Male Odyssey, Female Ghosts: Women in Christopher Nolan’s Cinema

Note: This piece was written before the release of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey.

When the cast of Christopher Nolan’s newest, highly anticipated adaptation of The Odyssey was announced in November 2024, the initial excitement soon took a subtle turn towards skepticism when people discovered that the star power of Zendaya might have been confined to a marginal part with only a few lines. The criticism appeared as fitting as the groundbreaking filmmaker’s choice of the Homeric epic as his 13th cinematic adventure, given a legendary career of exploring male psychology through literal and symbolic odysseys into intricate time-spaces that exceed genres and expectations. In this light, it is natural that a stellar ensemble of supporting actresses (aside from Zendaya, Anne Hathaway returns after 10 years of absence since the Batman Trilogy and Interstellar, for example) in The Odyssey would spark feminist concerns about their secondary space in a male narrative. However, that limitation alone doesn’t characterize the nature or extent of Nolan’s problematic treatment of female characters; rather, it is the instrumentalisation of their limited parts across his filmography that harms both public sentiments and narrative potential.

Tracing nearly 30 years of Nolan’s cinema, it is easier to highlight the bold concepts that underlie his formal sophistication than to spot the women that embody a substantial part of the emotional power of the narratives. From the nameless “Leonard’s wife” in Memento (2000) to Marion Cotillard’s Mal in Inception (2010) to Florence Pugh’s Jean in Oppenheimer (2023), these beautiful, mysterious women give a tender shade of humanity to their lovers—the otherwise morally ambiguous male protagonists—oftentimes through their tragic deaths. While this attempt at sentimental appeal is supposed to go hand in hand with the intellectual promises to make miracles, critics have launched far more attacks on the problem of flat affect, if anything harsh has been written about the inventive plot conceits at all. In response to this criticism, the director himself commented in a 2017 interview with Playboy that “I’ve had people write about my films as being emotionless, yet I have screened those same movies and people have been in floods of tears at the end. It’s an impossible contradiction for a filmmaker to resolve.” However, what is contradictory here doesn’t seem to be the audience’s varying tastes, but the paradox inherent in his attempt to elicit authentic emotional resonance through recycling the prototypically female “object loss.” Although attempts to diversify his portrayal of women have been made, few female characters have escaped romantic or hierarchical ties to the male protagonists, or the burden of incentivizing emotional transformation. When women have stopped catalyzing anything other than their role as catalysts, it becomes a loss both for the filmmaker and for a socio-cultural landscape that his filmography has helped shape since the turn of the century.

Christopher Nolan has portrayed men of all kinds of identities—scientists, killers, even dream stealers—but one thing remains almost unchanged: they are in love with a dead woman. Even worse, as plot twists often reveal (the shock of which dwindles with familiarity with Nolan’s style), these men inadvertently caused their lovers’ deaths.

Memento, Nolan’s sophomore feature and independent breakout in 2000, inherits the trope of a premature victim—that is, dead before the story begins—from the noir tradition but attempts to complicate the situation sentimentally with a lover’s complex. Like a classic noir set, the world of Memento is bleak with a nihilistic undertone, full of liminal spaces that offer no assurance of emotional or narrative anchor. Running between motels, parking lots, and restaurants, the amnestic hero Leonard (Guy Pearce) is just as confused as we are about his existence, and the non-linear storytelling doesn’t help much by handicapping the audience in the very same way—only allowing access to events retrospectively, and in fragments.

Although Leonard is the epitome of an unreliable narrator, his unwavering love for his murdered wife can stand any tests. It’s difficult to align with a protagonist whose only purpose in life is vengeance, but we are enticed to do so whenever the camera closes in on a vulnerable Leonard cued to remember his wife, who constitutes his last piece of intact memory, and thus, the key to his identification. We gain a glimpse of this dead woman through impressions: Leonard’s words, tattoos, brief tender expressions, but most explicitly, flashbacks. Fragments of her make us feel Leonard’s pain by showing the quotidian paradise that was his life. She walks out of the house, she washes her hands, she smiles and looks away, she wakes up in the morning… These shots are shaky, sunny, and saturated with the somatic textures of skin, hair, and loving looks, but lack indication of any personality. She doesn’t have quirks, styles, or expressions. In the most personal episode, she is reading a coverless book in bed, and gets into a half-serious, half-playful argument with Leonard. But it is more of a monologue than a quarrel because Leonard’s lines contain all the information we need to know: “You’ve read it a thousand times,” and then, “I always thought the pleasure of a book was in wanting to know what happens next.” From the owner of the book, we only get generic statements like “It’s good” or “I enjoy it.” Even the unnamed woman’s physical appearance—dark eyes, short curly hair, sculpted cheekbones—would be echoed in the casting and styling of Marion Cotillard and Florence Pugh in Nolan’s later works. She can be anyone, and indeed is anyone—morphing into the non-existent wife of Leonard’s imagined identity from time to time to explain the real cause of her death: not murder, but insulin overdose caused by Leonard’s memory condition, and her own stubborn disbelief of it. Leonard describes how much he misses her, but there is nothing to miss for the audience except the concept of a missed object, whose void is exploited to its fullest to cradle the motive of a male narrative and the lackluster emotional dimension of the film.

