I’m glad someone is telling the truth—that the production is a 'rather modest, almost chamber drama which occasionally reminded me of B productions.' Reading the articles about the scale and grandeur of this production makes me feel like the little child seeing the emperor with no clothes, while nobody else sees what I see.
I think these are very right words to describe Nolan's Odyssey. As a History student I've been thinking these exact thoughts during the movie. Humans are just animals with informational-intellectual instincts. They create families, they create civilisations due to stories they tell each other and things they make to state something important. The age collapses when words and things no longer mean what they used to, like oaths in Odyssey. When we exploit and corrupt ideas to our profit.
So I thing Odyssey is also about that there're no "eternal truths". No eternal City. Destruction is just a heritage to new generations. Something ends and the other starts. So it's a somewhat optimistic way of seeing the world.
Not myth itself changes ==> history changes its meaning. Odysseus becomes the first modern man / bourgeois only when modernity recognizes itself in him.
Perhaps this is also the Benjaminian point. The Odyssey is not simply the birth of a new civilization. It only becomes its founding myth retroactively, once that civilization already exists. Meaning is transmitted afterwards. As Žižek himself argues elsewhere, the new symbolic order rewrites its own past.
Benjamin’s “tiger’s leap into the past” therefore does not recover an original truth:
it reactivates unrealized possibilities buried beneath the winners’s narrative of history. The past is never fixed: it remains open because every historical rupture reorganizes its meaning retrospectively.
But… the old Greeks did not become bourgeois retrospectively. They were already cunning, political and calculating. What changed was the symbolic constellation through which we read them. Modernity discovered its own image in Odysseus and thereby transformed an ancient epic into the founding myth of the modern subject.
Slavoj loves Masturbating with his own intellect, doesn't he? He is looking at a cinema screen, intellectualizing about Hollywood, AI, and 'post-truth' culture, completely blind to the fact that he is just a spectator sitting in a dark room watching shadows. He gets so excited because a director showed Greek heroes pissing inside a wooden horse. This is what intellectuals do—they find beauty in the mud because they are terrified of the sky. They analyze the 'founding crimes' of civilization while their own lives remain completely unlived. Forget Nolan, forget Žižek's political masturbation, and stop trying to find truth in the theater. If you want a real Odyssey into the ultimate mystery of existence, don’t look at Hollywood’s heroes. Go check out the piece on Heraclitus sitting right on my profile—that is where the real fire burns.
> Dante was right to place Odysseus in the eighth circle of hell in his Inferno.
Dante acutely observed the cunning mendacity of the hero Odysseus, but Dante also showed his own merciless vindicativeness for fictionally assigning Odysseus to the eighth circle of his Inferno.
yeah only men can deem Nolan's movies as good. they're not even decent. all he does is too much exposition in dialogues and creates martyr-like male geniuses characters while women are reduced to serving desu ex machina.
I was thinking about Voltaire's Bastards The Dictatorship of Reason in the West . Sir John Ralston Saul dedicated it to Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil. Phil Ochs sang Cops of the World and We ain't Marching anymore. It is the story of Midas and a Modern Prometheus.
We finally saw it yesterday and I guess we agree on the “chamber drama” aspect of it, but not on its greatness as a film.
It seemed so flat to me, so monotonous, so repetitive. The writing was laughably awful at times, as you point out. No one really acted except perhaps Anne Hathaway and Argos. The casting was off—and not because of race—but because there were these repetitive shots of people’s faces—Telemachus and Antinous, especially— where they just stared into the camera in clueless ways. The women should have been, if anything, darker and more strong-featured, more Mediterranean. Charlize Theron? Please! When we emerged from the theater to walk a couple of blocks to a favorite bar, there was a deluge of Biblical (or Zeus-ian) proportions and we got completely soaked and sodden. I was dripping puddles for the rest of the night. I thought this might have been a message to me, but I’m not sure what it was.
