When one of the most distinguished filmmakers of the 21st century takes on one of the foundational stories of man, there is bound to be controversy. For that, Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” did not disappoint. But what does that controversy tell us about the time we’re living through now – in this specific moment in America? If politics is downstream from culture, where does the cultural pendulum land that informs us of our politics? Are we finally “post-woke?” The Daily Wire talks with Spencer Klavan, a Yale graduate who earned his doctorate in ancient Greek literature from Oxford University; writer, host of “The Young Heretics” podcast, and author of the book “How To Save The West” to find out if this is the battle that ends the culture wars, or if it’s just another campaign on an epic journey through the history of man.
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Ben Domenech: Spencer, I don’t know about you, but I personally did not expect to see the degree to which Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” sparked this gigantic discourse reaction, however you want to describe it. Is that something that you expected? And if so, whether you expected it or not, why do you think it did?
Spencer Klavan: No, I didn’t expect it at all, to be honest. I was completely taken aback by it. And that’s even after the many months of pre-discourse that we’ve been having in the lead up to the release of this movie. And I think part of it is just that if you’re a classicist, if you’re obsessed with old books and classic literature and you spend your life pouring in detail over these lost poems, you sort of get used to expecting that nobody really cares about the stuff you care about. And sometimes you can maybe convince them to pay attention for a little bit, but by and large, people care more about politics and sports and stuff. So it really just still feels a bit surreal that we’ve been in several news cycles worth of intense debate over this movie and even close reading, I would say, of this movie.
Minute analysis about the casting choices and the changes that were made to the original poem and so forth. So my major reaction is actually to just be delighted that people are talking this much about Homer, even if not all of the conversation has been completely edifying. The upshot for me is that there’s an opportunity for more people to discover or rediscover this treasure of Western literature. As for why it’s going on, I think it has primarily to do with people’s sense of American culture in 2026 and less to do with people’s preexisting attachments to “The Odyssey.” Some of us know and care and love this poem a lot. Some of us know about it, that it’s an important work of Western literature and therefore care about it. But a lot of us are really intensely attached to what happens to American popular culture in the 21st century.
Especially I think conservatives feel like they went through an extended period where every major organ of public discourse and art, especially art, was being used not just to tell them that conservatives suck or that America sucks, but to take these treasures that are already part of the canon, like “The Odyssey,” like the fairytales that Disney put on screen, like other poems such as Beowulf and great works of literature to take those to wear their prestige, like a skin suit, to borrow all of the love and affection they inspire, but then to drag them through the mud and tell us how they’re wrong or they’re oppressive toward women and therefore they’re representative of how America and the culture is also wrong. And so I think that’s where the sensitivity came from in the lead up to the movie. And then it triggered this larger conversation again about the state of the culture as it relates to conservatives and the Right in conservatism.
Are conservatives taking center stage again? Are they winning or have they lost the plot? And is Hollywood still filled with people who have an inveterate opposition to the Right wing, to conservatism, to traditional values? And I think people are reading the movie still through that lens, even as they are also discussing how Nolan did and whether it’s a good movie in its own right.
BD: First off, as someone who’s literally sitting in a room surrounded by very old books right now in my office, I feel your pain. Thank you for joining my support group. But the thing that I think is so interesting about this is Nolan is one of the very small handful of directors who the director themselves is a brand that brings people to the theater, meaning that he can make a movie like Dunkirk with mid-tier stars and have people show up for it. He decided with this film to do a bunch of things on the casting side that were attention grabbers. And I certainly think that that was an aspect of this that a lot of conservatives were skeptical about, not just Elliot Page, but about the choices of Lupita Nyong’o, who’s a good actress, but is she Helen of Troy?
Some of the other choices were very modern: the choice to have American accents, the choice to use the language the way it was; all that led into this pre-discourse that you mentioned that was voting down the trailer to the nth degree. And then despite those assumptions and despite those being the types of people you would think would normally be interested in a movie like “The Odyssey” and would be a tell about its performance, the thing goes out and just does gangbusters. Is that an indication, as some I think suspect, that conservatives, especially too online conservatives, exercise less power perhaps now than they maybe did in some of the recent years where it seemed like the culture, comedy, the things that were getting greenlit were trending in that direction? How do we get the Trump voter back into the seats? We make Tom Cruise be Maverick again, that kind of thing.
