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Jonathan Pageau is WRONG About the Odyssey

Dr Scott Masson

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🗡️ More on THE ODYSSEY The Odyssey

Show Description:
Dr. Masson (‪@LitProf‬) responds to Jonathan Pageau's final review of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. Pageau calls the film a story of repentance, restoration, and the return of the Father — a symbolically dense, ultimately Christian retelling. But is it? A professor who has taught Homer for twenty-three years examines the three claims at the heart of Pageau's case: his interpretive method, the moral center he finds in the film, and his reading of the ending as a restored homecoming.

Along the way: why symbolic patterns cannot be separated from a story's ordered actions, why xenia is not the Golden Rule, how Nolan inverts the Sinon of Virgil and Dante, what the film borrows from Christianity without keeping, and why a return followed by abdication and exile is not the return of the king. With Pageau's argument presented fairly, in his own words.

Watch Jonathan Pageau's original review: Nolan’s The Odyssey Full Breakdown: The Po...

📖 ⏰ Chapters
00:00 A Return, Followed by Exile
00:35 Three Disagreements with Pageau
01:19 Pageau's Case, Fairly Stated
03:13 What Makes a Story the Same Story?
05:07 Clement, Basil, and the Praise of Virtue
05:43 Method: Symbolic Pattern vs. Narrative Action
07:08 Pageau in His Own Words
09:38 "Conserving Nothing"
09:42 The Moral Centre of Nolan's Film
11:53 Xenia, the Golden Rule, and the Betrayal of Sinon
17:00 Is the Structure Christian?
18:28 The Logos Is Embodied in the Mythos
21:16 The Father Returns — But as What?
23:50 Hiroshima and the Oppenheimer Story
26:16 Not the Return of the King
31:10 Get the Visual Guide

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#TheOdyssey #ChristopherNolan #JonathanPageau #Homer #MovieReview #ClassicalEducation #classics #literature #epic #GreatBooks #SymbolicWorld #OdysseyMovie

20 Comments

@marjanbakhtiarikish6433 1 month ago

Thank you, Spot on again! It was so enlightening and reassuring to hear your thorough analysis of Nolan's subversion of Homer's Odyssey. We find it absurd to be asked by Pageau, not to "compare" a movie that calls itself "Odyssey", has people cast in ancient costumes, has cyclops, etc to the original text of Homer; That our expectations to see a faithful adaptation is to be ridiculed. Pageau obviously makes so many projections of his own into the movie, that we are not even sure he was watching what was in front of him. That little batman statue in the background was a serious giveaway of Pageau's infatuation with Nolan and desire to defend him at all costs. Once more Thank you so much for your analysis, you have totally demolished all the misinterpretations and falsification that Nolan deliberately perpetrated and which Pageau seems to want to revel in and justify; to further his own postmodern interpretation. Pageau vs Professor: Pageau 0 - Professor won. Game over!

@arldoran 1 month ago

Pageau confused the cover-up with Nolan's true message.
This movie is nothing but a postmodern deconstruction of Homer's masterpiece.

@Saladiisima 1 month ago

I am so glad your channel popped up during this Nolan foofah. This is the 3rd of your takes I have heard and fully appreciated. They contain much of what I intuitively hold within on the fundamental importance of our ancient texts but do not have the training to express.

I skipped the uni track (early '80s), read many classics (post 1800s) and do now wish I had read the foundational heroic tales and especially so to my offspring. I had false assumptions on their accessibility and my own competence.

@koho 1 month ago

Classicist cage match! I'm here for it!

@Grace-Chapel 1 month ago

I admire Pageau and though he is far more educated than me, I am still confident that Nolan did not do nor intend to do what he claims.

@fountainpen2448 4 weeks ago

I wouldl ike very much to listen to your explanation but the music which should be in the background became the foreground and it was very distracting.

@AaronHowell-x1e 1 month ago

This poem and Nolan's version of it have been analyzed to death. I prefer just reading the book and watching the film starring Armand Assante and drawing my own conclusions.

@thecrookedtrail679 1 month ago

Why is there dramatic music in the background?

@georgelewis3047 1 month ago

I'll wager that half the posters chirping agreement down here did not see Pageau's talk, nor understand half of the technical content in this video (I confess I don't).
I have one basic conclusion from all of the Odyssey fooferah:
It is not good enough to say "Nolan has the right to express his creative vision (blah blah blah)". That is an uncritical cop-out. When you take a core, foundational part of Western patrimony (i.e., belongs to all Europeans) and invert and subvert it, you have not only failed Homer but cheated your audience. Nolan's errors and omissions are well documented elsewhere, but fundamentally he has misunderstood and misrepresented Odysseus. Impressive as the film may be technically, I do not give Nolan permission to shape my own mental movie that I create when reading the book (which I will do again). The tragedy is what a missed opportunity this is, which will not come around again for at least another decade.
(In any case, the appalling choice of using a uniformly Yankee voice with current vernacular is alone sufficient to repel me in a time of bellicose, abusive, imperialistic Yankee shouting.)

@Επαμεινώνδας82 1 month ago

Nolan made a great movie about modern society. He did not make Homer's Odyssey

@SKW-12 1 month ago

I'm not a scholar. But an interesting observation - I instinctively knew something didn't sit right with Nolan's version, and it took digging into many conversations like this one to put words to what I sensed. Thank you.

@TheLookingGlassAU 1 month ago (edited)

I thought The Matrix (1999) was a Christian centric film, but later discovered it's an extremely Gnostic film, not a Christian film.
If you haven't been trained how to discern author's intent vs reader centric postmodern hermeneutic then you read into any text what originates from your own emotions.
I have worked pretty hard to unlearn my postmodern indoctrination during high school and my early 20s. Maybe this explains the misinterpreting of Nolan by Pegeau

@goodkady 1 month ago (edited)

Listening to Pageau struggle to justify his cockamamie analysis was almost as painful as watching Nolie’s Homieheimer. Like taking a 3 hour nap in a Procrustean crib, n’sheesh.

@scholarius6209 1 month ago

Thank you, it was excellent.

We're kind of colleagues, since I teach Byzantine Patristics here in Russia and have a special course on Byzantine and Late Antique education, so I had to discuss Nolan's Odyssey with several people in detail. And some of them "bought" mr. Pageau's interpretation of Nolan's story as Christian as opposed to Homer's "pagan" story. Thank you for a detailed examination and refutation of this misunderstanding.

@rafaelsakarya 1 month ago

Phenomenal analysis! I was excited when I saw this title and was not let down. Wonderful listen, and will be listening again.

@Kapsouri 2 weeks ago

Thank you, great commentary. What’s the music in the background?

@CarpetcookieO_o 1 month ago

Thank you Dr. Masson I was hoping you would examine Pageau's analysis.

Could a possible origin of the methodological differences you perceive between Pageau and yourself be a difference of weighting the senses of interpretation?

Pageau seems to prioritize an allegorical or anagogical reading of the text and therefore a more iconographic view of Nolan's adaptation.

@dustinneely 1 month ago

I have a lot of respect for Pageau, but I feel his love for Christopher Nolan had him in full cope mode. IMO he totally missed this boat on his analysis.