I spend so much time trying to figure myself out that I forget to actually be here. Stepping outside that constant self-focus can feel like finally taking a full breath
So I see we’re talking about the movie from conceptual point of view. Im sorry the movie lost me as myth of fate and the and the tension between what the Gods tell Odysseus in the book and what he truly believes to be his fate. The Gods could have recanted at any time for anything. It’s never as simple as complete these heroic tasks and you will go home. To realize that all men aren’t heroic or don’t have the same fortitude of strength, yet you are open to the same fickleness is disconcerting. But, for a modern audience I assume the marvel type of fantasy is popular.
THE ODYSSEY: FINALLY A GOOD CHAMBER DRAMA NOW FREE: There is no way back; every such attempt to restore old greatness ends up in new, brutal barbarism PUBLISHED 3 DAYS AGO 251 LIKES 37 RESTACKS 10 COMMENTS hits the right note because it treats the reader like an adult. No hedging, no inspirational ending, just the work.
Let me inform you that during the woke era (circa 2012-2024) Netflix and other platforms have been punishing us (pervert male heterosexuals that enjoy watching beautiful sexy women) with hundreds of series and movies with desexualized, not sexy, ill dressed, made up like they have no make up, and even a bit fat on purpose otherwise beautiful actresses to show us how feminist they are.
Nolan even needs an implausible black Helen of Troy to teach us (racist viewers) not to be racist (Americans think all the people of the world have the same racism history and issues like the USA).
The episode of life inside the horse seems interesting but it’s not the Odissey spirit.
Ulysses’ guilty feelings seem a Sunday school version of the Catholic sin complex that pervades any American movie or series.
You are reading between the lines ideas that Nolan never thought. The creator of the great Memento and Interstellar is now just going for the Oscars which only a woke filtered movie can get.
I’m glad someone is telling the truth—that the production is a 'rather modest, almost chamber drama which occasionally reminded me of B productions.' Reading the articles about the scale and grandeur of this production makes me feel like the little child seeing the emperor with no clothes, while nobody else sees what I see.
I think these are very right words to describe Nolan's Odyssey. As a History student I've been thinking these exact thoughts during the movie. Humans are just animals with informational-intellectual instincts. They create families, they create civilisations due to stories they tell each other and things they make to state something important. The age collapses when words and things no longer mean what they used to, like oaths in Odyssey. When we exploit and corrupt ideas to our profit.
So I thing Odyssey is also about that there're no "eternal truths". No eternal City. Destruction is just a heritage to new generations. Something ends and the other starts. So it's a somewhat optimistic way of seeing the world.
Not myth itself changes ==> history changes its meaning. Odysseus becomes the first modern man / bourgeois only when modernity recognizes itself in him.
Perhaps this is also the Benjaminian point. The Odyssey is not simply the birth of a new civilization. It only becomes its founding myth retroactively, once that civilization already exists. Meaning is transmitted afterwards. As Žižek himself argues elsewhere, the new symbolic order rewrites its own past.
Benjamin’s “tiger’s leap into the past” therefore does not recover an original truth:
it reactivates unrealized possibilities buried beneath the winners’s narrative of history. The past is never fixed: it remains open because every historical rupture reorganizes its meaning retrospectively.
But… the old Greeks did not become bourgeois retrospectively. They were already cunning, political and calculating. What changed was the symbolic constellation through which we read them. Modernity discovered its own image in Odysseus and thereby transformed an ancient epic into the founding myth of the modern subject.
Slavoj loves Masturbating with his own intellect, doesn't he? He is looking at a cinema screen, intellectualizing about Hollywood, AI, and 'post-truth' culture, completely blind to the fact that he is just a spectator sitting in a dark room watching shadows. He gets so excited because a director showed Greek heroes pissing inside a wooden horse. This is what intellectuals do—they find beauty in the mud because they are terrified of the sky. They analyze the 'founding crimes' of civilization while their own lives remain completely unlived. Forget Nolan, forget Žižek's political masturbation, and stop trying to find truth in the theater. If you want a real Odyssey into the ultimate mystery of existence, don’t look at Hollywood’s heroes. Go check out the piece on Heraclitus sitting right on my profile—that is where the real fire burns.
