Know Your Own Men

Some say that Christopher Nolan has finally transformed into a women’s director, but the gender dynamics in his new mythology epic are actually much more complicated.

By Abby MonteilJuly 24, 2026

• Film

• Gender & Sexuality

EDGAR ALLAN POE once proclaimed that “the death […] of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” And, 13 films in, Christopher Nolan tends to agree. His oeuvre is full of well-worn hallmarks: intricate, nonlinear narratives; brilliant, haunted men traversing labyrinthine prisons of their own making; and, perhaps most theatrically, a whole lot of dead wives.

There are fair comparisons to be made between Nolan and Homer, composer of the 3,000-year-old Greek epic poem on which his latest film is based: the Odyssey. Both have made a name for themselves trafficking philosophical musings about the human condition and the stories we tell to make sense of it, on the largest scale possible. Many of Nolan’s aforementioned narrative obsessions run throughout The Odyssey, with one exception: the only dead wife in sight is minor character Clytemnestra, who was killed before the story begins.

By now, the “Nolan dead wife” has become its own archetype, a curious one when considering that his very much alive wife of nearly 30 years, producer Emma Thomas, is by all accounts one of his closest collaborators. Still, The Odyssey can easily be read as a formulating text for Nolan’s films, arguably the closest thing we have to modern epics. His stories revolve around great men burdened with impossible, world-altering choices in which long-suffering women pay the price—if not death, then shame and isolation that never convinces these men to meaningfully alter their courses.

According to classicist Emily Wilson, whose 2017 edition of The Odyssey Nolan has referenced as an inspiration, that gendered tension has always been readily apparent in Homer’s epic. In a New Yorker essay, Wilson described the classic as “a complex and truthful articulation of gender dynamics that continue to haunt us.” She writes: “The Odyssey traces deep male fears about female power, and it shows the terrible damage done to women, and perhaps also to men, by the androcentric social structures that keep us silent and constrained.”

Whether consciously done or not, Nolan’s The Odyssey functions as a meta commentary on how women factor into his career-long obsessions with power, time, and memory. At this point in Nolan’s career, trying to pinpoint why exactly he’s repeatedly fridged female characters is a dead end.

Perhaps there’s been minute progress: we’ve moved from a murdered woman credited only as “The Blonde” in his microbudget debut Following (1998) to a string of dead wives—Elizabeth Debicki’s dead wife character in Tenet (2020) is unkilled through time travel, but I digress—to women like Kitty in Oppenheimer (2023) and Penelope (Anne Hathaway) in The Odyssey, unkillable thanks to real history and preexisting source material, respectively (although in the film, Oppenheimer’s mistress, Jean Tatlock, does die).

Ever the maximalist rationalist, Nolan distinguishes his spin on The Odyssey by casting an eye away from Mount Olympus in favor of a tactile epochal tale of the grief and guilt lurking behind a legendary great man’s exterior. He hasn’t suddenly transformed into a women’s director, or even one particularly cognizant of his female characters’ inner lives. Yet in using Odysseus (Matt Damon) as an avatar for more universal anxieties about the world future generations stand to inherit (and the corrupt forces that have shaped it), The Odyssey is perhaps the closest the filmmaker has come to, as Circe (Samantha Morton) would say, knowing the men in his movies.

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Contrary to the typical Nolan film, several female characters are scattered across protagonist Odysseus’ long journey home from Troy. Supernatural beings like the witch Circe and nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) are wily deceivers—much like Odysseus himself, who is often associated with the epithet “polytropos” (much-turning). Odysseus’ cunning makes him a favorite of Athena (Zendaya), goddess of wisdom and war, and the story’s most prominent Olympian. In the original poem, her active role in Odysseus’ travels serves as a direct contrast to the societal limitations placed on human women.

Odysseus’ wife Penelope has spent his 20-year absence raising their son Telemachus (Tom Holland) and fending off slovenly suitors who seek to take control of the family’s home kingdom of Ithaca in his absence. In Nolan’s version, Hathaway’s Penelope is confined almost entirely within her chambers throughout the film’s behemoth running time. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shoots her framed behind her private screen door, or through the loom she secretly unravels each night; if she never finishes her off-screen father-in-law’s burial shroud, she will not be forced to remarry. Like Kitty Oppenheimer, she has grown tired of living in her husband’s long, winding shadow. While Penelope remains steadfastly faithful to Odysseus, both she and Kitty are forced to answer for their partners’ embattled reputations (here, in the threat of suitors decimating the family home rather than in a US Senate hearing).

