Director: David Wain
Writers: Michael Showalter, David Wain
Stars: Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Michael Showalter

Synopsis: Set on the last day of camp, in the hot summer of 1981, a group of counselors try to complete their unfinished business before the day ends.

Some movies that make it into film festivals don’t find distribution. Rarely does a film like Wet Hot American Summer, which got raves from fans during its festival run, struggle to find a distributor. When the investors, not the filmmakers, picked USA Films as the distributor, the company gave the film a limited theatrical run. There were few who saw it in a theater and it made very little money.

Yet, the film gained a new life on home video, DVD, and eventually streaming. By the time streamers had gotten a hold of it, it had become a bona fide cult classic. A few years ago Netflix even paid for two limited series based off the film, which are not as good, but still have good moments. 

I, like many people, first saw the film on an internet list of great cult films while I was in college. After that first watch, I was head over heels in love. There are many parts that still make me laugh as hard as the first time I saw them.

In some of the most brilliant physical comedy, camp bad boy Andy (Paul Rudd) is the last to leave the mess hall after breakfast. Instead of clearing his dishes, he knocks them to the floor. Beth (Janeane Garofalo), the camp director, tells him to pick it up. There is a power struggle and Rudd makes the most of playing a teenager with his scoffs and protests, but he relents. As he picks up the pieces of his meal he gets more frustrated and starts dropping things again. The bit is absolute gold, but the icing on the cake is as Andy leaves, he gives Beth one last piece of his mind with a well placed middle finger. It’s a perfect scene in a film with some terrific physical comedy.

What sells scenes like Andy’s meltdown is the sincerity of the actors and the material. While it has parody elements, Wet Hot American Summer doesn’t indulge in overt parody like many films of its kind. Wet Hot American Summer is wholly its own. There is a depth to the silliness and while it is great at being funny, that depth and the message about the need to be yourself wholly and truly, rings utterly true. This is present in Steve’s (Kevin Sussman) strange “talent,” in Katie’s (Marguerite Moreau) confession to Coop (Michael Showalter) that sex is more important to her than love, in Gene’s (Christopher Meloni) unhinged, but ultimately affirming confession about his strange fetishes, and in Ben (Bradley Cooper) and McKinley’s (Michael Ian Black) love.

There’s little reason for there to be such a sweet and very affecting love between two men in this movie, but it’s there and it’s perfect. In a film that has so much innuendo and implied heterosexual promiscuity, the only sex scene present is between Ben and McKinley. The two of them in the hot, sweaty equipment shed is better than anything silly that could have happened between another couple, while also being a little silly as they have to kick soccer balls out of the way and the shelves can barely hold their weight. The scene is perfect, as is the commitment ceremony later, but it is intercut with scenes of Gary (A.D. Miles) and J.J. (Zak Orth) spying and using homophobic slurs. This ominous and likely very prevalent homophobia seemingly threatens the beautiful message. Though, Gary and J.J. redeem themselves and find acceptance, which brings it full circle and doesn’t undercut the warmth already established.

Wet Hot American Summer is an absolute gem of a silly comedy. It should have launched the careers of all these actors into the stratosphere, but it took some time for Hollywood to fully embrace them. Now on the 25th anniversary of its release, we can celebrate it as the goofy, loveable, silly film it is. Hopefully more will come to see it as the great comedy it is and we, the already initiated, will embrace those coming into the fold. To paraphrase Coop, we want you inside of us.

Long before humanity learned to record history, before civilizations raised monuments meant to outlast generations, and before philosophers sought to organize existence through systems of logic and reason, people gathered beneath the night sky and told stories. They shared them beside fires that held back only a fraction of the darkness, under stars that seemed close enough to touch yet impossibly distant, in a world of beauty, terror, and forces beyond their control.

These stories were never merely entertainment. They were humanity’s earliest attempts to confront existence itself—to understand love and loss, tragedy and triumph, mortality and meaning. They asked questions that remain unanswered thousands of years later: Why do the people we love disappear? Why does suffering arrive without warning? Are we truly shaping our own destinies, or are we moving through forces far greater than ourselves?

