RadixJournal - Dark Odysseus Rises

00:00:00.000 Long story short, I think that I would describe Odysseus as proto-Jewish. 0.61

00:00:09.840 He's maybe the world's first Jew, but he's an Arian Jew, if that makes sense.

00:00:19.000 He's a little bit halfway between Jacob and Esau, and he has components of both.

00:00:25.820 And I'm just thinking of Schleskin's The Jewish Century, which is right there on my bookshelf. And he understands Odysseus in the same way. He's a man of twists and turns. But he's also a man who wouldn't apologize for pillaging and raping a village.

00:00:45.540 and so he sort of is right there in the bronze age at the birth of all of these things but

00:00:53.920 just a couple of things to remember here and we talked about how the olympians are are split

00:01:01.480 on greece and troy um he is descended from hermes he is hermes plays a role in uh homer's

00:01:12.000 the odyssey is you know smallish but he plays no role in nolan's film and it's very interesting

00:01:20.660 when i think when they're navigating the whirlpool and um selah and charybdis they um when we have

00:01:28.700 the ultimate crash of the vessel and the death of all of his men odysseus actually saves himself

00:01:35.860 by grabbing onto a fig tree and the fig is a totem of Dionysus and I absolutely think that 0.90

00:01:48.620 there is gem if we want to call it it's sort of proto gem because obviously Judaism doesn't exist

00:01:56.480 in 800 bc or thereabouts whenever this was written but much as we saw with the greeks

00:02:06.320 the achaeans argives with the iliad we see the same thing in the odyssey uh with this sort of

00:02:15.500 it's not over the top and it's not it's not right in your face but there's a dionysian or or hermes

00:02:25.120 mercurian connection with these people vis-a-vis other civilizations and so i i think homer and the

00:02:35.000 homeric hems etc i i think they they might be thought of best as proto gem or gem that hasn't

00:02:43.260 been fully actualized or worked out but they are gem and i would say this in contradistinction

00:02:50.620 to people who want to be like, you know, the Odyssey is our Bible, you know, it's the war

00:02:56.660 cry of Aryan man or something. It's like, no, it is the epic of the first Jew. That's how I would 0.90

00:03:08.480 describe it. I don't say that as a criticism. It's not like it's not great. And I'll mention also

00:03:13.640 one other thing real quick before I talk about Christopher Nolan's work. So this is mentioned

00:03:22.460 in the book, and we also mentioned this in our course when we were reading selections from the

00:03:27.940 Iliad. So during the Bronze Age collapse, there's this fascinating group called the Sea People,

00:03:37.660 the people of the sea. And we know very little about them, but we know that they were

00:03:43.120 catastrophically terrible and they invaded multiple lands and ransacked them and so on

00:03:51.620 who were they were they roving pirates possibly were they sort of the equivalent of illegal 0.99

00:03:58.880 immigrants or refugees like roving bands of marauders uh wreaking havoc everywhere 0.86

00:04:06.920 collapsing civilizations did they cause the bronze age collapse probably not i i would say that they 0.97

00:04:13.980 probably were a symptom of a bronze age collapse um but one interesting theory that a few people

00:04:22.440 have thrown out there and we sort of throw it out there as well in our book we're not positive about

00:04:27.500 it is that the iliad is a kind of mask on the sea people and other illegal immigrant quote unquote

00:04:36.620 to refugee peoples that were invading these civilizations as they were declining and collapsing 0.97

00:04:41.720 a thousand years before christ and um so the greeks are the sea people they arrive in black 1.00

00:04:49.280 ships they're at a lower level of civilization they're you know black ships in homer homeric 0.98

00:04:56.600 hymns the uh these are ships from crete uh basically gang raping pirates pedophiles who 0.94

00:05:05.260 then become priests uh but anyway they they are the bad guys and troy represents a higher 0.96

00:05:14.980 civilization now what do we make of all of this is it interesting that paris whose trojans stole 0.61

00:05:24.160 helen the hellenes the the essence of beauty of blondness etc uh and took her to civilization 0.98

00:05:33.800 What do we make of that? Is that a kind of twist on what I'm saying? I don't know the answer. It's no doubt worth going into. But the whole Iliad epic might be a mask because it's written hundreds of years after the Bronze Age collapse. 0.92

00:05:49.680 it's a sort of like mask placed on these people and much like in some civil situation where

