Christopher Nolan's Collapsing Worlds

The Odyssey and the Bronze Age Collapse

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Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is many things. It is, first and foremost, a blockbuster movie of precisely the kind that has made Nolan himself famous, wealthy, and lauded for making over the past two decades. Its second aspect - a distant second - is an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, the epic poem stitched together from a variety of overlapping, competing, occasionally incompatible oral traditions sometime during the Greek Archaic Period. Nolan’s Odysseus is definitively not the compulsive trickster of the poem; instead, he’s a veteran of a long and punishing war, haunted by what he’s done, who he’s become, and the consequences of his actions.

We don’t need to dwell here on the movie’s faithfulness to the original. Others have done so at length, with varying levels of good faith and insight into either the Odyssey or the movie that bears the name. Suffice to say that Nolan’s project is a rather different one than Homer (or the assemblage of poets who produced the text bearing the name) embarked on more than 2,500 years ago. To my way of thinking, the movie’s faithfulness to the original poem has little to do with its effectiveness as a coherent film or what it has to say about the present. Judged by that standard, Nolan’s Odyssey has a great deal to offer.

Nolan tells us precisely what his film is about. “Our age of bronze is collapsing,” says Odysseus at one point, perhaps the movie’s clunkiest line. It’s rivaled for clunkiness only by a statement from Odysseus’s long-suffering spouse Penelope, who comments, “Our civilization is collapsing.”

We might interpret this dialogue as an attempt to add a patina of heft to a story that is fundamentally about one man’s journey home. The same goes for the repeated references to “peoples of the sea,” whose depredations weigh heavily on the minds of the main characters. A big story needs a big world, and a general air of collapse and lurking danger around the edges goes a long way toward creating the vibe that allows the film to function as an epic.

Yet this repeated emphasis with falling worlds, and those who bear the responsibility for tearing out the pillars that keep societies standing, is in fact the movie’s fundamental concern. In his moment of confession to Penelope, Odysseus admits that the Trojan Horse - his great accomplishment, for which he’s renowned and famous throughout the Greek world despite his physical absence - was a monstrous violation: “One man’s idea, one man’s trick, to break Zeus’s Law forever. We lived in a world of palaces, trade, language, blind to its beauty, until we broke it.”

Homer’s poem features plenty of questioning of the costs of war and the damage wrought by violent men: The shade (ghost) of Achilles, whom Odysseus meets during his excursion to Hades, plainly states, “‘Odysseus, you must not comfort me for death. I would prefer to be a workman, hired by a poor man on a peasant farm, than rule as king of all the dead.”

Where Nolan departs is in his explicit connection of this questioning to a genuine time and place: the late Bronze Age of the eastern Mediterranean, an era when long-distance trade tied together powerful kingdoms everywhere from Greece to Egypt to Mesopotamia. For the first time in human history, a large-scale state system emerged, with regular communication and diplomacy between rulers that went beyond temporary alliances and continuous warfare. Gold mined in the Egyptian deserts became jewelry worn by nobles living on the island of Crete, artists from Crete painted frescoes on the walls of Egyptian pharaohs’ tombs, Greek sword styles became popular as far away as Denmark, Canaanite ships transported wine and aromatics from port to port, and mercenary charioteers could find work anywhere from the Aegean to the Arabian Desert. Merchants found safety and riches by trading at the palaces of the ruling kings, protected by the diplomacy of their overlords and the shared wealth they created.

This is the world Nolan evokes, but what makes this world so compelling is the fact that after existing for centuries, it utterly collapsed in a few short decades around 1200 BC. This was the Bronze Age Collapse.

(If you’d like to learn more about the Bronze Age Collapse, check out my book Lost Worlds!)

We have an old story of how this happened, based on a selective reading of the few scattered written sources we have: Invading Sea Peoples of unknown origins were responsible for a wave of indiscriminate destruction that brought low the formerly glittering late Bronze Age world. This simple idea no longer holds - we no longer see the Sea Peoples as a coherent entity, much less the party responsible for this entire disaster - but something really did snap around 1200 BC. Finding out precisely what, and who was both affected and responsible, has been a major concern of scholars working in a variety of fields over recent decades.

Without putting books on his shelf, I would guess that Nolan read Eric Cline’s seminal work 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Cline argues forcefully that what happened around 1200 BC was, in fact, a collapse that left behind diminished populations and less materially sophisticated societies; that it affected much of the eastern Mediterranean, everywhere between Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia; and that the Bronze Age Collapse was caused by a runaway combination of factors, ranging from climatic shifts to political instability, that snowballed into a general crisis. After decades of languishing on the vine as other topics took precedence, the Bronze Age Collapse has quite suddenly become a major topic of debate.