Ancient myths were not born from humanity’s ignorance, but from its awareness of limitation. Their creators understood something modern culture often struggles to accept: not everything meaningful can be reduced to an explanation. The universe is more than a collection of facts waiting to be catalogued. Human existence is more than biology, chemistry, and measurable events. Some experiences remain powerful precisely because they cannot be completely explained.

Myth lived within that space between knowledge and mystery. It gave form to what language could not fully capture—through symbols that evoked rather than defined, through stories that invited reflection rather than simple understanding. It did not seek to eliminate uncertainty. It taught humanity how to live alongside it.

This is why myths endure. Civilizations disappear, languages fade, and kingdoms once thought eternal become fragments of history. Yet certain stories survive because they were never truly about the cultures that created them. They were about the universal questions every generation inherits. They remind us that humanity does not only seek information; we seek meaning. We do not simply want to know how the world works. We want to understand what our existence within it means.

Few stories embody this better than Homer’s “The Odyssey,” an epic that has traveled across nearly three thousand years of human history and continues to resonate. It is not merely an adventure about a warrior attempting to return home. Beneath the monsters, gods, battles, and legendary encounters lies something far more personal: the story of a man who leaves one version of himself behind and must discover whether the person who returns can still belong to the life he once knew.

On the surface, “The Odyssey” follows Odysseus across the sea as he struggles to reclaim his kingdom of Ithaca. But its deeper truth is that home is never merely a location. Home is a memory. Home is identity. Home is the people who remember who you were before the world changed you.

This is the tragedy at the center of Odysseus’s journey. He does not simply fight to reach Ithaca—he wrestles with whether Ithaca still exists for him. The man who left for war was a king, husband, father, and hero. The man who returns has been shaped by violence, loss, temptation, isolation, and years spent confronting forces beyond human control.

His journey is not only a test of courage or intelligence. It is a transformation. By the time he reaches home, the question is no longer whether he survived, but whether survival has cost him the very identity he fought to reclaim.

Penelope’s patient loyalty, Telemachus’s uncertain growth into adulthood, and the suitors’ destruction of hospitality create a story about fractured time and eroded belonging. Odysseus’s greatest weapon is his cunning (mētis), allowing him to overcome enemies stronger than himself. Yet that same cunning also isolates him. Every disguise, every false name, and every carefully constructed deception pushes him further away from any simple understanding of who he truly is.

This is precisely what makes Christopher Nolan’s decision to adapt The Odyssey such a fascinating artistic choice. Few contemporary filmmakers have shown a greater interest in humanity’s relationship with the unknown. Nolan has built his career around characters confronting realities larger than themselves—the nature of time, the limits of perception, the consequences of discovery, and the fragile connection between memory and identity.

He is not simply a filmmaker of spectacle. His greatest strength has always been his ability to connect enormous ideas with deeply human emotions. In Interstellar, the mysteries of space become a story about love, distance, and the unbearable passage of time between a father and daughter. In Oppenheimer, the creation of the atomic bomb becomes less a story about scientific achievement than about the moral consequences of knowledge humanity cannot control. In Dunkirk, historical scale becomes an intimate portrait of survival, fear, and human endurance.

Yet this same strength creates the central challenge of adapting Homer’s epic.

Nolan’s cinema is built around the pursuit of understanding. His characters encounter impossible realities and attempt to uncover their hidden structures. They investigate, calculate, decode, and analyze. Their greatest power is their ability to comprehend what others cannot.

There is something deeply admirable about this instinct. Nolan celebrates curiosity, intelligence, and humanity’s refusal to accept limitations. His films suggest that even when confronted with the impossible, the human mind continues reaching outward.

But Homer’s The Odyssey emerges from a fundamentally different worldview. Homer’s The Odyssey does not suggest that humanity’s greatest achievement is understanding the unknown. Instead, it suggests that our greatest challenge is learning how to exist alongside it.

