Nolan, “The Odyssey” and the Autopsy of an Argument: When Plausibility Replaces Trut
From Homer to Nolan, from xenia to the politics of migration, and from the Bronze Age collapse to artificial intelligence
This article grew out of two interventions that sparked a debate over the political interpretation of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey: the first by Peter Swallow, who reads the film as an allegory of the crisis of the rules-based international order, and the subsequent amplification of that interpretation in Italy by Alessandro Barbero. At the center of Swallow’s argument is xenia, rendered by Nolan as the “Law of Zeus”: the principle that governs the relationship between host and guest in the Homeric world and that, according to Swallow, becomes in the film a metaphor for multilateralism and the contemporary international order.
That interpretation raises the central question of this article: how much of what is being attributed to the film is actually in the film, how much belongs to Nolan’s reinterpretation, and how much is being supplied by the observer?
This is not merely a philological question. Xenia in Homer is not simply a celebration of openness to the stranger. It is a rule of reciprocity. It imposes obligations on the host, but also on the guest. The stranger must be respected, but the stranger must also respect the rules of hospitality. When that reciprocity is broken, the social and moral order is endangered. In the Odyssey, the suitors are not merely guests: they are guests who turn hospitality into appropriation, abuse, and systematic violation of its rules. Their destruction is inseparable from that violation.
The issue becomes even more interesting when we consider Nolan’s ending and its reference to the collapse of Mycenaean civilization. If the film connects catastrophe to the violation of the “Law of Zeus,” and if that violation is read as a metaphor for the breakdown of the rules that make coexistence possible, then its message may be less straightforwardly “woke” than it first appears. Xenia does not simply say: welcome the stranger. It says: welcome the stranger within a framework of reciprocity that both sides are required to respect.
And this is where the political question changes perspective. The casting of a Black actress as Helen helped place the film immediately within the symbolic territory of contemporary progressivism, provoking accusations of “wokeness” on one side and celebratory readings on the other. But what if Helen had been played by a white actress? Would we have read the same film in the same way? And, more importantly, does an ethnically inclusive representation of an ancient character really allow us to conclude that the film endorses a particular conception of hospitality, immigration, or cosmopolitanism?
Perhaps the paradox is precisely this: a film presented as a celebration of openness may be built around a conception of hospitality that is far more demanding than its political surface suggests. Xenia does not erase the distinction between guest and host; it makes that distinction morally binding. It does not abolish the rules of the community; it establishes the conditions under which an encounter with the other can remain peaceful. And when those rules are systematically violated, the world of the Odyssey suggests that hospitality can turn from a principle of civilization into a cause of catastrophe.
This does not mean that Nolan necessarily intended to advance a “nationalist” argument, nor that Swallow is necessarily wrong in his reading. It means something simpler—and perhaps more important: before deciding what a film is trying to tell us, we should first establish what we can legitimately infer from it.
That tension—between Homer and Nolan, between xenia and contemporary politics, between inclusion and reciprocity, between interpretation and evidence—is where the autopsy of the argument begins. Because the real question, in the end, is not which political side the film belongs to. It is whether we still have the ability to distinguish what a work actually shows us from what, because we want it to say something, we end up making it say.
Introduction
There is a simple way to understand whether an argument is solid: do not look first at the conclusion. Follow the chain that is supposed to lead us there. That is what I want to do here with Peter Swallow’s argument about Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey”, subsequently amplified in Italy by the medievalist Alessandro Barbero. I am not interested, at least initially, in establishing whether Swallow is politically right. Nor am I interested in deciding whether Nolan’s film is beautiful or ugly, woke or anti-woke, progressive or conservative.
The question is more elementary: do the conclusions Swallow draws actually follow from his premises? It is an elementary question, but not a secondary one. If the conclusions do not follow, we have a problem that goes well beyond The Odyssey. There is also an important clarification to make from the beginning: this article is itself an interpretation.
I am not claiming to demonstrate that Swallow is wrong about the overall meaning of Nolan’s film. I am claiming something narrower, and therefore more verifiable: that we should distinguish what is fact from what is interpretation, and what requires additional premises before it can become a conclusion. That distinction sounds elementary. It is precisely the distinction we are increasingly losing.