Nolan, who has described his Odyssey as “a middle-aged love story,” is reluctant to acknowledge complications in Odysseus and Penelope’s marriage. In Wilson’s edition, Penelope faces mixed emotions at the prospect of her husband’s return—she is “overjoyed” upon recognizing him, but, while describing a metaphorical dream to a disguised Odysseus about an eagle (Odysseus) killing the geese in her home (the suitors), she admits that she “wept and wailed” at the geese’s deaths.

This ambivalence is absent from the film, as are most of Odysseus’ extramarital escapades. His affair with the sorceress Circe, which begets three sons in Greek mythology, is omitted entirely. Rather than knowingly entering into an affair with Calypso, Nolan’s Odysseus can only be with her while he has forgotten his wife’s existence. This Odyssey is remarkably chaste, save for a postcoital flashback in which Penelope refuses to promise Odysseus that she will take another husband should he die in the war. When he’s unable to promise her in turn that he’ll come back, she replies, “Then your memory won’t be making my decisions.”

The film’s other two mortal women, Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, have historically served as warped reminders of who Penelope might have become in her husband’s absence. That they are reimagined here as identical twin sisters, both played by Lupita Nyong’o, makes this framing even more glaringly apparent. The Helen of legend is in some ways the ultimate Nolanian woman: a beautiful face traditionally framed as the catalyst for the Trojan War, one of the most consequential quests in all of Greek mythology.

If Helen represents an extreme version of what could happen should Penelope take another husband while Odysseus lives, then her sister Clytemnestra is a twisted foil to Penelope and Telemachus’ relationship. After she kills her husband, the Mycenaean king Agamemnon (Benny Safdie), for sacrificing their daughter to the gods, she is in turn murdered in vengeance, off camera, by her son Orestes.

Perhaps the most modern element of this Odyssey is its cursory reminders that, contrary to what the original text insinuates, women’s sexual fidelity is the pretext, not the cause, for men’s bloody battles. As Odysseus tells Penelope, the true cause of the Trojan War is Agamemnon’s desire to break Troy’s control of trading routes. When Helen’s husband Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) jeers that her now-scarred face would only launch 500, not 1,000 ships, she bitterly points out that the war was really engineered for his “brother’s ambition.” Neither Helen nor Clytemnestra is given much time for interiority over The Odyssey’s running time, but the film at least nods to their justifiable anger toward their fates.

Despite 19th-century translator Samuel Butler’s speculation to the contrary, there is no historical evidence suggesting that any women played a part in crafting the Odyssey (the composition and recitation of Greek epics was an exclusively male affair). The poem’s supernatural women stand in for ancient men’s ability to imagine the capacities of feminine power, without directly threatening their masculine sense of control as mortal women could.

Nolan’s version of The Odyssey is exceedingly light on Greek gods. The film’s opening crawl situates us in “a time of apparent magic,” quite the understatement for a tale in which men are transformed into pigs and coaxed into amnesia via lotus flowers. Supernatural happenings are very much still afoot, but the film itself is far more interested in how the gods of Mount Olympus manifest as figments of our male heroes’ own neuroses.

Athena is the only god we physically see in this version of the Odyssey, and even her presence is questionable. Nolan’s greatest adaptational subversion comes in the final minutes of the film, as a still-disguised Odysseus admits to Penelope that the Trojan horse—the trick that legend will remember as his greatest victory—is actually his greatest shame. In engineering the means through which his men raped and pillaged across Troy, Odysseus assumes the blame for the irrevocable desecration of the civilization he holds dear (as he tells Penelope, “To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire”). The Athena that has accompanied him for years bears the face of the priestess who was brutalized and murdered outside the Athenian temple where the horse was delivered as a false peace offering.

This Nolanian decision that casts Odysseus less as a victorious tactician than as a destroyer of worlds whose Trojan horse is tantamount to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb (the Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin biography that inspired Oppenheimer notably places the figure within the realm of Greek tragedy, dubbing him the “American Prometheus”).