The gods of Homer’s world are not puzzles waiting to be solved. They are forces that represent the unpredictable nature of existence itself. Poseidon’s wrath is not merely an obstacle for Odysseus to overcome; it is a reminder of human vulnerability before forces beyond mortal control. The sea is not simply a physical barrier between Odysseus and home. It represents the chaos of life—the storms that arrive without warning, the losses that cannot be prevented, and the moments when human ambition meets its limits.

The Sirens do not offer knowledge to be mastered. They offer temptation. Circe’s transformations and Calypso’s island do not exist merely as challenges for Odysseus’s intelligence. They test his endurance, his identity, and his ability to remain connected to the life he is trying to reclaim.

This distinction changes the meaning of the story itself. Nolan’s greatest works often explore humanity reaching beyond itself and discovering the consequences of that pursuit. His characters seek answers because understanding represents survival. But Homer presents a world where some mysteries are not meant to be conquered. They are meant to be respected.

Homer’s universe does not demand that humanity solve mystery; it asks us to respect it. The ancient Greeks understood something modern storytelling often struggles with: sometimes the universe offers no explanation. Sometimes suffering arrives without a lesson. Sometimes intelligence and determination are not enough. Sometimes human beings must simply endure.

Penelope’s years of waiting, Telemachus’s quiet growth without his father, and the destruction of Odysseus’s crew are not moments waiting for simple resolution. They exist within the uncertainty of human experience. The suitors are not punished because the universe operates like a simple equation of crime and consequence. Their actions violate a deeper moral order—the sacred responsibility of hospitality, loyalty, and respect between people.

The power of “The Odyssey” has never come from providing easy answers. It comes from recognizing that some truths are found not through explanation, but through endurance.

This is also where the women of Homer’s epic reveal another important tension. Penelope, Circe, and Calypso have endured for centuries because they are not merely obstacles or supporting figures within Odysseus’s journey. They represent different forms of power, desire, intelligence, and emotional complexity.

Penelope’s strength is not passive waiting. Her loyalty is an act of resistance, using patience and intelligence to preserve a home that has been threatened by chaos. Circe is not simply a temptation for Odysseus to overcome; she is a figure of transformation, knowledge, and power in her own right. Calypso is not merely a distraction from the journey home, but a representation of comfort, immortality, and the painful temptation to abandon the difficult responsibilities of human life.

One challenge of Nolan’s adaptation is that his instinct toward psychological explanation can sometimes reduce mythic figures into clearer emotional functions. Characters who once contained contradictions and symbolic depth risk becoming easier to categorize. The performances may bring humanity and complexity to these figures, but the screenplay occasionally struggles to preserve the larger mystery that made them endure.

This is the central tension of Nolan’s The Odyssey. The issue is not that he misunderstands Homer. In many ways, he understands the epic better than most filmmakers could. His respect for the material is clear. His fascination with grand ideas, philosophical questions, and human ambition makes him an inspired choice to bring this story to the screen.

But Nolan approaches the material with too much understanding and not enough surrender. He transforms the mysterious into the mechanical, the spiritual into the intellectual, and what was meant to be experienced into something meant to be analyzed. His vision creates a world of extraordinary scale, with breathtaking large-format cinematography, practical craftsmanship, and images that remind audiences why cinema remains such a powerful art form.

Yet myth has never survived through accuracy alone. A filmmaker can recreate ancient worlds with incredible detail, construct breathtaking environments, and create unforgettable cinematic moments while still struggling to capture the feeling that allowed those stories to survive for thousands of years.

There is a difference between recreating myth and preserving the feeling of myth. Nolan’s The Odyssey understands the physical world of Homer’s epic. The kingdoms feel alive. The ships carry weight. The monsters possess a terrifying presence. The craftsmanship is undeniable.

But mythology has never existed because humanity wanted to see larger versions of reality. It endured because it revealed something deeper about ourselves.

The Cyclops was never frightening simply because he was enormous. The Sirens were never memorable because they were visually impressive. These figures survived because they represented something within the human soul: arrogance, temptation, isolation, longing, and the desire to abandon purpose. They were not merely obstacles standing in Odysseus’s way. They were reflections of humanity itself.

By bringing these creatures into complete cinematic reality, Nolan creates images of astonishing power. Yet that clarity can sometimes diminish the uncertainty that made them meaningful. The more fully explained they become, the less space remains for imagination.