The dead victim is, whether surprisingly or not, not the only female archetype that Nolan thrifts from film noir. Contrary to the dead wife’s supposed role to elicit heartfelt humanity is the dangerous seductress that takes full advantage of Leonard’s condition for her own benefit, the classic “femme fatale” Natalie quite brilliantly embodied by Carrie-Anne Moss. In a pivotal scene of revelation, Natalie deliberately insults Leonard’s wife to provoke violence, and then takes advantage of his memory loss to accuse her creditor for the wounds Leonard leaves on her face to use him as a vengeful killing machine. In a sequence of calculated hysteria, Natalie exerts her antagonistic force not without erotic suggestiveness, “I can say whatever I want and you won’t remember. We’ll still be best friends, or maybe even lovers.” She whispers this to Leonard’s ear seconds before he hits her, her characterization the polar opposite of purity and ideal. Instead of motivating the protagonist, she places traps on his way to redemption, and brings out the reckless primitiveness hidden in the darker hemisphere of his psyche.

Ten years and four films later, Nolan revisits these female archetypes in Inception, this time giving it a “twist” by combining the good and the evil in the character of Mal (Marion Cotillard), a literal ghost that exists only in male subconsciousness. If Memento literalises Leonard’s troubled relationship with his past in anterograde amnesia, then Inception interiorizes it in the realm of psychology, featuring the professional dream stealer Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) on his final commission: planting an idea instead of extracting one. ​​While his collaborators initially balk at such an outrageous request, Cobb takes a headlong plunge when his patron Saito offers to clear his name and reunite him with his children—an irresistible reward for a man accused of murdering his wife and banished from his own country. He undertakes the job knowing inception can work, haunted by an experiment he once carried out on Mal that led to her suicide.

Therefore, Mal simultaneously becomes the driving force behind Cobb’s mission—their children are what remains of a lost ideal—and its most formidable obstruction, her presence similarly staged in a bipolar fashion. She is the manifestation of malignancy in Cobb’s present subconsciousness, shooting and stabbing his colleagues to stall the mission that would bring him home and to their children, but a different Mal prior to her death lives in Cobb’s memory in a saturated style cemented in Leonard’s flashbacks of his deceased wife. This version of Mal is lovely and trustful, but grows increasingly unstable after Cobb brings her back to reality from their collective worldbuilding by planting the idea of permanent skepticism in her head. The superimposition of her two shades—the “femme fatale” and the angelic wife—happens in the suicide scene, where she coerces Cobb to jump together and return to their “real” children by framing him as an abusive criminal, thus “freeing [him] from the guilt of choosing to leave [their children].” A blend of manipulation and love, however, doesn’t constitute complexity. Maturing female characters in Memento by way of fusion rather than transformation, Mal becomes an essentialized vessel for melancholia: visually lush but textually thin, conveniently recycled across distinct male protagonists with colorful touches of various star personae—an ironic backlash on Nolan’s nuanced exploration of male psychology.

While the underwhelming female representation in Memento and Inception could be partially rationalized by Leonard’s memory condition or the conniving subconscious of Dom Cobb, Oppenheimer (2023) is unfortunately shy of such alibis for a title figure blessed with infinite intellectual agency, who “learned enough Dutch in six weeks to give a lecture on quantum mechanics,” as his colleague Isador Rabi observes in awe.

Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy)’s mistress Jean (Florence Pugh) is everything Mal is and more. In a sex scene shortly after they meet at a Communist gathering, intimacy and risk are tuned up to top volume when Jean makes Robert read from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita. Her simple but premonitory selection of “and now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” foreshadows the ambition Nolan has in store for Jean’s character—a signifier of guilt that exceeds personal romance and evokes the devastation of humanity itself.

This ambition is tested in a climactic collapse of timelines through sporadic montage and surrealistic imagery near the end of the McCarthyist trial against Oppenheimer. When Roger Robb (Jason Clarke), a pawn planted on the interrogation board by Oppenheimer’s nemesis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), forces Oppenheimer to an emotional and logical dead end by grinding his moral ground on mass destruction weapons, an increasingly disturbing sequence of flashbacks erupts on screen, intercut with an outrageous Strauss accusing Oppenheimer of wanting “the glorious, insincere guilt of the self-important to wear like a f—ing crown.” Yet the final blow that utterly destroys the scientist’s habitual mask of composure is not the perverse truth from his male rivalry—a major and delicately carved theme in Nolan’s filmography that appeared as early in Following (1998) and as prominently in the Dark Knight trilogy—but the lifeless imagery of a dying Jean.

Tangled hair, spasming hands, silent ripples in an overflowing bathtub—a moral and ideological allegory is being made here, one that connects abandoning a mentally deteriorating mistress for familial duty and exterminating hundreds of thousands of civilians under the banner of national security. The movie is asking us to emphasize with a single person instead of cold statistics, but the emotional charge dwindles when that person also turns out to be a result of statistical optimization based on Nolan’s sample pool of “dead lovers,” and a specific trend of post-WWII film noirs that links their “femme fatales” with Communist conspiracy (I Married a Communist (1949) is a direct example of this).

When asked what she thought about the first-person nature of Oppenheimer’s script in an interview with the Times, Emily Blunt, who portrays the part of Mrs. Oppenheimer, answered, “It was made clear to all of us that this is a single perspective… We were there to emotionally elicit different sides of this character.” Indeed, aside from the “dead lovers” that caress male vulnerability, another group of more independent-appearing women has been gaining prominence in Nolan’s filmography over the years to impart strength and resilience. Consider Blunt’s Kitty Oppenheimer as the most recent example, the talented dream architect Ariadne (Elliot Page) in Inception, or even Interstellar’s Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway), the only female explorer on the NASA space crew—they have passions, intelligence, and grit, and most importantly, they are not dead. Their characterizations promise potential, and a fair portion of it is indeed realized when they outgrow male protagonists (usually their mentors) emotionally or intellectually. Yet somehow, perhaps simply by virtue of being women, it is not enough for them to just perform their jobs and enjoy the limited agency that Nolan’s large male ensembles take for granted. They must shoulder the extra burden of emotional labor: to nurse the male protagonists’ redemption arcs.

Inception’s Ariadne is typified in this lineage of “independent” women. When Cobb goes to Professor Miles—portrayed by none other than Michael Caine, the director’s recurring casting choice for respected patriarchs—to ask for an architect “who’s as good as I [he] was,” the renowned scholar and Cobb’s father-in-law calls Ariadne “somebody better.” Soon, Cobb agrees that she is “very impressive,” dazzled by her ambiguous decision to shatter a mirror wall in his dream world without blinking, even placing her on the altar of a prodigy by telling Arthur “I’ve never seen anyone pick it up that quickly before.” It is customary for Nolan to set up authority for female characters through their connections to men, while male authority like that of Michael Caine requires no explanation except the aid of professional styling and set design. In other words, Nolan’s contrived presentation of female strength seems to violate a golden principle of filmmaking—“show, don’t tell,” and this pattern will return in the analysis of Kitty Oppenheimer, though in a subtler form.

As for Ariadne, although the film sets her up to be a promising player, the trajectory of her character soon takes a U-turn as she gets increasingly entangled in Cobb’s troubled relationship with Mal, who brutally stabs her the first time she enters Cobb’s subconscious, but none of it would come as a surprise if one is familiar with the mythological origin of her labyrinthine name: “Ariadne”, daughter of King Minos, helps the hero Theseus escape her supervillain of a father’s maze only to be abandoned by him and later marry the god Dionysus, who falls in love with her while she is asleep (think about the kiss Arthur steals from Ariadne in his dream under the excuse of professional disguise). After breaking into Cobb’s prison of memories in the dungeon of his subconsciousness out of curiosity and concern (but really just terrible unprofessionalism), Ariadne insists in joining the team even though her job as an architect has already ended, persuading Cobb with “[the] team needs someone who understands what you’re struggling with,” while Cobb’s longtime collaborator Arthur—who knew Mal not from mere projection but from reality before her death—is standing inches away. This approach to female characterization could be interpreted as either additive—somehow the “intern” holds the key to emotional connection with Cobb rather than his best friend simply because she is a woman—or deductive in the same way that the “dead lovers” are mere vessels for sentiments, but regardless of the choice of phrasing, Ariadne’s forced arc feels awkwardly artificial, rather than an organic development that fits the story like a piece of missing puzzle.

