The term "Bronze Age" was first used in 1836.
And while Homer (or, you know, whatever collection of scribes wrote down the Epic Cycle whom we collectively call Homer) may have had a general concept of the Bronze Age Collapse (kind of. Archaic Greeks would know about palace ruins, and may have had a concept that many great civilizations had been lost in the recent past. Theres really only 1 mention of *writing* in the Iliad, and its...pretty amiguous. So its not even super clear is Homer realized that people in the Mycenean period had written language), the character of Odysseus definitely did not.
The homeric Odyssey isn't about the Bronze Age Collapse and its themes do not represent an anxiety about the degeneracy and decline of Greek Culture, and if we are going to assess Nolan's film on the rubric of "are concepts, themes, and terminology something that Homer would have used or recognized", we would be here all day. (Theres not even really an Archaic Greek word for "Veteran" in the same way we do, or in the same way its used in the film. Odysseus, a man still fit for battle, would never apply the term to himself) But I don't think thats a particularly fair way to assess the film.
As for my comparison to De Vinci, who died before Vasaris book- Vasari used the term "rebirth" to describe the shift in art styles, and it wouldn't be used to describe the entire cultural era until the 1850s. So, Michelangelo likely wouldn't have thought he was having a great day in the Italian Renaissance either, honestly. Though he might have felt like his art was part of the artistic revival at the time.
Yes, WE, modern people with modern concepts about history, talk about living in the Information Age. We are very used to dividing up history into discreet eras, often to the point of oversimplification, to compare eras to each other, to try to find cause and effect in our progression from one to the next. It's a concept clearly, Nolan finds very interesting.
It also nearly sent me into a fit in the movie because it's just Nolan breaking the forth wall and saying to the camera "This movie is actually about the decline of the American empire because of the loss of traditional values".
And it's just part of the whole contradiction of the film. The insistence on REAL ancient instruments and Hathaway learning to weave on a REAL ancient loom and pretense of gritty realism, while simultaneously being an incredibly modern American War Guilt movie with inconsistent costume design, name dropping the Bronze Age Collapse. It's clunky and awkward at best.
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