And that is where the difference between spectacle and wonder becomes essential. Spectacle impresses us; wonder humbles us. Spectacle celebrates what human beings can create. Wonder reminds us that there are things beyond our ability to contain. Spectacle makes us look outward at the scale of an image. Wonder makes us look inward and question our place within something larger.

Nolan remains one of cinema’s greatest visual filmmakers, and there will undoubtedly be moments in The Odyssey that achieve a grandeur only the theatrical experience can provide. But grandeur alone is not the same as awe.

The deepest power of Homer’s epic was never simply that Odysseus overcame impossible challenges. It was that he discovered the limits of his own power. His journey is not a simple story of victory. It is a story about transformation, loss, and the painful realization that returning home does not mean returning unchanged.

Odysseus does not defeat the mysteries of existence. He survives them.

Myth was never humanity’s escape from reality. It was humanity confronting reality in its most difficult form: uncertain, contradictory, and larger than any single perspective.

This is why The Odyssey has endured. It does not promise that every mystery can be solved. It offers companionship in the face of uncertainty. It reminds us that some truths become more meaningful because they remain beyond explanation.

Nolan’s adaptation represents a fascinating contradiction. He is a filmmaker whose greatest gift is creating systems, patterns, and structures that reveal hidden truths beneath chaos. His cinema often finds order within confusion.

But The Odyssey resists that impulse. Its deepest power exists in the spaces between answers. It asks us to sit with uncertainty rather than overcome it. It suggests that wisdom does not always come from discovering the truth behind a mystery, but from accepting that some mysteries are part of being human.

Nolan’s The Odyssey is an ambitious and technically remarkable achievement—visually stunning, intellectually engaged, and deeply committed to exploring one of humanity’s greatest stories. Yet in its pursuit of clarity, it occasionally loses the uncertainty and spiritual weight that allowed Homer’s epic to survive for thousands of years.

Homer leaves us humbled before forces beyond our comprehension. Nolan leaves us contemplating the extraordinary reach of human intelligence. Both experiences are powerful. Both have value. But they are not the same.

And in the space between them lies the quiet vanishing of myth’s deepest magic.

Welcome to Following Direction, a new recurring series at InSession Film that charts the careers of directors through the lens of the themes commonly explored in their work. To kick things off, I’m taking a look at the mighty Christopher Nolan and his newest epic, The Odyssey, and how his career hasn’t just been about examining our relationship with time, but to our loved ones, and the lengths his characters are willing to go to return to them. (Warning: Minor spoilers for The Odyssey will follow.)

Perhaps you haven’t heard: Christopher Nolan has a thing for time. A concept and a constant, he treats a realm that is fundamental, yet unequivocally incomprehensible like a sandbox packed with sandcastle molds for him to build empires of varying time periods within. Perhaps because of this, many seem to think his films are puzzles. On the contrary, they are palindromes: stories that can be told the same no matter if you choose to travel backwards or forwards but always reach the same end point, where a man reckons with his place and the consequences of his actions. Like all great storytellers, he manages to sculpt living creatures lacking strict compositions with the grains beneath his feet; no kingdom is complete without a king, queen, and the subjects over which they rule, after all.. It was ultimately a given, then, foreseen by the Gods that the modern king of the blockbuster would select The Odyssey, the oldest story ever told, as his next conquest, a tale that not only contains beings of all shapes, sizes, and species, but lends itself rather nicely to the idea of how time cannot be turned back no matter how much plot armor we assume we possess, and what happens when it’s gone: To us, and to those we’ve left behind.

For as much as time – seconds, days, years, etc., whether viewed backwards or forwards – is Nolan’s most commonly cited preoccupation, man’s journey home to a world forever changed has been just as omnipresent in his films from the beginning. Specifically, has always had his eye on how the impact of missing or losing loved ones can alter the course of the character’s life forever, whether it’s something as simple as swaths of broken men being evacuated from a war-torn French beach in Dunkirk so they can return home to the arms of their families or as complex as the nightmare plaguing Memento’s Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), an amnesiac attempting to piece together the puzzle of his recent, traumatic past to find the men who bludgeoned his memories away before raping and killing his wife. 