1. The first premise is true
Swallow begins with xenia, the ancient Greek concept of hospitality and the regulated relationship between guest and host. This is a strong starting point. In Homer’s Odyssey, hospitality is unquestionably fundamental. The behaviour of the guest and the host has moral, social and religious consequences. Zeus is associated with the protection of strangers and guests, and violations of the rules of hospitality are repeatedly presented as morally significant. There is no need to contest this point. And that is precisely why the next step is interesting. A true premise does not automatically make every conclusion built upon it true. The truth of premises and the validity of an inference are two different problems.
2. From xenia to “Zeus’s Law”
Nolan takes this ancient concept and translates it into the film as “Zeus’s Law”. Here we need to distinguish two levels. Xenia belongs to the conceptual world of ancient Greek culture. “Zeus’s Law”, by contrast, is Nolan’s narrative formulation: a cinematic device through which the principle is made explicit, memorable and central to the story. This is not a minor philological distinction.
The film turns an ancient social and religious institution into something closer to a universal moral law: treat others as you would want to be treated, respect strangers, and understand that a society built on travel, exchange and encounter can survive only if a minimum of mutual trust exists. That is a perfectly legitimate artistic choice. But it is already an interpretation.
Nolan is not simply reproducing Homer. He is extracting one element of Homeric culture, simplifying it, universalising it and placing it at the centre of the moral architecture of his film. That does not make the choice illegitimate. It makes it Nolan’s choice.
3. The first real leap: from xenia to the international order
Swallow then makes the decisive move. Nolan’s treatment of xenia, he argues, is “inequivocally modern” and functions as an allegory of the progressive disintegration of the rules-based international order. Let us stop here. We are no longer dealing with a fact. We are dealing with an interpretation. An interpretation may be brilliant, persuasive and even illuminating. But to establish it, we need to explain why the film supports it and why it is preferable—or at least particularly strong—compared with alternative readings.
The transition is roughly this: xenia → general principle of coexistence → international order. It is possible. But it is not a deduction. It is an interpretive metaphor. And this apparently pedantic distinction is actually the heart of the matter, because a metaphor can be extraordinarily persuasive without being a demonstration.
4. The second leap: from interpretation to message
The problem becomes more evident when Swallow moves from saying that the film can be read as an allegory of the international order to asserting that its message is that society will collapse if we abandon that order. The language has changed. We are no longer hearing “This is one possible interpretation.” We are hearing “This is what the film is telling us.” That is a much stronger claim.
To justify it, we would need additional evidence: the narrative structure, the dialogue, recurring themes, the director’s statements, the relationship between different parts of the story and, crucially, the alternatives that the film either excludes or leaves open. It is not enough that an interpretation is compatible with the film. Compatibility is not demonstration.
This is one of the most common problems in contemporary reasoning: confusing something that can explain a phenomenon with something that necessarily explains it.
5. Then Russia, China and Trump enter the picture
Swallow next brings in Russia, China and Donald Trump: the violation of state sovereignty, disputes over international maritime law and the retreat from multilateral cooperation. These are real political issues. But what do they demonstrate about Nolan’s Odyssey?
By themselves, nothing. They demonstrate that the contemporary world contains conflicts over international rules. They become relevant to the film only after we have accepted the previous interpretive step: that Nolan’s xenia represents the contemporary international order. Once that premise is accepted, Russia, China and Trump become useful examples. But they are not evidence of the premise itself. This is an important distinction. I would not necessarily call the reasoning formally circular. Something subtler is happening.
A framework of interpretation has been constructed, and contemporary facts are then selected because they acquire meaning within that framework. The problem is not that those facts are false. The problem is that they do not, by themselves, prove that the framework is correct.
6. But there is another possible reading of xenia
And this is where the argument becomes considerably more interesting. Because if we take xenia seriously, we should not reduce it to the modern political formula “be welcoming to foreigners”. That is only half of the relationship. The institution of xenia establishes obligations on both sides. The host must offer protection, food, shelter and respect. But the guest is not therefore entitled to do whatever he wants.
