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I’ll miss football’s disappearing cathedrals

Sharing the same physical space as those that go before is a spiritual act.
A CGI image of a son and dad holding hands on the concourse of a modern stadium.
The 'new' Old Trafford.
MUFC.

On the way back from a gig a few weeks ago, my dad asked me a question. “Are there any artists that you’d be so up for seeing that you’d pay anything for a ticket?” 

Paul McCartney? Julian Lage? Stevie Wonder? 

That’s about it really. Notwithstanding the fact that I’m running out of internal organs to sell to afford gig tickets nowadays, it struck me that a lot of the people I’d pay anything to see are now all dead. Some of them died long before I was born: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon (as part of The Beatles), John Bonham (as part of Led Zeppelin). And then there are the bands who split up before I was born, especially Waters-Gilmour-Wright-Mason era Pink Floyd and Gabriel-Hackett-Banks-Rutherford-Collins era of Genesis. 

But there are a few artists I wish I’d had the chance to see in the fleeting moments we were alive at the same time. David Bowie, Jeff Beck, Gary Moore, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Neil Peart (of Rush), Jeff Buckley (although as a 4-year-old when he died, he probably would have been lost on me back them.)  

I was thinking about this question again while watching the Merseyside football derby in February. It was a proper Merseyside derby. By this, I meant that it ended up with fans on the pitch, fights, two players being sent off, and both Liverpool’s manager and assistant manager being sent off too. A proper Merseyside derby.  

It was also the last ever Merseyside derby to be held at Goodison Park. And that made me profoundly sad.  

I’ve driven past Goodison a fair bit. You catch site of it looming over Stanley Park as you walk up to Anfield. But I’ve never actually been to a match at Goodison. And now I never will. Goodison will soon join a growing list of football grounds that no longer exist: Highbury, Maine Road, White Hart Lane, The Dell, the Boleyn Ground. All gone.  

Along with Goodison, another stadium has been added to the scrap pile in recent days. You may have heard of it: Old Trafford.  

Yes, Manchester United – who last month announced 200 redundancies at the club, having previously made 250 members of staff redundant last year – have made the decision to spend £2bn on leaving the historic and iconic, if crumbling, Old Trafford stadium to move to a new 100,000-seat stadium. Turns out I only have a few more years to go to Old Trafford before it becomes another page in my book of regrets.  

Highbury. Maine Road. White Hart Lane. The Dell. The Boleyn Ground. Goodison. Old Trafford. These are football’s cathedrals, and they are disappearing.  

And all of this reminds me about the kind of debates that pop up whenever a church building – whether active or defunct – is used for a purpose that some Christians find disrespectful or blasphemous. Church buildings are often contested spaces; what goes on within them is policed in a way that simply isn’t the case for many other public spaces. Should they host heavy metal gigs? Should disused churches be converted into housing, as this slightly bizarre article seems to revel in.  

When I used to live in Nottingham, there was a bar in the centre of town located inside an old church. It’s a gorgeous old building and it has largely survived the conversion into a bar. It is, it must be said, a lovely place for a drink. But it’s difficult not to feel at least a tinge of sadness that, where that place once reverberated with the sound of praise and worship, it now echoes with the thrum of drinks orders and club music. It feels haunted with the presence of God. 

Look, things change, I know that. I’m not so nostalgic as to think that everything needs to stay as it was when I was a child. But it’s hard not to wonder about the histories that are being lost, and the stories that are being forgotten, when we demolish or repurpose our church buildings, or our football stadia.   

There is a reason why we preserve our history, and our cultural heritage. Sharing the same physical space as those that go before us is a supremely spiritual act. We visit castle ruins, old churches, and war-torn battlefields because they connect us to those that went before. We enter the stories of those people and realise that perhaps they aren’t so different from our own stories. 

Come May, the Gwladys Street End at Goodison will have sung its last song. In the near future, Old Trafford’s Stretford End will fall silent, too. Liverpool’s owners FSG have come in for a lot of criticism since taking over in 2010. But, along with appointing Jürgen Klopp, their decision to renovate rather than move away from Anfield will surely go down in history as an unqualified success. It is a place that reeks of history, of stories past. And those stories shape and underwrite the club’s stories in the present.  

Again: things change, I get that. But whether it’s the church’s buildings or football stadia, we lose these spaces – and the stories born within them – at great cost to ourselves.  

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I’m not sure Christopher Nolan has actually read The Odyssey

The director has drunk the Kool-aid of modernity, and done so deeply
the head of a classical statue looks up amid embers around it.
The odyssey poster.
Universal Studios.

Greek myths are full of hubris. Full of it. I feel like ‘hubris’ isn’t a word you hear very often anymore. It means excessive pride or self-confidence that leads to a downfall, in case you were wondering. “Boris Johnson’s hubristic underestimation of the effects of ‘Partygate’ was the final nail in his political coffin,” we might say.  

