Article
Character
Comment
Sport
4 min read

When medal mania strikes

What turns a healthy motivation to excel into a toxic desperation to achieve?

Paul Valler is an executive coach and mentor. He is a former chair of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

A defeat fencer, withour a mask, turns angrily and roars.
Sandro Bazadze loses and loses it.

The brilliance and joy of medalists in the Paris Olympics is incredible to see.   Their discipline and sacrifices in training pay off in mesmerising displays of excellence and moments of pure elation.  Yet for there to be winners, there also must be losers, and there have been revealing moments of crushing disappointment which are never nice to see.  Sadly, Sandro Bazadze, world number one in fencing, could well go down in Olympic history as ‘the distraught loser who lost it’ in a furious rant at the referee as he was eliminated in the last 16 of the men’s sabre.  What is it that makes some people explode like that?  What is it that changes a healthy motivation to excel into a toxic desperation to achieve? What is it that changes a human being who is fully alive into an anxious person, so driven to succeed that they cannot bear to fail?   

That is likely why Bazadze erupted.  When he was denied success, he was denied who he thought he was. 

Few of us will achieve Olympic greatness, or the media recognition that redefines an athlete’s profile by forever linking their name to their achievement.  But we all have an inner tendency to believe that our value is based on what we can achieve.  We live in a culture that continually sends us the message that approval and worth depend on your results.   Many of us believe it, and then fall for a life of continuous intensity - a ‘cycle of grief’ as we fiercely strive for results, but mourn the loss of our inner peace.  And this cultural message of acceptance through achievement becomes really toxic when we begin to believe the lie that our identity is based on our performance.  That is likely why Bazadze erupted.  When he was denied success, he was denied who he thought he was.   “The referees have killed me”, he exclaimed. 

It’s not just athletes who are at risk from this.  Think about how our education system sends the same message about grades.  Thousands of teenagers suffer anxiety and mental illness as they face exams, because they believe their self-worth depends on their marks.  As GCSE results are published this month, thousands will be congratulated, but some will become depressed from failure.   

I know many workplaces where ‘performance management’ has become so oppressive that it leads to drivenness, perfectionism and burnout.  Even retirees can feel driven to complete their ‘bucket list’ before they die or become infirm.  So, people in all walks of life easily become addicted to the treadmill of ‘performance-based living’ and feel tired, trapped and troubled.  Labouring under the false belief that self-respect depends on achievement.   If you believe that, you cannot fail or even be ill without feeling deficient.    

There is a deep peace in that.  A freedom and resilience that makes it possible to compete without fear of failure. 

There is a better way.  We can choose to renounce that pernicious lie of a performance identity and affirm the deep truth that our real identity and significance is found in who we are as God’s much-loved children.  We can anchor our emotions in the security of that true identity.  If Bazadze had really understood and internalised this, he would still have been disappointed with the judges decision, but not destroyed by it.   

It is possible to decide to face up to the mania for results and our culture of continuous intensity.  That is what Sabbath is about – an act of resistance against a world dominated by the need for success.  God knows we need a break, not only to rest, but to recentre our hearts and minds on the truth.  We are loved unconditionally and don’t need to strive to achieve in order to be accepted and significant to God.  There is a deep peace in that.  A freedom and resilience that makes it possible to compete without fear of failure.  In the Bible, the word excellence is never applied to achievement, only to character, and the most excellent way is defined as love.  The Christian worldview celebrates great performance, but avoids making an idol of it, because that leads to a destructive obsession and to insecurity. 

Being secure in God is not about avoiding competition or pressure.   It is learning to pursue outstanding attainment free from any sense of our identity being stolen by our grades, or jobs, or whether other people approve of us or award us medals.  Top quality performance is superb and we should give our best with all our heart whatever we do.  But God is a God of grace, who loves, accepts and dignifies everyone unconditionally,  including those who didn’t even qualify for the Olympics, just as much as those who were on the rostrum.   

Article
Belief
Books
Comment
Film & TV
5 min read

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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