00:05:57.820 let's say the united states collapses and then we have due to climate change or whatever we have 1.00

00:06:05.340 all these millions of refugees from mexico and south america come in and they kind of ransack 1.00

00:06:11.460 the place but then sort of later on establish order and maybe they even learn the virtues of 0.79

00:06:17.800 america from the defeated freem who comes and speaks to them or something like this 0.99

00:06:22.840 200 years later we would create this epic where like the illegal immigrants were 0.82

00:06:28.860 like catholics or from of the west or or noble people or a founding population or something 0.93

00:06:36.400 so it's it's a mask on top of uh the the the notion that these are like the greeks the people

00:06:44.040 we should root for something is a little bit spurious or suspicious in my mind um and nolan

00:06:52.260 in his film i'm not sure he's well he sort of is addressing this so he he adds a number of things

00:07:02.460 one of them is that uh penelope uh odysseus's long-suffering wife and telemachus his son

00:07:10.240 they're speaking and she's like the people of the sea they're like we don't know anything about them

00:07:15.040 but they're coming and they're dangerous so we need a king so it sort of adds some urgency 0.50

00:07:19.420 and then later on in the film there's at least a suggestion that the Greeks might be the sea people

00:07:28.440 or at least they inspired the sea people that after the Greeks sacked Troy that this inspired

00:07:35.040 waves of banditry and stuff like that so i i did find that uh rather interesting and that that's

00:07:42.200 something that is not in the text and nolan is bringing it in but i guess overall and nolan

00:07:50.640 i mean this movie was i found it very entertaining in the way that oppenheimer was not very

00:08:01.100 entertaining although visually interesting in many places but was a bit of a slog and i've not

00:08:08.760 re-watched oppenheimer and i probably won't re-watch oppenheimer maybe for another few years

00:08:15.020 uh but i i think differently of this one it is a nolan movie it looks like a nolan movie

00:08:22.640 for better and for worse i mean there's been this nolan effect that has been in hollywood

00:08:28.920 since the dark night desaturate the image it's gray and brown with maybe a light blue tinge

00:08:38.900 and everything's serious and sort of ultra moral as well like the dark night even though it's you

00:08:47.860 know it's a dark and gritty reboot and that's true to some extent but it's remarkable how moral

00:08:54.700 christopher nolan's batman is he just you know the whole i don't kill thing was sort of more

00:09:01.160 honored in the breach and the observance i mean tim burton's batman would just kill people

00:09:05.720 these crazy clowns and uh various villains that he would face but christopher nolan's version was

00:09:15.500 you know we need to set a good example for all of gotham that they can learn that they too can be

00:09:20.460 good liberals like myself it's he created something and you see that definitely in

00:09:28.540 james bond movies after the dark night like skyfall inspector uh you see this even in the

00:09:36.600 marvel cinematic universe they sort of adopted some of the nolan like things see a lot of nolanism

00:09:42.520 in hollywood and you definitely see that here so there are a few moments where there is a

00:09:50.120 a bright blue sea and you really feel like you're in the mediterranean or gnc or southern european

00:10:01.700 land or islands but that's the exception to the rule it is gray and brown and it it's deadly

00:10:10.860 serious and i think this is a big problem with odysseus because i mean i don't i certainly don't

00:10:17.740 hate matt damon i mean i i would say that i like matt damon um but matt damon i i he's best at

00:10:27.600 playing characters who are guileless and straightforward and that works in christopher

00:10:39.820 nolan's odyssey but the the fact is the man of twists and turns the the world's first jew so to

00:10:48.860 speak the um this trickster who like jacob out maneuvers people and someone who by the way

00:10:59.200 says flatly we we went to this island and raped and pillaged and uh yeah that was fun without any 0.71

00:11:08.980 pang of conscience um that's not the odysseus here and matt damon he's shell-shocked from the

00:11:18.700 trojan war in a somewhat moving way but is that odysseus or is this now a kind of

00:11:28.980 you know white american hollywood imagining what it would be like if there were a man

00:11:36.560 who went through the Trojan War,

00:11:39.260 like a man who went through Vietnam.