In one myth, Icarus is imprisoned, but given wings held together by wax in aid of his escape. He is warned not to fly too close to the sun, because the heat will melt the wax. Guess what he does? Yep! Flies too close to the sun. The wings melt and he falls to his death. Hubris

Another myth tells the story of Prometheus. No, not the slightly underrated Alien prequel. (That’s right, I said underrated, but that’s another article for another day). Prometheus defies the Greek gods by stealing fire and giving it to humans. As punishment, Zeus ties Prometheus to a rock and has an eagle eat his liver, only for it to grow back overnight so the eagle can come back the next day and start again. Hubris. 

Greek myths are full of hubris. Full of it. 

And so, this is why I find the new poster for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of Greek epic The Odyssey so … bizarre. But then I’ve been nervous about Nolan’s adaptation since it was announced. Nolan is a wonderful filmmaker, but he’s also deeply naturalistic in the messages he conveys. By this, I mean that all his films suggest that nature – the physical, material world of atoms and things – is all there is. Even when he has opportunity to explore themes of the mystical, or magical, or the supernatural, he only does so when a purely ‘natural’ explanation for such things is possible.  

For example, in The Prestige (and HUGE spoilers for the film here: it’s incredible, please watch it if you haven’t), Nolan tells the story of two rival magicians, played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale. Robert Angier (Jackman) is trying to work out Alfred Borden’s (Bale) teleportation trick. The secret? (Seriously: big, big spoilers here). Science. Nikola Tesla has invented a device that can clone someone but send the clone to a different location. The trick – the mysterious MacGuffin at the film’s heart – has a natural, scientific explanation. Magic isn’t real and you’re a fool if you think otherwise. 

Perhaps this is also why Nolan directed the wonderful Dark Knight trilogy. After all, Batman’s superpower is just wealth: it’s entirely naturalistic, with nothing that can’t fit into a scientific way of understanding the world. Or we could point towards the science fiction that underwrites Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet. For a filmmaker so gifted at tension and intrigue, he has surprisingly little truck with mystique, mystery, and the divine. But this is a problem when it comes to The Odyssey. A huge problem.  

Let’s return to that poster I mentioned earlier. It shows the head of a classical Greek statue, flames ember underneath it. The caption? Defy the Gods. And it’s at this point I start to wonder if Nolan has actually read The Odyssey. Because The Odyssey takes questions of divinity and their authority very, very seriously. Like many Greek myths and poems, the message of The Odyssey isn’t ‘defy the Gods’. No: it’s ‘trying to defy the gods is an unbelievably stupid, futile, and dangerous thing to do’. Nolan would seemingly have us raze Mount Olympus to the ground.  

Look, all we have is a poster so far. Nolan might prove me wrong. But we shouldn’t be surprised if Nolan reworks The Odyssey in such a way that ‘defy the Gods’ becomes its central message. Because Nolan is a quintessentially modern filmmaker.  

In a 1965 book called Freud and Philosophy, French philosopher Paul Ricœur described the modern period as dominated by a climate of suspicion or scepticism. Within this ‘climate of thought’, the straightforward understandings of things are actually deceptive, instead hiding hidden, deeper, and ‘truer’ meanings. He described Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Mark as the ‘masters of suspicion.’ And so the world around us is to be approached suspiciously, to uncover the ‘truer’ meanings about our subconscious (so Freud), our false, religiously imposed morals (so Nietzsche), or our exploitative economic systems (so Marx). 

Each of Ricœur’s ‘masters of suspicion’ might be mapped on to one of the villains in Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. Liam Neeson is Ra’s al Ghul, a Freud-like figure who helps Bruce Wayne navigate the psychological effects of his parents’ murders in childhood. Heath Ledger’s mesmeric Joker is Nietzsche’s stand-in, exposing our misguided systems and structures of ethics, tethered to a religious framework we no longer hold to. Tom Hardy’s Bane is Marx, freeing Gotham’s proletariat from the economic structures that oppress them so. 

It's not a perfect fit, but I think there’s more than enough evidence to say that Nolan has drunk the Kool-aid of modernity, and he has drunk so very deeply. And this would be fine – absolutely fine – if he wasn’t planning to adapt The Odyssey. Because, as a quintessentially modern filmmaker, Nolan’s work emerges out of and celebrates a culture wherein ‘defy the gods’ is a slogan that can only be heard as heroic, courageous, and noble, rather than dumb and futile, as The Odyssey would stress to us. 

Defying divinity is not heroic. The Odyssey knows this and knows it well. Defying the gods never ends well for humans stupid enough to try in Homer’s work. Our modern sensibilities encourage us to be suspicious of institutionalised power, especially when that power takes a religious shape. We are predisposed to imagine that invocations of the divine are nothing more than thinly-veiled power-grabs. And sometimes they are. But The Odyssey is right to say that divinity itself is not to be trifled with. Renounce your creator at your peril. 

Like all his other films, Nolan’s The Odyssey is likely to be tense, wrought, and cinematographically immaculate. But also like his other films, I worry it will be deeply naturalistic in the way it handles the inescapably divine and supernatural elements present in Homer’s epic. The Odyssey has an important message for our increasingly hubristic society. I just worry that Nolan’s not the man to convey it as it deserves. 

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If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
 
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