The New York Times app has all the stuff that you may not have seen.
The way the tabs are at the top with all of the different sections. I can immediately navigate to something that matches what I'm feeling. I owe the games always. Do it the many, do it in the world. I love how much content it exposed me to.
Things that I never would have thought to turn to a news app for.
This app is essential. The New York Times app. All of the times, all in one place. Download it now at nytimes.com/app. [MUSIC PLAYING]
All in mid. I'm a little late, weighing in on the Odyssey. Chocolate up to having on kids. I don't make it to the movies as much as I would like. But my god, what a trick is for no one to hold off here.
Elon Musk did not understand this movie at all. But this movie sure understood who Elon Musk is, who Donald Trump is, who we have become.
“And I really believe that it points away out.”
Tricks are essential to the Odyssey. Odysseus is in myth. Tricks are. He's described in that famed first line of the story, as the man of many ways, or of many wilds,
or of many turns. He is, depending on the translation you read, an ingenious man, a cunning man, a complicated man. A man who urns for his wife. But can't seem to stop betting goddesses.
Odysseus is a man of appetites and contradictions. A man who wants nothing more than to go home, but chooses again and again to stay abroad.
Odysseus is never one thing.
He's always many things. About Damon is no trickster. I like Matt Damon, but I thought he was going to be the problem of the Nolan's Odyssey. I made this right wing outcry over casting,
Lupita and Yongo and Elliot Page. It was Damon, who I couldn't reconcile with the Odyssey. Because Damon always seems to me, like a man of a single way. A man who wakes up early, keeps to a clean diet, rarely has more than one glass of wine before bed.
That's admirable, but it's not Odysseus. But Nolan wasn't looking for a trickster. Nolan's Odysseus is something else.
“And that, I think you can say, was Nolan's first trick.”
I've spent a few years now quietly obsessed with the archetype of the trickster. The trickster is Loki in Norse mythology. Issue in the Euruba's stories. Coyote or Raven in indigenous tales.
Maui in Polynesia. Hermes and Odysseus among the Age of Greeks.
The trickster plays a crucial function,
writes Louis Hide and his really wonderful book, "Trickster makes this world." That function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that a culture depends on. The trickster dances across customs and taboos.
Says what cannot be said, does what should not have been done. The trickster injects disorder into order. Rendo's visible, what is ordinarily hidden. The trickster causes profound damage that makes new growth possible. But the happy ending is never guaranteed.
“The trickster can be regenerative or ruinous.”
Coyote brings fire. Raven brings the sun. Loki brings home a get-in. Hide's argument is that tricksters are for cultures, both necessary and dangerous.
They represent attention every culture has to grapple with. Because a culture, a society that cannot meet disruption and change with creativity, cannot survive change. A culture that cannot protect its core values, however, will eventually be consumed by corruption.
This is the tension. Too much order leads to paralysis. Too much chaos invites, collapse. We are living in an Age of Chaos. We are living in an Age of Tricksters.
Dumbled Trump and Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson and Andrew Tade and Nick Fuentez and Bronze Age pervert. The grammar of the modern-rightest tricksy. What is serious and what is not. What is a provocation and what is actually a promise.
Why did they say that? And how did they get away with it? I'm not saying these matter only tricksters. But I am saying, I am saying. The dominant personalities of the Age have gathered power by bulldozing
customs and taboos, by saying what cannot be said, by doing what should not be done. Hides said that Americans love a trickster. They love a con man.
Because the embodies things that are actually true about America
cannot be openly declared.
“That may have been true in 1998 when Hyde wrote his book.”
I can see the argument that American institutions and American culture had ossified in some ways in the years since that our society become too robot and bureaucratized. The too much had become unsayable. There was too little openness to real transgression and invention.
But today, there is little that can no longer be said. The ideas and morals upon which the best of our culture was built have been more than disrupted. They have been desecrated. The question now is whether that disruption could be met with creativity
and renewal or whether it'll simply bring us ruin.
This is the central question of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. Nolan's Odyssey hinges on Zeus's law. Treat the beggar and the stranger as you would want to be treated. But as a hoard of processes have now pointed out, that is not Zeus's law, at least not in antiquity.
Zeus's law is narrower. It's more a demand for hospitality towards the guest or the stranger. With the admonition there could be punishment because anybody could be a God in disguise. It's not a law of compassion, not of reciprocity. And so here we find Nolan's central trick.
Nolan has smuggled the core of Judeo-Christian ethics into the center of the Odyssey. Zeus's law in Nolan's Odyssey echoes Leviticus 1934.
“The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native born.”
Love them as yourself, for your foreigners in Egypt. Notice that love them as yourself. It echoes Rabbi Helel, who said, "What is hateful to you? Do not do to your fellow." That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.
It echoes Matthew 712 when Jesus says, "In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you for this sums up the law and the prophets." Such an ethic is demanding. Few of us truly live unto it. But the Ronald modern right is not that they don't live unto it.
It's that they detest it. To treat the foreigner residing among us as well as we treat our native born to love them, is derided as suicidal empathy. The Trump administration glorifies cruel detourcy immigrant towards a stranger, towards the weak and the poor.
