The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s cinematic retelling of Homer’s epic poem, has taken the country by storm. While on vacation back home in southern Illinois, I visited a Dolby theater with my family to experience it myself — and was not disappointed. The film delivered spectacular visuals, clever effects, and breathtaking sound design.
Dozens of scenes had my heart racing as massive jumps in decibels shook the walls around me and the seat beneath me. When the Cyclops was stabbed in the eye, its screams of agony bounced off the walls of the cave and landed directly in our theater, creating a real sense of terror. When Circe transformed the soldiers into pigs, the sound of crunching bone leaped into each aisle and made my skin crawl. The acting was superb, as was Nolan’s ability to instill energy and suspense into a story that has been told, retold, and parodied hundreds of times.
At a moment of widespread oversaturation and unoriginality, Nolan’s passionate retelling inspired and captivated. It was by no means perfect, but as a rendering of the poem’s narrative, warnings, and symbols, it excelled. I was entertained; my family was entertained; and my mother, a former mythology teacher, was so entertained that she saw it twice.
Just as fascinating has been watching critics and commentators interpret the film’s message about norms and social bonds. Invoked throughout the film, “Zeus’s Law” serves as the Bronze Age’s Golden Rule, meant to instill mutual respect between individuals and society. Hospitality, tradition, and empathy are all held in high regard, with institutions and individuals alike called on to care for guests and their needs. Hosts are to be kind and courteous, as are guests; palaces are to provide moral direction and some of society’s bounty to the underclasses; and strangers and beggars are to be treated with care, since any one of them might be a god in disguise who dare not be angered.
From very early in the film, it becomes clear that Nolan is critiquing our current moment from a small-‘c’ conservative perspective. The historian Bret Devereaux put this argument well in a review when he described Nolan’s understanding of Zeus’s Law and civilizational structure as almost Burkean in outlook. Nolan views civilizational collapse, in Ancient Greece and in our own period, as driven by a breakdown of morality, mercy, decorum, and social bonds. Vice — greed, hedonism, violence, sadism — becomes the new id driving human pursuits, creating a society where collective well-being is destroyed by warped individual selfishness.
We see this conservative vision play out in Troy. Odysseus’s Trojan Horse at once breaks Zeus’s Law and unleashes the ungodly destruction of Troy and its people. Greek soldiers pouring through the city’s gates, with Agamemnon in command, devolve into wild, debauched creatures hell-bent on destruction. Women and children are killed, raped, and enslaved; men are slaughtered by the hundreds; sacred statues and temples are desecrated and innocent priests cut down. With social bonds and morals broken, humanity is launched into a world where anarchy, power, and brutality govern one’s relationship — or lack thereof — to society’s structures and obligations.
Odysseus realizes as much in Athena’s temple. It is, after all, his own men who behead children and priestesses, who set fires that engulf homes and shops, who desecrate both gods and mortals by violating a sacred law meant to be upheld by all. Amid the jubilant celebrations and toasts, Odysseus begins to feel dread, humiliation, and trauma. He is hailed as a hero, a tactician who brought unequivocal victory to his people. But internally, his mind begins to suffer. He has broken the tenets of a Burkean social order in which obligation and moral standing come before individual interest. Who was he, just one man, to break an order that had held for untold generations?
The trip through Hades — or hell — serves as a reckoning with the collapse of the traditional order. Soldiers who perished at Troy are not welcomed as heroes in the afterlife but buried under ash and torment. Veterans who made it home are not greeted as returning victors; they become beggars or thieves in a world where mercy and empathy are in steep decline. Much like the Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution, the break with the traditions of old is presented as begetting something far more barbaric. Our inherited rights, bequeathed to us by the dead and upheld for generations through moral and cultural obligation, are abandoned and burned, leaving behind a decayed society. Cities and ports are laid to waste as the breakdown in norms, hospitality, and trade spreads anarchy and ruin. The dreaded “sea people,” really just fellow Greeks fleeing collapse and war, are said to be bringing the apocalypse. Terror is everywhere, and no rule is infallible.
Nolan’s Burkean interpretation of The Odyssey, with its emphasis on traditional moral orders and social obligations, casts our present as a moment of ideological and social rupture. At the end of history, politicians devoid of decorum, respectability, and empathy turn toward a politics of cruel avarice and bitterness. We are all now the people of Ithaca, watching our social order collapse into immorality and war.