Oppenheimer hardly did a better job on that front, as Kitty flirts her way into the narrative just like Jean Tatlock—only that, within seconds, they are not repositioned in a bedroom but exchanging life stories against the beautiful landscape of New Mexico, an indication of the broader and deeper bond befitting a lawful spouse instead of a clandestine lover. From their conversation we learn that Kitty is a “biologist graduated to housewife,” which sets the tone for an intelligent woman’s misfortune. Henceforth, much space in the film is devoted to showing that Kitty is capable of matching wits with the men around her, even surpassing them. On a linguistic level, she frequently delivers wisdom that proves crucial for her husband’s reputation and career (“Wake up! It is Strauss! It’s always been Strauss, and you know it. Why won't you fight?”), but her intellect is almost always wrapped in the generic package of domesticity and alcoholism, and never endorsed with anything akin to self-cultivation (with the exception of occasional horseback riding, which is also for Robert’s accompaniment). One night shortly after their first child is born, Robert brings home the news of his promotion to a drunk Kitty, who snaps out of an alcohol-induced celebratory mood when he asks why she wouldn’t go to their crying baby. After pushing him away in an overtly theatrical fashion, she spits out “I have been going to him all f—ing day” in a hoarse voice rising from deep down her chest. Her simmering delirium half-lit by pale moonlight, Emily Blunt has transformed this character into a formidable force, one that begs narrative agency to fully land, or else runs the risk of flying to the realm of performativity, because there exists a nearly comedic contrast between the actress’s magnetic presence and the prototypical domesticity that limits her far beyond the level of the fictional.

Blunt’s most critically acclaimed performance, however, happens in Oppenheimer’s hearing room, where she is literally and symbolically given the proper room to shine—at least before the men outshine her again. Just when she seizes the screen with an incredulous laugh that punctures the confidence of a conniving interrogator, Nolan starts passing the torch of reaction shots amongst the men in the room: from a humiliated Robb Roger, to a senior board member smiling approvingly, to the relieved defense attorney, and finally lingers on Oppenheimer himself, who lowers his head with a half smile, a silent reminder that this has never been Kitty’s moment, but his. Although Nolan is trying to “show not tell,” Kitty’s intellectual superiority, this familiar gesture of narrative reattribution firmly locates power in the men, whose approval confirms Kitty’s lack of command.

When women in Nolan’s films finally emerge as living human beings instead of ghostly shades, they also grow incompatible with the rigid model of conventional functionality. The problem isn’t that they serve a purpose, but the fixed, gendered nature of that purpose which refrains ultimately the expressive range of Nolan’s male narratives. Moving forward, for a leading filmmaker with an Achilles’ heel for female representation, both the appeal and the risk of adapting The Odyssey is obvious: afterall, it’s not just a story of Odysseus, but also about the faithful wives, innocent maidens, and deceitful witches that shape his journey. The question then becomes: what representational strategy would Nolan deploy to depict these canonized women with a stellar female cast, reinforcement or reinvention?

Bibliography

Siddhika Prajapati, “Women Don’t Have a Meaningful Role in Christopher Nolan’s Movies—Why Critics Are Wrong After the Sad Reality of Zendaya’s Role Comes Out,” FandomWire, November 13, 2024.

Christopher Nolan, “Interview: Christopher Nolan,” Playboy South Africa, August 30, 2017.

Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan (Newmarket, 2000).

Inception, directed by Christopher Nolan (Warner Bros., 2010).

Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan (Universal Pictures, 2023).

Mark Tracy, “Emily Blunt Doesn’t Care if Her ‘Oppenheimer’ Character Is Likable,” The New York Times, January 1, 2024.

Jenna Shen is a Film & English double major in CC. She loves watching, writing about, and making films. She recently co-wrote and produced her first feature film @kingston.movie