No one aside from those who Nolan holds closest will likely ever know where such dark fixations derive from given the director’s penchant for privacy. (Although who knows, maybe they haven’t the slightest, either.) He prefers things that way, after all. Most still refuse to believe that Nolan doesn’t own a cell phone or have an e-mail, but his privacy would never be put on trial due to how quickly any prosecutor would be laughed out of the courtroom. “I don’t want people to know anything about me,” he told The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg in 2015. “The more you know about somebody who makes the films, the less you can just watch the movies … I actually don’t want people to have me in mind at all when they’re watching the films, genuinely.”

Of course, it feels that there should be more to that impenetrability, a catch-all reason that Nolan himself must surely one day explain in great detail. But what if he’s already done so, spilling his guts on the page and screen rather than in the trades or on a podcast? (Is Christopher Nolan familiar with podcasts?) Under Nolan’s Law, we may be forbidden from analyzing the man behind the camera while the picture is moving. But he never said anything about what we are or are not permitted to do once the reel has spun out. That’s what this new essay series is designed to do: To attempt a daunting but endlessly rewarding task. We will examine the motifs the filmmakers in question return to throughout their oeuvres, displaying dissectable connections to such ideas and offering us an opportunity to maybe, just maybe, bring us closer to their work and their core principles. 

One of the things I love most about film as an artform is that it grants viewers the gift of not only witnessing someone’s vision come to life, but to hand over their hearts for us to hold.. No artist is ever not drawing on inspiration of some kind, and sure, they may simply feel called to a story because of taste or general interest, but where does that come from? I’m not a psychologist, so I won’t pretend to be one here, but cinema is a form – more than any other – where there is always more than meets the eye. (Note: “Eye.” You’re welcome, Cyclops.) I intend to look beyond, through time and space, to claim a better grasp on whatever it is the filmmakers I select for these pieces are searching for.

Odysseus (Matt Damon) is a man possessed by the things he can control. Or thinks he can, at least. Should we take his strongest detractors at their word, he’s a lot like Christopher Nolan in that way: A man of great power and responsibility, yet one who operates in a world of unpredictabilities. The fact that he repeatedly seems to maintain even a shred of governance over something so volatile is masterful in and of itself. So it may not come as a surprise to learn that The Odyssey is an enormous, epic triumph, a brilliant adaptation of a tale as old as time that looks even more inward than its original author may have ever imagined it could. Finally, a grand victory for the Woke Left.

If Homer were to witness Nolan’s adaptation of his epic poem, all 172 minutes of it, he’d likely break out in a lethal batch of hives and find a band of Sirens to turn himself over to before the rash did him in. It might only take Ludwig Göransson’s most audacious score to date to accomplish that, in fact, but the scale of it – both in narrative terms and if seen in Nolan’s preferred IMAX/70MM film format, a wonder to behold that cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema spares no expense in capturing – would do him no favors. It’s a faithful adaptation, but as is only natural for the form, liberties are taken. As he is wont to do, Nolan and his Oscar-winning editor, Jennifer Lame, let the story unravel in a non-linear structure, frequently shifting back and forth through time so as to fill in the gaps in everyone’s assumptions about our main character’s whereabouts. They treat The Odyssey like the manipulative nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) treats Odysseus’ mind, as a sieve through which memories can escape when it is their turn to do so, only revealing themselves when our hero is ready, thus so are we.

“Who here has a story about Odysseus?” Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) shouts into a banquet hall after the Trojan War hero’s son, Telemachus (a best-ever Tom Holland), enters his kingdom in search of truth or rebuttal to the rumors about his father’s whereabouts. The stories that travelers are all too willing to tell tend to be just that: Rumors. Most of them provide his only child and beloved wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway, predictably great) with no proof of life in either direction, yet their hope remains. One day, the King of Ithaca will return to his throne, reclaiming it from the many slimy suitors occupying his house (Robert Pattinson is tremendous as the particularly sniveling Antinous) and reuniting with those he left behind. His trusty swineherd Eumaeus (John Leguizamo, excellent) will regain his master; so, too, will the near-dead Argos, Odysseus’ hunting dog who has only managed to stay alive over the 20-year absence of his best friend on the prayer that he’ll give him one more pet before he wags his tail for a final time. 