Borders have been militarized against the world’s various “sea peoples”; entire swaths of the earth have been turned into zones of cruelty, violence, and inhospitality; the law has been weaponized to attack norms, individuals, and institutions and to ensure personal enrichment; international arbitration and coordination have been supplanted by a brazen imperial appetite for conquest. Whatever ideals once kept our liberal order in check now seem dead and buried, cast aside by a generation that has traded tradition and national obligation for blood, wealth, and power.
The powerful vision animating Nolan’s Odyssey no doubt resonates with Americans who feel our current moment is unprecedented and devoid of reason. Walls are being erected, gates closed, and cosmopolitanism thrown to the wolves in favor of retrenchment and new forms of nationalism.
Supply-Side Liberalism as Zeus’s Law
For liberals especially, this Burkean interpretation ironically makes a lot of sense. After all, many of the traditions and norms we have come to cherish are vestiges of American liberalism. Mid-century liberalism delivered virtually all the laws, rulings, and norms around privacy, speech, property, and equality that have come to be viewed as fixed and permanent. Liberalism itself has become a kind of tradition.
Our economic logic fits this mold too, with deregulation, tax incentives, and supply-side growth serving as cornerstones of liberalism’s modern orthodoxy. For well over fifty years, America’s social order has bequeathed a slate of rights and obligations without fundamentally breaking from the New Deal’s administrative machinery. The role of labor has of course diminished since its prominence in the 1940s, but even this was not much of a disruption. After World War II, labor and working-class militancy were gradually converted into just another interest group alongside activists, nonprofits, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and businesses. Unions still played some role in the liberal electoral coalition, but they were no longer where the party’s energy was felt.
In this analogy, Zeus’s Law is our own liberal social order. Our law, put simply, was a social bond carrying certain expectations and promises toward both capitalism and the individual. Individual rights and social freedoms — privacy, abortion, contraception, freedom of religion, the de jure end of segregation — were to be protected and removed from political contention. The American dream, or the idea of social mobility more generally, was to be at least hypothetically available to all who were willing to work hard, innovate, and educate themselves in the burgeoning fields of the future.
As for state and local governments, the supply-side investments and grants that for decades had flowed from federal coffers into regional business groups, communities, and projects would continue apace. Supply-siders would drive the direction of federal money, delivering an economy that was not planned but not entirely private either. From the 1970s onward, this moral and political order offered everyone a supply-side liberal contract that supposedly guaranteed the right to a safe and secure life. Departing from more communal and class-based visions, it was a new way of seeing your fellow citizens — a way of spotting a potential Zeus in every passerby. Every person was to be bequeathed a fair playing field, with government there to help business and consumer, entrepreneur and professional alike, get ahead and enjoy the bounties of individual striving and growth.
Nolan witnessed this order firsthand in his childhood in the UK and the United States. Growing up in London and spending summers in Evanston, Illinois, he experienced these promises in urban centers defined by finance, real estate, tech, and above all steady growth. At the start of his career, in the 1990s and early 2000s, this bond and its obligations were at their most admired: it was an era of faith in markets, faith in limited government, and faith in the power of individuals to educate themselves, invest, and soar.
Political battles, when they broke into national consciousness, never verged on outright weaponization or mass civil unrest. Government shutdowns came and went; Bush v. Gore caused controversy, but the country moved forward with the ostensible president-elect; the dot-com bubble briefly roiled markets and 401(k)s, then disappeared from the headlines. The 9/11 attacks jolted the country into patriotic fervor and sent soldiers overseas, but this wasn’t exactly new in American politics. As for stark differences between the parties, both sides of the aisle were happy to support supply-side policies, vote for the Iraq War, and drag their feet on social issues — except, of course, crime.
Hard crackdowns in the legal system — broken-windows policing, three-strikes laws, harsher sentencing — ensued, as did punitive drug policies that swelled the country’s prison population. Long-standing entitlements were ended and replaced with tax credits, temporary assistance, and a growing emphasis on work requirements and individual merit. The law did little to protect working-class women, who were now expected to join the labor market, earn less than their male counterparts, and still care for their children with dwindling assistance. Nor did the safety net address the regional inequalities and diseases of despair spreading through the rusting Northeast and Midwest.
Nolan’s analogy between Zeus’s Law and our own social order is appealing, especially to those who see our period as marked by a sudden collapse in norms and sanity. When the Trojan Horse is shown burning alongside Troy, it renders the viewer speechless — contemplating the film’s meaning in their own lives, in a moment when unprecedented political behavior and environmental crisis alike seem to signal divine damnation.
But despite the stunning imagery and direction, Nolan’s analogy ultimately falls flat, because our current moment is one of continuation, not divergence. Put another way, Nolan sees a moral rupture that never took place.
