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dsign 13 hours ago

It's a movie for theaters and not a flashback edgy post; the success of the work is about pleasing the audience. That is already a thing in Homer's original Odyssey, at least as I read it in high school. But now with a few more decades on my ribs, I can quickly find out that the text that I read came from oral traditions that spanned from 1200 to 600 BCE, and after finding its way to written form, a cultural chain of transliterations:

Archaic Greece -> Hellenistic Alexandria[^1] -> Roman Egypt -> Byzantine Constantinople -> Renaissance Italy

Each age was obsessed with something, and the latest stages in that chain are heavily marked by Christian values. So, yeah, swords and explosion and stuff and don't do anything we would consider obscene today which includes sex, though movie directors are completely unabashed about bloody horror. To me, it's not a reflection on the director, but on his audience and their society.

[^1]: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103T4T

gabriel666smith 12 hours ago | parent [-]

I’d agree, but would argue that Nolan has a unique (almost Delphic) talent - for better or worse - amongst contemporary Hollywood directors for capturing and reflecting contemporary and near-future textures and preoccupations, and this alone makes his work more interesting, and worthy of critical attention, than your comment seems to imply if I have interpreted it correctly.

I think that’s just as true of his lesser films (Tenet capturing COVID’s barely comprehensible, antiseptic-psychedelic temporality, for example) as in his stronger work, and makes him - to me, at least - a very interesting artist within the Hollywood structure.

runarberg 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Nolan has a unique talent [...] amongst contemporary Hollywood directors for capturing and reflecting contemporary and near-future textures and preoccupations.

Just to be clear. This is the same director who interpreted Occupy Wall Street as Batman’s Bane.

I don‘t dispute his talent, but this talent of his speaks to conservative, pro-establishment, values. If you don‘t share his conservative values, it is very easy to see how his interpretations are at complete odds with contemporary textures and preoccupations.