There have been few prides and joys that have so fallen from their alma mater’s good graces as Christopher Nolan has; once upon a time, even the acclaimed UCL Film Society balanced on their dicks for him to show an ankle at the UCL200 celebrations.
This disturbing sentiment has only exacerbated since the release of Nolan’s cunty Greek orientalist flick, The Odyssey (2026). But seriously, was there anyone who really doubted the success of this film? It’s got Spiderman, Catwoman, Edward Cullen and more in its stacked cast.
The BFI IMAX mailing list is staggering under the weight of 40,000 people (at the time of writing) who are desperate to see it in a slightly more square screen than the commoner’s cinema has to offer.
Intellectual LARPers are scrambling to borrow the last crowd-battered copy in the Main Library’s classics shelf. There can be absolutely no doubt that everyone and their flat’s rat colony are swooning over Matt Damon's sexy, blown-out DILF voice.
In only a slightly more dignified manner than Film Soc, the entire UCL English Department - young and impressionable first years, slavish PhD candidates, and disintegrating lecturers alike - has been lording Nolan over any shithead that dares illegitimise their degree.
An undergraduate once nurtured by Foster Court, Nolan first legitimised Batman to the sceptical mainstream when his Dark Knight trilogy produced outstanding commercial and cultural success.
However, now it seems his newest film is suffering from too much cultural capital. The combination of pressure from the classicists and the mythology nerds has led to a furious, concentrated eruption from a small section of Nolan’s UCL successors about claims of orientalism and Hollywood whitewashing.
Fascinatingly, for all the brain-smoothing charm of his signature, hot, arrogant male protagonist, Nolan has failed to escape the paralogistic scorn of ‘that’s not how the book goes’ original-fan dickheads. Except this time, they actually have some solid points:
Why has the marriage bed, ingrained in a native olive tree symbolising Odysseus’ and Penelope’s uniquely faithful love, been replaced by a tiny pin which looks like every other Western love-token?
Why is there no spicy scene featuring Odysseus and his harem of possessive, exotic witches?
Why was Odysseus not naked as he pounded 108 young men in his own feast hall (with his son)?
You might guess that most of the Nolan dissenters have, damningly, read the thing. The big baddie Emily Wilson herself, whom all UCL English professors worship for her amazing modern translation of The Odyssey, unleashed her mortifying critical castration of Nolan in the damning statement that she would be ‘ashamed to have written this script’.
No one could’ve betrayed their roots with a spectacular double whammy like Christopher Nolan, who both holds a UCL English undergraduate degree and has praised Wilson’s translation publicly.
In the wake of Nolan’s dramatic rise and fall in the court of prestigious opinion, one can only hope the next 200 years of UCL’s existence yield a better role model for its students.