THAT’S WHAT XI SAID: The Odyssey and the Clash of Civilizations.

The most interesting figure affecting the interview, though, does not show up on the screen and may not be aware that the conversation even occurred. That is Xi Jinping.

The interview opens strangely: [Yiyang] Zhuge’s first question is to ask Nolan if he’s “a bard for a civilization at dusk.” After Nolan points out that in Homer’s time, Greece was on the ascent but had not yet regained the glories of an earlier age, Zhuge interjects that Athens lost the Peloponnesian War because of the democracy’s hubris.

This may seem like an odd way to begin the conversation that focuses on other topics, but Zhuge had little choice but to start along those lines. She is parroting two of Xi’s favorite arguments. The first is that “the East is rising and the West is declining.” The other is that the United States is on the verge of falling into the “Thucydides trap” of provoking a war with Xi rather than making way for China’s inexorable rise. Xi brought up the Thucydides trap in his most recent meeting with Donald Trump.

A Chinese lover of the Western classics, as Zhuge clearly is, has to frame her thoughts around Xi’s ideas because the CCP abhors the discussion of interesting ideas or works of art on their own merits. Xi, parroting Mao and Stalin, says that “art and literary workers are the engineers of the human soul.” Much as another engineer might use a backhoe to reshape a pile of dirt, so an artist or writer will use their paintings and prose to reshape souls. For now, Zhuge can still openly admire these parts of the Western tradition that she finds so beautiful, but first she must dance to the party’s tune.

Nolan, who sat for the interview during the publicity campaign for his movie in China, may have had no idea that this was occurring. He may be uninterested in ideological struggle. His responses nonetheless showed why Western ideas fill the CCP with fear.

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