But it is Penelope and Telemachus that carry the greatest burdens. A wife without her husband; a boy without a father, unable to truly embrace manhood without a patriarchal hand dangling a lantern over his shoulder, lighting the way. Though the passage of time is certainly a constant throughout Nolan’s 13th feature film – certainly as it relates to the decades that have passed since Odysseus left his kingdom behind – it’s the thought of coming home to his family that plagues him most, the unknown of what will be there when he returns pulling him further from its once-safe harbors like a whirlpool dominating its sector of the sea. After he survives an encounter with the famed Sirens, whose song is known to entice even the strongest men to leap overboard and swim into their fatal clutches, he laments this very fact, telling his second in command, Eurylochus (a transfixing Himesh Patel), that their tune disclosed an uncomfortable notion:

“What you most want is what you most can’t have, and what you most can’t have is what you already had and lost. It sang of all the promises I couldn’t keep. And it told me I don’t really want to go home.”

Much like Nolan’s previous film, 2023’s Oppenheimer, his latest tells the story of a great man who took responsibility into his own hands only to learn of its consequences after it was already too late; a man who thought his choices could potentially destroy the world, yet never ran the calculations intentionally enough to prevent that from happening altogether. More than the “world,” however, it’s the destruction of the home he vaguely remembers that Odysseus fears most. Moments prior to the grand climax of the finest, the most stirring final act of Nolan’s career – one that also happens to feature the strongest single stretch of acting we’ve ever seen from Zendaya – a character considers why the godlike man at its center stayed away for so long:

“What if he knew that very night [in Troy] as he walked through fires of anarchy and pain, and in a daze of sweaty celebration to follow…What if he knew exactly what he’d done? Maybe he couldn’t bear to see the ruins of what he’d done anywhere, least of all his home?”

It’s this sentiment that drives The Odyssey – that and the idea that the power of a sacrifice is in the cost to the person making it – and has driven everything Nolan has made to this point. It’s only now that he has verbalized it in such a despondent way, as if in acknowledgement to the current state and impending future of our world, the one unfolding thousands of years after Homer’s. In the past, Nolan’s visions of family and of home have been akin to beacons. Try Inception on for size, should you dare: In a dream, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) stands on a building’s ledge as his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) dangles from one out of reach, moments before she commits suicide in the hopes that it might free him from the guilt he feels in response to her death, his supplying her with the thought that her world wasn’t real, and his abandonment of their children. He once thought about calling out to their “beautiful faces” while in limbo, but deemed his efforts too little, too late. Yet not until May told him that they were “going home to [their] real children” did Cobb understand that it was written in the stars: “I did what I had to do to get back to my children,” he later recalls. 

He did what he had to do. It’s a problem that all of Nolan’s men face, and from one time-bending thriller to the next, it remains. Interstellar may be the finest pre-Odyssey example of a story driven by man’s tortured impulse to get back to where he once belonged, with the relationship between Coop (Matthew McConaughey) and his daughter Murph (played as a child by Mackenzie Foy and as an adult by Jessica Chastain) residing in its heart. Planet-threatening forces cause a father to leave his daughter behind for “greater” responsibilities in the cosmos, that desertion fracturing their bond as time sits still for him and flies by for her. It is punishment for Coop to receive a video message from his little girl, suddenly all grown up, in which she begs for his return:

“You son of a bitch. I never made one of these when you were still responding because I was so mad at you for leaving. And then when you went quiet, it felt like I should live with that decision, and I have. But today is my birthday. And it’s a special one, because you told me… You once told me that when you came back, we might be the same age. And today I’m the same age you were when you left. So it would be a real good time for you to come back.”