00:11:41.980 He feels guilty about the horse

00:11:44.260 because much like with The Dark Knight,

00:11:46.100 where there's like, you know, 1.00

00:11:46.880 we don't kill, no guns, Catwoman. 1.00

00:11:51.540 Much like that,

00:11:53.320 Christopher Nolan puts a tremendous amount of emphasis,

00:11:56.100 and this is appropriate.

00:11:58.040 He puts a tremendous amount of emphasis

00:11:59.700 on the law of hospitality,

00:12:03.280 or what they refer to as Zeus's law.

00:12:05.180 So basically, if you are a traveler, you will receive accommodations gladly.

00:12:14.880 They'll give you food and drink, let you stay a night or two.

00:12:19.400 Don't be the guests that will not leave like the suitors.

00:12:23.860 But there are just rules of hospitality.

00:12:26.180 And the old wives tale that justifies this is that you never know if that traveler might be a god in disguise.

00:12:35.180 and this he makes and and this is an important thing about the ancient world there's no doubt

00:12:42.720 but he almost makes this custom custom i would say like the scent the the centerpiece of bronze

00:12:53.260 age morality and the bronze age world and there's this problem where the suitors are that so if you

00:13:02.780 don't know the basic narrative of the odyssey so odysseus goes off to war he it takes him 10 you

00:13:09.320 know the war takes 10 years takes another 10 to get back etc etc but um the the suitors for

00:13:16.920 penelope are just staying in odysseus's house they won't leave they're threatening uh they're

00:13:25.000 depleting the supplies their leeches etc etc and and odysseus kills them all at the end when he

00:13:32.420 returns um but they they make it this interesting thing where it's like to kill this the suitors are 0.95

00:13:42.340 disobeying the spirit of zeus's law no doubt but to kill them would almost be worse and and and

00:13:47.980 odysseus if he kills them would be rightly hunted by everyone but also the gift of the horse at

00:13:54.660 troy was this he broke the law as well like odysseus is almost responsible for the bronze

00:14:02.400 age collapse due to a declining morality i'm not even exaggerating here i think this is what

00:14:08.460 christopher nolan is saying and and what he's putting forth like the trojan horse was an equally

00:14:14.700 egregious more egregious breaking of zeus's law and he's guilt-ridden for it and he just sort of

00:14:25.360 i don't he looks like moses and he's wearing greek armor from the fifth century but it's

00:14:35.220 in the bronze age and odysseus is a moralist and so the movie is incredible

00:14:42.340 and overwhelming even in the visuals and imax certainly adds to that the whole thing holds up

00:14:49.640 i was definitely never bored and the movie is three hours but i was never bored uh good action

00:14:55.640 characters etc uh but it's it's a christopher nolan movie it's like dark odysseus rises

00:15:05.040 basically it's like the story of Bruce Wayne as opposed to Homer's Odysseus and

00:15:15.480 you know there's some other things I want to add here but that's my takeaway from it

00:15:22.080 it really is great though I don't I don't want to I don't want to bash it because on some level

00:15:28.800 The fact that Hollywood, which is clearly in decline financially, but but also in decline in terms of relevance, is still able to make a product like this is incredible.

00:15:42.700 I mean, the amount, I mean, it's written, directed and produced by Christopher Nolan, but the, the amount of manpower that goes into like tightening up that script and making sure that everything works to get all these actors and all of the actors are good.

00:16:00.760 i mean the the what we'll tie we can talk about woke casting later but you know all the actors

00:16:05.400 are very good uh the music is overpowering uh it's all filmed on imax so it's just huge

00:16:15.720 visually impressive uh uh realistic i would put that in quotes you do definitely feel like you're 0.59

00:16:24.880 on a boat and you might be taken in to a whirlpool i mean it's and then there's some cgi with some of

00:16:33.580 the monsters like the cyclops and things like that so to as a product of corporate hollywood

00:16:41.880 it is incredible and i know that's not a backhanded criticism like hollywood is still

00:16:47.300 able to produce something at a grand scale that is entertaining and impressive and thoughtful

00:16:56.980 and thought-provoking so i i wouldn't want to bash the movie at all but i think maybe due to

00:17:05.340 the fact that christopher nolan is likely autistic that he wants to make everything literal you know

00:17:14.080 like the horse has to be sinking into the beach now maybe that's a symbol in itself like a decline 0.63

00:17:21.000 or something like that but it seems like he just wouldn't be he was like well what if they built

