Christopher Nolan makes films about the philosophical, moral and political dead end that he believes Western civilization has been stuck in for years. He has a point. We live in a time in which all the operating systems running our lives seem to be malfunctioning at the same time. Systems of law, governance and the economy (not to mention the environment) are collapsing all around us. The metaphor of the slowly boiling frog is becoming a lived experience for many Europeans suffering historically unprecedented heatwaves this summer. There is no evidence that the frog is preparing to leap out of the pot. 

As Anton Jäger pointed out in the last issue, many political movements since the 2010s such as Extinction Rebellion or Black Lives Matter have been movements in name only. They simulate the appearance of change: “footballers taking the knee before games for a couple of seasons, a ban on plastic bags coinciding with increased use and dumping of plastic waste”. Even the livestreamed genocide in Gaza has struggled to channel expressions of outrage and despair felt by many into concrete action. Presented with the most extreme acts of violence and destruction, the systemic reaction by western governments and institutions is at best symbolic. The thrust of political antagonism seems to disobey the laws of Newtonian physics. Instead of generating action in the opposite direction, energy is absorbed and converted into information in the form of social media storms. Hacktivism is venting not politics because it rarely leads to material change. Sadly, what mass political movements that there are, belong to the parties of the right.

Mr Nolan is a propagandist of the centrist liberal consensus, of the good ol’ days before Brexit and Trump. Ideologically snug between the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, simultaneously a progressive and a nationalist. This worldview is evident in his work, from the Batman trilogy to Oppenheimer and Dunkirk: a pantheon of besieged, white, middle-aged male nostalgia for the age of Empire is internalised as a pathos of blood and soil, a rehashing of Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”: “Go bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need”.  In Oppenheimer, Nolan’s moral compass skips over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 90 seconds while quivering for the rest of the 178 minutes at the anguish of a scientist guilty of making a weapon of mass destruction.

In Nolan’s Odyssey, Ithaca stands in for Britain, a loyal vassal state at the mercy of an out-of-control overlord, the Mycenaean king Agamemnon is cast as the US. A Bronze Age Jason Bourne is recovering from PTSD, having broken the Law of Zeus – the Geneva Conventions, charter of the UN and judgement of the ICC in our parlance. Having been party to atrocities in the Trojan Wars, he recovers in what looks like a yoga retreat aided by a stone-faced Calypso, played by Charlize Theron, much like an IDF soldier enjoying a spot of R&R in Thailand after committing war crimes in Gaza.

Ancient texts act as a mirror in which a generation can examine its pimples. The question is whether reaching out to the tale of the Late Bronze Age Collapse to make sense of our current crisis is appropriate. Our systems were built on the so-called rules-based order established after the Second World War, but the certainties of the post-war consensus are being systematically defiled by the very folks that wrote and are supposed to uphold them. Yet such are the demands of maintaining imperial dominance that, as Odysseus spells out to Penelope after a bout of lovemaking, imperial wars are inevitable. They may be sold as fights over principle and honour (WMDs and democracy) but really they’re about controlling resources. To keep the empire dominant, international institutions are undermined and even dismantled. The ICC has had its judges systematically harassed, its Japanese president Tomoko Akane sanctioned, while the UN’s Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese had her credit cards and even her subscription to Microsoft Word withdrawn. Nolan acknowledges the mess but never dares to look into the abyss. 

Those wronged are visited in the afterlife for a beg-your-pardon while Odysseus carries on killing in the here and now without consequence. Agamemnon is a rascal, and Trump is just being Trump. Threats to invade Greenland or Canada get a firm tut-tut, but a school full of Iranian girls slaughtered or Venezuelan resources stolen in broad daylight? Not even a word from the bastions of democracy and human rights. 

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In The Asset Class (2026) the writer Hettie O’Brien journeys into the failing vital organs of capitalism as it digests its own stomach. Private equity’s returns come not from running businesses better but from financial engineering – the leveraged buyout, roughly 80% debt to 20% equity, with the debt then loaded onto the company being bought, and the money hidden from taxmen. A case in point: Yorkshire Water, where a third of every household bill is used for servicing debt and paying dividends while sewage is released every 18 minutes into the sea and no reservoir has been completed since 1992.

Lindsay Owens explores consumer capitalism’s dysfunctions in her forthcoming book Gouged: The End of a Fair Price–and What That Means for Your Wallet through the phenomenon of surveillance pricing, in which individuals buying the same goods or services are charged differently according to data metrics such as location, buying habits and demographic. Examined up close, what seems to be a classic market mechanism is a cancer that is quietly killing capitalism at a cellular level. In retrospect, Uber’s first ten years were an exercise in losing $30bn in creating a near global monopoly of supply, only to bounce back once the trap door was shut, making $10bn profit in 2025 alone. The company’s policy of deliberate immiseration ensures that there is always a large pool of available drivers desperate enough for a job and passengers forced to pay whatever Uber asks. The bait was more choice, the switch was no choice at all. 

Veena Dubal, Professor of Law at UC Irvine, coined the phrase “algorithmic wage discrimination” in her 2023 article of the same name. Dubal argues that gig platforms pay workers vastly different wages for substantively identical work, calculated by opaque, ever-shifting formulas drawing on an individual’s location, behaviour, acceptance rates and inferred desperation. It’s the labour-side mirror of surveillance pricing – instead of finding the highest you’ll pay, it finds the lowest a given worker will accept. In their article “Uber for Nursing: How an AI-Powered Gig Model Is Threatening Health Care”, Katie J. Wells and Funda Ustek-Spilda map the same machinery onto health care apps, which calculate how desperate a nurse is for work before making them an offer they simply can’t refuse – to paraphrase The Godfather. Dubal likens the worker experience today to gambling: variable-ratio reinforcement, bonuses and quests that feel like slot machines and produce what she calls “algorithmic gamblification”.

The failure of American capitalism on its own terms has coincided with Trump’s thinly disguised wars for resources. It is clear for most of us, from Venezuela to Iran and Greenland that the two are inherently connected but this eludes Nolan. In his most revealing scene at the end of the film Odysseus makes clear, Troy – and by extension all the victims of imperial wars – will be forgotten. Once Trump is gone and Agamemnon is dead, and Odysseus has set out for new horizons in search of new imperial conquest or markets, things will return to normal. This is exactly the point at which Homer (not Simpson) begs to differ: the poem resists Hollywood happy endings, instead pointing to cycles of human folly, the essence of tragedy.

It is possible to meaningfully reflect on the contemporary with considerably less bombast. Near the end of Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (2021), the graphic artist ex-boyfriend of the protagonist Julie reflects: “I grew up in a time when culture was passed along through objects. They were interesting because we could live among them. We could pick them up. Hold them in our hands. Compare them. I spent my life doing that.” The collecting, he admits, kept going long after it stopped giving him the feeling it once did, and he’s left only with a sense of futility and regret. He tells Julie that he “began to worship what had been, and now I have nothing else”, recognising that this nostalgia may be betraying his fear of death. Even an imperial bard such as Nolan might consider that his nostalgia for empire is, deep down yet another expression of its demise. Masoud Golsorkhi