Allow me to sing, o Muse, of a recent dinner conversation about “The Odyssey.” The setting was not a Greek restaurant but a Vietnamese joint. My friend Sharon and I had just settled at our table and ordered our dinner and drinks when she steered our conversation toward Christopher Nolan’s latest opus.

Have I seen it? she asked. Of course. What did I think? It was fine, I said. A little too long, definitely overhyped. I think I described it as Nolan’s baroque reward for “Oppenheimer.”

Then, like Odysseus himself, she aimed at her main target of derision: Matt Damon. What on Earth possessed Nolan, a notoriously detail-oriented director, to tap the all-purpose flour of movie stars to portray one of the most storied heroes in literature?

“What, was Leo not available?” she asked, as if petitioning the gods. But divine entities stopped intervening in man’s affairs long ago; besides, I had the answer drawn and nocked since I’d walked out of the theater days before.

Why not Leo? Because nobody would believe Leonardo DiCaprio could string that bow.

I can only imagine that at this point, restaurant waitstaffs across the world have picked up crumbs and slices of chatter about Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s 2,700-year-old blockbuster. Nolan’s work is designed to bring out everyone’s inner critic and professor, but his execution of “The Odyssey” tosses us plenty of bones to pick.

By now the distinctiveness of Nolan’s cinematic ruminations is common knowledge. Whether we’re talking about “Oppenheimer,” “Interstellar” or his “Batman” trilogy, Nolan is a seasoned explorer in the realm of man’s hubris and its relationship with personal history, time and memory, especially the selective variety, among many touchstones. The nonlinear nature of Homer’s epic poem lends itself to his style.

But perhaps the least appreciated aspect of Nolan’s approach is his conscious use of modern celebrities in his version of one of the earliest stories to question the human compulsion to reach for fabled immortality at the cost of the people beside us. In essence, Nolan chose a superstar cast to drive home the interpretation of Homer’s saga as a legend about fame.

Spinning that lore for a modern audience, then, calls for fronting the cast with a star whose popular persona is outsized compared to his dramatic proficiency. Damon is the simplest and most reliable vehicle to tell us about a complicated man, as the highly lauded translator Emily Wilson describes Odysseus.

By this, I don’t mean to call Damon a bad actor. I’m just saying that his “Odyssey” performance is workmanlike. Wilson, for her part, walked away from the film with an impression of Nolan’s efforts that makes a person picture the Muse Calliope whispering in her ear, “Drag him.”  Thus inspired, she wrote a long and brutal essay for the London Review of Books.

In my view, though, if the idea is to position Odysseus as an everyman hero swept up in a maelstrom of ordeals too vast for him to conquer, Damon was always going to be Nolan’s guy.

Which brings us back to the hero’s mythical recurve. Odysseus’ bow is an extension of his valorous identity. It is his Excalibur, his Andúril, the vaunted weapon only he can string and use to hit a bullseye through a row of twelve crossed axes. The fact that none of Penelope’s suitors could do that marked them as unfit to take his place as Ithaca’s king.

And while my friend made very good points about Hollywood personal trainers and physics and how, through creatine, all things are possible, the simple fact is that we’re more likely to buy that the man synonymous with Jason Bourne would be the only one who can bend that buster, string it, and make it sing.

It might seem strange to look this deeply into the why of Matt Damon as Odysseus, since his casting didn’t agitate right-wing trolls. The MAGA crowd whined early and loudly when the trades announced Lupita Nyong’o’s selection to play Helen of Troy, a fuss only slightly outdone by the news of Elliot Page’s casting as a Greek soldier named Sinon. When the rumor mills incorrectly assumed Page was playing Achilles, heads exploded.

But Nyong’o’s Helen, admirably performed though it was, contained few of the metatextual implications of Nolan’s other casting choices.

Tapping Travis Scott to play the Bard singing the tales of Odysseus’ exploits, for example, doesn’t merely reframe the role of ancient storytellers and poets as that age’s rappers. Scott is a 10-time Grammy nominee whose ability to combine spectacle with his lyrical craft has gained him a significantly passionate following. He is a brand unto himself and a sought-after corporate ambassador. If a queen like Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway) desired to send a message to her unworthy suitors about their inadequacy, she’d choose a rhapsodist with that kind of pull who also blends in with a boisterous crowd.

Then we have Benny Safdie as Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, whom Odysseus follows to Troy and, ultimately, his cursed fate. Placing famous directors in front of the camera is a classic auteur filmmaker flourish, and Safdie is both an actor and a director mainly associated with indie films.