Murph might understand what her father told her as he said goodbye all those years earlier – that “once you’re a parent, you’re the ghost of your children’s future” – but she’ll reject it until the cows come home because she refuses to let Coop exist as a ghost, convinced, not unlike Telemachus that her dad will be back someday. Interstellar’s odyssey just takes a bit longer than that of the man who takes his name from the journey. Coop makes it back in time for Murph to become their ghost. It’s a beautiful, emotional finale that serves as a counter to the silly insistence that Nolan lacks warmth. As Justin Chang wrote for NPR, “Nolan, whose style has often been dismissed as coldly intellectual, is one of our most emotionally driven filmmakers.”

Nolan’s first masterpiece, 2000’s Memento, proved his emotionality early on, and could theoretically be seen as his first attempt at cracking The Odyssey. At least its consideration for memory, anyway. As he slowly but surely gets his bearings on his shattered life, Leonard (the aforementioned Guy Pearce) realizes how pivotal it can be just to believe in a truth, confirmation be damned: 

“I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world’s still there. Do I believe the world’s still there? Is it still out there?…Yeah. We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I’m no different.”

Those words exist among the greatest Nolan has written to date not only because it came so early in a storied career full of memorable monologues, but because they holistically weigh the past as an entity and its repercussions as a single unit. “If we can’t make memories, we can’t heal,” Leonard also notes, just as wisely and in spite of his pain. His wife may be gone, but to sit with grief is to remain captive. And how can man properly grieve – a process that concludes, of course, with acceptance – if he is incapable of seeing a short-term future in which one’s terrible past lacks as strong a grip as it once had? To borrow some words from Tenet that fit Memento’s bill, “What happened, happened.” As it had to; as it was always going to.

And who could forget about The Prestige? (Too many, far too often.) If there was ever a film tailormade for Christopher Nolan’s instincts, it would be one about magic, though what is to be taken away from that dazzling trick of a movie is somehow a bit more dour than the rest. (Another wife dies here.) Hoping to comfort Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) after his wife drowns during an underwater stunt gone wrong, John Cutter (Michael Caine) tells the story of a sailor who nearly met a similar fate. He tells it twice, first claiming that the sailor said drowning felt like “going home,” only later revealing the truth: He actually said it was agony. 

Much of The Odyssey takes place at sea. Odysseus and his men nearly drown on multiple occasions. On his inevitable journey back to Ithaca – WHOA, spoiler for a book you should have read in high school – he manages to evade Poseidon’s wrath and the agony that would surely come with it, washing ashore and meeting his invisible confidant, Athena, on the rocks. “Where am I?” he asks. “Don’t you recognize your own home?” she replies with a smile, and he springs out of his waterlogged stupor, eager to trudge to the mountaintop, to see the kingdom he had all but lost to the currents of time. If Calypso had her selfish way, Odysseus would have never made it back. But she freed him to try when the time came. “You weren’t ready to go home,” she proclaimed. Furious, he retorts, “I am now.” With some of her final words, Nolan writes for Calypso what he may have been writing for himself: “As I always knew you would be.” 

It’s only fitting that this story should end with the beginning.

My “discovery” of Christopher Nolan is far from unique; I almost wrote here that it is likely a “discovery” that many mid-to-late 20-somethings share, but I stopped myself, recognizing that it’s probably similar to how the vast majority of people who have ever watched a movie came to know the then up-and-coming auteur’s name. (To those of you who saw Memento at the time of its theatrical run, you’re free to shudder.) Of course, it all began with 2005’s Batman Begins, the first entry in Nolan’s trilogy chronicling the origin and ensuing adventures of the Caped Crusader played by Christian Bale. I came of age during the Comic Book Movie Boom and was a Spider-Man kid, but Batman ran a close second, his air of mystery and fury serving as a shot to the spunky, teenaged chaser I foolishly downed before the burn rather than after. Batman Begins is one of my earliest moviegoing memories; my parents, reasonable but strict when it came down to what we watched, were not privy to the tone Nolan would run with. I didn’t care. What budding, seven-year-old cinephile would? The midnight images washed over me like a cap clouding an enemy’s vision in the heat of a battle lost before it began. I was transfixed, grappling hook, line, and sinker. 