Or do you think it’s just an indication that people are just starved for something that seems epic? They want something larger, to bring an experience to bring them back to the theater or something along those lines, meaning it doesn’t have as much to do with politics.
SK: I think underneath all of this, the secret is that it’s really just normal traditional Americans who were exercising power over the box office and the culture. And it was never the very online Right. The very online Right, who have a specific set of concerns that they’re entitled to, have interpreted the Trump victory as a total vindication of their project. But that’s not actually what happened in 2024. What happened is that normal people who basically just go along to get along and want to raise healthy families and like their country and don’t want to be told that they suck all the time — they saw the Right and they saw Trump’s MAGA as the place where the imperfect vessel for their concerns because the Left had become so grotesque and had wrapped itself up in so much totally bananas social theory and economic theory. I think people looked at that and that’s just unpopular.
And they then turned instead to Trump, who channels some of this normy energy. And Hollywood and the people that make mass entertainment, they saw that and tacked closer to the common sense attitude of the majority of the country. And again, I think the devoted online committed Right, seriously ideological conservatives, interpreted that as a moment of ascendancy for themselves. But I don’t think that’s ever what it was. On top of which, your point about Nolan is really key. Not only is he a major brand as a director, but he’s also somebody who’s not been overtly political, but some of his movies have been read and can be read as having conservative sensibility, especially the “Dark Knight” trilogy, which has been understood to have a lot of conservative messaging in it. And so these choices, which I do think were influenced by the insular culture of Hollywood — the choice of Nyong’o and Paige — those choices read not just as woke, but as a betrayal to these people who were already feeling like they’d been promised something that they weren’t getting, namely a culture that catered more to them.
And the upshot of all of this, I think, is that this movie does actually, by and large, appeal to normie America. It obviously doesn’t appeal to online Right or ideological Right America. And this will be interpreted in turn by culture vultures as disproving the thesis that if you go woke, you go broke. You’ve already seen this in papers like Variety. The fact that people freaked out about it and that it did so well means that these people don’t actually have any cultural power. I think normie Americans do have a lot of cultural power, and I still think that wokeness is a mistake. It detracts from this movie everywhere it appears. It’s just that it doesn’t make as big of a dent in the movie as people thought it would. And so I think really what’s going on is a reality check for people who are further to the Right than even the majority of people who voted for Donald Trump.
BD: I think you’re completely right about that. And I do want to follow up with a question about the comedy side of things. It is interesting to me to chart the career of someone who I interviewed right after he was canceled, comedian Shane Gillis. I profiled him when he was kind of at his lowest; if he had a low moment, I don’t think he actually did, because he bounced back pretty quickly. But the point is he was doing clubs with 50 people. That’s where I interviewed him between two shows, where he had probably 120 people. And at the time he was down, but he was very confident that his comedy was connecting and that people liked the direction he was going. Now he just set the Guinness World Record for performing in front of this giant crowd in Eagle Stadium and is the brand face for Bud Light and for all these other things that are meant to cater to normies. Even though he started as kind of a Right-tinged comedian, he’s kind of tacked towards the center. On that stage in Philly, the end of the show was a bit with Dave Chappelle where Chappelle called JD Vance a f*gg*t and they were laughing together on stage.
Is that an indication that the pendulum is swinging in the other direction, in a way that the Righties now have power with Trump, that it’s now cool and edgier to be swinging to the Left?
SK: Interesting. Well, comedy is another domain where these dynamics we’ve talked about in “The Odyssey” are very much at play. I agree with you. I think of Shane Gillis. In my head, I file him as the opposite of Hannah Gadsby, whom you probably recall. She was the Nanette lady who did this special on Netflix, which basically amounted to anti-comedy. I mean, it had some funny bits in it, but it was designed to subvert your expectations, pull the rug out from under you, and make a very political, social point.
BD: By the way, according to James McCann, every Australian comic has to do that thing. And that’s one of the reasons he had to leave for his career to go.
SK: No, big time. That’s kind of what I was about to say. It wasn’t just every Australian for a while. It was: this is the new model of comedy. It was the model of comedy that went with woke. And just like woke, it was actually really off-putting to a bunch of people who weren’t particularly all that political. And as you suggested, it created the conditions under which leftism would be the most easily skewered thing. If you didn’t shut people down, if you didn’t shout people out, they were going to make jokes about woke because it was so ascendant and so self-serious and so ridiculous. So there was this anti-woke comedy movement. But again, the thing about it is that meant people like Shane Gillis got filed under anti-woke. They got filed as conservative-tinged and Right-wing. And yet I really think what they were was comedians who appealed to a broad sensibility.