Notably, unlike Damon’s Odysseus, Safdie’s Agamemnon is not jacked. But his intimidating onyx armor obscures all that, much in the way Darth Vader’s helmet and cloak overcompensate for his shriveled form. We don’t see Agamemnon’s face for most of the movie until the end, when his wife and Helen’s twin Clytemnestra (also Nyong’o) murders him in the bathtub as revenge for sacrificing their daughter. Only then do we see this dark colossus for the slight creature he always was.

Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.
Sign up here

Admittedly, that’s a lot more flexible interpretation than the obvious reasoning behind Damon’s selection. Yes, Nolan has worked with some of the most distinguished actors of our time, including Christian Bale, Cillian Murphy and Leo.

But when reading the famous opener of one longstanding translation — “Speak, memory, of the cunning hero/The wanderer, blown off course time and again” —  few broadly popular A-list actors besides Damon live up to that picture.

Damon’s Odysseus captures all the heroic arrogance, bravery and selfish stupidity of an action-flick brawler who would shoot a giant cyclops in the eye as he’s making his escape, just because. Moves like that make it easy to comprehend that his ill-fated meanders could have been avoided if he’d followed the same directions that got everyone else home sooner.

But really, it all comes back to that bow. Only a true and blustery hero can string it, much as we believe that only Damon can win a knife fight by wielding a pen. And if we’re being honest, DiCaprio may have earned an Oscar for his performance in “The Revenant,” but he does not have the biceps to take on that CGI grizzly.

The post Christopher Nolan’s Odysseus could only be Matt Damon appeared first on Salon.com.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk recently made headlines over an issue we don’t typically associate with this president of the United States and a tech CEO: history. 

On July 22, Musk posted on X, the social media platform he owns, that his generative artificial intelligence model Grok would produce, by year’s end, a feature-length movie of “The Odyssey” that is “historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.” Two days later, Trump issued an executive order mandating that signage be placed on the exterior of Smithsonian Institution museums, alerting visitors to the “inaccurate information” conveyed in the displays within, and directing them to “locations and resources for accurate information regarding America’s history.” Striking in these two apparently unrelated episodes is one word in particular — accuracy — and important lessons museums and historians can learn to combat these attacks on the integrity of historical research.

There is an important, material connection between these incidents: AI. While frenemies Trump and Musk have a complicated relationship, both continue to be involved in a large-scale transformation of government by means of its fusion with corporate interests, and particularly with corporate investment in AI.

In the same week that the pair were ranting over historical “accuracy,” Michael Kratsios, the president’s science adviser, proposed overhauling the government’s approach to funding the sciences. His plan would leave that role to corporations and private philanthropists instead. Kratsios is not a scientist; his previous experience includes working at an investment fund run by Peter Thiel and for the Department of Government Efficiency under Musk. Among the priority areas Kratsios promotes for this new funding model are AI, quantum computing and robotics. And on the same day he introduced his proposal, Kratsios announced the winners of research grants from the Genesis Mission, the administration’s AI initiative.

While this push to redirect the country’s scientific research has incited alarm, reactions to interventions in the historical humanities have been more muted. Yet attacks on public museums and on creative retellings of historical narratives are just as dangerous to the health of this country’s democracy.

When he testified on July 21 before the Republican-led House Oversight Subcommittee on the perils of government intervention in the Smithsonian’s activities, David Blight, a professor of American history at Yale University, offered a righteous defense of his profession. Besides highlighting the need for close engagement with history to lead to richer understandings of the past, Blight said it was necessary to disturb the questionable stories — those supposedly incontestable truths that the Trump administration insists are more “accurate” — that have been ingrained in our cultural memory. “If we’re not careful,” he warned, “we will end up with what the great writer Toni Morrison called ‘statist history.’ And it will create what she called ‘sanctioned ignorance.’”

AI has become a blunt instrument in the enterprise to impose precisely this form of sanctioned ignorance about America’s past. The signs Trump proposed for the outside of the Smithsonian suggest vaguely that there is another, more “accurate” history to be found elsewhere, and generative AI is exactly what Musk is proposing to provide this. Taken together, their plans amount to a one-two punch, history in the hands of the corporate state. 

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

The federal government’s prospective disinvestment in the sciences has long been the status quo for the humanities, with corporate foundations and private philanthropy providing the main funding sources. Media outlets have recently been reporting on partnerships between museums, historical image collections and AI firms. A recent Financial Times article pointed to the prevalence of AI companies throwing struggling museums a “lifeline” by promising to bring in new audiences attracted by the prospect of chatbot-led “personalized” tours, along with other glitzy experiments. 