Since that book was released more than a decade ago, archaeologists, historians, philologists, and climatologists have delved deep into research on a number of aspects of the eastern Mediterranean more than 3,000 years ago. Some scholars aren’t convinced that what happened around 1200 BC amounts to a full-blown collapse; and what even is a collapse, anyway? Let’s review what the evidence actually says about this period, and then we’ll evaluate Nolan’s use of the age as a setting for this particular story.

Around 1250 BC, the late Bronze Age world of the eastern Mediterranean was at its height. Sophisticated kingdoms and empires controlled that entire vast space: the petty kingdoms of the Mycenaeans in Greece, the potent Hittite Empire in Anatolia and Syria, the Assyrians and Babylonians in Mesopotamia, and New Kingdom Egypt in northeast Africa. These kings ruled from their palaces, which were both political centers and the nodes of the economic network that tied these places together.

By 1150 BC, just a century later, the Mycenaean Greek palaces were almost entirely gone, as were the petty kingdoms that had ruled from them. The Hittite Empire had ceased to exist, abandoning its longtime capital at Hattuşa and splintering into a series of smaller entities. The Assyrians withdrew from their extended territory back to the fringes of their home, the city of Aşşur in northern Iraq, while the Babylonians barely clung on further south. Egypt’s New Kingdom assassinated its last great pharaoh in 1155 BC and held out as a unified entity for another few decades, but it too would soon splinter.

The constant long-distance trade and communication that had pulled the various corners of this world together effectively ceased. Whole regions, like the vicinity of the Hittite capital at Hattuşa and whole swathes of Greece, lost half to three quarters of their previous population. Many of those Mycenaean palaces were destroyed by fire, and so were numerous cities: Hisalrik, the site of the city we know as Troy, suffered not one but two episodes of destruction, the second dating to around 1180 BC. The city of Ugarit, on the Syrian coast, was razed to the ground. In 1207 and 1177 BC, Egypt suffered two invasions by groups they call the “Sea Peoples,” whom they defeated in extraordinarily bloody, well-documented battles. On the second occasion, the Egyptians settled the surviving Sea Peoples in the Levant, which was then a part of Egypt’s extended empire; the group known in the Egyptian texts as Peleset were likely the forerunners of the Biblical Philistines, and based on ancient DNA evidence, may well have originated in the Aegean.

What’s most essential to note is that though there were previous episodes of destruction in this world - the late Bronze Age was hardly peaceful - nothing was rebuilt this time around. Whatever impulses had underpinned that particular way of organizing things, whatever beliefs made it viable, whatever material bases made it possible to organize and rule in those fashions, were now gone. Nowhere was this transformation more profound than in Greece, where a literate, cosmopolitan society of kings and palaces simply disappeared.

Why did this happen? Both textual and archaeological sources tell us that droughts and famines struck several portions of the eastern Mediterranean right around this time. It’s tempting to build our entire interpretative edifice on this insight: When climates change, states fall and societies are forced to adapt. Peasants don’t want to be taxed by kings and nobles when they can’t feed their children, and this surely explains at least some of the destruction and political decentralization we see in the archaeological record: Without a thriving underclass, there was nobody for the wealthy elites to exploit, and it was elite culture that suffered the most in the Bronze Age Collapse.

As appealing and logical as this explanation seems, it skips a few key causal steps. There is no evidence of climatic disruption directly associated with the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces: Where we can track climatic events in conjunction with the archaeological record, as is the case near the destroyed palace at Pylos, it seems that the local rulers weathered the initial drought but then fell apart during a slightly later time of increased rainfall. Instead of a direct cause, we should think of climatic disruption as an accelerant for existing social and political tensions: not as destiny, but as a major factor that can easily exacerbate an already tense, unstable situation. What matters more is the interconnected nature of the system as a whole: What happened in Mycenaean Greece rippled outward through those same networks of trade and communication that bound the late Bronze Age world together.

To the extent that we can date the sequence of events around 1200 BC, this collapse seems to have struck first in the Aegean, then spread east and south to Syria, the Levant, and Egypt. If this is correct, it means that the process we call the Bronze Age Collapse actually began among the Mycenaean Greeks. This is plausible, and several of the names of the ethnic groups the Egyptians counted among the “Sea Peoples” were likely of Aegean origin: Ekwesh, a name that appears in Egyptian texts, is almost certainly a rendering of “Achaeans,” the general term for the Greeks in the Homeric epics.

According to this interpretation - which I find pretty solid, given the evidence at our disposal - internal upheaval in Mycenaean Greece produced a wave of burned palaces. We have not the foggiest idea why these palaces were burned; social rebellions against kingly rule are one possibility, but it’s equally likely that competition between petty kings led to some centers wiping out others. As the palaces burned, these warriors took to their ships, spreading out across the eastern Mediterranean and doing precisely what they had done at home on a wider scale. While we can’t prove it, the destruction of the city we know as Troy around 1180 BC may well have come at their hands. Not all of the “Sea Peoples” need have been Mycenaeans, but some clearly were. In the decades after 1200 BC, cities were burned and states fell all along the eastern Mediterranean littoral.