The guest has obligations too: he must respect the host, avoid abusing hospitality and recognise that hospitality is a relationship governed by reciprocity. In other words, xenia is not simply “The stranger arrives, therefore the host must accept everything.” It is closer to “The stranger enters under a recognised relationship of mutual obligation.” That distinction matters enormously when the film is read politically. Because the moment xenia is transformed into a metaphor for contemporary migration, internationalism or multiculturalism, the question becomes unavoidable:
Who is obliged to respect the law of Zeus? Only the host? Or also the guest? If the answer is only the first, then we are no longer really describing xenia. We are projecting a modern political principle onto an ancient institution while selectively removing the reciprocal obligations that made the institution work in the first place. And this opens a completely different political reading of Nolan’s film.
7. The Proci problem
The most obvious example is sitting in the centre of the Odyssey itself. The suitors are not simply “foreigners”. They are guests who have violated the very institution that protects them. They enter Odysseus’ household, consume its resources, abuse its hospitality, pressure Penelope and effectively behave as though the host owes them unlimited accommodation.
Their punishment is therefore not simply an act of violence against unwanted outsiders. It is presented as the restoration of an order that they have violated. That is precisely why the suitors are so important to Nolan’s decision to make “Zeus’s Law” the moral centre of the film. The same rule that obliges the host to respect the stranger also imposes limits upon the stranger.
The moral principle is reciprocal. And that makes the political interpretation much less comfortable than Swallow’s version suggests. Because if xenia is the metaphor, the relevant question is not merely “Are we willing to accept the stranger?” It is also “Is the stranger willing to enter the relationship on the terms that make hospitality possible?”
This does not automatically produce an anti-immigration argument. Nor does it prove that Nolan intended one. But it does demonstrate that the concept cannot simply be translated into an unconditional political obligation to welcome.
8. And then there is the Bronze Age collapse
This is where Nolan’s film makes its most radical departure from Homer. The film connects the moral collapse of xenia with a much larger historical catastrophe: the collapse of the Bronze Age world. The film invokes the “Sea Peoples”, whose raids and violence are associated with the destruction of the existing order. Contemporary historical scholarship, however, does not support the simplistic proposition that the Mycenaean world collapsed because “migrants arrived”.
The Bronze Age collapse was a complex regional phenomenon involving warfare, political instability, economic disruption, environmental pressures, migrations and other interconnected factors. The very category “Sea Peoples” is itself a modern scholarly label for groups known through fragmentary ancient evidence, not the name of a single unified people with a clearly established identity. So here again we need to separate three things: what happens in the film; the historical explanation constructed by the film; and what historians can actually establish about the Bronze Age collapse.
They are not the same thing. But there is an additional twist in Nolan’s version that makes the political reading even more complicated. The film ultimately turns the “Sea Peoples” into a kind of mirror of the Greeks themselves. The people perceived as marauding outsiders are connected to the violence unleashed by the Greeks after Troy.
The supposed barbarian threat therefore becomes, at least in part, the consequence of the civilisation that created it. That is not a straightforward “migrants destroy civilisation” narrative. It is closer to: civilisation destroys its own rules and then encounters the consequences of that destruction. That is a much more interesting proposition. And it brings us back to xenia. The danger is not simply that outsiders exist. The danger is that the rules governing relations between insiders and outsiders cease to exist.
9. Troy, the horse and the destruction of the rule
There is another uncomfortable detail. Odysseus himself is not an innocent guardian of Zeus’s Law. The Trojan Horse is a deception. Troy is destroyed through a violation of trust. And Nolan’s film appears to make this morally consequential. This is crucial because it prevents the story from being reduced to a simple opposition between virtuous insiders and barbaric outsiders. Odysseus wins. But the manner in which he wins helps poison the world he eventually returns to.
The hero therefore becomes part of the problem. And this is perhaps where Nolan’s film is at its strongest: the rule is not simply a weapon that good people use against bad people. It is a rule that binds everyone. If you violate it because you believe your cause is just, you have still contributed to its destruction.
That is a genuinely interesting moral idea. And it is also politically ambiguous. Because it can support a cosmopolitan interpretation. But it can also support a conservative one.