You can see this if you look at somebody like Nate Bargatze, who is even less incendiary, much less incendiary than Gillis, but clearly at an aesthetic level, at a vibes level, in the same boat. And all of these guys get picked up as anti-woke. But really what they are, and I’ve been trying to get this term to catch on, I think they’re post-woke. I think they’re trying to move past the condition where we’re either endorsing or attacking wokeness, but are actually just moving beyond whatever national psychosis that represented to begin with. And that’s something that is hard for people on the right to read. It’s something that’s very easily interpreted as anti-woke, but it’s actually post-woke.
BD: What are some of the examples that you would point to that would signal that we are entering a post-woke period of culture in America?
SK: I feel very strongly that the summer of movies we’ve just been through, if you take Nolan’s “Odyssey” out of the equation for a second, is a really strong indicator of a post-woke movement. And I’m thinking especially of the runaway success of “Backrooms” and “Obsession,” these two very small horror films.
BD: I would also argue that to a degree, “Project Hail Mary” is kind of post-woke.
SK: Wonderful example, yes. Which is the other sensational movie, not just in terms of how it did at the box office, but of how much discussion it drove. If you track that trajectory, it turns out, first of all, that it’s been a really good summer for movies. I’ve been surprised at how much I care about the movies this year. And I think that’s related to the fact that it’s been a summer of post-woke movies, movies that have been, again, sometimes filed away as, or interpreted as, reactions against those censorious lefties who wanted just to make us all into they/thems. But if you look at these as objects, if you watch these movies closely, if you try to understand them on their own terms, they’re engaging with a whole separate set of concerns. “Backrooms” is about AI, and it’s about growing up buried under ’90s nostalgia, and it’s about what the experience of Gen Z looks like.
These are also movies that come out of YouTube. So they’re movies that come out of a youth culture that hasn’t even been part of our mainstream conversation. And that contributes to a sense of freshness and excitement. Oh, we don’t have to be rolling over, banging our heads over the same five sticking points – the same five arguments we’ve been having. We might actually be able to look forward to a new generation of creators. All of it is optimistic to me, but not in the sense of, “Yeah, we’re really going to go get those lefties.” It’s less reactionary than that.
BD: Did you see Curry Barker say that he has actually never read “The Monkey’s Paw”? He just based it on the Simpsons episode with “The Monkey’s Paw.”
SK: That’s almost like a scene out of “Backrooms.” That’s like a “Backrooms” deleted scene where it’s just a copy of a copy.
BD: I will admit, I’ve not yet seen Nolan’s “Odyssey.” I have been busy, and I had to host at Fox. But one thing that I do know about it is that it’s been impossible to avoid the conversation and to spoil some things, and I love “The Odyssey.” And just like you had many copies of it at age 12, which made me lots of girlfriends. But the thing that I have a problem with, if I’m monitoring the discourse, is that to me, the fundamental moral decision that Odysseus makes at the center of that story is a decision to reject what sounds like an idyllic, everlasting life, basically. One that he obviously escapes from and leaves behind in order to go home. To me, at least in the discourse around this, that is not how this movie frames it. I don’t know if you agree with that analysis, but if that is the case, why do you think Nolan took away that one key aspect of the story?
SK: It’s interesting. I think that moment you’re referring to, which is the Calypso’s Island story, is actually the second most questionable choice that Nolan makes. The first one is Nolan’s decision to put guilt about the Trojan horse at the center of the Odysseus character arc. This is something that’s been discussed ad nauseum. And again, it’s getting filtered through the is it woke or is it not woke lens. And again, I just don’t think that’s the most effective or useful lens to use. I think what’s really going on in that case is that Nolan doesn’t understand how steeped he is in modern and, in some cases, Christian assumptions about war and trickery. He’s imagining his way into Odysseus’s mind, and he can only really see it through this modern lens of PTSD and war guilt. And I do think that changes the poem in a really meaningful way and is less complicated and good and interesting than Homer’s poem.