One could argue that Odysseus hasn’t been counseled by Athena at all, but rather by a ghost or hallucination alluding to his primal wartime sin. The goddess doesn’t appear to other human characters while in disguise as a mortal in this version either. Telemachus regularly remarks that others, such as an old beggar or his guide Mentor (Ryan Hurst), have “wise eyes, Athena’s eyes.” Although Athena presents as both of these men in the original text, here they’re flesh-and-blood reminders of the godlike potential within humanity itself. Which, in a Nolan film, never ends well.

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There’s a poignancy to Nolan’s decision to frame the gods as reflections of people’s own moral reckonings. His last two films are still enamored with the great man complex, but more so as a prism for probing existential anxieties about the world that future generations stand to inherit. Greek civilization in The Odyssey is teetering on the precipice of the same hubristic sociopolitical collapse that Oppenheimer argued the United States has been hurtling toward since the end of World War II (Telemachus’ assertion to his mother that Ithaca can’t be endangered because they’re “part of the greatest civilization ever known” is laughably naive).

By positioning their leads as emblems of society-wide destruction, Oppenheimer and The Odyssey invite Western viewers, many of whom live within waning empires themselves, to use these figures as a means to interrogate their own complacency in the destruction their countries wreak. In a way, this makes the main characters more universally representative than many of Nolan’s previous protagonists, men whose transgressions in films like Inception (2010), Memento (2000), and The Prestige (2006) were rooted in interpersonal conflicts that racked up a female body count.

Still, it’s a shame that Athena’s smaller role inevitably erases the fantastical agency that the immortal women of The Odyssey usually hold, and situates them within the same patriarchal confines of the human world and Nolan’s filmography as a whole.

Out of all the epic’s deities, Calypso’s character ultimately suffers the most. The dreamlike seven years that Odysseus spends on the nymph’s island evoke “Limbo,” the subconscious world in which Inception’s Cobb and his late wife Mal became trapped. Like Cobb and Memento’s Leonard, he has become paralyzed by his own self-deception. After the Sirens taunt Odysseus with the truth that he’s too mired in his own guilt to face going home, he would much rather dissociate entirely than face his own fractured psyche.

Odysseus’ eventual grappling with his suppressed memories grants Nolan permission to frame The Odyssey as one of his beloved nonlinear narratives. Calypso, who claims that her Munchausen by proxy–esque administration of the lotus flowers protected her lover until his mind was sufficiently healed, nobly accepts his decision to leave her. The powerful Calypso who rails against the sexist double standards of Mount Olympus, who makes petty asides about being more beautiful than Penelope while bidding farewell to Odysseus, is granted no personality at all. Like The Dark Knight Trilogy’s Rachel Dawes, her only source of value is in reflecting Odysseus’ own inner life back at him. (Here, at least, Calypso avoids getting blown up.)

Nolan tends to discover greater depths with his hard-edged women—consider The Dark Knight Rises’s slinky femme fatale Selina Kyle (a.k.a. “the Cat”) or The Prestige’s two-timing magician’s assistant, Olivia. The sorceress Circe, one of Odysseus’ most formidable adversaries on his long voyage home, falls into this lineage. Nolan’s version of the character is reminiscent of the one found in Madeline Miller’s 2018 novel Circe, which reimagines various myths from her perspective. Miller’s Circe is well acquainted with the violent, harsh realities that come with asserting oneself as a woman in a civilization strung together by fragile myths about masculine power. Zeus, threatened by her powers, exiles her to the remote island of Aeaea; later, she is raped by sailors whom she has agreed to shelter in her home.

The sequence in which Circe turns Odysseus’ men into pigs is a grotesque marvel of practical effects. The costs of war are best conveyed through The Odyssey’s often excruciating sound design: the gargles of soldiers drowning inside the Trojan horse, the agonized screams of the blinded Cyclops, and, here, the snapping of bones as the men’s faces are distended into snouts.

When Odysseus confronts Circe about her sorcery, he asks her if his men tried to hurt her.

“They would have,” she insists, going so far as to describe the men’s human forms as their true “disguises.” Given her backstory, it’s difficult to argue with her.

Nolan has been criticized for his didacticism, yet Circe’s frank monologue about humanity’s penchant for patriarchal violence never feels trite. “They’ve raped and pillaged across the world for you, and you think that’s against their nature?” she asks Odysseus. “You thought they’d respect me in my home? […] Know your own men!”

But in Circe’s scenes, Nolan is as clear-eyed about the gendered parameters of his epics as he’s ever been. For all the flaws of his modern mythmaking, that’s an evolution worth retelling.