It may be tempting to see value in projects such as the Schmidt Foundation — that’s Eric Schmidt of Google — funding a fellowship in AI at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Musk Foundation’s support of the Scroll Prize to use AI in reconstructing ancient texts in the burnt scrolls of Herculaneum. But these projects are simply two among countless others that have been seeding AI into museums and historical research for well over a decade. Even more egregious is the case of AI companies buying  and destroying rare books en masse in the process of scanning them for data. In the context of the dire austerity we are witnessing, the juggernaut of tech money seems impossible to resist. But the public should know the dangers of ceding the precious work of peering into the past to those whose chief aims are to exploit it for data and build visions of our collective history to their own liking. 

It is a fact that AI is inherently incapable of producing an accurate image of the past. The data on which image recognition and generative models are based rely on statistics and probability to arbitrate the truth. Algorithmic mediation of the past means that the greatest weight will be given to what privileged institutions have already been able to preserve in the greatest numbers. 

In other words, AI is unable to treat evidence — or people — equally with context and knowledge of how that evidence relates to the inequities built into museums and image archives themselves. Yet the more space we grant to Big AI, in partnership with an authoritarian state, into institutions of historical research and public communication about history, the less able we will be to find our way toward historical accounts that have fallen into the cracks of algorithmic data sets. 

No amount of feeding them more data will make them better able to offer a vision of history that is more accurate to the past and an essential part of our striving toward a more equitable future. That fact alone threatens the future of democracy.

The post Trump and Musk both want to control America’s history appeared first on Salon.com.

The most-quoted line from Al Franken’s 2003 bestseller “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them” attempts to draw a distinction between conservative and liberal forms of patriotism. 

“Conservatives love America like a four-year-old loves his mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups,” wrote Franken, a comedian who would, only five years later, would be elected U.S. senator from Minnesota as a Democrat. “To a four-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow.” 

Twenty-three years on, the right still has that infantile view of America. Under the thumb of Donald Trump and his MAGA agenda, it has grown even more petulant. Conservatives won’t tolerate any information that complicates their desire for flag-waving. The United States is a one-of-a-kind nation, and its history one of uninterrupted excellence. There’s no room for nuance and no time for reflection. Any mention of the perverse institution of slavery or of the many bloody, pointless conflicts the nation has led or joined, particularly in the last 50 years, is treated by the right like a “Yo Momma” joke, an intentionally offensive attack on a saintly figure that could not and cannot do wrong.   

The difference between liberals and conservatives on this issue can be seen, oddly enough, in Franken’s disappearance from the national stage. Following accusations of sexual harassment, the former “Saturday Night Live” star and constant presence in left-of-center media was quickly pushed aside. Liberals could still enjoy Stuart Smalley skits and support Franken’s political positions, but many felt guilty about their past support for a man who arguably didn’t deserve it. In a word, they felt shame.  

You’ll find no such contrition on the other side of the aisle. On Monday, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan cemented his lackey status with the president when he told reporters that Americans shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in recent months got what was coming to them. Karl Rove, the man who helped cook up the lies used to justify a war that left more than a million Iraqis dead, still makes regular appearances on Fox News. He’s joined on the network by Oliver North who, as a National Security council staff member during the Reagan administration, illegally provided arms to Contra groups that carried out atrocities against civilians in Nicaragua. Henry Kissinger’s misdeeds in Cambodia couldn’t keep the College of William and Mary from appointing him chancellor. 

To the conservative mind, these men were working in service of American interests. Because America is great, their actions must be great, ipso facto, Q.E.D.

That sort of black-and-white thinking was always going to clash with the shades of gray in Christopher Nolan’s smash-hit adaptation of “The Odyssey.” In his retelling of Homer’s epic poem, Nolan imagines Odysseus as a man haunted by the sacking of Troy. His covert operation to sneak within the city walls was a betrayal of bedrock beliefs about honor and civility, a shameful act that brought humanity into a darker age. The king of Ithaca’s pride in his ingenious trick is steadily sapped by a series of cosmic punishments. He returns home in beggar’s clothes with a plan to pay penance to the scores of souls he unjustly sent to the underworld. 

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

In true originalist fashion, conservatives spent the months leading up to the release of “The Odyssey” raging about Nolan’s decision to cast nonwhite actors in starring roles. Like the originalists on the Supreme Court, they’re largely making up their argument out of whole cloth and using the imagined thoughts of long-dead people as a fig leaf for their own prejudices.  