Were the “Sea Peoples” responsible for all of this? Almost certainly not, just as placing all the blame on climate change misses the mark. It’s more apt to think of maritime piracy and predation as symptoms of the broader disintegration of the world rather than its cause; pirates thrive when states don’t have the capacity to stop them. Amid a worsening climate, dissatisfaction with the ruling elite, and pervasive aristocratic and state competition, bad things snowballed quickly. The late Bronze Age Mediterranean was full of violent men with swords and ships, and when their previous employment - under the roofs of the kings’ palaces - disappeared, they did what they already knew how to do. This, to me, is the essence of the Bronze Age Collapse: As that civilization crumbled, men with swords made it all worse.

This brings us back to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. I think Nolan is at least vaguely aware of the recent scholarly discussion around the Sea Peoples, the Bronze Age Collapse, and the Greeks’ role in creating the ruins of a golden era. I appreciate that on its own merits: He captures the vibe of a world where danger lurked every time one looked out to sea and old, foundational ideas of decorum and proper behavior were falling by the wayside.

Scholars have spilled a great deal of ink debating whether a “collapse” is really such a bad thing, whether in fact political decentralization and a lack of kings and literate administrators might actually make life better for the bulk of the populace. I have never, in nearly two decades of studying state disintegration and social upheaval, found those arguments convincing. If populations are falling, mortality is rising or fertility is dropping, usually both, and neither of those options says much good about that society. If palaces are burning and populations are dropping, that doesn’t seem like a gentle transformation into a more decentralized and less hierarchical society; it feels like a disaster, and we should be comfortable calling it one.

This is what I find appealing about Nolan’s Odyssey. His moral argument is clear: Violent men, whatever they might tell themselves or however much their societies might laud them for their violence, break things. That’s what they are, breakers. No amount of fine singing, epic poetry, or feasting in whitewashed palaces can change that. When Odysseus pulls on his helmet, he ceases to be a father, husband, and caretaker of Ithaca; he becomes a killer, a destroyer of worlds. Power, ambition, fame: this is what the Greeks set out to find, and when they do, it is the end of the very thing they sought to conquer.

Agamemnon’s victory dies with him, undone by the same overweening arrogance that led him to sacrifice his own daughter for favorable winds. Jon Bernthal’s menacing Menelaus, king of Sparta, has returned home victorious; yet he lives uncomfortably with the woman he slew thousands to reclaim and then disfigured as punishment, while rumors of raiding and destruction wrought of his own actions plague the peace of his kingdom. The sorceress Circe reveals the true nature of Odysseus’s surviving men - greedy, thoughtless wreckers - when she turns them into pigs, but we already know what kind of men they are after they burn the first seaside village they encounter seemingly for fun. Odysseus, the hero himself, is haunted by the knowledge that his famous trick broke the foundational law of hospitality that underpinned their world. His everlasting fame is no substitute for the lives ended, the buildings burned, the cities razed.

Is that Homer’s Odyssey? No, not exactly, despite hitting most of the same beats in the plot. Heroes in Homeric poetry do grapple with the consequences of their actions, but they exist in a world where heroic deeds are defined not by their moral quality but by the renown that can be wrung out of them. That is not Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. For him, even the renown is no recompense for the damage wrought not just to people but to the very ideas that allow them to interact with one another.

There’s a single line of the Roman poet Vergil’s famous Aeneid, another epic set in the aftermath of the fall of Troy, that more accurately captures Nolan’s view. Aeneas, the Trojan hero who will one day sail to Italy and lay the foundations for Rome, finds himself in Carthage, Rome’s future rival. At a temple in Carthage, Aeneas gazes at a series of murals depicting the Trojan War. The hero feeds his soul, Vergil says, on an empty picture.

That is what Odysseus’s heroism is: an empty picture.

Nolan’s message in The Odyssey is hard to mistake: destroy at your own peril, because once you start, it’s almost impossible to stop, with immense costs for both the perpetrators and the victims. It’s not a subtle work, but subtlety has never been Nolan’s strength. It’s also not Homer’s message, but we don’t live in Archaic Greece; we live in the 21st century.

Nolan’s thematic obsession is tailored for a world plagued by its own legions of wreckers and destroyers, its own Greeks waiting outside the gate. Might those wreckers, after watching this film in glorious IMAX, question the impact of their own actions on the broader world? Probably not, just as the politicians, soldiers, and nobles who eagerly devoured Homer’s work for millennia took little inspiration from Achilles’ shade but much from Achilles the living killer. We find what we need in works from the past, and Christopher Nolan is no exception. He sees a world around him tearing itself down, and offers a commentary, an analysis, a plea, wrapped in a skin nearly 3,000 years old.