The Odyssey is a boarding school film

In 2023 the journalist Will Lloyd wrote a compelling article in the New Statesman in which he argued that all of Christopher Nolan’s films are influenced by his experience of boarding school. I was constantly reminded of this watching his latest epic, The Odyssey:

Every Christopher Nolan movie is about the torture of a man like Christopher Nolan.

[…] These men are obsessives, with a taste for the theatrical. Too secretive to ever tell people who they are, they simply demonstrate their genius. […] In these conservative parables, Nolan’s heroes always believe they are masters of “the structures of society”. And always they find themselves consumed by them.

Whenever these men lose control of their lives, Nolan takes them back to the dormitory at Haileybury […] Once they have taken enough punishment, and reconciled themselves to the tragic predicament all human beings find themselves in […] the director lets them out to breathe. No triumph can be achieved without indescribable loss. And every triumph involves a queasy, beaten recognition that the system, however compromised, must go on.

Christopher Nolan: the last Tory, by Will Lloyd

Three years before The Odyssey hit our screens, this is a brilliant description of what the film portrays. It’s also a pretty good summary of what boarding school can do to you.

Watching it, I was also put in mind Joy Schaverien’s theory of the boarding school survivor, memorably given the mnemonic A, B, C, D:

Abandonment	Feelings of being abandoned by primary caregivers, leading to confusion and distress.
Bereavement	A profound sense of loss, akin to mourning, due to separation from family and familiar surroundings.
Captivity	A sense of being trapped in the boarding school environment, with limited freedom to leave.
Dissociation	A psychological response where individuals may disconnect from their emotions or experiences as a coping mechanism.

I don’t think you need to be a highly trained psychologist and therapist, as Schaverien was, to see all of the above at work in Nolan’s version of The Odyssey.

We find in it: Odysseus’s longing for home; his irrational yet unwavering adherence to an invisible higher order (‘Zeus’s law’); his refusal, ever, to ask for help, or advice – from anyone, not from his trusted lieutenants, not from his family and certainly never from the opposite sex, in front of whom he remains comically tongue-tied; his dissociation from reality via drugs (the lotus flowers) and violence; and, most tragically of all, his slow realisation that home is the last place he wants to be. All of these things are present either during boarding school or within the psyche of those who survive it.

Christopher Nolan’s Odysseus is like a faithful rugby captain, who, on arriving at the away match discovers that his team not only have to play against boys who are twice the size (the Laestrygonians) but that they are amour-plated to boot. It would risk far too much embarrassment (the worst thing that can happen to you at boarding school) to ask the bus driver to turn around and take them back to school, so he has to go through with the match where his team are slaughtered. Literally.

And yet, make it home he does, where he is (eventually, after even more violence) reconciled with his family, servants and dog. He even (in this version) gets to sail off into the sunset with Ann Hathaway. But it will never be enough.