America was not blown off course by some foundational violation of contract or bond. Deregulation, market-oriented models, and attacks on labor were underway as early as the 1940s and 1950s. Brent Cebul’s Illusions of Progress makes clear just how dominant supply-side liberalism and business-friendly policies were within our order all along. It was, after all, the American West and South — bastions of conservatism and reaction — that benefited most from federal investment delivered through the mechanisms of federalism and public-private partnerships.
Even in the heyday of the New Deal state, government intervention in the economy was delivered through existing channels that often bypassed entire populations and regions. Rather than relying on public institutions or state-owned assets, as in a social democratic state, the American government became the funder and insurer of the market, with a weak presence on the ground. Instead of directly building things or providing services, it worked through tax cuts, inducements, outsourcing, and subsidies. Government, business, and philanthropy became joined at the hip in a triangular system that channeled federal dollars to private organizations. The mid-century male breadwinner benefited, as did business and the ever growing nonprofit sector. This, in essence, was as far as our welfare state was willing to go.
And even at its strongest, labor militancy and class consciousness were never the ideological or material underpinnings of this structure. They might have generated different political outcomes, but sadly they never did. So while stagflation and neoliberalism battered labor and remade the country’s economy from industrial to service-oriented, these events never broke us away from the triangular supply-side bond that still drives the country today. This is where Nolan’s analogy fails: We never had a sack of Troy. We never broke Zeus’s Law. And that is precisely the problem with our current moment.
The Odyssey frames our moment as one in which morals and bonds have been broken. But in reality, our social order has continued unabated, with supply-side liberalism chugging along despite growing polarization, inequality, and political upheaval. Sure, social questions have grown more contentious, especially around abortion and LGBTQ rights, but just as in the 1980s and 1990s, they have never been the fulcrum of our order. Broken-windows policing disproportionately targeted working-class and African American communities, harming core constituencies of the liberal coalition. Welfare reform overwhelmingly hurt single mothers, working-class people, and the poor — all groups liberalism purported to fight for. Democrats infamously dragged their feet on gay marriage and abortion protections, only vehemently defending the latter once Roe v. Wade was overturned.
Continuation, Not Aberration
The core bond of supply-side liberalism — its promise of wealth, unfettered markets, and market autonomy — has yet to be broken. Donald Trump has derailed certain commitments, like free trade and the GOP’s ostensible anti-statism. But those commitments could always be shifted to protect the broader bond and its spoils. Despite historic tariffs and administrative curtailment, no paradigm-ending event has occurred. Ours is still a triangular system of big government, big business, and big philanthropy. Federal dollars still flow to states, communities, businesses, and nonprofits and still enable the basic functions of a modern state. This structure has not changed.
Nolan’s suggestion seems to be that Trumpism is the cause of our rupture — that a lack of respect for decorum, institutional legitimacy, and morality has generated this crisis; that the open embrace of nationalism and cruelty is driving us toward greater inequality and violence. Crucially, we are meant to believe that we have become something fundamentally different, that we have broken from the old order and mutated away from what we used to be and stand for. Surely, the thinking goes, we were not always just imperial operators serving an American capitalism that benefits the few and disrespects everyone else.
But capitalist America has always been thus. During the era of consensus, Washington bombed nation after nation and killed untold numbers of innocent people and fomented coups and civil wars to defend banana companies and financial institutions. American politicians, in thrall to the domestic capitalist class, deregulated business, privatized the welfare state, and protected elites’ right to exploitation and to untaxed wealth. At the height of neoliberal triumphalism, the United States invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, then caused a global financial crisis that pushed millions to the brink of poverty and starvation. When was the supposed rupture?
Trump’s antics have been historic, but as many have argued, he is no aberration. Plenty of Republicans, especially in the base, held Trumpian beliefs well before 2016 — and those beliefs won’t suddenly dissipate when the man himself leaves office. No rupture in America’s social order has occurred. Troy has not been sacked, and Zeus’s Law has not been broken, because no fundamental part of America’s social bond has been severed.
The supply-side, business-friendly state that emerged from the consolidation of the New Deal is still kicking, its fundamental logic still in place. The Odyssey is an entertaining film, but its conservative critique of American society is simply wrong. We are still living in the Bronze Age. Society has not collapsed, revolution has not occurred, and no alternative has appeared. We are living, instead, at the point in an order when purpose seems exhausted, promises weak, and the future tenuous.
Much like Odysseus, we all now find ourselves adrift at sea, hoping to make our way back to a mythical, happy home that never existed in the first place.