Arguments will be made until suns go up, down, and up again about whether or not Bale’s portrayal of Bruce Wayne is the lasting one, but few can reasonably be had about what Nolan (and David S. Goyer, his co-story author on all three of his Batman films) did with the character. Batman Begins charted, well, the beginnings of the superhero’s arc: fearing bats before flipping that terror on its head and using it as a symbol he’d levy on the criminal underworld, building the Batcave with the help of his trusty butler Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine) and his lone confidant at Wayne Enterprises, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), and protecting Gotham by night as a result of the collective effort. The Dark Knight is the greatest superhero film ever made and contains the greatest supervillain performance ever put to screen, Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning turn as The Joker; I recall being blissfully baffled by how a man so goofy could be so sinister, only to later grasp that the two qualities were masks for one another. The Dark Knight Rises – admired, then reviled, only to enjoy reclamation years after initial criticisms collapsed into the ether of the internet – was once the grandest thing I’d ever seen. Tom Hardy’s Bane voice was immediately added to the impression repertoire. It’s still there, but by request only.

Of course, what started as an obsession with vigilantes in leather getups quickly evolved into a fascination with scale. The silver screen was already gigantic; how did this guy manage to make it feel that much bigger? In the years that followed, I’d follow Nolan into battle time and again if only to feel that sensation once more, no matter the runtime, to watch his indelible images grow larger and more profoundly overwhelming in the best of times and the worst. I surely thought I was the only one who couldn’t understand Inception in 2010; I studied it like a textbook, and I still only sort of get it, but know that it doesn’t really matter, does it? Interstellar was the first film I ever saw in IMAX/70MM at the Cinemark Tinseltown in Rochester; the screen got even bigger then, and the guy from We Are Marshall became a star, to me, then and there. I wept during Dunkirk, all the way through its epic finale as my deepest depression reached its own next chapter in 2017. I found Tenet ridiculous, and saw it again three years post-release and saw what felt like a different film, a glorious, moving, and contemplative odyssey through the past, present, and future. And, like many others, I was bowled over by Oppenheimer, seeing it 12 times in the theater and plenty more at home over the course of just a few months, never enduring any exhaustion thanks to the chords of Göransson’s score, the relentless and intentional pace of Lame’s masterful editing, the titanicism of Cillian Murphy’s titular performance, and Nolan’s most audacious script yet. When it took home seven Academy Awards, I celebrated each like my team had just lifted a trophy.

Nolan Bros. far and wide know the feeling, and those who find Nolan Bros. exhausting roll their eyes whenever one of us does – *gestures wildly at the paragraphs above* – all of this. I’m not immune to either experience. There is both a level of pride and of wincing chagrin to subscribing to Nolan’s particular brand of storytelling, if only because his dissenters – or, at least, those who wish that the majority of Nolanites would dare to dream a little bigger (darling) and watch something not made on the grandest scale cinema has to offer – have plenty of valid points. Without limiting themselves, the recurring arguments reference his narratives being overtly complex for the sake of invention; his dialogue being muffled due to his reliance on startling sound design, not to mention it feeling unnatural and convenient for the screen or otherwise; that he can’t stop killing the wife.

Yet no filmmaker is perfect, even if one or two (or a few more) of the films they make come damn close to meeting that high bar. And as much as Christopher Nolan may come off as a perfectionist, quaffed hair and tailored suits and all, his films tell the opposite story. His are the stories of men whose imperfections define their journeys but not them as men. How could a man who is galvanized by a feeling as profoundly introspective as that ever be derided as “cold?” No, no, I won’t go back on my receipt of those assessments; what kind of a critic would I be if I did? And what kind of a filmmaker would Nolan be if he didn’t counter them head on, even if he’ll never publicly admit to doing so? I suppose he’d be the kind of filmmaker that fails where he so often thrives, telling the tales of odysseys in a nature that represents how he views time in all its stages. How the best stories are all the things you want them to be, yet all the things you’ve never wished for at the same time. How sometimes, however painful the experience, it’s best to let go of control in order to live. It’s only then that dawn will break over a darkened world, and that the escaping sun will shine brighter than it ever did before.