00:17:27.200 this giant wooden horse wouldn't it sink and oh i don't you know we need to make this real he's

00:17:31.980 autistic and thus he takes everything literally and so i think what he's done is update the odyssey

00:17:41.580 for a modern audience but in doing so he's evaporated odysseus's character and he's really

00:17:49.700 evaporated any symbolism that is in homer's epic and he's made something that's sort of appealing

00:17:59.900 to modern audiences like here's another example um search uh circe circe circe however you

00:18:10.620 pronounce the witch who turns odysseus's men into pigs and and and actually lets him go visit the

00:18:17.420 underworld and and things like that um she's done fine i mean i kind of wanted that character to be

00:18:26.860 a little more over the top uh like you're you're a witch you sort of look like a normal woman i

00:18:33.300 i don't know you're i i sort of wanted that to be scarier and also when he goes to the underworld

00:18:40.140 achilles is not there so i don't know why he made that choice and he takes out some of these things

00:18:47.100 like when he's they're trapped with the cyclops and and um uh odysseus tells the cyclops i'm no

00:18:53.220 man what's my name i'm no man no one it's a and so when the cyclops is saying i'm being attacked

00:18:58.900 by no one all of his fellow cyclopses don't come to save him he just gets rid of that fascinating

00:19:05.380 line i am no one um and also with calypso now calypso basically takes um odysseus on as her

00:19:20.040 gigolo so to speak i mean basically he is making love with calypso all night and he's you know

00:19:29.800 eating the white lotus and going off into dreams this is also an interesting symbol

00:19:34.020 which is definitely being used in that um hbo series the white lotus but he's eating the lotus

00:19:40.260 flower and and drifting off and so on and she's keeping him as a a love slave she is a goddess

00:19:46.480 herself and in this version she's played so also particularly with like calypso music and the

00:19:55.880 adoption of this like you wanted something overwhelmingly sexy or exotic or weird in some

00:20:02.840 way but it's charlise theron who's heavily botoxed and she reminds me of like an island 0.90

00:20:11.780 milf or something like she's some rich widow who just lives in hawaii or something like she's just 0.97

00:20:19.120 too when she came on screen i was like oh yeah this is 2026 like that you are a wealthy maybe

00:20:28.680 slightly loose but sophisticated modern american woman like there's no there's no weirdness to

00:20:38.740 nolan there's nothing that like takes you out of it or is wild he he takes everything literally

00:20:45.800 and he makes it relevant to basically an american and western european upper class audience

00:20:54.000 which is also why i don't think he should do a james bond movie because none of his women are

00:21:00.140 sexy or dangerous or a little bit crazy he just doesn't do that everyone's moral

00:21:08.120 odysseus is no longer the man of twist and turns he's a shell-shocked vietnam veteran who feels

00:21:15.200 guilty about the loss of his men um penelope is a well acted i i really liked penelope's character

00:21:26.100 but a bit of a boomer feminist maybe i mean i don't know the you know she's like why can't i 0.94

00:21:34.060 be queen i have so much experience you know i mean which is to be fair she makes a good point but

00:21:40.420 it's not like she's not from an ancient world she's she's from the 20th 20th century the 21st

00:21:47.680 century and calypso is an island milf i i it's it's like he due to his autism it his autism

00:21:59.180 probably is his greatest strength but it doesn't allow him to explore things symbolically because

00:22:06.600 he has to take everything literally it sort of stifles his creativity and so even though it is

00:22:14.960 a great film it's very it's a gray film it's very gray in all senses of the word it it's just

00:22:25.300 there's nothing exotic there's nothing ancient about it even though it does play to that because

00:22:33.240 the only way that christopher nolan could understand the ancient world would be like

00:22:37.040 what is its like overriding moral system like what is its source code oh zeus's law hospitality okay

00:22:43.460 well he breaks hospitality like that's how he does things which is smart on some level but

00:22:49.680 is very limiting on another level so i don't know dark odysseus rises i mean that that is maybe how

00:22:58.440 i would describe it it's a great movie but it's a christopher nolan movie and it could have been

00:23:06.080 a great movie with a different source material and all of the symbolism that is present in homer's

00:23:15.780 epic has been defense traded so that is my critical appreciation of the odyssey but

00:23:25.300 i don't know if you guys have any thoughts on this

RadixJournal - July 18, 2026

Dark Odysseus Rises

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