10. The Black Helen question
Which brings us to the controversy that preceded the film: Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. The casting became one of the central targets of the film’s critics on the right, particularly Elon Musk, who attacked Nolan over Nyong’o’s casting and accused the film of pursuing ideological diversity.
The obvious response is that Helen is a mythological character and that there is no archaeological photograph of the “historically correct” Helen. Fair enough. But I think the political question is more interesting than the usual argument over whether the casting is historically accurate. Because imagine the film without Lupita Nyong’o. Imagine Nolan had cast a conventionally white actress as Helen. Would the film have been received in the same way? Probably not.
The accusation of “wokeness” would have lost one of its most visible objects. And that matters because casting does not merely affect the film itself. It affects the political frame through which the film is received.
A Black Helen makes the film immediately legible to contemporary audiences as a film participating in the politics of representation.
That means the same moral argument about xenia is introduced into the cultural ecosystem already carrying a particular political label. And this leads to a fascinating possibility. Perhaps the casting makes the film easier for progressive audiences to accept before they have actually examined what the film is saying.
In other words, the “woke” surface could potentially function as a kind of Trojan Horse. The audience sees representation. It recognises the expected political signal. It relaxes. And then it encounters a much more complicated proposition: hospitality is reciprocal; entry into a community does not mean exemption from its rules; and the survival of a society depends upon those rules being respected by both sides. I am not claiming that this was Nolan’s conscious strategy.
We have no evidence for that. I am saying that the interpretation is logically possible, and that it exposes a weakness in the assumption that diverse casting automatically entails a progressive political message.
The politics of representation and the politics of the narrative are not necessarily identical.
11. Could xenia actually support a form of nationalism?
This is the point at which Swallow’s reading becomes particularly vulnerable. If xenia means simply “be open to foreigners”, then the political conclusion is obvious: hospitality becomes an argument for cosmopolitanism and multilateralism. But if xenia means a reciprocal relationship governed by rules, the conclusion changes.
A society may legitimately say: You are welcome here, but the relationship has rules. The guest has rights. The host has rights. The guest has obligations. The host has obligations. Neither side is morally invisible. And that does not abolish the distinction between citizen and stranger. Indeed, it presupposes it. There can be no guest without a host.
There can be no hospitality without someone possessing a home in which hospitality can be offered. And there can be no meaningful xenia if the guest destroys the very rules that made the relationship possible.
This does not prove that nationalism is the correct political conclusion. But it does mean that xenia cannot simply be appropriated as an uncomplicated argument against nationalism. One can construct a different argument: a community has the right to defend the rules that make hospitality possible. That is not necessarily xenophobia. It may even be the opposite: if hospitality is to remain possible, the host must have sufficient confidence that the guest will respect the relationship.
The political problem begins only when this principle is transformed into a blanket claim that every outsider is inherently dangerous. But the opposite error is equally serious: assuming that every obligation lies exclusively with the host. Neither position corresponds very well to the reciprocal structure of xenia.
12. So what is Nolan actually saying?
This is where we should resist the temptation to solve the film too quickly. Nolan has publicly described themes in earlier films in terms that emphasise community, collective responsibility and the dangers of excessive individualism. Discussing Dunkirk, for example, he explicitly contrasted community and collective action with what he called a contemporary “cult of individuality”, and praised the strength of unions and collective organisation.
That does not make Nolan a Labour politician, a progressive ideologue or an advocate of a specific immigration policy. Nor do we have a sufficiently clear public statement in which Nolan himself says that The Odyssey is an allegory of the post-war rules-based international order in the precise terms used by Swallow.
That distinction matters. Swallow is making an interpretation. Nolan has supplied material that can make certain collective and communitarian readings plausible. But the leap from those facts to “Nolan’s film is fundamentally a defence of contemporary multilateralism” remains an inference. And, interestingly, the film itself seems to leave enough ambiguity for another reading. Perhaps Nolan is saying: Civilisation depends on rules. Swallow adds: Those rules are the rules-based international order.
A different viewer might add: Those rules are the rules of a particular community. Another might add: Those rules must govern both the host and the stranger. And another might conclude: A civilisation that abandons its own rules in the name of victory ultimately destroys itself. The film does not necessarily decide between these readings. That may be its strength. Or its weakness.
