The Elon Musk of Filmmakers?

Businessman and culture warrior Elon Musk recently attacked the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming The Odyssey. Why anyone should be concerned about casting one of the most beautiful and talented women in show business as Helen is a mystery to me. If I had to guess, however, it probably has something to do with Musk’s troubling racial views (and yes, the “authenticity” claim is nonsense; The Odyssey is a work of fiction, one he almost certainly never bothered to read). Still, I found the timing of Musk’s complaint fascinating and even a bit serendipitous; in recent weeks, I’ve come to think of Musk and Nolan as kindred spirits, ideologically united in many ways.

It might not be a stretch to say that Christopher Nolan is the Elon Musk of filmmakers. Nolan shares many of Musk’s quirks and insecurities: fear of the poor, unwashed masses; a dismissive attitude towards women; the complete absence of a sense of humor; and an insatiable hunger to be admired, to be taken seriously. Like Musk, Nolan relies on hype and a cult of personality to dominate the industry, perhaps because on some level he realizes he’s hawking an immensely costly and inferior product. Nolan and Musk share a toxic messiah complex, a notion that they are revolutionizing both their respective fields and perhaps how we function as a human beings. Their ideas are of course delusions of grandeur, signs of our empire’s slow but inexorable decline.

Nolan’s creative output, like Musk’s, has always reflected an instinctual conservatism. The Dark Knight’s only saving grace, Heath Ledger’s scenery-chewing Joker, is an exponent of Nolan’s reactionary worldview: a terrorist who destroys for the sake of it, who cannot be reasoned with and who must be dealt with through extrajudicial means. The Dark Knight Rises parodied the Occupy movement through the grotesque figure of Bane, threatening to give Gotham City “back to you…the people.” Like the best propaganda, these symbolic characters activate unconscious feelings among viewers in a kind of subliminal political messaging. These messages, which promote unthinking patriotism, unconditional respect for authority, and reification of the status quo, have also been laundered through the enormously influential Marvel behemoth and other anti-art movie franchises.

Much like Musk, Nolan often tries to exhibit his sophistication and literacy. These attempts lay bare the flimsiness of his intellectual pretensions. One of the most embarrassing instances of this occurs in Oppenheimer, when the titular character is quizzed by fellow leftists on his knowledge of Marxism. The exchange goes:

OPPENHEIMER: I’ve read Das Kapital. All three volumes. Does that count?

CHEVALIER: That would make you better read than most Party members.

OPPENHEIMER: It’s turgid stuff, but there’s some thinking… ‘Ownership is theft.’

TATLOCK: ‘Property is theft.’

OPPENHEIMER: Sorry, I read it in the original German.

Oppenheimer’s performative behavior, as Nolan writes it, not only echoes Musk’s posturing in general, it is, amazingly, almost identical to Musk’s (almost certainly false) claim that he himself has read all three volumes of Capital in the original German! What is perhaps most revealing is that the phrase ‘property is theft’ is not only entirely absent from Capital, but it didn’t originate with Marx at all. In fact, Marx actually ridicules the phrase (originated by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) in a scathing rebuttal to Proudhon’s anarchist socialism. The fact that this glaring inaccuracy passed through the film’s enormous production team unnoticed implies another shared trait of Nolan and Musk: the need to be surrounded by a clique of yes-men, unable or unwilling to point out the flaws in the great genius’s work.

Nolan appears to be as mystified by women as he is by philosophy. His fundamental conservatism rears its head whenever he depicts women striking out from the roles they are appointed to by society, and like Musk, Nolan often reduces women in his films to fetishized objects or dangerous Others. The communist Jean Tatlock falls into depression and commits suicide, a fate that is shared by Marion Cotillard’s Mal, the femme fatale of Inception. When Nolan tries to say something meaningful about human relationships, he usually ends up predictably reifying the nuclear family as the cornerstone of a healthy society, the final end and highest aim of human existence, as the bland, pretentious Interstellar testifies. Nolan reaches for profundity, but leaves us only with soppy cliches about how love and family transcend all temporal and spatial boundaries.

Nolan and Musk’s shared obsession with the colonization of space provides a window into their intellectual limitations and narcissistic tendencies. While both seem aware of the impending ecological disaster facing humanity, they seem to regard it as a foregone conclusion, without even trying to meaningfully articulate its true causes or potential solutions. One might still argue that Musk’s massive investment in electric vehicles indicates that he is genuinely concerned about the impact of carbon emissions on the atmosphere., but if this were true, why would he be systematically destroying every regulatory mechanism governing the use of fossil fuels, or argue that underpopulation is somehow a greater threat to our survival than climate change? The horrific rotating space station at the end of Interstellar is reminiscent of Musk’s dystopian visions of our post-Earth existence. Neither man offers a compelling answer for how the free market is going to bring about a fully automated, post-scarcity society in outer space, and yet we are expected to enthusiastically greet the prospect of abandoning mother Earth for the fantasy of interplanetary colonization, leaving all of the social structures that promote waste and inequality intact.

All this begs the question as to how these fairly mediocre men have achieved such enormous success. I would argue that it rests on their shrewd understanding of markets and consumer behavior. Both men know how to manipulate public reactions in order to maximize their successes. Despite being weighed down by some fairly unprofitable companies, Musk has often used his erratic behavior to manipulate the stock market in his favor. He has also used his massive following to influence political outcomes that favor his economic class, resulting in lucrative government contracts or massive tax cuts for the super-rich. Every Nolan production since The Dark Knight has been accompanied with an increasingly elaborate PR campaign, including deliberate reveals of the A-list casts and hints of new technical feats. The success of Oppenheimer and the likely success of his forthcoming The Odyssey hinge largely on this fetishistic hyping of technological innovations. However, the Barbenheimer phenomenon was more gracefully orchestrated than any shot in Oppenheimer. As for The Odyssey, despite Nolan’s pursuit of no-expenses-spared authenticity, the film’s first trailer seems to be visually flat and dreary, hardly distinguishable from AI.

Lacking a healthy economic foundation from which to grow, our artistic and cultural output has been hollowed out in the name of the profit motive. Musk’s actions and personal interests (or lack thereof) provide a window into the decadence of our system. Every film of Nolan’s testifies to this decadence: they are products of a film industry that is oligopolistic and increasingly resembles a monopoly, fears any sort of artistic risk or provocation that could alienate consumers, and indeed views the constituent pieces of every aesthetic experience as mere numbers on a balance sheet. Nolan, like Musk, may view himself as the future of his industry, raising the possibilities of art and life to new heights; in reality he is another capitalist whose actions are dictated mainly by the interests of his class.

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