From Memento to Oppenheimer, and now The Odyssey, there is something that resonates throughout Christopher Nolan’s filmography, as he continues to show how the symbolic frameworks that sustain us as a civilization are being challenged—those narratives that circulate in our times, attempting to account for our actions.

But these narratives appear with a particular volatility. It is possible that our time is confronting us with a more liquid, blurred version of the status of the Symbolic. We have countless examples in contemporary world politics of how the law is transgressed—the very law that sustains the civilizational agreement and the possibility of human coexistence.

The rules of coexistence that we had established among ourselves as citizens have changed, and they are moving at a dizzying speed. The codes of online interactions demonstrate this very well. But also at the geopolitical level, these rules are being questioned. Here too, we have examples in current wars that reveal a new ordering: I do not comply—so what? This ethical position opens the way to barbarism, to an obscene and fierce (superegoic) jouissance.

We think that this version of *The Odyssey*, shows this particular plasticity of the Symbolic. Let us take the Symbolic as the cultural, as the rules of interaction, the relationship to language; as the set of words and meanings that allow us to understand and organize our experience and relate to others.

The Symbolic is the world of language and shared, agreed-upon meanings. If these agreements are broken, irreversible consequences are generated. It would seem that it is no longer the Symbolic that organizes the Imaginary (as maps, for example), but rather is the Imaginary that conditions the changes and plasticity of the Symbolic (again, with the various geopolitical scenarios as a clear example; another example is how the truth is replaced by the trend, and so on).

There are two moments in the film that we could use in the sense of an ethical reflection on our time: when Odysseus tells of his encounter with the voice of the sirens, and at the end, when he finally encounters Penelope.

We think that this contemporary ethical reflection shows very well what an experience of analysis can achieve: ethically assuming the consequences of one’s jouissance. The voice of the sirens is a good example of this point: “It told me what you most want is what you most can’t have. What you most can’t have is what you already had and lost.”

What was had and lost? What is the real loss?

Some answers arrive with the second moment. When Odysseus manages to reunite with Penelope:

(…) “We left them a gift, an offering of peace, that they took into their home. We violated all that’s ever sacred between people. It turned a fight into a hunt.” (…) “-What if he knew exactly what he’d done?” (…) “One man’s idea, one man’s trick… to break Zeus’s Law forever. We live in a world of palaces, trades, language, blinded with beauty… until we broke it.” (…) “The breaking of Zeus’s law, spreading like plague. Our age of bronze is collapsing.”¹

This second ethical reflection shows how the subjective recognition of the attribute of the enemy takes place within oneself: the relationship of the ego to the Other. By transgressing Zeus’s law, the xenia²it shows how what appeared to be an external, geopolitical conflict is only a manifestation of an internal conflict; it expresses a human problem with oneself. When a don, a gift—the Trojan horse—that was meant to signify peace becomes itself the bomb, the Symbolic fractures once again. The lines move around, the limits are no longer the same; they are displaced. These shifts are not without consequences.

Christopher Nolan invites us not to contemplate the beauty attributed to the glory of these battles. This glory becomes the horror of the subject, and behind the supposed grandiosity there is simply a man who knows, through experience, that he cannot escape the consequences of his actions, despite the narratives that had supported them, especially when his own actions fractured the narratives that he was supposed to defend.

One does not just watch this movie; it is unavoidable to become part of it³… Maybe because clinical evidence suggests that there is a singular Odyssey for each one of us. The beauty of the experience of an analysis is the space it offers to untangle your own singular Odyssey, to assume it as singular and unique, allowing the subject to take ownership of the ethical position that sustains it.

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1 Retrieved from: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChristopherNolan/comments/1uyscbm/heres_the_text_for_the_big_speech_odysseus_gives/

2 Christopher Nolan interviewed by political philosophy lecturer & doctoral student Zhong Shu in Beijing, China, on 30 July 2026. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa4I8Ch2TRo

3 Idem.