> Dante was right to place Odysseus in the eighth circle of hell in his Inferno.
Dante acutely observed the cunning mendacity of the hero Odysseus, but Dante also showed his own merciless vindicativeness for fictionally assigning Odysseus to the eighth circle of his Inferno.
yeah only men can deem Nolan's movies as good. they're not even decent. all he does is too much exposition in dialogues and creates martyr-like male geniuses characters while women are reduced to serving desu ex machina.
I was thinking about Voltaire's Bastards The Dictatorship of Reason in the West . Sir John Ralston Saul dedicated it to Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil. Phil Ochs sang Cops of the World and We ain't Marching anymore. It is the story of Midas and a Modern Prometheus.
Where is Solon?
https://www.johnralstonsaul.com/non-fiction-books/voltaires_bastards/
We finally saw it yesterday and I guess we agree on the “chamber drama” aspect of it, but not on its greatness as a film.
It seemed so flat to me, so monotonous, so repetitive. The writing was laughably awful at times, as you point out. No one really acted except perhaps Anne Hathaway and Argos. The casting was off—and not because of race—but because there were these repetitive shots of people’s faces—Telemachus and Antinous, especially— where they just stared into the camera in clueless ways. The women should have been, if anything, darker and more strong-featured, more Mediterranean. Charlize Theron? Please! When we emerged from the theater to walk a couple of blocks to a favorite bar, there was a deluge of Biblical (or Zeus-ian) proportions and we got completely soaked and sodden. I was dripping puddles for the rest of the night. I thought this might have been a message to me, but I’m not sure what it was.
I spend so much time trying to figure myself out that I forget to actually be here. Stepping outside that constant self-focus can feel like finally taking a full breath
So I see we’re talking about the movie from conceptual point of view. Im sorry the movie lost me as myth of fate and the and the tension between what the Gods tell Odysseus in the book and what he truly believes to be his fate. The Gods could have recanted at any time for anything. It’s never as simple as complete these heroic tasks and you will go home. To realize that all men aren’t heroic or don’t have the same fortitude of strength, yet you are open to the same fickleness is disconcerting. But, for a modern audience I assume the marvel type of fantasy is popular.
I watched the movie. It's distressing that humanity considers audiovisual forms that contain so much violence as entertainment. Is there another way?
1492 may have turned out quite differently if Odysseus made it to the West first.
THE ODYSSEY: FINALLY A GOOD CHAMBER DRAMA NOW FREE: There is no way back; every such attempt to restore old greatness ends up in new, brutal barbarism PUBLISHED 3 DAYS AGO 251 LIKES 37 RESTACKS 10 COMMENTS hits the right note because it treats the reader like an adult. No hedging, no inspirational ending, just the work.
Let me inform you that during the woke era (circa 2012-2024) Netflix and other platforms have been punishing us (pervert male heterosexuals that enjoy watching beautiful sexy women) with hundreds of series and movies with desexualized, not sexy, ill dressed, made up like they have no make up, and even a bit fat on purpose otherwise beautiful actresses to show us how feminist they are.
Nolan even needs an implausible black Helen of Troy to teach us (racist viewers) not to be racist (Americans think all the people of the world have the same racism history and issues like the USA).
The episode of life inside the horse seems interesting but it’s not the Odissey spirit.
Ulysses’ guilty feelings seem a Sunday school version of the Catholic sin complex that pervades any American movie or series.
You are reading between the lines ideas that Nolan never thought. The creator of the great Memento and Interstellar is now just going for the Oscars which only a woke filtered movie can get.
I would love to know your opinion and perspective on the displacement and disappearance of the figures of the gods.
Now I'm curious! Usually behind grand heroic and gods endorsed stories hide sordid events.