It takes money from Medicaid because taxes for the rich, it threatens the destruction of whole civilizations. It is built on the logic of tribut, not compassion, or love, or even reciprocity. Steven Miller put it perfectly to CNN's Jake Tapper. We live in a world in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.
These are the iron laws of the world. But are you saying that they're beginning of time?
“But was it the iron law replaced by the golden rule?”
Isn't that at the heart of what we believe has led our society to progress to become something better and grander than were preceded it? When Odysseus can cocks the trick of the Trojan horse. When he takes advantage of Trojan's veneration, of the same gods he worships, takes advantage of the commonality between them to sack the city, to make its streets run with blood to burn it to the ground.
Is he a hero or a villain? Was that a trick or a crime? The Homer he was a hero. To Nolan, he is a soul in need of redemption. Between Homer's time and our own came a revolution in civilizational values,
an upending of what it means to be civilized. We have human rights law. We have laws governing war. They did not. Which side of that divide are we on now? The modern right believes that western civilization has lost the appetite for strength,
and dominance, and hierarchy, and I would say cruelty.
They'd built it in the first place.
There's a reason a theorist named Bronze Age pervert of all things, became required reading for young trumpets, a reason. Right wing intellectuals like Curtis Yarvin and Michael Anton, muse about the need for an American Caesar. A reason, the Trump administration is obsessed with Roman style architecture.
They are circling this era for a reason. A reason exchange Elon Musk had on ex-reels how far this thinking has gone. A user told Musk it was time to wise up to abandon liberalism,
Because universal suffrage leads to universal suffering.
Musk's reply, "I have wise up."
Helen of Troy and Nolan's Odyssey is not the reason for the war. She's an excuse for a war launched to dominate routes of trade. It's a telling choice made amidst an administration that is crashing into the global trading order, because it seeks more dominance over its flows.
When Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, released his cry of protest at Davos against this regime, he also reached back to an older age to describe what he saw happening. The strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must. And this Afroism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable,
as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.
“Is this the way you build a prosperous, strong, secure world?”
When Nolan's Odysseus recalls the sacking of Troy,
he blanches at the memory of 10 years of rage and fury, pouring into a city in a single night. Sitting in that theatre, I found it hard not to think of the built-up rage that Hamas poured into Israel on October 7th,
and that Israel's poured into Gaza a hundredfold since. Benjamin Netanyahu has described Israel's future as Athens and Supersparta. Athens and Supersparta. You will know her already, the Israeli-born historian with sapiens, sees the irony of this clearly.
Rome has its usefulness. But if, after 2000 years, the Jews simply become the Romans, what was the point? Why did you waste 2000 years then? You could have just become Roman back then.
What was the point?
“And this, I think, is Nolan's finest trick.”
To make one of our oldest moral rules so new again. To turn the best of Judeo-Christianity into the lasouse. So we can see why it might matter. What it might still have to say to us. What Odysseus, eventually, is at his violations of the moral order,
have brought ruin to all around him. I can mnon the king who launched the war against Troy is dead. His throat slit by his wife,
who never forgave him for sacrificing their daughter for fair winds.
Troy is destroyed. Ithaca, Odysseus's beloved home, is overrun by suitors. We seek his wife and his land, and think nothing of murdering his son to get it. Odysseus and his men were not fighting the barbarians.
They were the barbarians. And their actions led to more barbarity. So to has the political movement in our time, that rose promising to make Western civilization great again. America great again.
A trade it's inheritance. The world looks at America now and sees us as the barbarians. We are the country obliterating the global order. We are the country that takes what we want, and demands tribute from those without the strength to resist.
And what the political opposition has to do now is to recognize what Nolan recognized. That it is actually an affirmation of our core values to say, cruelty is weakness. It is only compassion and reciprocity that can build a durable and decent society.
Order is necessary, but order with that ethics and decency is perversion or authoritarianism. There is so much beauty and wisdom. In the injunction to avoid inflicting on others, what we would not see turned against us. In remembering that we were strangers in the land of Egypt.
At the end of his book,
“hide considers when does a trickstress tale end in ruin?”
And when does it end in regeneration? And his answer is when you cannot rejoin the worlds. Loki is bound beneath earth, poison dripped on him for an eternity. And eventually Armageddon is result, ruin. Hermes in Greek mythology becomes the connector between our world and the underworld.
He is one who guides Persephone and spring to return each year. It is only when severed worlds can be bonded. The cultures can rediscover the strength. I don't want to make this too didactic here at the end. So just say this.
Justice and progress in America have come repeatedly. When those seeking it realize that the language of the Torah of the Bible and of the Declaration of Independence
Can be wielded on behalf of a better world.
That they are agents for change, not for the status quo.
“I would say it has been some time since religion and liberalism and patriotism had a comfortable relationship in this country.”
Since they were tightly bonded, but the shape of the modern right has created space to do that work again.
Regeneration is hard.
“It requires seeing old values in new ways.”
It requires recognizing a moral inheritance that is collapsed into cliché.
It can still hold power in an age when it has been debased and forgotten. No one's Odysseus is not a trickster. He is a man living in the ruins brought about by tricksters. So tour we. This movie, the hunger for it.
“I think is a sign that the age of the trickster is ending.”
That is not what we need now. Now we need those who would make this world.
