, in terms of racism, and you know, these are categories that I don't find particularly interesting.

[00:11:39]Uh but, I do think that it is important to notice what's going on, which is that we have to this idea of the return of the father and the return of identity, the return to the origin. One of the things that Odysseus finds when he goes back home is that he goes he finds the his bed. And if you remember the story, his bed is actually a tree. And so, he cut a tree and made the bed out of this this cut-down tree. And so, you have all these roots that kind of go down into the earth. And this idea that he's coming back to be joined with his wife on that tree that is deeply rooted in the land where he is where he is. And so, this idea that the return of the father is also a return to the origin and the return of memory towards our ancestors, right? The return to memory towards the things that bind us together as families, as peoples, as nations.

[00:12:37]And so, you know, we have to remember that Helen of Troy isn't just a character in a mythological story. She's not just a character in a fictional story that is being swapped, you know, for someone from a different culture like we've seen in so many of the franchises in the past uh decades.

[00:12:56]But, Helen of Troy gave her name to the Hellenes. That is, the Greeks that are the foundation of, you know, Western culture, at least a large part of the foundation of Western culture.

[00:13:10]>> [snorts] >> One of the traditions that their name comes from Helen. That is, it is in the Trojan War that the first identity was really really comes together. And this is so profound that not only the Greeks, but the Romans. That is, the Romans who see themselves as Trojans, and the Greeks that saw themselves, of course, as the Hellenes. They are both, even though they were on opposite sides in that war, they see that story, the story of Helen, and the story of the Trojan War, as being the origin of their people. And this is something that, you know, Deacon Seraphim Rowland and I have been talking about in our universal history series for many, for a few years now, which is that every single nation in the West will try to connect itself to Troy, even if that connection is mythological and is difficult to defend in terms of modern, you know, history and history historiography. You know, the Britons know that their island was their civilization was founded by Brutus, Brutus who escaped the Trojan War.

[00:14:18]The gods in the Scandinavian epics, you know, in the Eddas, they in they are told to be, you know, warriors from Troy that escaped from Troy. And this is true of all the peoples of Europe that are seen seeing the Trojan War as being the beginning of their civilization. And so, this is, in some ways, the the the end of the line, you could say, for these kinds of gestures of trying to replace characters with other cultures, with other races. And, you know, obviously, Africans have their own beautiful traditions, their own beautiful history. They have all kinds of things that that make them amazing, and we also know that the joining of African cultures to the West has given us beautiful things like jazz and all kinds of cultural phenomena. And so, of course, we can celebrate that. But if you tried to go to the root, if you got tried to go to the very person that gave her name to the Hellenes, and you replace her with someone who is not Western, someone who is from another place entirely, someone who is from Africa, or if you did it with someone who's from India, or for someone who's from East Asia. All of these things would create the same problem, which is that you're trying to go to the very core, to the very home, to the very seed, the very beginning, and you're trying to replace it with something else. And we've seen efforts like this before. If you think of the manner in which Islam, for example, deals with Christianity. This is how they deal with it. They say, "Oh, you can have your Christ, as long as you seed the most important thing. As long as you remove the fact that he is the incarnation. As long as you remove the fact that he was crucified and resurrected, then you can have your Christ." So, let's take the deepest part. Let's take the thing that really is the seed for the tree, remove that, and then we we we know that we're going to watch, of course, the tree die.

[00:16:19]We we think that we're at least going to watch the tree die. And [snorts] so, these types of gestures, the gesture that that Christopher Nolan is doing is, I think, is in some ways the last straw.

[00:16:30]And so, you know, hopefully it'll be a time for people to kind of remember and and realize, you know, who we are and why the Trojan War is so important, why the transgressions that happened in the Trojan War are lessons that we need to learn from, and why the the heroism and the bringing together of the peoples in the Trojan War is also something that we can remember. And I think that this is very important to remember this as we move forward in the end of the World War II consensus story, as we watch and we wait and we look for return of the father, return of the king stories. Hopefully, we can find those that are balanced because we have to remember that when Odysseus returns to his home and finds all of the suiters that have been there eating his food and taking his land and planning to kill his son and take his wife, of course Odysseus slaughters them all.

[00:17:36]And of course that is not the Christian ending to the story. Hopefully that as we move forward in our story, we can find a more balanced and a better version of a return of the king. I think that you know, the image of the just king, the image of the return of Christ where justice is done properly and where things are separated properly. Hopefully this is the image that we can use and beauty is established and the kingdom is established, you know, in truth and in in justice as well.

[00:18:11]Hopefully we can see that as the ultimate version of the return of the king, the return of the father after all of the chaos. And so I hope this has been useful. We're going to keep looking, we're going to keep watching.

[00:18:24]As soon as the Odyssey comes out, I will try to make a symbolic interpretation and a review of it because, you know, I love Christopher Nolan Nolan movies and so I still have a little bit of hope that, you know, this is superficial, some of these gestures are superficial and that deep inside there will be a story about the return of the father in a way that will be fruitful for the future. So thanks everyone for your attention. Hope you enjoy this and I'll talk to you very soon. Bye-bye.