13. The problem with using Homer to prove a modern political thesis
This brings us back to the original argument. Swallow is entirely entitled to read Nolan’s Odyssey as a defence of multilateralism. But the argument becomes problematic when the interpretation is presented as though it were contained within the ancient material itself. Homer did not write about NATO.
He did not write about the United Nations. He did not write about the post-war rules-based international order. And xenia was not a primitive version of contemporary international law. It was a social, religious and moral institution belonging to a particular world. Nolan transforms it.
Swallow transforms Nolan’s transformation again. And we end up with: Homer → Nolan → Swallow → contemporary political conclusion. There is nothing illegitimate about this chain. But every arrow is an interpretive operation. That is precisely what needs to be acknowledged.
14. The appropriation of the ancient world
Here we reach perhaps the most interesting part of Swallow’s article. Swallow attacks a political right that, in his view, attempts to appropriate the ancient world in order to legitimise contemporary political battles.
And he is right about one important principle: nobody owns Homer. But the principle must be symmetrical. If nobody owns the ancient world, nobody owns its political interpretation either.
There is no authorised conservative reading. But there is no authorised progressive, cosmopolitan or multilateralist reading either. All interpretations must be judged by the same standards: evidence, coherence, knowledge of the original material and, above all, the ability to distinguish what the text shows from what we want the text to say.
The question is therefore not whether political appropriation of antiquity is legitimate. It is inevitable. The question is more uncomfortable: At what point do we stop interpreting an ancient text and start using it to support a position we already held?
15. And here we arrive at Barbero
If a professor, historian or intellectual endorses an argument of this kind, that does not mean he necessarily agrees with every one of its premises. But authority makes scrutiny more important, not less. The question should not be: “Barbero says it, therefore it must be interesting.” It should be: “Barbero says it. Let us see whether the reasoning holds.” The same principle applies to Swallow. It applies to Nolan. It applies to Elon Musk. It applies to a scientist. It applies to a journalist. And, above all, it applies to ourselves.
Authority can point us towards a source. It can suggest a hypothesis. It can make something worth listening to. It cannot replace verification.
16. The real problem is not being wrong
Being wrong is not the problem. An intelligent person can formulate a bad interpretation. An academic can make a mistake. A historian can misunderstand a film. A philosopher can construct a weak argument. A scientist can formulate a hypothesis that is later disproved. That is normal. Knowledge advances through error.
The problem begins when there is no longer an internal mechanism through which we can recognise the error. When every piece of information is immediately classified according to the political camp of the person who produced it. When we no longer ask “Is it true?” but “Whose side is it on?” When we no longer search for the strongest argument of the opponent, but for the argument that allows us to neutralise him. When we no longer listen in order to change our minds, but only in order to prepare our response.
At that point culture can become, paradoxically, an obstacle to knowledge. Because the more rhetorical tools we possess, the more capable we become of constructing an apparently coherent explanation for almost anything. And here lies the paradox: the less informed person may have few arguments; the highly informed person may have an infinite number. But having more arguments does not necessarily mean being more correct. It may simply mean having more instruments with which to defend a position.
17. The decisive question: what could change my mind?
At this point we arrive at the most important question of the entire exercise. Not “Are you right?” but: “What could make you change your mind?” It is an incredibly simple question, and one of the hardest to ask ourselves sincerely. Because a position that contains no possible circumstance capable of changing it gradually becomes indistinguishable from an identity.
If every piece of evidence is reinterpreted as confirmation; if every objection is explained as the opponent’s ignorance; if every contrary source is dismissed as propaganda; if every internal contradiction is justified as “complexity”; then we have built a position that is practically impermeable to reality.
And a position impermeable to reality does not become stronger because it possesses more information. It simply becomes harder to challenge.
18. Listening means accepting the possibility of being changed
This is where the question of listening returns. Listening does not mean waiting politely for the other person to finish so that we can reply. It means granting him, at least in principle, the possibility of changing our representation of the world. That is the difference between a conversation and two alternating monologues. It is the difference between critical thought and propaganda.
It is perhaps the difference between a living culture and a culture that has transformed knowledge into a rhetorical arsenal. A living culture is not a culture that never makes mistakes. It is a culture in which mistakes can still be corrected.