For these pseudo-historians, complicating Odysseus was another liberal assault on Homer’s tale. As a great king from a mythical age, at least in their view, any suggestion that Odysseus might feel a genuinely human reaction is heretical to the right-wing mind, a slight against their preferred bedtime stories. 

In a review for Fox News subsidiary OutKick that might as well have been written in crayon, Jon Root described Odysseus’ lingering guilt as “character assassination.”

“The new stories being told in this film mostly feel like . . . a complete betrayal of the source material that made so many of these characters worth investing in,” he wrote.    

At the end of the film, Matt Damon’s haggard Odysseus sails toward the unknown, accepting that he doesn’t deserve the comfort of a king. He’s uniquely responsible for ushering in an age of barbarism and will spend the rest of his life making amends in the fallen world he helped create. 

Kissinger, in contrast, defended the bombing of Cambodia until he died peacefully at the age of 100. In its obituary,  the William F. Buckley-founded National Review praised the former secretary of state as a man who spent his life tamping down turmoil. 

Sing to them, muse, of an uncomplicated man.

The post The real reason conservatives hate Nolan’s “Odyssey” appeared first on Salon.com.

Throughout all three hours of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” — the acclaimed writer-director’s take on the ancient Greek epic attributed to Homer — I repeatedly returned to one question.

This isn’t entirely atypical. In the past, Nolan’s films have pushed me to ponder ideas both enormous and infinitesimal; much of his work ricochets across this spectrum at a dizzying rate, which is part of why his movies, though always grand in scale, feel different from your typical blockbuster fare. Unlike many of his contemporaries working in the big-budget space, Nolan has no affection for the slow build. His films are designed to be all-consuming experiences, opening in media res, grabbing the viewer by the ankle and dragging them into action already in progress. This technique also makes them difficult to refute based on feeling alone. When you’re swept up into the story immediately and held there for 180 minutes, it’s harder to pinpoint exactly where the film ends and your own impression of it begins. With its exhaustive narrative breadth and action set pieces that only a budget of a cool $250 million could afford, the fact that “The Odyssey” exists at all is intended to feel like a miracle. But that’s precisely why I couldn’t seem to shake that one nagging question: What’s the point of all this?

I mean, I know the point. The point is to dazzle. The point is to convey cinema’s great power. The point is to remind us that there is no filmmaker working today other than Christopher Nolan who can make a movie of this size.

(Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal) Mia Goth as Melantho and Anne Hathaway as Penelope in “The Odyssey”

But do any of those things warrant “The Odyssey”? Nolan, fresh off the success of “Oppenheimer” — a historical biopic about the father of the atomic bomb that became a runaway hit, generating nearly a billion dollars and seven Oscar wins — had a blank check waiting on his doorstep upon returning home from Oscar night. He could conceivably do whatever he liked, go in whichever direction he pleased. And yet, Nolan returned to Homer’s poem, the structural basis of almost all storytelling throughout human record, which, if you break it down more acutely, includes Nolan’s filmography.

Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.
Sign up here

Nolan has called the lack of mainstream adaptations of the work a “curious gap in Hollywood history.” But I’d argue the lack of “Odyssey” films partially stems from the fact that the text speaks for itself. Pursuing an adaptation of this caliber feels like a losing battle, something a filmmaker does just to prove that they can. Without any noteworthy changes that give the source material unexpected new meaning — significance you could only get in a movie theater, and not from the story or any of its scholarly interpretations — that air of self-importance quickly turns to a sour funk. In an ironic twist, Nolan’s own ambition in adapting “The Odyssey” looks something like Odysseus’. Fresh from his latest victory, Nolan reaches for the stars and grazes the Gods. His determination may be admirable, but the sheer, futile arrogance of such a display backfires in equally spectacular fashion.

None of this is to say that there isn’t merit in a filmmaker, particularly one of Nolan’s stature, wanting to explore their artistic desires. But that’s also why “The Odyssey” is such a keen disappointment. Someone like Nolan — who has passed just about every bar there is to pass, raised that bar, and then passed it again — probing his ambition within the context of a work as substantial as “The Odyssey” should prove to be compelling in its own right. To use a recent example operating on a similar blockbuster scale, Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” did this particularly well, assessing humanity and movies together against the backdrop of Spielberg’s favorite themes. One could enjoy “Disclosure Day” as a solitary experience, or measure it against Spielberg’s body of work to explore an even deeper meaning.

