Shipwrecks

One of the favorite pastimes of intellectuals, as we are seeing, is to go against what the masses like. What is least forgivable about Christopher Nolan is not his cinema, but that it is liked, that it makes money, and at the same time enjoys the prestige of a good part of the critics and the Academy.

Nolan makes sophisticated yet popular cinema, spectacular and knowledgeable, closely linked to a tradition that always tries to remake and reinterpret, in the vein of Tarantino, but without so much irony or ever falling into bloody and parodic farce. In every evolution of a certain art, a Nolan appears, just as before, in literature, a Borges had appeared, someone capable of writing everything and reinterpreting everything in a personal line that is also accessible to the bulk of the public. Cinema, fortunately, continues to be culture for the masses, or popular culture, and Nolan knows that he doesn't make his films for museums but for empty seats and profit and loss accounts, and that's why he puts in all that rhetoric – and music – and the casting of handsome men and women that fits each moment for the delight of the viewers' eyes.

It makes little sense to oppose it for whatever learned reasons, certain ‘betrayals of the Homeric spirit’ or even from readings that aim to be more political than aesthetic, or as if attacking it from morality – the role of women! – could make it less attractive. The truth is that people are flocking to it, even the most cinephiles, while at the same time becoming reluctant, lamenting that it cannot be seen in the original IMAX format (they don’t like the film, they say, and at the same time they would like to see it bigger…). And at the same time, and in a pleasingly surprising way, Homer’s work has started selling again, even reaching the top of the bestseller list, both new verse versions and those that adapt the poem into narrative prose. Right now, two versions of the Odyssey are selling well in Catalan, and in Spanish the cunning editors at Blackie Books have rescued from oblivion the prose versions made by the Protestant pastor Gustav Schwab (who died in 1850), and are publishing them as a commercial trilogy, like a saga, and the truth is that it reads very well, from the Trojan War to the adventures of Aeneas, passing obviously through Odysseus. And all this at the same time that new Odysseuses are dying in the Mediterranean, searching for our Ithaca, adventurers who do not want to return home but to flee from it, or who escape from their native Troys, homelands rotten with corruption and inequality. Nolan invents a ‘law of Zeus’ to refer to the duties of hospitality, but at the same time is aware that the suitors are abusers, opportunists who come to seize the resources of the land, which is the reading we currently make of immigration, at least from the most fearful right. But we do not know what the law is, of Zeus or of whoever, or what we are obliged to towards these castaways.