But I also think that that’s something which people who interpret Odysseus’s character are always seeing him through their own lens. It’s true of Dante, it’s true of Sophocles, it’s true of Tennyson and all sorts of people who have rewritten the story. The part that you are talking about, which I actually genuinely think has a lot to do with keeping the movie under three hours, which Nolan, I think, has said was one of his goals, is compressing a few different episodes from the original poem.
So you’ve got three different stories. You’ve got The Lotus Eaters, which is where Odysseus’s men eat the lotus and they forget about their journey home. You’ve got the Island of Calypso, which, in the movie, is central. And then you’ve got the Island of Phaeacia, which is not in the movie, which is really core to the poem because it’s where Odysseus tells his story. And a lot of the most famous episodes are all told on the Island of Phaeacia. So Nolan telescopes those three things into one. And that means he’s not able to give us a couple of key moral choices. The choice that Odysseus makes in the poem not to eat the lotus. The choice, as you say, that he makes not to accept Calypso’s offer. Calypso in the poem is an immortal, beautiful immortal, and she offers him a life of perfect pleasure forever.
And he says, no, home is more important. Penelope, my wife, is more important. So you’re right that it’s really the first thing we learn about Odysseus’s character in the poem. It’s the first sequence with him in it, which comes quite late. I do still think that Nolan understands the importance of that choice. And it’s one of the places in the movie where I think he really is reading the poem quite closely. There are a couple of moments where he gets images or moments that are different, but they are evidence of his attention to the poem. And that’s because The Lotus Flower, which in the movie Odysseus eats, makes him forget about home. But the way it works in the movie is that even when he’s drugged, there’s still something in his heart that makes him uneasy. And he wanders up and down the shore collecting old bits from his shipwrecked craft so that he can put them together into a raft.
And finally, when Calypso takes away the lotus, he starts to remember and tell his story again the way he does on Phaeacia in the poem. And so there is still this idea that even though he’s been given a kind of bliss, a sort of anesthesia in the movie version, he nevertheless has a core somewhere deep down that prefers the hardship of making his way back to Penelope to the bliss of forgetfulness and of Calypso. But it does show up differently. And I think it’s actually just a formal constraint for Nolan that he’s not able to get it in there all the way.
BD: Right now on all the book charts, different translations of “The Odyssey” are charting, which is something that I never thought I would see. That’s great. Which translation would you advise that people read if they’ve never read it before? And if they have read it before, and this is inspiring them to go back to this type of epic literature, what would you advise them to read next? Give them a place to go.
SK: Wonderful. Okay. Well, like you, I was also 12 years old when I first encountered this poem. I thought of it as the first “big boy” book that I ever read. And I lay awake on my grandparents’ floor reading the English version. That version was the Richmond Lattimore translation, which I think still holds up. It’s great. It’s very beautiful. A lot of people prefer the Robert Fitzgerald translation. Personally, my all-time favorite is actually Robert Fagles’s, which is slightly freer and more majestic. I think a lot of guys like that.
But there’s something to note, a new translation that not everyone knows about, which is Daniel Mendelsohn’s. It’s in a very regal kind of Iambic pentameter, which is our English – the rhythm of Shakespeare, of course. And that one is also excellent. I’ll be teaching with that one in the fall. So I would say any one of those would be a good choice, especially the Mendelsohn or the Fagles.
If you want more of this stuff, boy, do I have good news for you because there’s no shortage of literature in this vein. Obviously, Homer’s other poem, “The Iliad,” would be a great next choice. So would Virgil’s “Aeneid” if you want a different Roman view of these events and their fallout, including a very different portrayal of Odysseus as kind of a louse, a nihilist skunk.
You get that in the “Aeneid,” and you’ll start to see how people have reinterpreted this character throughout history. Finally, the one thing that I think people might be likely to sleep on is that those are all pretty obvious next steps in other epics. But another thing people could do is read “The Oresteia,” which is our only complete trilogy of tragedies from ancient Greece. And it tells the story of what happens after Agamemnon comes home. The guy who in Nolan’s movie is the big, hulking, black, armored, Darth Vader-looking bad guy. In the trilogy, it’s a profound meditation on justice, homecoming, and whether or not you have to avenge your father when he’s killed. So we can leave it at that, but it’s a great, great work that would be fun to read, I think, after Homer.
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