Sure, one might argue that in “The Odyssey,” Nolan is studying his own hubris, accepting the innate faults that come with bringing Homer to the big screen. But I don’t think Nolan understands that’s what’s happening here, and that’s because his “Odyssey” doesn’t have anything new to say about the original text or his beliefs as a filmmaker. If anything, “The Odyssey” only waters down every artistic statement Nolan has already posed.

(Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal) Robert Pattinson as Antinous in “The Odyssey”

Like Homer’s poem, Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is told nonlinearly, scattered between the perspectives of Odysseus (Matt Damon), his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and their son, Telemachus (Tom Holland). Ten years after the fall of Troy, Odysseus still hasn’t returned home to Ithaca, and his kingdom has been overtaken by suitors crudely courting his wife’s hand. As their impatience grows, the window for Odysseus to reclaim his kingdom and restore a crumbling world to Zeus’ law — essentially open-hearted hospitality and treating others as you’d be treated — is closing. As Telemachus travels to seek news of his father’s whereabouts, or if he’s even alive, Odysseus recounts his story to the island nymph, Calypso (Charlize Theron): The bloody Trojan War, a cyclops, a sea witch, dalliances with the dead, sirens, and a crew of impatient men.

Nolan makes only a handful of changes to the translations of the original text. Instead of Gods like Poseidon and Zeus playing an integral role in the story, they are left as unseen forces that motivate the characters’ actions. (Every 40 minutes or so, Zendaya appears to Odysseus as the goddess Athena to spout some ethereal wisdom before disappearing, but Athena plays more like a postwar trauma manifestation than an actual character.) Characters speak with a more casual, modern dialect. And, perhaps most memorably significant, the Trojan Horse is discovered half-submerged on the beach, and not outside Troy’s gates on wheels. Nolan uses this adjustment to build out the film’s emotional throughline: an extended rumination on the evils of war and the repugnance of men. And while it’s a smart and novel twist on a colloquial metaphor that has almost come to precede Homer’s poem, Nolan’s Trojan Horse doesn’t inspire any reflections on war that weren’t addressed more directly and cleverly in “Oppenheimer.”

(Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal) John Leguizamo as Eumaeus in “The Odyssey”

Every question “The Odyssey” poses has been asked dozens of times before by Nolan himself, and in far more interesting ways. Here, Nolan once again returns to his pet themes of playing God, human mistreatment, the passage of time, and bearing witness to the world’s slow, painful destruction. All of these things are surveyed with more thought and care in many of his other works, especially “Oppenheimer,” but also in “Interstellar,” “Tenet,” and even translated into the hyper-accessible superhero fare of his “Batman” films.

Many great filmmakers are immersed in the same ideas, returning to them in one way or another with each film. But to do that with something like “The Odyssey” is unnecessary, even haughty. Nolan attempts to assert the text’s relevancy in our contemporary age, but that’s not something any scholar or even the average reader would contest. This is Homer, after all, famously the foundation of all great work. What’s perplexing is that Nolan’s said as much himself. So why try to tackle “The Odyssey” at all, if not only to — as Nolan also acknowledged — be one of the only loyal feature-length film adaptations in history, and have his name forever cemented in the same conversation as Homer’s?

In the second act (that is, the second hour of the film’s three), Nolan gets close to revealing why. Tied to the mast of his ship as he and his crew pass the singing sirens, adorned on the jagged rocks at sea, Odysseus screams out with pain and desire. After the ship has made safe passage and the sirens’ voices have drifted into the air, Odysseus’ second-in-command, Eurylochus (Himesh Patel), asks him what he heard. Odysseus tells Eurylochus that their song contains everything he’s ever known and everything he never wanted to admit to himself. And, in a line of dialogue that will stick with me — one that shot straight to my heart faster than any of Nolan’s oft-repeated contemplations on war or morality — Odysseus says, “Their song told me that what you want the most is what you already had.”

There’s no better summary of Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” Here, a filmmaker who managed to reach the peak of Olympus makes the prideful, ill-fated decision to hoist a ladder toward the stars, trying to get even higher, past where even the Gods can see. He knows there is no foundation to hold him, nothing to prop his steps against, but he tries anyway. And truthfully, there’s dignity in that curiosity, in wanting to know if greatness is all there is, or if there is something more that exists beyond what we can perceive. But both history and myth have proven that there’s no measuring up to the Gods.

The post Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is pointless appeared first on Salon.com.