19. And this is the society that is supposed to govern artificial intelligence?
At this point the question of The Odyssey stops being only a question about The Odyssey. We are entering the age of generative artificial intelligence: machines capable of producing in seconds connections, analogies, explanations, interpretations and arguments in quantities incomparably greater than anything a single human being could produce.
The problem will certainly be the ability of machines to generate something plausible but false. But let us look in the mirror. Are we really certain that the biggest problem is the machine? If a machine produces a false connection, we must be able to recognise it. If it produces a beautiful interpretation, we must be able to distinguish the beauty of the interpretation from its validity. If it produces a persuasive narrative, we must ask what its premises are and whether its conclusion actually follows from them.
In other words, we need to recover precisely the skills that public debate is progressively teaching us to abandon: separating fact from interpretation; interpretation from evidence; correlation from causation; analogy from demonstration; plausibility from truth. Artificial intelligence will make all of this more important, not less. Because a machine does not need to convince us that a narrative is true. It only needs to make it plausible enough. And a plausible narrative is far more dangerous than an obviously absurd one.
The absurd narrative is easy to reject. The plausible one is completed by us.
20. The real risk of AI
AI is not giving us only machines capable of answering. It is giving us machines capable of arguing: capable of constructing, in seconds, an apparently impeccable chain between a fact, an interpretation and a conclusion; capable of finding analogies we had not noticed; capable of producing an explanation for almost everything. But an explanation is not necessarily a true explanation.
A connection is not necessarily a causal relationship. A coherent narrative is not necessarily a correct reconstruction. A persuasive answer is not necessarily a well-founded answer. That is the real cultural challenge posed by artificial intelligence. It will not be enough to build increasingly intelligent machines. We will have to build—or perhaps rebuild—human beings capable of resisting the persuasive power of apparent intelligence.
Otherwise something paradoxical will happen. We will have created tools capable of enormously multiplying our ability to produce arguments while progressively losing the ability to verify them. And then artificial intelligence will not necessarily increase the intelligence of society. It may simply increase the speed at which a society already convinced that it is right can manufacture ever better arguments for convincing itself that it is right.
That, perhaps, is the real danger. Not a machine that thinks too much. A society that verifies too little, while finally possessing machines capable of thinking persuasively on its behalf.
21. The problem is not being wrong. It is becoming unable to be wrong.
Perhaps, in the end, the question is not even whether Swallow is wrong. He may be right about the political meaning of Nolan’s film. He may even have identified one of the most interesting possible readings of Nolan’s Odyssey. But that does not change the problem we have encountered along the way: an interpretation does not become a demonstration simply because it is formulated by a competent person, with confidence and with a convincing narrative.
And the opposite is also true. An interpretation does not become false merely because we cannot demonstrate it like a theorem. The task of critical thought is not to turn every interpretation into proof. It is to know what kind of statement we are looking at: fact, interpretation, inference, analogy, hypothesis, prediction, political judgement. And, above all, which step requires a premise that has not yet been demonstrated.
If, when confronted with an argument, our first reaction is to ask whether we agree with its political conclusion, we have already missed the point. The first question should be: “Wait. Show me how you got there.” Where does this assertion come from? Which part is fact? Which part is interpretation? Which premise has been added without being declared? Which conclusion has actually been demonstrated? Which alternative has been excluded? And above all: what could make me change my mind?
That is not a weak question. It is one of the most demanding forms of intellectual freedom. Because it means accepting that reality still has the right to contradict us. And perhaps that is the capacity we should defend above all others: not the ability to always be right, but the ability to recognise when we are wrong.
Nolan’s Odyssey, in the end, is only the concrete case with which we began. The real question is much larger. It concerns one of the fundamental capacities of intellectual culture: the ability to listen to an argument without knowing in advance where we want it to lead. Once, that ability was considered an intellectual virtue. Today it risks becoming a rarity. And if that is really the case, then the question we should ask ourselves as artificial intelligence transforms the way we produce and consume arguments is not merely: How intelligent will machines become? It is also: How capable will we still be of thinking for ourselves? And perhaps, more radically still: Will we remain free enough to accept that, sometimes, we are the ones who are wrong?
