Making an Epic in the Age of Forgetting

Christopher Nolan, Homer, and the interior conditions for receiving a story

Mary Harrington has been arguing that literacy was the first technological singularity. Long before the printing press or the smartphone, the alphabet itself began the slow externalization of human memory. Socrates already saw the danger. Writing, he warned in the Phaedrus, would produce the appearance of wisdom without the reality of it—people who could consult records but could no longer truly remember. Knowledge would become something stored outside the person rather than something formed within the person.

Homer sits precisely at that hinge. The Odyssey is the classic case of an oral epic that was eventually written down. For generations, the poem lived almost entirely in memory. It was performed, varied, and held in the minds of singers and hearers who did not primarily read it. The written text we possess is a late crystallization of that living tradition—the moment an “Age of Heroes” culture brushed up against the new technology of the alphabet. What makes the Homeric poems unique is that they preserve, in fixed form, the mental habits of a people who still treated story as something that had to be carried in the body and the voice.

Harrington’s larger point is that the long centuries after the first singularity did not simply destroy memory. In the hybrid manuscript culture of the Middle Ages, the art of memory was refined and even spiritualized. Scholars and monks trained their minds to hold vast quantities of material through memory palaces, imagistic tags, and disciplined rumination. Knowledge was not merely retrieved; it was internalized until it shaped the person who held it. The printing press largely ended that discipline. Once books became cheap, abundant, and reliable, the incentive to form the interior architecture of memory weakened. Why train the mind to hold what the shelf already holds? The digital age has accelerated the same process to near completion. We outsource recall, then attention, then the very capacity to be formed by what we encounter. AI and LLMs now promise to outsource composition and thought itself. Harrington calls this the third singularity and warns of a great forgetting—an age in which we risk losing the faculties that once allowed stories to take root in us.

It was into this condition that I watched an early Thursday showing of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. The film is a slow burn by contemporary standards, and I mean that as relative praise. Its pacing seeks kinship with the poem itself. Even inside the overwhelming sensory environment of IMAX—massive scale, immersive sound, and frequent strobe and light effects—Nolan resists the nervous tempo of most current blockbusters. Whether the film fully achieves the patience it reaches for is another question. A truly slower, more ceremonial treatment of the material would almost certainly require the extended form of an episodic series. Within the limits of a single theatrical feature, though, this is about as deliberate as big-studio filmmaking currently allows. Nolan is clearly trying to make an Epic.

Not “epic” in the marketing sense. An Epic in the older, capital-E sense. The kind of film that once tried to give a culture a shared imaginative world at scale. Think Ben-Hur. Think Dr. Zhivago. Vast canvases, deliberate rhythms, and casting choices that sometimes feel slightly strange or anachronistic by the standards of their own day—yet somehow belong to the form. Those mid-century pictures did not always make perfect historical sense, but they carried a certain cultural seriousness. They aimed to imprint.

The stage history of Ben-Hur is helpful here. When Lew Wallace’s novel was adapted for the theater at the end of the nineteenth century, Christ was not portrayed by an actor at all. A powerful beam of light represented him. Wallace himself had forbidden any human representation of the Lord on stage. The radiance was considered excessive. Even in the 1959 film with Charlton Heston, the tradition held: the face of Jesus is never shown. We see only His back, His hand, the reaction of those who encounter Him. That restraint was not merely a matter of cinematic taste. It reflected a deeper Western instinct. Christ had so thoroughly inhabited the architecture of cultural memory that the question “Who has the right to play Him?” was still taken seriously. To show the face too readily would have been to treat the presence of the Lord as ordinary material for spectacle rather than as something that confronts and reorders the one who encounters it.

This is where the question of anamnesis becomes decisive. Anamnesis is the Greek word for remembrance, but in the Christian tradition, it means far more than simple mental recall. In my own present work, I have been exploring it as embodied, attentive remembrance—the remembering Christ commands when He says, “Do this in remembrance of me.” It is corporate, formative, and participatory. It does not merely bring the past to mind; it makes the past present in a way that shapes the one who remembers. In this sense, it stands in opposition to the externalized, searchable, disposable memory of the digital age. Harrington’s trained memory of the monastic centuries and the anamnesis of the Lord’s Supper both insist on the same thing: true reception requires an interior architecture capable of holding what is given. Without that architecture, even the greatest story becomes content.

Which brings us, finally, to the nature of the Epic and the society that receives it.

An Epic is not merely a long story with battles and gods. At its best, it is a cultural technology of memory. It brings people together in a shared imaginative world and asks them to carry that world forward. In oral culture, the Epic lived inside the hearers; it formed their sense of time, honor, homecoming, and the limits of human striving. Even after the poem was written down, the act of reading or hearing it still presupposed a certain interior readiness—an ability to hold images, to ruminate, to let the story work on the affections over time. The great Hollywood Epics of the mid-twentieth century still operated under a weakened version of that assumption. They trusted that audiences would sit still for three hours—often with a formal intermission, a practical carry-over from the theater that also acknowledged the limits of attention and the body. In an ideal world, Hollywood and theaters would still make that kind of space for attention. The commercial pressure to maximize the number of screenings and fill seats, however, makes such patience difficult to justify. Those older films believed spectacle could serve contemplation as well as thrills, and that a story of sufficient gravity might still leave a lasting shape in the mind.

We no longer live in that world. The feed has formed our habits of attention. Stories arrive as content—watched, clipped, discussed for a weekend, then displaced. Even a film of genuine ambition risks becoming just another high-production-value item that passes through us without leaving much of a residue. The danger is not that Nolan has failed the poem. The danger is that we may no longer possess the interior conditions required to receive an Epic as something more than spectacle. Harrington’s diagnosis drives the point home: if memory has been externalized and attention fragmented, then the cultural work that Epics once performed becomes nearly impossible. The journey of Odysseus can still entertain us. Whether we can still be claimed by it—whether the story can still take up residence in us and reorder our sense of home, fidelity, and time—is a different and more troubling question.

Nolan has at least made the attempt honest. He has given the story room to work at its own pace and on its own terms. Whether we still have the equipment to meet it halfway is not finally a question about filmmaking. It is a question about the kind of people we have become, and the kind of practices of embodied remembrance we are still willing to recover.